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Comment by fuzzythinker | Hacker News Reader

Ouch, 25% vs. 6%. That's how they value managers vs. (engineers? or everyone else?). Sad.

Well, a) it's based of base salary, so managers may be making a lower base than others, and b) while both bonuses are based on company revenue, managers may have a higher target.

It makes sense to have a larger part of sales' income be commission than, say, engineers, who may have less control over meeting revenue targets.

In what universe are managers averaging less base salary than individual contributors? Aside from a few outlier engineers you see from time to time...

I see it quite a bit... Managers will often have larger equity or bonus comp.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg each have a $1 salary.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032315/why-did-larr...

This is just arguing in bad faith.

I don't think I'm intending to deceive anyone. It's an interesting salary setup that popped into my mind when I read CamelCaseName's, ryandrake's, and supernovae's comments.

I'm sorry if it came off as deceitful or misled anyone.

They've already made more money than they or their descendants (probably for generations) will ever need and are very likely also getting capital gains on that wealth through one way or another.

The $1 salary is just posturing.

I wasn't saying whether it was moral or immoral or good or bad. I was just giving an example.

I'm curious, would you say it is better for them to have a $1 salary, a $100k salary, or a $100M salary?

It would be nice first of all for them not to be tax dodging assholes, who like in the case of ActiBlizz not only didn't pay tax to the US but also manipulated the tax system to get tax credits to the tune of hundreds of millions of Dollars in just a single year¹ while also kicking out hundreds of their employees for short term gain.

And if their companies already use the tax system as nothing other than toilet paper, why would one assume they as private persons would do anything different?

¹: https://www.fanbyte.com/news/americans-paid-activision-blizz...

I agree there should be less tax loophole exploitation. I think the best way to prevent it though is through law changes to remove the loopholes.

To compare against Blizzard's 2018 numbers, I checked out Google's 2018 numbers (full disclosure I work at Google, but my words are my own). I could be misinterpreting the document, but it looks like Google paid $14.5B in corporate income taxes in 2017 and $4.2B in 2018.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2018Q4_alphabet_earnings...

In addition to being edge cases, the people you listed are not managers.

I think they are/were, or at least some of them have been at some points in time during which they had a $1 salary. Although maybe there are different definitions of the word manager and I'm not really familiar with them all.

>Typically, responsibilities include being a decision maker on business strategy and other key policy issues, leader, manager, and executor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_executive_officer

>"We've never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President," their letter said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50653345

That was said when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were stepping back. So it seems to imply their old roles were management roles and their new roles aren't.

In 25 years, exactly once have I had someone in my team that was paid more than me.

It was someone who had been in the job 5-6 years longer than me, and consistently been one of the highest performers. I believe I was the one to give him a raise to a higher base than me.

So it does certainly happen, but as you say I think they're outliers.

Usually I think you'll see this happen because companies are poor at having a separate tech promotion track that doesn't lead into management, and so it sometimes happens with people that really ought to have been promoted, but that neither they or you want to become managers.

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion on this. That's more than 4x more for managers than engineers.

Yes, 4x is a big gap, not just % wise, but dollar wise too. I'm sure they don't talk about it during the interview. But if somehow that information slipped in during interview, I would honestly just thank them for the time and walk out because I would never work for a company that believes in the large gap of the output of the 2 groups.

It's a standard sort of thing.

The idea is that a non-manager has minimal ability to affect the company's bottom line. While those further up have the ability (and now have the incentive) to affect the profit of their division or the whole company.

So a worker gets 100k with a 10% bonus, his boss gets $120k with a 40 percent bonus etc. In a good year the boss will get almost twice the worker but in a bad year he will make just 20% more.

0.0004% is 4x 0.0001%. If it's a small amount then 4x really doesn't matter.

The compensation progression for a manager generally consists of a slow (if any growth) in base salary and most compensation increases come from stock and bonus. I believe this is generally the same for high level ICs. Some companies make it explicit that there is an IC level that corresponds to each manager level and both have the same compensation structure.

In any human hierarchy, the management of the hierarchy tends to view itself as the most important component.

At the same time, it is literally the least talented.

Well, if the managers have a base salary of 100k and the engineers, 150k, I think it’s fair.

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