If you make $100,000 per year at an 8 person company, but the company's profit is $12 billion per year — do you have low pay?
The tech industry has discovered you can make employees happy by paying them more than "average," but it's still a lot lower than the benefits, productivity, and supernormal growth powers employees are providing to companies.
A productive software developer is worth at a minimum $3 million per year.
If the company is earning $12B/year with 12 employees, then the company founders (and early employees who contributed sweat-equity to get the company off the ground) should enjoy their success, but that doesn't mean that they need to pay new hires extravagant amounts of money as a sense of "fairness".
I've seen the balance sheet for my company, and right now, our software developers (well, all employees really) are worth negative dollars per year. Sure, our investors (and to a lesser extent our employees) may be rewarded handsomely some years down the road, but it's not the developers money that's on the line - they get a paycheck for as long as the company is in business, and they have no chance of losing any money they invested in the company. Though even if I could snap my fingers and make the company earn $100M/year overnight, there's no way a developer is worth $3M/year.
Just because you "got in early" and worked for a year then coast for the next 10 years while other people pull of the business doesn't mean you should get outsized rewards.
there's no way a developer is worth $3M/year.
Then perhaps your company isn't using developers as efficiently as they could be used? Sure, you can automate a $10 million industry, or you can destroy an $800 billion industry. Not all choices are equal.
Not all developers can work for companies poised to take over an $800B industry. For every developer in a disruptive company that's going to earn huge rewards, there's 100 developers writing a web backend for a struggling publishing company, or writing integrations for an ERP implementation. (and though that ERP can save the company millions of dollars, that savings is only due in a small part to that single developer's efforts)
That's the point of managing your own career and your own life, isn't it?
Nothing gets handed to you. You have to position yourself for success.
that savings is only due in a small part to that single developer's efforts
Not if you quit, make it SaaS and sell it to 3,000 companies for $100/month (or even $1,000/month).
Well no, it's a market limitation, not every developer can work for companies that are poised to take over an $800B industry. No matter how successful a developer is at such a company, there will still be a need for developers in less lucrative, more mundane jobs.
Not if you quit, make it SaaS and sell it to 3,000 companies for $100/month (or even $1,000/month).
Again, that's the risk part, not every developer is in a place in his life where he can quit his job with a steady paycheck and work for some speculative startup that may or may not ever become successful.
And besides, didn't you just say that developer who quit his job to work at a small startup shouldn't get an outsized reward just because he took that risk to work for an early stage startup?
Amazon simply canceled $170 million (http://recode.net/2014/10/23/amazon-takes-170-million-writed...) due to their fire phone failure. Or, they could have given each employee working on the project a bonus of a little over a million dollars.
Easy come, easy go.
So, let's say $100k per year. That's (roughly, rounded up) $50 per hour.
What's minimum wage? A few places have minimum, uneducated, non-creative wage of $15 per hour.
Your hourly rate of $50/hr is about 3x of just somebody who does manual, non-creative labor. Are you worth more than 3x of a restaurant employee? I sure am.
Then, what's your "better than a non-creative womp" multiplier for your output? 10x? Surely you provide more than 10x value as compared to a fast food employee. You're a creative force (or, you can be when you apply yourself). 100x? That's more in the correct range.
So, 100x * minimum wage of $15/hr * 2087 hours/year = $3 million per year.