> It is the company’s structure accounts for the majority of the value created by that engineer’s work.
Except that billionaire founders also persist in flattering themselves that their company "only hires the best". If that were true, FAANG salaries for ICs ought to be even higher than they are, and competition between them for employees would be cutthroat rather than collegial.
As it is, they are competing for employees as a group with the rest of the industry, more so than with each other, so the truth is a mixture: individual employees matter more than their compensation actually reflects, and the company the employee is embedded in matters a great deal too (enough so that we only ever see a randomly occurring concentration of high quality employees producing innovative products and services when that group is more-or-less the whole org: a startup. Inside a larger org, such groups only flourish deliberately).
Except that billionaire founders also persist in flattering themselves that their company "only hires the best". If that were true, FAANG salaries for ICs ought to be even higher than they are, and competition between them for employees would be cutthroat rather than collegial.
As it is, they are competing for employees as a group with the rest of the industry, more so than with each other, so the truth is a mixture: individual employees matter more than their compensation actually reflects, and the company the employee is embedded in matters a great deal too (enough so that we only ever see a randomly occurring concentration of high quality employees producing innovative products and services when that group is more-or-less the whole org: a startup. Inside a larger org, such groups only flourish deliberately).