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Comment by ced | Hacker News Reader

Subsidizing is such a loaded word. Your comment is an example of the pie fallacy. Yes, your colleagues may get a bigger paycheck because you're a top engineer. But that doesn't necessarily imply that the additional money they get is "taken" from you.

And obviously, doing a startup is no guarantee that your returns will be better.

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Is it really a pie fallacy?

Here's what I really mean by subsidizing, in context, and you can decide if it fits, or if I am suggesting something else...

If you buy into the idea that a developer, for example, can be 10x more productive than another, which I do (and I'm not one of the 10x guys at all), then you tend to think that those people should be paid a heap more than the average IT guy... but in fact, they are bound by the same corporate salary ranges as everyone else on the team... so you end up with the delta between the bottom guy and the most productive guy is at most 70K.

Therefore, thanks primarily to the top performers, our overall team performs well and everyone benefits similarly... but they really shouldn't benefit similarly since the amount of value creation is wildly different from developer to developer.

so that developer decides to try his hand doing his own startup and quickly realizes that the market generally rewards those that are best at marketing and not those that are best at writing code 10x faster than the average.

The problem of being super productive is that the organization can't exactly support it.

Just because you are 10 or 100 times more productive doesn't mean the company can sell 10 or 100 times more.

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