Re:In defense of the Google chef
by yummyfajitas on Saturday November 12, 2011 @09:50AM
(#3227894)
Sometimes the pay is even formalized; they want to pay "competitive market rate", often defined as something like 10% above average, which leads inevitably to an upward wage spiral, since by definition everyone can't pay 10% above average.
What you are describing is a bidding war for a scarce resource. This happens for all sorts of people, not just CEO's. See, for example, programmers.
...they really do think that their social peers are the only people who could possibly do the job...
What's the "social peer" of a CEO? Other CEO's and upper management?
I certainly think that only my "social peers" (read: other programmers) can do the job of programming.
At the very least, the opposite hypothesis---that they earn their pay by providing shareholder value---has been extremely hard to show empirically.
This is hard to show for most fields. When a job consists of building organizational capital (e.g., CEO, programmer, manager) rather than directly producing outputs (e.g., cook, assembly line worker, doctor), it's very difficult to empirically measure the contribution of any individual.
This is doubly true if you are trying to generate macro-level statistics (e.g., compare CEO performance across companies, or programmer performance across projects).
What you are describing is a bidding war for a scarce resource. This happens for all sorts of people, not just CEO's. See, for example, programmers.
...they really do think that their social peers are the only people who could possibly do the job...
What's the "social peer" of a CEO? Other CEO's and upper management?
I certainly think that only my "social peers" (read: other programmers) can do the job of programming.
At the very least, the opposite hypothesis---that they earn their pay by providing shareholder value---has been extremely hard to show empirically.
This is hard to show for most fields. When a job consists of building organizational capital (e.g., CEO, programmer, manager) rather than directly producing outputs (e.g., cook, assembly line worker, doctor), it's very difficult to empirically measure the contribution of any individual.
This is doubly true if you are trying to generate macro-level statistics (e.g., compare CEO performance across companies, or programmer performance across projects).