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Comment by kuratkull | Hacker News Reader

Look at each valuable item that you use often, now look up the salary of the leader of the company that made it.

Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.

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And yet, all of those examples are critically dependent on huge pieces of infrastructure created and distributed for free by people motivated simply by craftsmanship - Linux, the BSD kernels and many other similar things.

These two ideas are not in conflict. You can create something and give it away free, or you can ask money. Many SWEs do both - eg. open-source for fun, proprietary at work.

You're giving a preposterous amount of credit to executives for the value that is mostly being created by the lower level workers. So, if every CxO-level leader in the world disappeared tomorrow (or if their compensations simply got capped arbitrarily), nothing would get built ever again?

Successful companies are mostly that due to having made the right business decisions, these come mostly top down. You can have a million workers, but if they don't have great leadership they'll produce basically nothing of great value.

Well, if every CxO-level leader disappeared how are decisions made? By popular vote?

People of my opinion/disposition already know that CEOs make too much. You don’t have to indirectly tell me.

CEO pay in America was forced to be made transparent by Congressional law.

Shortly thereafter CEO pay started to skyrocket. There's no evidence CEOs started doing a 10x better job running companies but their pay sure as heck increased, 10x then 100x!

Countless studies have shown that workers are not motivated by money beyond around low six figures.

There is no reason to suspect a CEO earning $100 million is 100 times more dedicated to the job than one earning $1 million dollars.

You wouldn't have those items without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.

> You wouldn't have those items without that compensation.

Asserted without evidence.

Traumatic? What are you talking about?

And it’s easy to argue (EDIT: more like assert without evidence) that cherry-picked aspects of the status quo for the last forty years is the linchpin of everything.

> You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr googles, steams, ikea tables, etc.

God, don't threaten me with a good time.

> You wouldn't have that item without that compensation.

You are swapping cause and effect. First comes the item, then the compensation.

What are you talking about? Let's have every worker stop doing their jobs. I'm sure those company leaders will continue to produce great products on their own.

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