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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

You responded to my point about about capped compensation or removing autonomy, so I think you understand what my point is: the anger people are expressing, including so-called "righteous anger," is totally hypocritical unless you are advocating for measures that would also apply to you. If you're not willing to commit to those measures, then you're just expressing jealousy that it's not you in that situation.

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But why does capped compensation help? The issue is not that people are highly paid, but that undeserving, corrupt, and even fraudulent people are highly paid. Capped compensation may well be a good idea (not sure), but it doesn't really help with corruption and incompetence. The point is that there are already double standards that apply to the average worker, but less so to the C-suite (particularly in startups).

I don't think it would be accurate to consider my anger over the CEO who awarded themselves a $25M bonus while laying off hundreds of my colleagues and tanking the company to be "jealousy".

Edit: I apologize for the aggressive tone in the original reply, though I disagree with your take it wasn't necessary.

Thanks for keeping it civil, I appreciate it! The capped compensation is for the "they're paid too much" angle. Removing autonomy in hiring is for the "they're undeserving/corrupt" angle. That way there's a different process for hiring that isn't corrupted by nepotism/cronyism.

I'm not trying to sound like I'm discrediting your experience or feelings, but I only really have your side of what happened, so of course your experience will sound justified from your perspective. There's a lot of possibilities for why that could have happened, not including ones that nobody could know about except upper management.

I may be wrong about my assessment of the leadership's competence in this case (I'm not, but I can see how you may not be able to know) but that doesn't mean jealousy is the motive. Your skepticism should be equally applied to the psychological motives of the commenters, in my opinion.

I'd absolutely commit to measures like more transparency and objectivity in hiring criteria, and of course that would apply to me as well. I've got nothing but contempt for the "senior developers" of HN who think writing fizzbuzz or coding on a whiteboard is beneath them; I have zero problem with being asked to demonstrate the concrete skills that I'm bringing to a position (and if that means I get beaten to the punch by someone with a less impressive degree/CV who happens to be better at the actual work, well, them's the breaks). I just wish the same applied at the top as well.

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