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Comment by cs137 | Hacker News Reader

What you're saying about management is true, but there's another reason why ultra-productive engineers aren't paid accordingly. It's context-dependent which engineers get to go into that state; put a "10x" engineer on a 0.1x project, and he'll probably just end up failing and making a bunch of enemies.

Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer. He'll still get his 10% bonus if he performs well, won't he? So why should they feel compelled to give him more?

Obviously, this is bad for workers and bad for society, but it makes sense from the corporate viewpoint.

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> Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer.

I think it's really two things.

1. The company provides the structure in which the engineer works. Code is not valuable on its own, it's valuable when it solves a business problem. The company structure converts business problems to engineering problems for the engineer to solve. That transmogrification has value and the ability to build & maintain the transmogrifier (aka the rest of the company) is a skill that gets rewarded. The transmogrifier also uses money as one of its inputs (salaries for the rest of the company) and so some of the "pure value" that the engineer creates can't be converted directly to money for the engineer, because it has to be used in the "business problem to engineering problem" conversion process.

It's similar to the argument about taxes. Why should I pay taxes for things I don't use? Well, even if I don't drive, the roads support other parts of society that benefit me.

2. The engineer effectively pays the company (meaning the owners or shareholders of the company) to reduce the engineer's risk. If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk. Otherwise the company owners will not make enough on the successes to cover the failures.

If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk.

This is, of course, the argument that capitalists use to justify their disproportionate take, but it doesn't hold water, because they don't really take on much risk. They risk capital they have. often in massive amounts; laborers have to work because they don't have capital to put at risk in the first place. The only thing the bosses are actually risking is becoming workers again, which they'll fight furiously to avoid, because they know how much it sucks, because they're the reason why it sucks.

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