You picked the an extreme example there. Walmart employs a zillion unskilled people. Similar numbers for Google would yield something like an extra $6,000 per employee per year.
CEOs have gone from making 20x the average worker to 200x. Are CEOs ten times more amazing? If anything, I think they're worse. I think that, broadly, they've shifted their focus from economic value creation to generating the numerical appearance of success in ways that let them extract lots of money.
There's also the problem of worker motivation. Companies are human enterprises. The greater the wealth differential, the less the people doing most of the work will feel part of something bigger than themselves. As with Walmart, they may show up and do what they're told, but they are less likely to actually give a shit.
I definitely agree that they are not 10x more amazing, but I also find that in the case of a company like google any kind of pay differential has far less of an impact. Employees at google get paid enough, and have such great benefits that they are easily in the top few percentages of the economy. The same can be stated about many tech companies and their employees. Engineer salary and benefits are very comfortable at this particular point in time, because it is very in demand, and requires high levels of skill.
It seems at least from what I've noticed that the companies with the highest differential in terms of rank and file -> CEOs, tend to be the ones with some of the lowest barriers to entry and the lowest skill levels. This is a subject that I would love to see a detailed study on because what "it seems like" is not always the reality of the situation.
I used Walmart precisely because besides being an extreme example, it is one of the largest employers in North America by a good margin.
According to Google search:
"Google CEO Sundar Pichai made $100.5 million in 2015, according to a regulatory filing released Tuesday. The filing revealed that Pichai was paid a salary of $652,500, awarded restricted stock worth $99.8 million"
and according to Business Insider, Google has roughly 57k employees.
If we just take Pichai's $652k salary, it is +$11/employee/year which is a couple cups of coffee.
Alternatively, if take his entire compensation of $100M, it becomes +$1754/employee/year which is more tangible but still nowhere near the $6k/year cited in parent.
If we just consider salary, I think the multiplier between the lowest to highest paid is going to be lower than you expect in tech. It's really only visible in more low skilled industries.
Oh, and, discussion on executive compensation always includes total compensation. For historical and legal reasons, much of the compensation growth happened in non-salary categories.
But I think it's a negative thing because it's a sign of a shift in behavior. Look at the graph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_...
CEOs have gone from making 20x the average worker to 200x. Are CEOs ten times more amazing? If anything, I think they're worse. I think that, broadly, they've shifted their focus from economic value creation to generating the numerical appearance of success in ways that let them extract lots of money.
There's also the problem of worker motivation. Companies are human enterprises. The greater the wealth differential, the less the people doing most of the work will feel part of something bigger than themselves. As with Walmart, they may show up and do what they're told, but they are less likely to actually give a shit.