I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return. With Amazon obviously the risk of that is low. But for many new companies the risk is very high. Therefore the payoffs are also high, to attract people to take the risk. Where I sympathize with your view is that sometimes an investment risk is taken, and the payout far exceeds the risk by any reasonable and sane margin. So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures, on the hope that the one successful one is so successful that it pays the losses of the failed ones. But yea, this system is not really working for the vast majority of people and that is a tragedy.
No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.
Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.
And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.
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The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.
1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.
2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.
In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.
They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.
> As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.
I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.
Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.
Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!
> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures
The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.
I have been an employee for 30 years across 10 jobs - one of which was Amazon from 2020-2023. I never once considered my “main source of income” my current job. My main source of income was my ability to get a job. I always stayed ready to look for a job at a moments notice and it has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking.
In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.
As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.
Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?
> I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
This is extremely unusual in general, not at all typical.
Here, on Hacker News, we have an unusually high proportion of high earners, and I'd guess a lot of FIRE people like me (and I infer, you), but the median US person has $8k, about 3 months, of savings: https://www.fool.com/money/research/average-savings-account-...
I could not guess either the income nor the savings distribution of those 14k Amazon departures. Also, reports suggest most of these people will have a chance to find a different role within Amazon.
As a former Amazon employee who lurked in the “anonymous” internal #pay-equity and the #pay-equity-discussion Slack channels, I can tell you that the typical return offer for an L4 who was a former intern was around $150K - $165K cash and stock and the average L5 was around $230K - $260K+ cash and stock per year (check my numbers on levels.fyi I might be off that was a couple of years ago).
But I have that amount in liquid cash because I’m an empty nest boomer with my wife who had a house built in 2016 in the burbs of Atlanta that I sold for twice the amount I paid for it in 2024 and downsized to a condo in Florida.
Before 2020, my only security was my ability to get a job fast.
But honestly anyone who expected loyalty from Amazon was like the old woman who took care of the snake. They should have been saving.
And I’m not at all FIRE, I’ll be realistically working until 65. Don’t cry for me. I work remotely and my wife and I travel all of the time including doing the digital nomad thing off an on where we are gone for months at a time.
Yes and when my employers - including Amazon - decided they wanted to stop putting money into my account, I didn’t stress.
I told my wife as soon as I had the meeting with my manager at Amazon back in 2023 about my “take $40K severance and leave immediately or try (and fail) to work through the PIP”. She asked me what were going to do? I said I’m going to take the $40K and we are going to the US Tennis Open as planned in three weeks. I called an old manager who didn’t have a job for me. But he threw a contract my way for a quick AWS implementation while I was still interviewing.
I doubt very seriously if my job fell out from under me tomorrow, someone wouldn’t at least offer me a short term contract quickly.
> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
For now, expect that to be clawed back severely over the next few years.
It’s already happening. The pay I am seeing offered now in second tier tech cities like Atlanta where I use to live are the same as they were in 2016 and haven’t kept up with inflation.
I’m having to continuously move up and closer to the “stakeholders”.
> I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.
I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:
- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.
- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA
- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools
- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.
In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.
I suppose. But in a world where upset people then act irrationally up to and including doing some murder I wonder if we start mapping burnt out individuals to a higher "cost" than their lost spending. What for example is the objective cost of Samuel Cassidy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting#Perpetr...
Oh I agree with you. I don't live in the US, but in a country that has a very high progressive tax rate. I am taxed about 50% of my income currently. But I gladly pay it because I like to live in a safe country with strong government programs and a great healthcare system. It is also very difficult to fire an employee here. Companies generally have to pay people to leave, and this can be a year salary upwards. But I do sympathize with people in the US, even if the "average" lifestyle experience is higher, because a lot of people seem to be struggling there.
Spare us your sympathy. When it's harder to terminate employees then employers are more reluctant to hire in the first place, leading to higher unemployment rates and overall slower economic growth. As a US based employee who has been laid off before (multiple times) I prefer our approach.
If the choice is between propping up the economy which is built atop a delicate house of cards and is about to implode on us anyways thanks to the AI bros, or knowing that the psychotic C-suite can't fire me because he needs an extra 0.2% of profit margin to look good to investors, I'll take the latter.
Having experienced both worlds here, it's about roughly the same difficulty getting hired, except over here in NL at the end of my 1 month in which they can fire me for any reason, I get a nice little ironclad contract that provides me rights as a worker. Anyone claiming getting laid off unceremoniously is better is just coping
Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.
This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.
Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.
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In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.
You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.
Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).
> In a society which claims that everyone is equal
No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.
Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).
Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.
Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.
[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
Yes, Martin. All men (and women) are created equal. The purpose of that document and in that phrase is that all are created equal under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal". Those are completely different things and as you mentioned, it's a very popular (and stupid) meme which is why I responded specifically to what you wrote there.
> Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
This sounds reasonable, as all bad ideas usually do (and good ones sometimes) but the complexity is in the implementation. If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Well, what do you do when your company hires over a million people? And, what do you actually distribute to the employees? Is it the market value of the company divided amongst employees? If they work for 6 months how much value do they get? How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
There aren't easy answers to these questions. We are in fact not great as a society (and I'm not sure we should even strive to be) at assessing who did what work. And, how do you handle people who are less skilled because they were born that way? Some people just aren't capable or competent and that's a genetic fact of life. Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay? How does that work?
