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The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Technology
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Fair point. I find it interesting that there’s such an emphasis on « just »; it takes some efforts to get to a point where as a company you can trust the process to the extent we trust docusign… it’s not exactly trivial. Still waaaaaaay overpaid indeed but still.
How much of that success was a direct result of the CEO, though? The more time goes on, the more any company depends on the historic collective achievement of humanity. The company couldn't have succeeded at all without an educated workforce, infrastructure, "the economy", or a million other general social, economic, and political factors completely outside the company's control.
Think of it like this... Most of math as we know it, and by extension computer science, wouldn't exist without Euler. Does that mean Euler, or Euler's children, should own all value generated by Euler's math? How about if he started a company that copyrighted those algorithms? All tech companies in perpetuity? How about the VC that conducted the hostile takeover with other people's money? Should the CEO who leads the robotics company that replaces the human workforce, rule ALL of humanity for the remainder of eternity?
Even though my examples are fucking ridiculous, the way the world actually works is that any CEO who started an ultimately successful company, regardless of whether or not they were pivotal or hindered the company, and even average executives who jumped in for a year just before IPO, frequently end up wealthier than hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people — wealthier than entire nation states — weather than people who had many orders of magnitude more influence in the success of the company than they ever did...
Ultimately, no matter how much you do or achieve individually, human civilisation and all its achievements could not exist without the collective effort of billions of people (and counting). In the grand scheme of things every hot shot CEO is just an inevitable statistic fulfilling a role that someone else would have fulfilled if they had never been born.
You’re preaching the choir. I agree he (and others) is overpaid. I solely reacted on weird spike thrown at docusign.
Where in disagree is on your very generous of billions in humanity’s achievements ; pretty sure a lot of us didn’t pitch in. Pretty sure my own name isn’t appearing in the credits for example. But I salute your optimism.
Have you ever worked for a company that did something? Then your name should be in the credits. You probably did a greater amount of directly value generating labor than the executives did.
Yeah, until we find out it doesn't when they inevitably get hacked. Like the credit reporting agencies. I'm sure those CEOs were (and still are) doing just fine.
Hardly an argument ; it can be said just about every company… and also unrelated to their CEO to a large extent.