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Comment by batmaniam | Hacker News Reader

The same could be asked about upper management. They earn 10x our pay, so their output is 10x more value than our work, and they work 10x harder, right? In our normal 8 hour work day, they must work 80 hours. Except a full day is 24 hours.

Why is the onus always on the bottom workers to be honest? Why are we trying to feel guilty about our working hours vs how much we're paid? Because it's clear salary is not tied to better performers given how much upper management is compensated.

Just enjoy your life. Management probably lowballed you coming into the job anyway, but if they are happy with your work, then spend that extra time you're saving to enjoying other things in life.

What do you want to do, OP? The new year is coming up.

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I'm not upper management. Most upper management gets paid way too much for the value they bring.

But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team.

Agree with your second statement. I work at a semiconductor startup. Both the CEO and the CTO are excellent folks. Kind, extremely competent, hardworking, and reasonable; I love my time spent interacting with them.

> But, when you have the opportunity to work under an excellent CEO or CTO you will learn that they do bring 10x or even 100x the value you bring to the team.

The same can be told about OP who claimed that they work 5-10 hours a week but their performance reviews have consistently ranged from mediocre to great. The point is, the hours you work is not an indicator for the value you bring to the team.

I absolutely agree.

They are also capable of causing 10x as much damage. Their job is to make correct decisions because they supposed to have the permission and responsibility to make larger decisions.

I have never seen that happen in practice. Can you give an example of a CEO who delivered 100x value to the company you worked for?

Yes. They do this in a lot of ways.

- Connections: industry, hires, investors

- Investing themselves into the company (bringing capital to help you grow)

- Domain specific knowledge. Hopefully they know the industry better than anyone.

- Management. Do not underestimate how far good management can go. It can really be a productivity multiplier - but the other way is true, too. If you have bad management, you're going to kill productivity.

I would love to see an experiment where a single CEO competes with a group of 100 experienced software engineers, sales people, product managers etc. I have a feeling that close to no CEO would win that one.

This is uncharitable, the parent comment explicitly said CEOs are a power multiplier.

Using your parallel, I think it'd be more fair to compare

> CEO + 300 software engineers, sales people, product managers

> 400 software engineers, sales people, product managers in a flat structure

I tend to think that the former would be more efficient, because otherwise we would be seeing at least some organizations of the latter type outcompeting the former on the free market. We don't, with 1-2 exceptions.

The whole point is the compensation is not based on how hard you work but the value you provide and what the market will support. Of course upper management works roughly the same hours as everyone else, but they also have far more responsibility.

Actually, compensation is based on what the company has to pay. There are some other rules, like they have to (overall) pay less than they make from the output. But in general, a company never pays their employees more than they think they have to.

10x programmers don't make 10x the pay. They might make slightly more, but not even 2x what a 1x programmer (of the same level, no comparing seniors to juniors) makes at the same company.

Sad truth.

You’re not wrong, of course the company will pay the minimum it can get away with. My point was a bit broader regarding the market value between an executive versus a programmer.

If a company is doing its job correctly, a 10x engineer should not be leveled the same as a 1x engineer. (It's more complicated than that but, y'know.)

Yeah, but you have to go up quite a few levels to make 10x the pay. E.g., a Google L5 makes (ballpark) $360k. An L8 makes (ballpark) $1M. That's only 3x higher, and you probably need a lot more than 10x impact to go L5 -> L8. An L4 makes $270k, still within ~1/4 of an L8. L3s are paid almost 200k, which is still ~1/5 of an L8.

I don't know what L9s or 10s are paid; it's probably highly variable and the total number are probably a handful.

Advancement at Google is tied heavily to being on the right projects to the extent that I think you're way overselling the extent to which the higher levels will be better at their jobs.

That seems plausible; I don’t work there. I think that further supports the argument that “10x engineers” are not paid 10x.

if the company is doing its job correctly, its paying the 10x engineer even less than the 1x engineer.

if the engineer is doing their job correctly, they are negotiating to be paid more than tne 1x

that's one way to get a lot of 1x engineers...

