I can assure you it is.

You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.

And again, the questions.

What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?

I don't think you understand what "proportional" means. It doesn't mean "there are two numbers."

It means that when looking at all employees, compensation is strongly linearly correlated to provided value.

What specific linear correlation do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?

That's literally what "proportional" means.

Jesus Christ. That’s not how it works!

Capitalism is explicitly not about that. Holy shit this is insane that you think that’s how capitalism works on a website that’s literally about venture capital. What the fuck.

X and Y exist right? Why can’t you divide them to make a proportion?

Among other reasons, because the employer holds all of that information and I'm not given access to it. It's an asymmetric information problem.

But you can for sure tell me the proportion that you think is fair right? Should it be 25%, 50%, 99%?

You're not arguing in good faith, dude.

I dunno, he's asking a really basic question that should be trivial to answer. When I see a basic, level-setting question like this go unanswered, it starts to seem like the side refusing to answer is the one acting in bad faith, not the side asking the question

The answer is 100%. This brings us to the start point of the real conversation this person is trying to have, which likely centers on the nature of employment, the importance of Job Creators, and/or the infallibility of markets.

Yes, that is the real conversation.

100% seems delusional to me because you're saying that the company deserves no profit for doing the work of providing you customers to provide value for?

It also seems to ignore the fact that some of the value you're creating is used to pay for the work that enables your value creation. Think about payroll processing, benefits administration, hiring, etc. etc. Those roles provide value as well but don't directly bring in money.

Isn't that part of the tradeoff of working for a company that they take a "fee" for giving you dependable work? You can approach 100% value-capture by working for yourself but there are downsides there as well.

I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created. How you split up the credit is a difficult problem. (As many developers will note, there is no such thing as a 'cost center'; all labor contributes to the outcome.)

However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.

> I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created.

So... you're describing the current system?

This is so loosely defined as to describe any system, really.

You’ve just found a roundabout way to repeat the idea that you don’t like that someone else is getting what you believe to be an unfairly large piece of the pie.

Because currently in the world today, the owner of the business is earning 100% of the value they provide as is the developer as is the bookkeeper.

You just don’t agree with each person’s view of the value they create and don’t have a way to determine the actual value they create.

So we’re back where we started.

> However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.

Isn’t the funder getting earning 100% of the value they create (just like you want them to) by providing capital? If not, how do you prove otherwise?

> The answer is 100%.

But that's not a valid answer? It seems like you're sidestepping the question by moving the goalposts and redefining terms.

The reality is that there will always be a gap between "what a company is willing to pay you for your work" and "what your contribution to the whole earns the company", and that's... fine? The whole is often greater than the parts, and this difference contributes to that gap. The gap also needs to provide for the commons of the company: workspaces, licenses, equipment, interest/loan repayments, etc.

This mostly just a fleshing out of the `X` and `Y` quantities mentioned by the ancestor. If you don't think the whole is worth that much more than the parts, then presumably you should seek employment at a company that offers you a larger absolute `X`, a larger relative `X / Y`, or (ideally) both. If no such company exists, you could attempt to start one of your own? That would be the ultimate vote of confidence that such a thing is even possible, right?

I suspect the reason why such companies do not exist is because that's actually much harder to accomplish than you're making it out to be.

How so?

The whole discussion stems from someone saying that they should be paid relative (in proportion to) their value.

All I want to know is what proportion (i.e. a percentage between 0 and 100) someone would deem fair. Why is that so hard to provide?