Look at it this way: A and B can be freelancers and gain at most 100K yearly, or they can work for C, where they commonly create wealth for C in amount of 1000K; C pays them 150K each (and keeps the rest, 1000K-150K-150K=700K).

Economically, it would make sense for A and B to work for C, since they gain 50K more. Economically it makes sense for C to hire them since together they create wealth, and the 700K that C gets to keep is a reward for his willingness to risk hiring them and managing them into a productive team etc.

If A and B would like the risk, they could start pairing themselves together and attempt to create wealth independently. But they could fail. 10% chance of a 1000K is still just 100K on average (it just has an interesting distribution of the payout). The difference up to 1000K is a payout to C for the risk they took in growing their business up to the current level of scalability. (otherwise other companies would pay more for the value that A and B provide)

If A and B care only about technology and are risk adverse, the economy doesn't award them more than the 150K which they are already getting. For such people, creating wealth of 1000K for the companies where they work is not a result of their behaviour, but a reward for the founders that took the risks and had the vision to create organizations allowing that.

Subsidizing is such a loaded word. Your comment is an example of the pie fallacy. Yes, your colleagues may get a bigger paycheck because you're a top engineer. But that doesn't necessarily imply that the additional money they get is "taken" from you.

And obviously, doing a startup is no guarantee that your returns will be better.

And guess what - we need those lesser mortals so we can keep doing the fun stuff.

If you're a top performer, unless the place you are at is losing money you aren't subsidising anyone's paycheck - I assume that the people skimming the cream off your contribution do exactly the same to every employee and anyone that isn't contributing (the value of) at least their own salary (should) would be shown the door.

I suspect it gets diverted to senior management (founders?) and shareholders. Given we are commenting on this at ycombinator.com, I don't have a problem with it, since I'm hoping to end up in either or both categories at some point.

How much of your startup is subsidized by all the open source software that many engineers work on for free?

Your subsidy argument cuts both ways.

Neither society nor the enterprise are zero-sum games, and that kind of thinking seems to imply that they are.