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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

If it's so unproductive why does it pay so well?

What makes you think pay is necessarily correlated to productivity?

Taken to the extreme, literal theft can pay well, and produces absolutely nothing.

Pay indicates the transfer of wealth -- it can be a heuristic for productivity, sure, but productivity is clearly not its only source.

I think about this quite often. What I'd really like to study at some point is: How much more does the receptionist at JP Morgan's head quarters make than the receptionist at Walmart's headquarters?

Because fundamentally I think there is an effect where the people in proximity to lots of money earn more. Obviously the Walmart receptionist and the JP Morgan receptionist are doing basically the same job. But the JP Morgan receptionist is surrounded by people who wouldn't think twice about doubling the receptionists pay and I would imagine that has a significant effect.

It's not the proximity to money, it's the real estate tied to doing that job.

If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.

Then you have to consider some place to eat - or you bring your own meals.

What about clothing? You need clothing that looks the part.

It's the proximity to real estate, which I guess you could argue is a proximity to "lots of money" as you put it, but... not reeeaaaally...

Sure, but real estate is expensive in those places for a reason - it being typically because a sufficient number of people with lots of money want to buy it.

There is only a weak correlation between local income and housing costs, and most of that is that it's hard to get extreme housing prices in areas with low income, rather than that housing in high income areas is inherently required to be expensive.

For example, Boston has a higher per-capita income than NYC but somewhat lower housing costs, and Austin has around the same per-capita income as Los Angeles but significantly lower housing costs. Because it's a lot easier to build housing in Texas than in California.

Experienced this(or actually, a similar phenomenon) myself during the brief, beautiful moment in my life when I was working in Switzerland and was making as much as the locals, while hailing from a country with approximately 20% the GDP per capita, if not less.

Crazy how the same box of pasta is suddenly three times the price once you cross the border.

JP Morgan is also in NYC and Wal Mart is in Arkansas.

These companies hire all of these exemplary graduates and pay them so well because (1) they are flush with cash because businesses are essentially held hostage to adtech; and (2) so that they won't go out into the world and build systems that make them irrelevant, as smart people are wont to do from time to time. Someone on your payroll doesn't have the time nor the inclination to knock you from your pedestal.

Why else would Google need 182,000 employees? Or how about Facebook with 67,000? Microsoft clocks in at a whopping 228,000, and Apple at 161,000.

These are staggering numbers of employees. So many, in fact, that it would be an exercise in futility to try and manage so many for the number of products they offer, especially Google and Meta.

It's cheaper to make busywork than risk the cash cow.

Re: Apple's 164K employees.

Keep in mind that approximately 50% work in the retail stores.

Right, and at least Microsoft has a large sales organization.

But Google and Meta?

Because there are costs that are externalized.

Options traders are paid well. It's still unproductive.

You're just shifting around a bunch of numbers temporarily to make a bunch of money for someone and lose a bunch for someone else.

Lots of shit we do is well-paid and unproductive.

If, as a species, we eliminated all bullshit jobs, there's a good chance only 20-30% of the species would be working. Here in America, only around 50% of people are actually working. Everyone else is in school, or retired.

Options traders help with the efficient allocation of capital, which is actually very valuable to society.

They are mercenaries hired to maximize the share of the loot that goes to their employers.

You are downvoted because what you say is unpopular, but nobody tried to refute what you say.

Despite what some people may think, options are not just for gambling, but some people - like farmers who have to plan for uncertain weather - use them for a real purpose. And of course the use of option in the financial sector for hedging is extremely important too. But it's easier to dismissively say that trading options is a "bullshit job" and go back to one's ivory tower.

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