Facebook Median Pay now $240k (opens in new tab)

All the "Facebook" content screeners in Berlin, Germany, are actually employees of a contractor (Arvato-Bertelsmann) who is mostly hiring them through job agencies. They're in charge of deciding what has to be banned according to Facebook Community Guidelines. They get to see gore, suicide videos, racial slurs etc. all the time, with no proper psychological training. They earn minimum wage (around 10$ per hour) and they're completely disposable.

Nonetheless, when Facebook had to face a small content-related crisis in Germany in 2016, that didn't stop Zuckerberg from saying the the company hires teams of hundreds in Germany to stop the spreading of hate content. They don't.

Source: Inside Facebook - Im Netz des Bösen, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2016. (sorry, paywall). http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/inside-facebook-im-netz-d...

What percentage of Facebook workers are contractors?

I'm sure most people reading HN scanning the title have SDE's come to mind immediately, without taking support staff into consideration, so the median is probably a good estimator for this audience, given your point.

Maybe it doesn't belong on the same table as a company like Wells Fargo since it's a different basis of comparison

Ben & Jerry's originally capped the pay ratio of their highest salaried executive and lowest-earning-worker to 5:1 ($150,000/year and $12/hour in 1995), but over the years they raised the ratio to 7:1, 17:1, and then stopped sharing a ratio after Unilever acquired them in 2000.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/companies-follow-ben-jerrys-l...

That sounds interesting but would probably be a paradise for tax lawyers. You just create a network of companies, one for each income band. That way, an employee never makes more than the average. Of course only large corperations can afford that so that smaller companies will have a harder time hiring talent.

It's easily gamed by contracting out for lower paid workers. What if Facebook came in at highest median pay because it relies more on contractors than other companies?

The data would be a bit more useful if they reported the job title of the median worker.

> I've been thinking a lot about the merits of the (highest income / median income) ratio in creating a society that is a little more resistant to eventual inequality.

That metric is very sensitive to outliers. If you have even one individual with enormous income, that ratio will be enormous. Now you might say "that's precisely the point", but I would argue that having how we design a society hinge on what one individual earns, is not statistically sound.

A more appropriate metric along the same line of thought would be something like top 10-percent excluding outliers divided by median income, where "excluding outliers" could be calculated in an admitedly somewhat arbitrary, but common way like e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interquartile_range#Outliers.

Or just use something that already exists instead of re-inventing the wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_index

Never heard of that but it sounds like a good idea intuitively! I’ve always thought median was meaningless, and an average without the standard deviation was as well.

1. The current explosion in employee perks (free medical, gym, lunch, etc.) is almost certainly driven my the tax system. Your suggestion would take it to the next level (along the lines of college athletes).

2. People can move. Labor is more geographically sticky than capital, but it is not infinitely so. I doubt you'd ever succeed in getting Singapore to stop being the capitalist's paradise through foreign policy.

Probably closest you can come to this in real world is Switzerland (maybe some nordic countries too). Very strong middle class (although there is no minimum wage codified in law), salaries disparities ie in IT vs normal people is much much smaller (meaning even a guy filling shelves in supermarket gets decent wage, if you get 3x his wage you are probably in top 1% earners). There is even a law enacted recently that highest earner in company (ie CEO) can't have salary more than 20x the lowest one (at least that's how I remember it).

It has far-reaching consequences where whole population has high standards of living which transpills into high overall happiness, low criminality, and there is no predatory mentality to screw other people over just for one's own benefit (that I can see massively in eastern europe where I come from, and many other developing countries all around the world).

Really, Suisse could be model in many things for rest of the world, if only their mentality would be more 'transferable'.

It’s (basically) called utilitarianism

I’m sure I’ll get downvoted for saying this, but lazy people will take advantage of the system and it will fall apart

It's clear that many people have a price at which they'd do things that they otherwise would not.

Facebook is a cancer that feeds on humanity's attention

IIRC this article includes stock options for engineers but not the CEO. Meanwhile, not counted, are the legions of Facebook contractors (e.g. food service, janitorial, and some? a plurality? engineers).

Stock is a significant part of the remuneration for Facebook employees. Probably close to 50% for engineers.

Its not a bubble. $240k is a reasonable salary for a professional with good grades from a good university working for a highly profitable private company. In fact as long as there is such a gap between revenue per employee, and compensation per employee, there will only be upward pressure on pay and conditions.

In reality, software engineering salaries outside of established tech environments are kept artificially low because there is no "guild of software engineers", and therefore anybody can get hired no matter what level of skill they have.

I too run a software startup. The most common and serious error I see in my fellow startup founders is expecting to build better technology with worse pay and conditions. You might be able to wrangle something decent out of some poorly qualified yet smart people, but its a bit of a long shot.

Why is it a bubble when they have an incredibly successful business that prints money where the people building the service are being rewarded for helping build such a successful outcome?

Why “bubble”? Their business is more profitable than crack cocaine, and their profit per employee is over a million dollars. Seems like fair compensation for once.

It's not a bubble by any stretch of the imagination. Facebook pays a lot because they have to pay a lot to get quality people to want to work at Facebook.

Compare this against companies like SpaceX where the median compensation is quite awful for the industry made even worse by the area (compensation is well below $90k in most cases). This poor compensation is made even more peculiar at a glance by the incredibly high standard of employee they have. But they have these incredibly well qualified people lining up outside the door wanting to work for them.

Of course refuting my argument is companies like Netflix. I don't entirely understand why they pay so much. But at least just taking examples like Facebook and SpaceX, compensation is mostly just based on supply and demand - rather than massive ongoing bubble of inflating salaries.

I know a guy working in their London office as a programmer and he makes £60k/year. So no, probably not.

Edit: in UK in general you won't be seeing £150k+ salaries as a programmer no matter who you work for, the only way to get there is contracting. Top paying salaried positions for really senior staff in London at financial companies top out at around £120-130k.

Google underpays heavily AFAIK.