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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged.

Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.

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I never understand the arguments against high pay for professional athletes. They are largely union organized labor. Their pays is directly tied to how much money their league is bringing in in revenue (mostly TV deals). If they don't get paid that money then that money goes to the already incredibly wealthy owners of the team. Does that make more sense?

Well it generally stems from the source of the arguments as to why you don't just print money and pay everyone a living wage.

Because money is artificially kept scarce.

Do you think Amazon could maintain its warehouses if it didn't have desperate workers trying to make enough to survive? Shit no it couldn't. So why do think the boss of that company who well let's be honest could probably be replaced quite easily compared to the warehouse workers (it's easy af to replace a workforce of one man but go try fill 10'000 positions at once) should get paid so much more than the workers literally making his company work? It'd take the AVG worker 3.5 lifetimes on 20 an hour to be compensated the same as one year of that CEO. Are you telling me that is acceptable? Your going to create individuals who have wealth that would take the AVG Joe 35 lifetimes to equal. Lol folks who simp for absurd pays to CEOs are legit bonkers. Your never going to earn that. Your kids and your kids kids are never going to earn that not for another 35 generations. So yeah how fair so you think that is? How equal is that? Creating a class of generational slaves and wealth imbalance that's set to last a few thousand years. Such sustainable business! Lol

> Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!!

Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.

> How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.

Livable conditions for all humans have nothing to do with how to compensate top of the of the top people in their profession. By mixing those 2, you're only hurting your case.

>Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.

Small nit pick, but it's a function of perceived economic value, which I think is where some of the outrage comes from.

For example, someone may provide a lot of unperceived economic value and not be paid accordingly or they may provide a high level of societal value, but relatively low economic value and not be paid well.

> Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.

I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better.

So what is the value there? It's almost like with a piece of art. Only because people are ready to pay a price for it, it's valued at that price.

On the other hand you have thousands of slaves working for the same company, generating value you can actually touch and they earn unbelievably less that the artistic head of this monster.

So sure...nice try but you have to be really far away from the bottom to actually believe it.

> I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better.

Did you ever try to manage small org vs big org vs huge company? It's very naive to think that managing dozens of people requires same skills as managing some of the biggest companies in the world.

Of course I did.

I'm Bill Gates.

Did you?

I worked for small and huge companies though and I could see that it requires far less work to manage a huge one than to manage a small one. I wouldn't even call it "work" if managing the small one is work. It's more like pointing your finger.

I’ve also stood next to the brain surgeon once and I could see that his work was easy.

Oh so we're comparing paper pushers to brain surgeons now? Guess I've found one eh?

You legitimately think you don’t need comparable level of education, work and skill between brain surgeon and leader of big, successful organization?

I assume you never actually lead anyy bigger team for significant amount of time. I’m not a manager, but I’ve lead teams of around 50 people as an IC. It’s tough job that requires very specific skill set to be successful.

Yes I legitimately think that you don't need that at the top of a huge company and I talk from my first hand experience I got from an international F500 company with hundreds of thousand paper pushers and now working in the health sector. The CEO of the former company was a senile wreck. He "managed" the company for quite a few years when I was there. His replacement does almost no work at all. Still on it. I would love to get into detail there but I might doxx myself.

As I wrote above: some mid-management person would probably be much better suited for the position. They are theoretically still in the pool but not realistically so the "scarcity" theory is faked since it's a fake group of people who are being considered. They're most of the times not even considered for their skill set. They've been just sucking up to their predecessor while stabbing everybody else in their way in the back. How this is considered a valuable skill for managing any company (besides in the mafia probably) is beyond me. Maybe you could explain it to me.

On the other hand, you can't replace a brain surgeon with a night nurse. You can't even take a random doctor to do the job and the brain surgeons reputation is directly connected to the actual work he/she does with their own hands. When he gets older, his eyes weaker, his hands shaky, he won't be able to do the job anymore.

If folks who had to pay them believed that, then they wouldn't pay them that (in my experience).

As to if you think the folks who pay them are clueless to do so, do you know any of them personally?

Just like the folks here who cheer this madness, those folks who pay them believe in the hype for the same stupid reasons OP outlined above and to justify their own wages.

Those folks are elected by the shareholders though.

So the people who are paying, are (indirectly) paying out of their own pockets.

If someone can't pay out of their own pockets the amount they think someone is worth for them to work for them (or appoint someone to do it for them), then... what's the alternative?

By the biggest shareholders which are in turn the same kind of people.

And they surely not pay it out of THEIR OWN pockets...they pay it out of pockets of their customers and so on goes the responsibility train...

Also what's the "choice" there? Seriously, even calling that "choice" is ridiculous.

The alternative is to force those bloodsuckers to pay wages people can life from. They can keep the rest. Nobody would give a damn because at some point they'd have to rise prices to reflect even in the slightest ways the actual worth of the work of their weakest slaves which carry the whole construct. Maybe and only maybe then they'd cut the wages higher above where all those useless paper pushers sit with their fancy names or they'd lose money because people would stop buying their shit.

Quite easy eh? And everybody knows about that solution. It's just not happening because everybody who could enforce it, is just as greedy as the assholes on top and their "shareholders".

It sounds like you're really angry. Does this directly impact you?

They can pay those wages because workers who can do the work to a level they consider acceptable will accept them.

One way to solve this problem is to convince those workers to work together as a bloc, not accept those wages, and demand higher ones.

Some folks won't like that of course, but the willingness to tell them to fuck off is important. If someone can't say no to a bad deal, after all, they can't actually negotiate.

I don't have a horse in that race however, and have more than enough of my own stuff I need to focus on.