Your simple idea opens up a pretty nasty can of worms here without clear answers. But there is one solution - if you (or others) think that giving ownership proportional to the amount of work done is the best way to run a company, the free market is right there waiting for you to give it a go.
> under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal".
Well, gods don't exist but many people substitute them with some kind of moral system so it's not only under the eyes of the law. The second part touches upon the core of the issue IMO - whether we want equal opportunities or equal outcomes.
Equal outcomes are obviously unjust because some people put in more work, have more skill or are better in some way at some things (whether that's work or morality) and equal outcomes can only be achieved by taking from them.
Equal opportunities are much more reasonable but they too have issues - specifically what counts as an opportunity and when does it start?
- If at birth, then the society must forbid any kind of inheritance, otherwise some people are obviously massively advantaged by being born to rich parents. Even that is not enough because rich parents can afford the child a much better education and contacts. You'd literally have to take children away from parents and assign them to random families, which would probably be somewhat unpopular.
- At the beginning of a particular school enrollment or job sounds more reasonable but then people who were advantaged or disadvantaged earlier have a much better change of getting into the school or getting the job so it just adds up.
- Not to mention people who are sufficiently rich through inheritance fundamentally don't have to work, they just invest. Assuming all people need roughly the same amount of money to survive and the rest can be invested, the rich will get richer faster than the poor.
These are hard problems with no easy solutions. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to solve them, even if that means trying out ideas that can turn out bad. The alternative is increasing inequality until a collapse, a revolution or until we're back to slavery.
> the complexity is in the implementation
No shit. I didn't say it was easy. But we can start by talking about an idealized world with perfect information and what justice/fairness would look like and then make changes according to real-world constraints such as imperfect information. This has already happened to criminal law - in an ideal world, you know ow much suffering an offender has caused, how severy punishment he deserves for it, how severe punishment prevents how much crime, whether somebody is actually rehabilitated or if they'll re-offend, etc. But in the real world, there are rules about what level of proof is necessary, about what evidence is admissible, whether you can assign punishments based on risk of re-offending, etc.
With compensation, the first step would be to negotiate based on equal information (not withholding information about compensation of other employees - in the name of privacy, it could be median and variance for each position). The second step is negotiating not money-per-unit-of-work but skill level relative to other employees.
> If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Not necessarily. If you started it alone and worked on it for some time, that time should count towards your share. Similarly, if you invested money into it, that should also count.
> How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
The exact details can be negotiated and various schemes should probably be experimented with at both the company and societal levels.
The point is that there should be no class divide between workers who get paid per uni of work and owners who take a cut from the income and/or can sell the company.
> Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay?
The company is still built on top of your work, your share just keeps decreasing relative to others as other people put in more and more work. This is actually something that protects founders - if you start as 1 man in a garage, then leave the company but it turns into something hugely profitable, you still keep getting a cut, just a small one.
A lot of people criticize my opinions based on risk (but incorrectly, given employees risk much more than owners - see other comments) but this actually spreads the risk around a lot. If you work for multiple companies in your life, you still have some income, unless all of them go bankrupt.
Oh and this solves the issue with privilege from inheritance to some degree - the children of workers didn't build the company, so they have no claim to a share in it.
>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company
Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?
Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?
This drives me nuts. You move to another city, risk your livelihood on a new job that you don’t know if is gonna work out for you. Your kids go to a new school, your partner has to either move to find a new job, or make it work long distance for a while… Your whole life changes on what is essentially a bet, you have no security whatsoever. And people say the risk is not yours.
Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.
Then don’t do that? In 2020, when I had the “opportunity” to work at Amazon in a role that would eventually require relocating after COVID, there was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life to work for Amazon and that was after my youngest had graduated. I instead interviewed for a “permanently remote role” [sic]. If that hadn’t been available, I would have kept working local jobs for less money.
Anyone with any familiarity about tech knew or should have known what kind of shitty company Amazon was. At 46, I went in with my eyes wide open. I made my money in stock and cash and severance and kept it moving when Amazon Amazoned me. It was just my 8th job out of now 10 in 30 years.
If your a billionaire and you invest in index funds, the risk of becoming homeless is really low, sure. The system works in such a way that the more money you have the easier it is to make more money. So if your stuck at the bottom, your really stuck.
And I believe there is a huge shift of wealth going on, to a very small number of insanely rich people. And that is a very big problem.
If being a founder/VC was truly more risky than being an employee - you'd see more homeless VC's and founders than employees, not just more millionaires - ie a spread either side.
Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!
So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.
Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.
Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.
The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?
Isn't it the same as the house in roulette - sure each spin the house is taking risk - but if the game is structured so the odds are in your favour - you are taking less risk than the customer.
It comes down to who is setting the rules of the game.
This is unfortunately true.
Accusing a company for maximizing profit is naive. There is a structural problem on taxation Vs how much the company contributes back to society.
Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.
Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time.
Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.
Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.
>Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.
Sounds like company towns, which were derided for other reasons.
