Sure, not everyone can be a chef—I completely agree. I spent my summers working in restaurants growing up, so I’ve seen firsthand just how brutal the work is and how much skill it takes. But certainly there is no doubt in my mind that more people can be good chefs than can be good software engineers.

And, as somebody else pointed out, the chef's existence -- and the supreme quality of his work -- was one of the big draws for tech talent to come to Google. And, furthermore, by freeing the tech talent from having to worry about food or leave work to get it, he contributed to the value they created.

I didn’t set up a straw man, but I did draw some hyperbolic distinctions for the sake of exposition. (In fact, I worked as a line cook one summer and I wasn’t very good at it—so not everyone can even be a line cook.) There is obviously a spectrum, and if we’re going to point out fallacies then you’ve set up a false dichotomy: that there’s either things everyone can be or things few people can be. This isn’t true, and I’m simply saying that software engineers are a scarcer resource than chefs. I don’t disagree that the chef at Google legitimately contributed to the value the company created, but I think there are plenty more chefs that could have done so than there were software engineers who could have built the core technology the company was built on. My point is that the salaries are, broadly speaking, a reflection of supply and demand and not difficulty of work.

I'll wager there are fewer trained chefs than software engineers. And you can't outsource it to India. Google could've hired a decent fry cook instead of a chef and given him fewer options. They didn't, so clearly they believed he added value.

Even if we postulate that it's more difficult to become a chef, or that fewer people are capable of becoming chefs, the economics of software - the borderline-nonexistent inventory and marginal cost of goods sold - conspire to make software engineers generally better paid than chefs. It's difficult to draw conclusions about how important the skill of this particular chef was to the success of Google, because we don't have a lot of data about "successful startups with chefs as early employees", but we do have a lot of data about "successful startups with talented engineers as early employees".