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Comment by whaaaaat | Hacker News Reader

I am not aware of any role in tech (or really anywhere in wage labor) where people are being paid what they are worth. Nearly every job that exists gets paid a whole lot less than they make for the company, sometimes millions less per year.

So I'd say, pay us all what we are worth, and pay the high performers proportionally more.

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> Nearly every job that exists gets paid a whole lot less than they make for the company, sometimes millions less per year.

In our specific industry, innumerable people are earning high compensation as part of companies and teams that have relatively little revenue (if any) and may very well collapse before turning a profit. Should they not be paid until their work actually makes some money? What if it doesn't?

"Worth" is pretty tricky in salaries, but tech workers happen to have very very little to complain about when it comes to compensation right now. The labor fight for them (us) is real but exists almost entirely on other fronts.

that's how equity works.

A person’s worth is magnified by the company as well. A software developer’s work is worth less without a salesperson who can sell that work, and vice versa.

I would characterize this as potential rather than worth.

You forgot to calculate risk. Wages have to be paid even when the company loses money, and before it makes any from your work. And it has to be paid even if you did a bad job. And in many places, they can't get rid of you for a long time even if you keep doing a bad job or practically no job at all. And when they finally can get rid of you, it's probably going to cost some more money.

Just become a shareholder, share the upside and share the downside. Don't have the balls? Be an employee, get a nice risk-free sum every month and live a worry-free life.

(Yeah I know being an employee isn't entirely without worries, but it's nothing compared to being a founder/shareholder.)

> Just become a shareholder

I always forget that all people, regardless of their capital, can "just become a shareholder".

Yes, they can - stock can be part of compensation. I'm sure almost any company would happily pay you in stock rather than in cash. And buying isn't the only way of becoming a shareholder, especially in software.

I co-founded my first startup when I was 16, as soon as I reached the lower age limit for being a company shareholder in the UK - I'm not from the UK, but I wanted it and so I found a way. If a 16 year old kid with acne and 300 euro in their wallet can do it, any adult professional can.

Yeah it's a load of risk, you work crazy hours, the stress is insane and sometimes you end up paying instead of earning - so don't be surprised that nobody will share the upside if you don't share the risk. It's not for everyone. But anyone can, if they actually wanted.

I remember when I was 18, trying to earn my way through college, scrounging by on less than minimum wage because I was paid under the table. Living in a flat with 8 other people to make the rent math work.

Foolish me for not just becoming a shareholder. I definitely had the spare time between the $7k/year I was making to take that risk and not die of starvation.

Your world would be great if I had a guarantee of food, water, a bed, basic medicine, etc. I'd love to have had the ability to throw my time at a risky innovative project. But, I didn't. If I had, and that project failed, I would have literally died. Downsides are too big in this capitalist world for anyone to just become a shareholder.

Yeah, as I said, it's definitely not for everyone. I skipped school because I wanted to do business. Sometimes I didn't have enough food, at the beginning. I had to buy (very) used instead of new. I lived at the far end of the city and I didn't really go anywhere because I didn't have enough money for bus tickets. A lot of sacrifice - and now someone comes and wants to have all of it without any sacrifice. I agree the world can be improved and your suggestions are what I have in mind too. But imho it's off topic to this conversation.

You said that you want to get all profit you made for the company - that's only possible if it's your company. If you don't want that, that's fine - but don't say the option isn't available.

It's much easier to become a shareholder than to become an employee. Today it takes about an hour, you can do it online, and you need just 50 EUR. Of course, the real trick is in making profit - and now it's up to you to show how invaluable and company-making-or-breaking your skills are - as they should be if you're asking for the full upside.

Can't do it? Then you have to share with sales, marketing, accounting, tax consultants, finance, auditors, lawyers, internal IT, HR, post-sales account managers, customer support, office managers, other engineers - and of course the people who keep it organized, and the people who took a risk and funded it. Seems fair to me.

Consider the opportunity cost of providing capital: if I invested my capital into NASDAQ100 accumulating ETF, I could reasonably expect 10-15% of yearly tax-free[0] profit stored in a safe asset that can be liquidated at any time. Potentially much more profit - last few years were great (20-40% p.a.). You have to give me more if you want me to risk my capital in a custom illiquid and unregulated over the counter deal, and I mean a lot more.

[0] In my country if you hold an asset for 3 years, you don't pay capital gains tax - this doesn't apply to dividends or any other form of income such as interest or rent. But the accumulating ETFs are fully tax free after 3 years - including the dividends and the gains. You just sell when you need money, no need to "reinvest" manually.

The market disagrees

Indeed. Thankfully, the market is not the only way of organizing people.

The market is the only way of organizing people, thankfully it doesn't mean much.

(Even non-profits etc are part of the market)

The market is not an organization, the market is a disorganization—except in the case of a monopoly/monopsony, in which case intervention is desirable.

Nobody said that the market is some organization, it's a way of organizing people, and it happens naturally. It's not something you invent, create and maintain, it's something you discover and observe - and try to control, often in vain or with unintended consequences, like weather. There was a market long before anybody thought of the word - and it was one of the first words. The oldest known written text is not some religious fluff or descriptions of market-less utopia, it's a "warranty claim" about a shipment of copper.

My point was that the word organization implies a planned structure, and a free market is explicitly not that. I'd consider it fair to say a market is a way of humans self-organizing, but a market is not an organization in any common sense of the word.

"Organization" (verb) doesn't necessarily result in "an organization" and almost definitely not in something "optimally organized". Your brain is organized and yet nobody planned it and it's definitely not an organization.

I also disagree that "an organization" (noun) implies anything other than "a group of people" as described in dictionary. An organization can exist without any planned structure - doesn't stop it from being an organization. In my teenage years I was part of few "hacker" groups (in the HN sense of the word) - we tinkered with computers and had a website with cool stuff, all under our 1337 H4X0R-esque name and logo. We definitely were an organization, but we really didn't plan any structure at all. We just liked tech.

See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organization

Oh my friend, you have some reading to do!

The capitalist market system is really only a few hundred years old! If you believe Meiksins Wood, she puts it at about the mid 1700s, others put it a little later.

And even then, it took quite some time to reach the rest of the globe.

We've had non-capitalist market economies, anarchist economies, communist economies (of various flavors), gift economies, and many other ways of organizing people.

Ask the folks who run Food Not Bombs about whether they are 'organized by the market'. :D

"The market" doesn't imply "the capitalist market system". Yes, the current structure of world economy started forming around that time. There was market since pre-history and will be long after Earth is dust.

The Open Source movement was definitely a different way of organizing people

I wonder if non-religious subcultures like that can last very long though

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