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Has anyone else noticed Twitter being really buggy since Elon Musk took over? It's worse than Facebook Messenger. For example, it has had trouble loading images for the last day. I don't get why people have concluded that you can fire all these people and have everything be fine. The content moderation is better, but Twitter as a piece of software is obviously much worse now.
I'm not saying that means firing those people was a bad idea. Maybe having software work perfectly is not worth the cost, and the stock market's reaction to the mass layoffs at FAANG suggests they weren't pulling their weight. But that brings me to a related question. Why was it so common up until recently for people to say that, despite the very high salaries of software engineers in California, they were actually very underpaid given the amount they made for their employers? This now appears not to be even close to true. Why did people think this? Was it just some dumb profit divided by headcount calculation?
It's precisely this because many leftists think the worker is entitled to most if not all the profits generated from their labor.
Okay, to be more fair, I think some people actually did some more in-depth analysis or had a more nuanced take. For an extremely naive example, they hire a software engineer at $200,000 to make some optimization on their servers that cuts costs of those servers by 10%, and if the company was spending $20 million on servers that's $2,000,000 saved. That example is probably not close to reality though, and I think people were thinking of software engineers in those FAANG companies, in which the software product is the driver of profits.
But it becomes extremely difficult to properly attribute what percentage of a single person's work is responsible for the success/profits of a product, especially when you have tens or hundreds of people working on it. And it's not just the software, there are also other aspects of business such as sales and marketing. Think of how many Google products fail due to shoddy marketing, or how many Google Engineers leave to start their own products/companies and fail (because while they might be technically talented, they lack people management ability for a CEO role or lack the sales/marketing ability to drive consumers to their product).
If it was so easy to generate millions in profit, why don't they A) Start their own business or B) successfully negotiate a higher salary? You could say this was their attempt to create some kind of public awareness/narrative to give a higher chance of them succeeding in option. I also think part of this mentality is driven by hatred for the rich, which is hilarious because as you pointed out, those software engineers are rich, earning the top 1% of income in the United States. But if there is someone richer, I guess you can go hate the richer guy first. Being a millionaire is okay now as long as there are billionaires to hate on.
There's also another perspective to consider. Most software engineers may be costing FAANG money, not generating profit for FAANG. They simply pay those software engineers a high enough salary that they are happy to work at those companies and don't leave to create competing products or go work for their competitors. That's why it was so easy for these companies to let go of people when profits went down because they weren't that valuable to the company. Think of how many "A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer" videos used to come out a few years ago and they showed very little of how much work they do and more on how many free smoothies they can get at the snack bar. (One could argue this is marketing to make the life at the company look better, or it was only focused on the positive aspects of the company). And some people claimed to work only 10 hours a week while being paid mid-high 6 figure salaries, and even more people that were working 2 remote software engineering jobs at the same time. These people are likely not working on the critical products/features that would be the main revenue drivers for the company.
Oh, this reminds me of a dumb take I saw on the system adminstrator subreddit, where several people argued (and everyone else agreed) that, as a system admin, they were worth whatever the lost revenue would be if they didn't do their jobs, which, as they pointed out, was basically all of it. Thinking about this for two seconds should reveal why this makes no sense.
There are lots of employees doing work upon which the same revenue depends. They obviously can't all be paid out of that same revenue. The value added by each step in a process cannot be equal to the total value created by the entire process, even though stopping any given step would destroy all value.
To expand on your example, the software engineer that saves the company $2,000,000 cannot do that without the system on which they're working being built in the first place. Someone had to make that investment, and they did so with the expectation that there would be optimizations that could be paid for with $200,000. If the resulting profits weren't expected, they would have invested in something else.
You could argue that their employers have monopolies.
Something would have to have changed such that the risk of their starting competitors had gone down.
It's anecdotal, but I do remember reading a comment somewhere that, at the height of the the lockdowns, expectations had gone out the window and the culture had become one of just making sure everyone's mental health was good. No one was put under any pressure at all to get anything done. It's hard to believe that was common though.
In economics the problem of how to value various actors in a cooperative game is solved by the Shapley Value. In order to calculate it, one needs the profit the company generated if it employed a only certain subset of employees, for every subset. So if it employs 1 sysadmin, 1 rockstar programmer, 2 average programmers, and 2 secretaries, one needs to consider 2^(1+1+2+2)=64 possibilities.
What if it's zero for everything but the set of all employees?
Clearly the profits, if one doesn't take into account risk or replacibility, should be divided equally. It is a simplified model.
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