[fredophile]

|Because it's much easier to measure performance of CEO's, at least artificially. If Google does well, then you (supposedly) know that Larry Page is doing well."

Originally I wrote a much longer reply but after re-reading it it came across as much more anti CEO compensation than I intended. I don't view short term market movements as an accurate reflection of company or CEO performance. If you willing to use easy to calculate but broken metrics I can supply a few for programmers. How about lines of code? This also ignores under performing executives getting big salaries and severance packages. No one is going to pay me millions if I get fired.

"And arguably, the fact that a few engineers can build WhatsApp and earn billions is an example of that in action"

I view employment at a startup like buying a lottery ticket. Someone is going to get a large payday but that doesn't mean they're better than someone that doesn't get one. Even with the possibility of a big payout your expected return is pretty low.

I think I stated the collusion argument badly so let me try again. If you're in charge of a major corporation and experiencing a talent shortage would you tell your HR department to exclude a large portion of the local candidate pool? That's what those companies did.

[edanm]

You raise interesting points. I'm honestly not knowledgeable enough to tell you if it makes sense to judge a CEO by the short-term, or even long-term, performance of their company. I don't think anyone really knows just how much is the correlation there.

What is clear is that, assuming CEO's do affect the value of a company significantly, they'll tend to affect it much more than even the best programmers, especially at a company the size of Google. That's just an issue of leverage. So a (possibly semi-broken) method of judging whether you made billions for the company will still spit out compensations of millions.

As for startups, I was talking specifically about the founders, not employees. And yes, I agree that startup's succeeding, at least on the Whatsapp scale, is very similar to a lottery. But smaller startups/consultancies can make much more money for the programmers who start them, who have skills that the market cares about more than just programming well.