> paying the 10x engineer even less than the 1x engineer

Why is that a good idea? Isn't there a risk that s/he will then quit?

best solution is to stay a 1x developer then devote most of your energy to sidegigs and stock investing

yes. or better be a 10x for 4 hours a week. i feel like 10x is about flow not stress, so doing 10x might be easier than 1x ironically.

there is a disconnect about how companies mildly or jot so mildly “gaslight” employees into burning all of their energy on the job.

Its more cultural than profit-seeking. The profit seeker would want to maximise the effectiveness of the worker, by for example thinking hard about what work is worth doing.

The biggest waste i see is cancelled projects that could have easily been pre-cancelled. The next is features that are hardly used. Followed by technical debt and its impact on velocity.

Actually, the best strategy is in fact to stay a 1x performer at work, AND to stay a 1x performer in your investing life via set-and-forget index funds.

Minimize risk and time spent in efficient markets with millions of participants (the developer talent pool, the stock market). These places are treadmills.

Instead, spend your free time in inefficient markets by starting a business with the rest of the time you’ve now freed up.

Most B2C and B2B markets don’t have millions of competitors, and hence are much less efficient than the developer talent pool and stock market (which do).

This is the optimal strategy.

In my last two jobs I fail to see that my employer got more value out of me than the expenses of paying me.

don't feel too bad. There are a lot of CEOs that get $20M salaries for doing nothing. If the company succeeds due to market conditions they are seen as heroes- if the company fails for market conditions they are seen as losers. They may have some impact but mostly its luck.

Ah yes, the incredible value of providing feedback on proposals and signing off on initiatives.

> but they also have far more responsibility

This is relative. In my experience, many people in upper management have held little to no real responsibility because they were the types that if all goes right, it's their doing, but if anything goes wrong, it's the fault of someone below them. I find this more true for middle managers, but I have seen this with upper management numerous times.

Again in my experience, the higher in rank one achieves, the less real work they end up doing when compared to their subordinates. Delegating isn't that hard to do and takes very little time -- and there are some master class delegators out there.

That all being said, I do respect and love working for upper management who understand, who care, and who do as much as the rest of us. I currently work for such individuals and it's part of the reason I've stayed as long as I have.

Compensation is based on how much economic rent the employer can extract from the value that its employees produce. Thus, roles who produce the same amount of value can still receive drastically different compensation. Furthermore, in case of upper management, the value produced is negative in many cases - numerous examples of companies run into the ground, with the people responsible still getting their golden parachutes etc.

They in general seem to accept credit for other peoples work and delegate blame to others as well. I don’t call that being responsible.

Most upper management aren't hired because they're good at something. They're hired for who they know.

Knowing the personal number of CxO from a Fortune 500 company and being familiar enough to just call them is worth a TON of money for the whole company.

Management experience is also a plus, but it's not necessary when you have the ability to short-track yourself (and your company) straight to the people who make the decisions.

You think execs get hired based on connections alone? That is pretty absurd. It’s difficult to see value when you have little insight into their day to day. Upper management probably has the same skill distribution of any other job. Meaning your likelihood of working for an incompetent C level is probably roughly the same as working for an incompetent leader at any other level.

> execs get hired based on connections alone

I think you're interpreting what theshrike79 wrote, a bit too literally :-) (agreed, though, about the skill distribution thoughts, I guess)

(Good books, btw, the Hyperion series, theshrike79 :-))

Labor is not productivity. Labor is labor, and if badly aimed, might as well be completely useless. Upper management has the power and responsability to make decisions which can have colossal implications on the overall productivty of the company towards its goal of selling what it sells. The real issue though, is that even though labor can approximately be measured, the impact of decisions not so much; whatever decision is taken becomes the "new normal" and it's hard to know how much it was a productive or improductive one. I'm not really knowledgeable on how upper managers are evaluated.

> Why is the onus always on the bottom workers

Power imbalance. The same reason why *essential* workers often get poverty salaries.

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