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Comment by Jagat | Hacker News Reader

You're saying that programmers have a unique set of skills which is why they're paid so much.

And in the next sentence you're questioning why CEOs get paid so much. A good CEO or CFO or CMO can generate value for the company at a scale that's much much larger than what a single programmer does.

During Satya Nadella's reign as the CEO, Microsoft went from people speculating its impending demise to a trillion dollar company. Don't you think he deserves a billion from that $700bn rise in market cap?

TSLA stock will tank the moment Elon Musk decides to step down? In a cynical world, maybe he's just a figurehead and there are others running the show behind the scene, but creating such persona is still something that a CEO has to do.

This is the same old Tesla vs Edison discussion. It's a common misconception among people that it's enough to be a genius lone worker to be able to provide value to a company.

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Thing is, bad CEOs that drive their company into the ground still get paid way more than we do. Terrible managers often get paid more than the talented people working under them. Salaries are determined more by power than by supply and demand. Also by supply and demand, but more by power. People who wield power get paid more, even if they're bad at it.

Thing is bad programmers draw salary way more than ...

Thing is, bad programmers do sometimes get fired. (Way too rarely, might I say, but that's the CEOs valuing cheap labor and speed over quality.)

Bad CEOs get a severance package on millions and go working elsewhere.

What's worse is that someone who is faking-it can impact the income of many people. For example, if you're a young engineer that works at a company that switches a good CEO for a bad CEO.

Bad CEOs get paid a lot since if they fuck up, their failures are public and nobody will hire them afterwards so they need the money as insurance.

If you're a bad programmer, your failures aren't public and you can job hop to the next gullible company.

> nobody will hire them afterwards

I don’t really think that is true at all.

They don't need the money; their pay is already more than enough to retire from. Also, a bad CEO needs to fail spectacularly to not get hired. Plenty of mediocre CEOs keep getting hired for insane salaries.

Trust me, terrible developers still get paid.

And thank goodness for that!

Supply and demand is just a form of power.

> Don't you think he deserves a billion from that $700bn rise in market cap?

No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.

Seems like an odd thing to say in response to such a clear example. Deserves maybe isn’t the right word but they earn it and people are willing to pay for the value so why not?

Even if you had been earning your current salary since the day Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have today even a quarter of a billion dollars. That's the outrageous part. That kind of wealth should not be attainable for any single person. If the company is doing that well, the wealth should go to everyone who's part of it. After all, without them no actual work would be done.

(a) depends on the salary and (b) have you heard of compounding? :) But seriously, that's a weird way to think about it. Nobody pays you to be a billionaire - it happens that you create something that grows in value and takes you up with it. I used to work for Bloomberg - Mike is rich because the thing he created is just that valuable. He didn't take the money from anyone, didn't make anyone pay him a crazy salary. He just made something amazing that's been generating value for 30+ years, and has made lots of people rich in the process. Why begrudge him that?

Because there is a limit in how much money a person can spend, and the rest of the money is working in the rent-seeking domain simply reducing the efficiency of everyone else.

You know, I respect Mike for what he created and I believe he should be doing very well. Still, he didn't do all the work himself. And billions of dollars is a ridiculous amount of wealth for someone to own. Employees should have gotten their fair share of that too.

> Employees should have gotten their fair share of that too.

You mean the employees should have asked for higher salaries and refused to work for his company if the company refused to pay? I don't think a single person has claimed that Bloomberg has paid them a single cent less than the salary specified in their contract.

That's the rub, isn't it? This is a protest against market forces, not against people. If I write a book and everybody in the world pays a dollar to read it (JK Rowling), how on earth could anyone say that I shouldn't have a billion dollars? Shouldn't they be ranting at the all the people who gave me the money of their own accord?

In Bloomberg's case, every employee made a conscious decision to work for the company to increase its value, and every employee was paid what they signed up for. What's unfair about it?

If you somehow published, distributed, translated, and marketed the book yourself then sure, you deserve a billion dollars. However, because you probably didn't do any of those things, just wrote the book (probably had a separate editor as well), you don't.

The second assumption is that people join companies to "increase their value". That may be true for some people on this forum, but most people join companies for a paycheck, because they can't live without income. If no one had to work to live comfortably, I doubt anyone would care about billionaires.

>He didn't take the money from anyone

So he summoned it out of thin air

>After all, without them no actual work would be done.

Leadership is the other side of that coin.

It is. It's not that leadership should get nothing. They just shouldn't get everything.

They don't really get everything. They often give a lot up to get what they do too.

Just translate "deserves a billion dollars" to "gets to decide how most of a billion dollars gets allocated".

Nobody can actually spend/consume more than ~10% of 1Bn. But if someone is smart enough to make 1Bn, it's probably a good bet for society to "promote that person to being in charge of how most of that 1Bn gets allocated". In most of the civilized world 1Bn doesn't automagically translate into "you're a god now, you can buy off the police and the judges and the government and do whatever". (Now sure, in a corrupt country one could fully spend 1Bn by "buying out" lots of people and institution and making himself a god, but in "the civilized world" it doesn't work, or would require significantly more than 1Bn.)

The alternatives are bureaucracies / central-planning committees. For some things they work well, for some they are catastrophic, but for most thing they are simply very very very suboptimal / wasteful and non-innovative!

Hence we "bet on capitalism" and let the guy "keep" his billion.

(There are issues ofc, one could spend a significant part of the money outside of the "legal market of civilized society" or use them to subtly "bend the system"... hence it's probably a good idea to cap personal wealth at 1Bn or smth like that and force other forms of power be shared or politically mediated. Or to just monitor that the use of the money is on goods and services that are actually legally buyable and are "bought to be used or sold at a profit" instead of "bought to profit the buyer and buy his servitude" or other schemes, or not on fake donations that buy influence.)

The CEO's compensation is usually determined by the board of directors at large public companies [0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/11/18/...

...yeah, but there's still a "market mechanism" - you're not going to be able hire and keep a good CEO if you don't pay at least "market rate". Also, probably most people worth >1Bn have not made that by being CEOs, that's more like what you get through successful investment (the "rich daddy" + "some brains" combo), or through being really really incredibly lucky as a founder.

> No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.

If somebody single-handedly invented a cure for all cancer and made it free to the world... you'd have a hard time convincing me that person didn't deserve a billion dollars.

And a terrible programmer can cause a lot more problems than they solve...

Both programmers and CEOs (and others) can be "force multipliers". If they're really good, they can help their company do better than the sum of the parts.

If the programmer is mostly working on code it's usually easy to discover if they're detrimental. Though if they're doing more fleeting stuff like design, it can be more difficult because the effects are less direct.

In a similar way, a CEOs performance can easily be masked by other factors, such as the market in general and good employees. Say the company increases sales by 10x, but most other candidate CEOs could have done 20-30x or more.

That said, I do think there's some other factors at play when hiring CEOs, as some with known repeated terrible histories still get hired etc.

> A good CEO or CFO or CMO can generate value for the company at a scale that's much much larger than what a single programmer does.

Based on the numbers, usually it's luck. It isn't to say that there are some outstanding CEOs. But the majority are in the mediocre camp and just get lucky.

https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/study-luck-looking-the-par...

"It shouldn't take a careful empirical study to convince you that CEOs don't get where they are on the basis of ability alone. If that were true, the C-suite would not be so dominated by white men," Frick writes.

Down-votes when there's numbers to back up the statement. Some upset C-level people (or people planning to be C-level some-day) reading Hacker News today?

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