Slack show employee compensation and revenue

It’s no secret that tech employees get paid a lot. OpenAI is currently paying their workers $600-$950k which is absolutely mind-boggling. That also doesn’t include signing bonuses, which I’ve heard are at times in the millions.

These jobs are hard, I definitely couldn’t do them. However, you have to wonder if employees are actually a good “return on investment” for their employer. Companies like Apple have this figured out (they generate $2.4m in revenue per employee). This got me thinking about ways to make this information more visible. What if, in tools like Slack a user could easily see both the total compensation of an employee as well as the revenue they created?

The obvious flaw with this design is that compensation is easy to track, while revenue creation is a much fuzzier number. This would massively change individual employee behavior, and would likely be a bad thing because people would be unmotivated to work on moonshot projects that can lose money before becoming successes (if they ever do).

It would also create some very spicy water cooler conversation, but I doubt we’ll see something like this in most companies anytime soon.

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