Elite in compensation, true.

But is the average Googler contributing more to humanity than the average teacher? I'm not so sure.

From the 2018 shareholder's letter, Google created $335 billion in economic activity in 2018.[0] From the 2019 Q2 financial results, Google has 107,646 employees. By raw division the average Google employee creates $3,112,052 in economic global activity each year.

[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2018/ [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q2_alphabet_earnings...

Sure but most of that "economic activity" is essentially spam, so I'm not sure it's a net positive...

One reason you're not sure is that it's impossible to measure, and therefore to know. It's even impossible to know what the question really means.

I know a nurse, occasionally she brings people back to life, it is just a part of her job - is she contributing to humanity more or less then an average Googler?

Average seems like a weird measurement. Some Forbes article claims by 2030 the world needs 68 million teachers (I had trouble finding how many currently exist). So, the scale of numbers of teachers and number of engineers is hardly one to one.

Maybe you could say : is the average engineer contributing more to humanity than 1,000 teachers? Or you could go by pay: is the average engineer contributing more than 10 teachers? (guessing on numbers of course)

One to one ratio though? I'd argue: yeah probably. It's indirect effects, but Android/Chromebook/Google Docs... These all have brought computing technology and the internet into the hands of children around the world. Internet access is clearly one of the great opportunities for education. It might be hard to measure, but it clearly has an outsized effect.

Which elite verifier verified that?

Maybe "it's natural" would have been more accurate than "it's quite common"; I was trying to word it to avoid it being read as claiming Google broadly is elitist.

But, no, I can't cite a study, it's a pattern I've observed at range of places.