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Comment by welshwelsh | Hacker News Reader

I think it's better to ask "what percentage of an employee's output is attributable to the ceo's leadership?"

A reasonable answer, IMO, would be somewhere between 0.5% and 5%. The average CEO gets maybe 1%, which I think is pretty fair.

Often if a CEO makes 1000x an employee, it's because there are tens or hundreds of thousands of employees under them. The executives still get a relatively small portion of employee output.

I must say though that being more valuable than 1000 employees seems like a very low bar to me. I'm sure there are many people who are more valuable than even 100,000 employees.

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Why should the answer be positive? I have worked places where the CEO's contribution was obviously negative. But that didn't matter, because the CEO's goal wasn't to maximize total societal wealth, or even the company's health, but to maximize the CEO's income. So anything that resulted in a stock price bump that lasted through their tenure was plenty. And given that CEO tenures are much shorter than they used to be, it's easier than ever to juke the numbers.

Steve Jobs turned a company that was 90 days from bankruptcy into the richest company in the world, with the same employees.

That’s one of … 10 million CEOs? The vast majority of CEOs are not capable of this, Steve Jobs undoubtedly had lieutenants and plain engineers who did brilliant work under him.

A long winded way to say that you are probably not working with Steve Jobs and regardless you need great employees to make a Steve Jobs successful.

> regardless you need great employees to make a Steve Jobs successful

A great CEO knows who to hire.

> Steve Jobs undoubtedly had lieutenants and plain engineers who did brilliant work under him

That didn't happen at random. Jobs also set them to work on the right things. When he took over Apple, he went through everything the company was doing and reoriented it all.

Jobs saw opportunities that everyone else missed.

Similarly, Terrence Tao was taking university-level mathematics courses at age 9. Does that justify teaching all 9-year olds mathematics at that level?

No, but it does justify not legislating away the possibility to teach any of them at that level.

That's stretching the analogy a bit; in today's economy, a great number of CEOs think that they deserve to be paid as if their impact was on par with Steve Jobs. If there were legislation to prevent a large Gini index at companies, Steve Jobs could have still been paid exorbitantly, if only his employee's compensation increased proportionally. And that's fair, because Steve Jobs wouldn't have gotten anywhere without excellent people to execute on his dreams.

I don’t think it’s particularly stretching the analogy, unless you think it would be appropriate that Terrence Tao could only be taught as he was if the lowest 9th grader would be taught Algebra II.

I'm having trouble making sense of what you're trying to say but note that Tao was 9 years old and not grade 9. Even I knew a kid in high school who was taking university classes.

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