> It sounds like you're really angry. Does this directly impact you?

Sure it does. I'm a human being with a healthy moral compass. Why doesn't it impact you?

> They can pay those wages because workers who can do the work to a level they consider acceptable will accept them.

Wow...do you think people would do it if they had a choice or a saying in this matter? Seriously?

> One way to solve this problem is to convince those workers to work together as a bloc, not accept those wages, and demand higher ones.

But they are not a bloc and the rest of society has done a great job to divide them along artificial lines (race, politics, gender, religion, etc.) and the same basic construct the ones above adhere to: selfishness as the winning factor within the system. The system does also everything it can to hinder unions of any kind. You could see how much of a WONDER it was when some people managed to form one at Amazon. It's been on the news worldwide!

So you making it something they could "just do" is kinda disgusting.

But, it's a good point that you rarely hear much in the public discourse about how much NFL players make, where tech CEOs are a constant target of this sort of anger.

Mind you, I agree with you on the general point, but turns out people don't act terribly rationally about who they get angry at for making too much money.

This is actually a very interesting point. I think what this points out is that society thinks an athlete who is good at throwing a ball earns their money more than a tech executive, and honestly I'm not sure I disagree.

One gets to where they are with extreme practice, talent, dedication, and typically a generous portion of privilege while growing up.

The other (tech execs) often get where they are by lying, cheating, manipulating, and with nepotism.

I seriously cannot tell if this is satire

>Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid.

No, athletes are paid what they deserve. That wasn't always the case, they got it through collective bargaining and it took strikes to make it happen.

The average warehouse worker does not have this option, and the entire government/media/corporate apparatus is designed to make collective bargaining as difficult as possible. The difference between a warehouse worker and an NFL player warming the bench is that one has a union, with teeth, that has fought for his fair share.

> The difference between a warehouse worker and an NFL player warming the bench is that one has a union, with teeth, that has fought for his fair share.

No, the difference is that NFL makes a ton of money per player and they only want the best so the supply is extremely limited whereas basically anyone can work in a warehouse so there supply is basically infinite.

If warehouses paid NFL wages, nobody would spend like 10 years practicing for the minuscule chance they get into the NFL and make NFL wages.

>No, the difference is that NFL makes a ton of money per player and they only want the best so the supply is extremely limited whereas basically anyone can work in a warehouse so there supply is basically infinite.

No, it's not. The NFL athlete market is even more ripe for collusion than other markets because there are only a handful of owners who can (and did) easily collude to keep salaries low. It took several player strikes to get the NFL to the eye popping numbers we see today, and it wasn't always that way. There is no way in hell Tom Brady get's to command a $50MM salary if the next guy on the bench is only making $80k/yr. Owners wont commit to a 500k/yr minimum for a guy who is injured out of the goodness of their hearts. You can't ignore that the jumps in player compensation happened in the NFL after lockouts and strikes. The "invisible hand of the market" isn't a force you can take for granted.

It’s not illegal collusion. To make any of the sports leagues have teams that are even remotely competitive require policies that are not allowed by most other industries. They all have legal exemptions from anti-trust

Sure, even with a union, warehouse workers won't make millions, but a union is not going to demand that either. With collective bargaining, the salary discrepancy will become a lot less disgraceful.

I'm all for unions for the warehouse workers but the CEO also controls AWS which is a high margin high pay industry so I don't think it is fair to compare their low margin low pay retail business wages to the CEO of a conglomerate that has a much more profitable high margin high pay business.

How many people can you feed with one share of Amazon stock? Is it even edible?

At $2200/share? You would have to work 7.5 weeks at minimum wage to make enough to buy one share.

How much money has Tom Brady or Jassy made for the patriots/Amazon due to their leadership? If they brought 500M then 25M seems fair.

Is there a consensus on the value of leadership? I know there is some research for and against the idea that executive leadership has a meaningful impact on value creation.

Tom Brady did actual work for his team, a CEO does not do $500M worth of work. If there were no employees other than the CEO then the $500M doesn't get made.

> CEO does not do $500M worth of work

The decision to make AWS created 100s of billions of dollars of value. CEO decisions can make and break companies.

> If there were no employees other than the CEO then the $500M doesn't get made.

Right, and if Tom Brady doesn't have receivers to throw to he doesn't win any super bowls. It is the leadership that can create massive amounts of value.

> The decision to make AWS created 100s of billions of dollars of value

I can make decisions to create something all day, none of it makes any money unless effort is put into it's creation. Product and engineering and design made AWS which allowed the company to make billions. The marketing team after that.

And who was leading that effort? When executing, hard decisions get propagated to the top and leaders like Jassy have to make the toughest decisions that result in moving the trajectory of the company/project. This can create or destroy a lot of value.

At best the project managers and team leads.

No decision is worth this much money when it comes at the expense of paying the people for their labour.

He isn't being paid for his work (which I assume you are conflating with labor); he is being paid for the perceived value he can bring to the company.

His decision-making can absolutely influence the bottom line far more than any single Amazon warehouse worker could.

Now, I'm not saying that warehouse workers are worthless or should be treated like shit, far from it, but if Amazon doesn't pay him this much, some other corporation will. That's the free market.

> he is being paid for the perceived value he can bring to the company.

Regardless of if he's a magician or not, we're talking about work.

> His decision-making can absolutely influence the bottom line far more than any single Amazon warehouse worker could.

I decided to have coffee this morning, but if I don't put in a doordash order and there's no barista, then I don't get to have coffee.

I'm more pointing out that people don't rage against the machine like you are doing when an athlete signs a new contract.

There are dozens of us upset with athlete pay! Dozens!

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