Well clearly there's something you can do to justify it because fb justifies it.

This is business after all. Your value is a combination of what you bring to the company and how hard you are to replace. FB makes $$$, the $$$ didn't just appear out of thin air, it happened because of the people who work there. Giving engineers a share of all that money seems much more reasonable than giving zuckerberg a second private jet.

> We’re engineers, not royalty. There’s nothing any one of us could do that would justify these wages, if it wasn’t for US immigration policies causing an artificial supply/demand issue.

Executives, CEOs and shareholders are all highly compensated for their risk in both time and money and are not "royalty." I would argue that being royal implies birth as an unjustifiably paid skill.

> Executives, CEOs and shareholders are all highly compensated for their risk in both time and money

That too is wrong. Paying wages based on supply/demand instead of based on the value an employee actually provides leads to exactly this kind of heavily distorted labor markets.

FB generates around $2 million in annual revenue and $600k in net income per employee (not just engineers). If the only thing you consider is value generated by each employee, then FB should be paying far more. Maybe 400k for a new grad and 1M for a senior engineer?

Well how do you define value? Is it workers should get enough for a modest life, a fair pay for a fair days work, the rest goes to shareholders?

I have the opposite take. The US has something approaching a free labor market. That sucks if you're at the bottom. It's awesome if you're in demand and can get a 20% pay rise at any time by jumping employers (and yes, that 20% stacks reliably).

I admire Europe for achieving a good lower bound on the standard of living of a person in society. If it were my way, all labor laws would only apply to those making less than 100K a year.

The same laws which protect lower income earners by making hiring/firing expensive, make the cost of hiring/firing well paid employees astronomical. That puts a serious damper on the fluidity of labor markets.

It’s a matter of value generation. Code that automates value generation at scale can bring more than enough value to compensate all the roles involved in its production.