[runako]

I follow the argument, but one can't even make that statement with those numbers about most places SWEs work.

So if we take a company like Google where we could plausibly say "the average top salary for a SWE is $500,000/yr," already it is possibly more remunerative than most places an SWE would work. We could assume it was stated in extremely bad faith, that only 0.5% of the SWEs there make that and everyone else makes $75k. Or we could assume there is a ladder, a progression, and a path to get there. I don't believe the extremely bad faith representation would work here because of likely PR blowback. QED there is likely a path for a delivery driver to earn six figures at UPS.

> a representation of the gains of a typical worker who is subject to the deal

This is covered elsewhere in TFA, and is dependent on the kind of employee.

[artsytrashcan]

Accepting this logic: a top-end figure tells you nothing about the nature of the progression to get there. In particular, it doesn't say anything about the relative conditions on each step of the progression, nor (again) about how many make it up each step. The extreme version of this is, of course, how many food service and retail companies have billionaire owners while their lowest level employees qualify for Section 8 and food stamps. Clearly, there is a better way to represent conditions in such a company, beyond simply stating the CEO's take-home. (QED /s)