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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

If you're able individually as a sole contributor to create 10M of value, sure, off you go, quit you job to go solo and generate all that sweet revenue for yourself.

It turns out someone identifying a market opportunity, getting funding, renting office space, hiring HR, infrastructure, service and support personnel, product designers, QA, sales, etc, etc all costs a surprising amount of money and effort that for some reason all those people feel they deserve to be paid for..

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This is a deflection: the original comment didn't say that there was no value in other parts of the business. It said that the price/value ratio was wrong.

But you can't unlock your value without those other parts of the business. Again, as an employee you aren't paid the value of your work, you're paid your replacement cost.

The other comment didn't give for why a 10m:250k ratio is wrong either though. The argument that the 10m is only enabled by the rest of the company is a reason why it isn't i 1:1. What should the ratio be? Why would it necessarily approach 1:1?

…or form a union with only those capable of generating 10M/year and dictate that market together. Easier than starting a company.

I might join a union of all software engineers in order to help junior engineers keep from getting completely burned out or horribly exploited, but I wouldn't join a union of elite FAANG engineers. I'm pretty sure the $250-$500k we can command is the most we can reasonably expect companies to be able to pay, since there's a ton of competition among them to hire us already

Otherwise, someone would've collected some VC money, hired the best of the best code monkeys for $1M+ each, and taken over some tech niche by now

Except Apple and others have already been caught colluding to stop engineers from making higher salaries.

And the courts put a stop to it. There were several cases against various companies over the years, but there don’t seem to be any since 2014. Did engineers salaries suddenly jump as a result 6 years ago? Is there any evidence of significant collusion since?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Steve and Larry share their employees salaries with each other to avoid a bidding war over top talent.

Lucy finds out and orders Steve and Larry to stop doing that.

Now Steve shares salary data with Teddy and Teddy tells Steve what the market average is. Larry also shares salary data with Teddy and also learns what the market average is.

No collusion! But the effect is the same. That's why they earn the big bucks.

Knowing the price of a thing is how markets work. If I want to buy tomatoes and a friend tells me a shop down the road has them on special offer, that's not collusion.We're not artificially suppressing the price of tomatoes. Anyway companies already know this by just offering a given salary and seeing if they get decent applicants. If they're not getting enough good applicant, they just raise the offer if they think it's appropriate. Having said that the habit of companies suppressing info about salaries between employees should be fought.

>If I want to buy tomatoes and a friend tells me a shop down the road has them on special offer, that's not collusion.We're not artificially suppressing the price of tomatoes.

You mixed up the analogy though. Rather it should be that tomato seller 1 talks to tomato seller 2 down the road and they agree to never charge less than x$ for 1 pound of tomatoes thus removing market forces and creating an artificial floor for tomato prices

You aren't really naive enough to think that just because a court ordered a corporation to stop doing something that they always stop doing that thing? Not only that but the order was only against some companies in SV which these days aren't even the highest paying or most desirable to work for.

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