[Meegul]

I understand where that sentiment comes from, especially looking at the slew of mid-sized companies that have never turned a profit despite paying multiple hundred K TCs, but if you look at the profits of the giants, it paints a different picture. The labor of thousands of very highly compensated engineers is still a drop in the bucket of the revenue generated by their labor. Alphabet seemingly employs somewhere between 20-40 thousand engineers, and it is their labor that produced all (?) of their revenue generating products. Spreading last year's revenue (~$282B) across their engineering staff would yield a revenue in the ballpark of $9M per engineer.

We all know that their engineers are paid well, but that's still potentially more than an order of magnitude off of the value they generate. Of course, there are many other expenses to running their business, but to claim that broadly developers are overvalued when one of the most prolific employers of developers is generating 10x+ the revenue of what they spend on them, is likely no more than only occasionally correct.

[ip26]

That raises an interesting question. If developers are toiling equally hard at company A and company B, on similar products, but company A currently had a dominant market position over company B thanks to network effects - are the developers at company A in any way responsible for its outsize gains and therefore due millions of dollars in TC?

[robin_reala]

Why are you leaving out all the other essential people that go towards that revenue figure?

[saagarjha]

Alphabet has at least twice those numbers.