Hacker News Reader

Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

A lot of companies with <$15k median pay as well. Seeing as US federal minimum wage is ~$15k (higher than that in more than half of states) and there are companies listed with even <$10k median pay, either part-time or outsourced workers are being included, neither of which seems like a fair comparison to make.

View on HN

Why don't you think it's fair? Legit ask, not a snipe.

Same reason why it’s not accurate to include a worker who work 1 month and quit as having made $10k/year on an annual salary of $120k.

It needs to be PPP adjusted, like any global comparison.

Don't know about outsourced, but part-time isn't a fair comparison since their hourly wage could be comparatively high but their total wage low. It would be fair if salaries were given per-hour, but I'm pretty sure that top executives don't have the same concept of working hours as low level employees

If it’s not normalized for time worked, then it’s not really pay ratio that represents the value a company sees in an employee, or the economic comfort of that employee. So, what’s it really trying to show?

Some jobs don’t require full time work, like consultation or janitorial services, and these jobs are structured around this, by having multiple clients. Trying to take any direct meaning from these ratios isn’t really possible since another dimension is required for these numbers to have any real use.

Because it must include labor in other countries where the pay scale is very different. A barista at Starbucks in NYC is going to have a different income than one in Vietnam. By making these all US companies, you are comparing the CEO pay of an American against an average of global norms which are far lower.

It would be useful (to me) to include another column that's just the median pay of US-based employees.

Another interesting tact would be to show what a Vietnamese CEO makes versus their company's median pay, or what this looked like in the US in 1950, for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com