Facebook Median Pay now $240k • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Median Pay now $240k

#81

Post by fergie » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #77

fergie wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not a bubble. $240k is a reasonable salary for a professional with good grades from a good university working for a highly profitable private company. In fact as long as there is such a gap between revenue per employee, and compensation per employee, there will only be upward pressure on pay and conditions. In reality, software engineering salaries outside of established tech environments are kept artificially lo…

> tech environments are kept artificially low because there is no "guild of software engineers" I think you would have a hard case saying Guilds and Unions are natural variations of prices.

Maybe, maybe not. See the link I posted elsewhere on this thread.

Re: Facebook Median Pay now $240k

#82

Post by fergie » Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

f00biebletch wrote: post #73

fergie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live in a first world country, try to find out what your mid-tier technology consultancies (Accenture, Deloitte, CGI, etc) are charging customers. It is almost certainly around 250-350k per year, even if they are working for an unglamorous, boring, traditional customer. The real issue is that outside of leading tech environments, too much rent is being extracted from the wages of software engineers.

Great point, although said rent is being driven largely by FB and GOOG. I remember the first time I was outbid for a flat in 2016 when a small group of googlers paid cash for the entire first year of rent. I should have moved to Seattle that afternoon :)

Ok, but I meant rent extraction in the economic sense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Re: Facebook Median Pay now $240k

#83

Post by hliyan » Tue, May 01, 2018, 10:26 AM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #32

hliyan wrote: post #6

I've been thinking a lot about the merits of the (highest income / median income) ratio in creating a society that is a little more resistant to eventual inequality. Rather than setting absolute tax brackets, what if we define tax brackets by this ratio? That way, it will be in the interest of the highest income earners to raise the median income.

That sounds interesting but would probably be a paradise for tax lawyers. You just create a network of companies, one for each income band. That way, an employee never makes more than the average. Of course only large corperations can afford that so that smaller companies will have a harder time hiring talent.

Again, I'm thinking about applying this to all individual (and human) adult citizens of a country, which will probably obviate the need to repeat the process at smaller scales like companies, where the problem is compounded by artificial constructs such as corporate personhood.