Tech's Elite Hates Labor
I think because individual tech workers are so highly paid relative to other industries, we fail to see how low our pay is relative to what the people at the top are making.<p>A high performing Google engineer may make 500k+ in total comp, Sundar Pichai makes $100M+ in many years. That&#x27;s 200x as much ... and the baseline is already super high.<p>You see startup founders who exit with generational wealth (tens or hundreds of millions). They are also frequently able to cash out along the way, or borrow against their success. Meanwhile while their first engineering hire, the person who probably wrote half the damn code for years, gets &lt; 1% of the equity and none of the glory.<p>It&#x27;s not bad enough that this is true. The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best &quot;labor&quot; in their industry.<p>The other industries known for highly paid labor (finance, law, and medicine in the US) do not distribute rewards this way. Yes the people at the stop are still pulling in massive pay but there&#x27;s a much stronger distribution of profits throughout the labor pyramid. I don&#x27;t envy the culture of those industries, but I do sometimes wonder what tech would be like if we leaned a little more that way.