sl8r

My understanding is that most unrepatriated earnings are actually deposited in US banks, meaning that those dollars are already being lent into the US economy. Repatriation is a tax accounting issue.

Lower middle-market private equity firms are probably the most likely investors. Often, they'd want to buy the entire business, but in some cases they might look at taking a minority stake with some control rights.

This is an interesting point; thanks! Found this article incase anyone is interested. One quote stood out to me:

> Private equity recruitment firm PER conducts an ‘unofficial count’ into how many analysts join the M&A and corporate finance teams of six leading banks in London. In 2010, PER calculated that 250 people joined a combination of Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. After tracking those individuals for three years, it recently calculated that 140 of them are still working in banking. That’s an attrition rate of 44%.

(http://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/139375/nearly-half-o...)

> Care to name some, besides banking and consulting, and possibly corporate law? I'd suggest that in most fields, you don't make significantly more money until you're managing a significant percentage of people, or tasked with making decisions that set the direction the company.

This is fair / you're right: I was mainly thinking of banking, consulting, law, and buy-side finance. As you say, though, there are plenty of highly-trained professionals who don't experience a 5x earnings increase over 10 years; functional medical roles (e.g., anesthesiologists) come to mind.

Something I was wondering when I wrote the original question -- and I may be way off here -- is whether there are cultural or structural effects in tech-industry programming that cause wage stagnation. For example, there is less wage stagnation for programmers in quant hedge funds than there is in the tech industry; part of this is the clear p&l, of course, but perhaps there is a cultural / structural component as well? I'm not a programmer, but I once heard something that stood out to me: A friend, who was a senior programmer, discovered an inefficient process where he worked. In brief, whenever a certain "event" occurred, the company lost money; the senior programmer noticed this, and built a fix -- no more "events", and hence lots of money saved. From what he told me, my back of the envelope was that by building this (which took him about a week), he saved the company more than $600k a year. I mentioned to him that if he had come in as an outside consultant with a black box solution and offered to charge $100k a year to save the company $600k per year, there was a nonzero chance they would have said "yes"; he laughed and shrugged. This made me wonder whether there is something intrinsically non-value-capturing going on; perhaps (1) tech-industry programming doesn't have a culture of individual-value-capturing, or (2) the role of a programmer doesn't have the structural leverage to reliably capture value. Of course, this story is just anec-data; there may be no conclusions here.

Yeah, piling on: While some tech companies have huge market caps, there are plenty of non-tech companies above the $100B mark. Current top ten includes Exxon Mobil, Berkshire Hathaway, Petro China, Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson, ICBC, and Novartis alongside Apple, Google, and Microsoft. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...)

The labor market for programers in the tech industry has two features (anecdotally observed) that are interesting to me:

1. Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation. This is in contrast to some other professional disciplines (e.g., salespeople often get paid on a percentage or commission, bankers often take a % cut, pe / vc / hf has 2% and 20%, real estate is on a %, lawyers may get paid on a % ("contingent fees"), etc.)

2. Initial salaries are good, but there is wage stagnation. Just-out-of-college salaries for programming are often better than virtually everything else (notably, banking and consulting); but after ten years, the opposite is relationship is reversed (considerably so). The difference between a newgrad salary and a 10-yearer salary for tech-industry programmers is often (in my anecdotal experience) less than 2x. In contrast, 5x or more is not unusual in other fields.

My experience is that there are some "weird" effects of equity comp once one gets into the calculus of incentives:

1. Payoffs are too small to be consequential. If you own 0.01% of a company and are personal-profit-maximizing, then you are indifferent between (a.) Increasing the company's valuation by $1M and (b.) Getting $100.

2. Growth makes "rest and vest" a reasonable strategy. If a startup does well, then an employee's initial equity grant typically dwarfs all subsequent compensation; does it make sense to work hard for a $5k raise when your equity is worth $500k?

Something I've often wondered about his how much of the top 10 VC performance advantage is due to deal availability. Top firms are offered the best deals (every startup wants to be funded by them), which means that they might be able to achieve better returns without being "better" than other VC firms in terms of, say, investing acumen or operational advice.

It could be that 0% of top VC returns are explained by this; I'm curious, though.

"When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think', I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example that it is _I_ who thinks, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity or operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego', and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking - that I _know_ what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is perhaps not 'willing' or 'feeling'? ... Whoever ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of _intuitive_ perception, like the person who says, 'I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual and certain' - will encounter nowadays a smile and two question marks from a philosopher nowadays. 'Sir', the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, 'it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why insist on the truth?'"

No condescension perceived :-)

I think that background varies - some people are fluent statisticians and others come from different disciplines / careers. Anecdotally, my experience from browsing A/B testing advice online is similar; some content is very statistically savvy and some is a bit oversimplified.