You're shadow boxing an opponent that doesn't exist.

Ilya Suskever is not a "mid-level" (as per the article) employee, he is a C-suite level employee at a tech venture.

Implying that uniqlo is using "$8.8m salaries to draw talent" implies that those salaries are broadly available to "mid-level" employees.

This is extremely implausible to me, given that that level of compensation (4x more than the C-suite employee you identified) is on par or larger than CEOs of some of the largest banks in the world.

It's moreso just a logical conclusion.

It's possible that a company could pay this much. But likely they could pay half this amount and still get same talent.

In a free market with logical players, makes 0 sense to pay 3-4x the highest competitor in wages, when you could pay 25-50% more and get the same talent.

Of course that's just the theory. Companies can pay whatever they want in reality.

Raising the ceiling on compensation for exceptional talent seems like good business strategy to me. This is a great time to understand technology as we become a science-hating culture completely addicted to science and technology to survive. Milk it for all it's worth no matter what your skill level. If your boss can afford to buy bottled farts from reality stars and Bored Ape NFTs they can afford to pay you more.

Ilya Suskever is not just an employee, they're C-suite and notable enough to have a Wikipedia page. Obviously people earn millions per year, but they're generally pretty notable and rare.

For the vast majority of humans, these salaries are simply not obtainable, at all. These kind of reports are great for one thing- wishful thinking.

To assume that everyone is making or will make the top 0.1% of the top 1% in salaried income is completely absurd.

Maybe the one off rockstar engineer is making this, but for the average techbro this is not going to happen.

Salaries like these are a stunt in the _vast_ majority of cases. There's so few people that could ever be worth that kind of money that it's pretty clearly just the PR department throwing this at the wall for news. Blatant attention grabs don't often get praise from engineers.

In tech, engineers that aren't paying at least some attention to the compensation of their peers will not fare well IMO. No one wants you to undervalue yourself more than the org underpaying you to undervalue yourself. I'm for open compensation personally, but since we can't have that lest there be madness or something, make sure your grass is sufficiently watered to remain green.

This is HN. You'll get more downvotes for complaining about downvotes than you will for saying something people disagree with.

You're just asked to follow a few basic guidelines [0]. Not so much about being "inflammatory."

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

down votes? Sir, you're in a hacker news forum.