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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical, and I don't even think it's relevant here, unless you were hiring executives for large but dying companies?

Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

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The five biggest companies in the US by revenue or profit are not data-driven tech companies.

None of the top ten US companies, by revenue, fit that description.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/

Ranked by profit, only Alphabet squeaks into the top ten at number five.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/list/filtered?sortBy=profits&f...

I’m not seeing much correlation here between rank of CEO compensation and company performance.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

The fame of the high salaries at tech companies relates primarily to technical staff, not executive pay. These companies are also located in some of the most expensive areas to live.

The top 5 in the S&P 500 are 4 tech companies and JP Morgan Chase. The top 5 by market cap are all tech companies.

S&P 500 is primarily a ranking by market cap. It’s a measure of how much the market values a stock. I can see it being a component of size (how “big”). There’s no doubt that the big tech companies are colossal entities.

The market cap of a company is largely based on a bet of the “size” of a company in the future.

Tesla is the most “valuable” US auto maker, by market capitalization. This illustrates that market cap is inherently related to predictions which have a large speculative component, which can be influenced by pure market phenomena.

> Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

Because a) at their scale they need to hire in bulk b) their business (advertising, "media"...) simply don't inspire that level of passion in anyone, so money is all they can do.

Because those tech companies were found to have been illegally colluding to suppress wages of their workers.

It’s easier to hire cheap workers when your actions are keeping wages lower than they otherwise would’ve been.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

This is a classic red herring, totally unrelated.

If anything, that undermines the point I'm arguing against: why would these companies feel any need to collude to suppress wages if they could get better performance just by hiring cheaper workers?

Also, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc. weren't part of this suit, so again, not relevant.

I think it's more like:

person who really wants the job but is kind of underqualified > person who is highly qualified, but doesn't really want the job (unless the money is right)

edit: I'll add that, for CEOs who should all look amazing on paper and know how to sell themselves, maybe willingness to do the job for less than market is a better signal than most

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