Bill James: This Is Not Capitalism. It Is Organized Theft.

Stupid digital Interwebs!

 

Google has a median salary of $107,000/year.

Google had $60 billion in revenue last year.

Google is routinely at or near the top of "Best Places to Work" lists.

Google has one of the highest employee turnover rates in the country.

 

High retention rates could mean satisfied/competent employees.

Or it could mean employees who are stuck where they are because of job security fears and no hopes of advancement (such as, oh, the newspaper industry).

I wish the hard-woking, high-quality journalists we've had at my shop could move up to bigger-circulation, better paid jobs, but that's not the case anymore.

Looks like Google is, happily, a different story.

 

Asking people what makes them productive isn't a great way of finding out what makes them productive. They are biased.

 

Not sure exactly where this fits in. I do know that not all Apple employees were "happy" in the early days.

 

There are legitimate arguments to be made that wages for employees should be raised, but tying it into what the lowest-paid employee makes versus what the corporate CEO makes isn't the way to go about it.

You'd be better served arguing that employee wages should be raised, given that the cost of living has risen in so many sectors, but that by doing so, you'd get fewer people to be dependent on government programs and tax credits that were simply put into place to be an excuse for employers not to pay higher wages.

Seriously, that's what the Earned Income Tax Credit is really all about: The government telling employers that they don't have to pay certain employees a higher wage, they'll just give them a tax break to make up for the lower wage. Which, of course, comes in the form of a bigger check from the government that the employee had to go to H&R Block to figure out what they'd get, only to pay a portion of that big check to H&R Block for tax preparation services and rapid refunds. Oh, and then the employee just spends the check all in one place because if they start a savings account with the money, they lose all the government benefits they get.

Meanwhile, said employees are still getting tax withheld from their checks... and that's not just income tax, but payroll tax as well... so the line that "they pay no tax" really doesn't mean what people think it means.

 

It's an oldie but a goodie.

Nobody is grossly overtaxed. Nobody gets a free ride. Pretty much everyone pays between 14-19 percent of their income in "taxes" of some kind.

 

Though politically impossible, I like Thomas Picketty's solution -- a global, progressive wealth tax.

 

I'm guessing that if you work at Google, other companies will covet your skills even if they are exactly the same as a person at a different tech company. So somebody matches or improves your salary to get you to come to their place, but now you're in charge and the cost of living is much lower in the town to which you relocate. That's probably pretty attractive to a lot of people.

 

Which is nowhere near enough to purchase a home in Santa Clara (median home price: $820,000).

 

That has to be the worldwide number. I'd be shocked if the median salary at Mountain View headquarters was lower than $150,000 or even $200,000.

Google folks don't have any trouble finding housing wherever they want.

 

Pretty big place. Maybe there are a lot of janitors and food service employees.