[sinatra]

Just to be fair, for 90% of the world, the kinds of compensation many hacker news readers have (a Silicon Valley engineer who gets a high base plus bonus plus equity) would also be considered “holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it … does not make any f_ing sense”

[abeppu]

Honestly, I get that.

I work at a company with engineers mostly in the US and in an EU country, and my understanding is that, though our salaries in that EU country are top of the range, they are still meaningfully lower than for US engineers. The international talent pool is very good, and available at considerable savings. While I am glad I have my job, and that companies still seem willing to pay Bay Area salaries, I don't fully get why.

[jayd16]

If you look at the cost of living in SF and what you get, it starts to make sense. What is the equivalent argument for hundreds of millions?

[oars]

Janitors, baristas, waiters, waitresses, bus drivers are also living in the Bay Area on nowhere close to those salaries.

SF engineer salaries are still insane to these people. And they need to deal with the cost of living in SF.

[cscurmudgeon]

Why should there be a justification? The only argument should be between Google and Pichai.

Strangely, why aren't we doing the same for actors and sports stars?

[cudgy]

Poor example. How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none

How many movies do people attend solely based on the actors in the movie? Or sporting events due to a player on a team? Many

[cscurmudgeon]

Poor logic. Why should that matter? The initial argument was that no one should need that much money.

The sporting events can't take place soley due to the star. Do you think the star built the stadium or did all the background work for a movie? By this logic, movies with novice actors should always do bad.

> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company?

Not explicitly.

What about founder CEOs who built v1 on their own?

[cudgy]

A CEO cannot be a CEO (unless they are a founder which is a different matter altogether) without an existing enterprise with equipment and real estate to manage, so I don’t see the point there.

Founder CEOs are founders of the company and of course they will receive large payouts. The gripe is with non-founder executive vp sliding into CEO jobs and going from making $1 million a year to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year practically guaranteed with all sorts of golden parachutes attached.

[ztrww]

> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none

A lot bought it because of some decisions made by the CEO. They likely wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t made them (of course it varies a lot between industries).

By how much would you say a famous actor/athlete increases the revenue 10/20/50/100/1000%? A CEO can do that too.

[cudgy]

How do you measure what affect the CEO had? CEOs (like Jack Welch for example) get great acclaim for years according to short term benchmarks only to be proven to have made disastrous decisions for the business. Appraisal of CEOs is more witchcraft than science.

[bmitc]

That is a fair critique and overall true. But it also highlights the pay of these CEOs to be so absurd as to be barely comprehensible. It makes me wonder what types of personalities these people are. If I even had that salary for a year, max three, I'd retire and spend time learning and doing non-profit and foundation work.

[welshwelsh]

That's why you'll never make CEO pay. Most people, myself included, will happily retire with a couple million.

A lot of these people have ambitions that require a lot more money than that. Maybe they want to cure aging or explore space or something.

Another way of looking at it: if someone makes 100m a year and they are thinking about retiring, how much would you need to offer for them to choose to work another year instead? That's how much you need to pay them next year.

[jerojero]

Whatever their ambitions are, it doesn't seem to be something that's doing the world very well. Inequality is increasing, climate change is boiling us alive. Houses keep getting more and more unaffordable... These people only work for themselves and their close circles. It just doesn't seem to be a structure of governance that is doing the world very good.

[bmitc]

And it's honestly not really anything to do with retirement. It's about doing something with my life that isn't just following someone else's ideas, who just happens to be higher in the pecking order than me.

[bmitc]

Has there ever been a case of a CEO singularly or even collectively achieving said ambitions? No. A lot of these people are cut throat, near sociopaths in personality. I guess we should be lucky they're just CEOs. If they're not of that personality, it's often largely due to luck. James Simons, who has had a large impact via his foundation work, in which he ensures funding for people to drive their own ideas versus his, readily and humbly admits that luck is very underappreciated in success.

[ghaff]

People for whom being an important executive is at least almost as important as having as much money as they can reasonably consume.

Certainly there’s a vast range of FIRE styles and even what constitutes retirement but at some level it’s a combination of keeping score, feeling valued relative to peers (see also sports), and the industry recognition.

[bmitc]

In other words: ego. Executives exist to play a game of ego.

[ghaff]

Unlike all the software engineers at Google who would be happy to have their various titles replaced with some egalitarian "developer" title.

Most people have egos. Some more than others. And public recognition via titles matters a lot for future opportunities. (Though maybe you don't care much about that so long as you make enough money.)