Every now and then I read about some former employee of a large tech company complaining about this and that.
It usually draws a visceral desire to start shouting at the author:
"You are not special!
You are not entitled!
You have to earn it! You lazy! Self-absorbed! Head-up-your-a...s! Whiner! You are replaceable!
Easily replaceable!
We are ALL easily replaceable!"
(Hmm - I may have to put this to some retro-punk noise - these feel like good lyrics to scream...)
Today's rant-instigator is a gentleman who thinks of himself in superlatives, although reading between the flowery lines in his Linked-In profile, his business skills seem to be best illustrated by his ability to build a Salesforce dashboard...
Apparently, he made some GREAT revelations on TikTok recently - he told the world that big (and smart) companies offer perks to their employees so that they can get more work out of them!
The HORROR! The CONSPIRACY!
And I could have sworn I read all about how good of an investment it is to spend money on your employees outside of direct compensation in just about every HR and business publication going back to .... Y2K?
Oh, the great discoveries people make daily! Indoor plumbing! The wheel!
And naturally, the gentleman in question pointed out that:
...even with a $150,000 salary and abundant perks, a Google employee still made "pennies on dollars" compared with the company executives.
And this is when I started laughing.
I can probably think of a dozen reasons why this gentleman earns "pennies on the dollar", compared to the CEOs of top tech companies. Here are the ones that come to mind without too much effort:
- You have never written a personal check to cover the payroll of the employees of a company you started.
- You can't get a meeting with a Fortune 100 CEO, because you have nothing to say to them that they care about.
- You are not responsible for the relative peace of mind of thousands of employees and millions of public market investors.
- You have not survived 20 years of big company organizational dynamics, board member management, or had to orchestrate a quarterly Ks & Qs call.
- You have heard about fiduciary duty and financial risk expressed in numbers with 9 zeroes after them. Maybe. In your college 200-level class, but not since then.
So - to complete my rant - put on your big-boy pants and get on with it.
Indeed - life is unfair. Luck does matter. And we do NOT live in a post-scarcity society.
But please! Your whining bores me!
Your sense of entitlement is embarrassing.
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