[ExI] idea

Fri Oct 12 14:06:50 UTC 2018

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2018 6:20 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] idea

I am not a CEO, I am only a rocket scientist.

spike

Very dry, sir, positively Saharan.

Now why can't paying the highest for employees be compatible with a different strategy for the CEO?  bill w

You can do that BillW, but my point is that competent leadership is still going to cost skerjillions of bucks.  Top executive talent will go where the pay is best.  Maximizing profits (the company’s and their own) is how they got that skillset to start with.

Paying higher than standard has been done.  Henry Ford did it successfully.  He had a new-ish technology in a new industry, and paid his men way higher than they could make elsewhere.  That worked for a while.

I live in an area where that strategy generally isn’t followed: they pay what the labor costs, yet they still get good people.  Reason: good people will take those jobs and do the hell out of them.

We hear all the flapping about immigration, but a quieter aspect of that whole question isn’t talked about so much: highly skilled and highly educated people with money can generally come to the states and get their immigration legally.  They do.  My own area has really filled up with smart ambitious Chinese and Indian people, here on H1B and other temporary immigration arrangements.  They take up jobs paying way below what many would consider below a practical living salary.  They cram into a tiny apartment with nothing in it besides beds, and live the Silicon Valley life.  Shrugs.  

With that eager and willing labor pool available, paying above the supply-set standard might make more problems than it solves.

On the other hand…

Companies can find ways, a good CEO and find ways, to make their company appealing.  Steve Jobs was a master at this.  By all accounts he was a total asshole, but somehow managed to surround himself with people who shared his vision.  So these innovative outfits such as Tesla and Apple can pay starvation wages and still get people to cram the PR department with excellent resumes, if… if they can provide interesting work.

I get it: if I were young now, I would work for peanuts, provided the work is interesting.  I would choose that over a high-paying boring job.

Tesla is training skerjillions of Indians and Chinese how to make good electric cars.  Apple is training them to make good computers and write good software.  There is no reason to pay them enough to rent an actual apartment, ja?  In the long run, we all win.

spike

On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 7:57 PM <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > wrote:

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Subject: Re: [ExI] idea

>>…Sounds like a great place to work.  Who steers the ship?  Why does she steer the ship?

>>…spike

>…Ah, there's the rub.  IN today's climate high level management people are given enormous golden parachutes in addition to giant salaries.  This may be a trend that is hard to modify…  

>… bill w

Ja.  Big companies compete with each other for high-level management talent.  If your company took all those millions it pays the CEO and distributed it to the lower-level workers, your company will soon be run by an incompetent CEO that no one else would hire, the one that replaced the previous CEO who left for high wages at your competitor.  Your company is quite unlikely to survive for very long.

The whole notion fails to take into account that CEOs are not in direct competition with lower level workers.  Lower level workers compete against each other, CEOs compete against each other, companies compete against each other.  When I worked in engineering at Lockheed, my salary was influenced by the salaries of similarly skilled rocket scientists at Boeing, not by what the CEO made.  I am not a CEO, I am only a rocket scientist.

spike

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