The only people that talk about CEOs and Board Chairmen this way are people that have never had a job with the responsibility level anywhere near that of a CEO or Board Chairman.
Sounds like you and your friends worked at inefficient and poorly run companies. Iāve had a different experience. Iāve never worked for a supervisor, manager, or director who couldnāt do my job and hadnāt previously done my job. And I never once questioned where they were half they day, because I always saw them working. I suppose thatās where our difference of opinion stems on this.
It doesnāt surprise me that youāre retired though. I would guess that in a world with less globalization, it was easier for inefficient companies like yours to exist.
If I were running a company and I told one of my managers that his pay was going to decrease to the same as the staff he supervises and he could either keep his job as a manager or he could go back to being a staff, if he chose to stay as a manager, that is a pretty good indication to me that he doesnāt do anywhere near enough work as a manager. I would either fire him or completely reconfigure his responsibilities.
You should go back and reread what I wrote carefully. I did not insult you. You wrote about how you did less work as a manager and you had fewer skills than the people you supervised. Those were your words. From that, I insinuated things ABOUT YOUR COMPANY, not you. To be fair, I think youāre smart as hell. Iām the one working hard to move up where I know I will have more responsibility than I currently have. If I was smarter, like you, I would work hard to move up at a company (like yours) where I would have less responsibility.
My original post that started us down this path was based on my experience which is totally the opposite of yours. In my experience, middle management, upper management, and CEOs earn their money because they have way more responsibility than their staff. I donāt know which is more common. Maybe your experience, maybe mine.
I will retract the attitude behind the globalization comment though. I did assume that since you said you were retired that you were much older. My bad. Sorry.
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As an aside, I think your qualification here kind of proves that we agree on a fundamental level. Entrepreneurs are hard working because their income depends on how well run and efficient their business is. Managers that arenāt forced to concern themselves with turning a particular profit are shielded from that responsibility. The ones that arenāt forced to work as hard are likely working for a less efficient company than those that are. If not āless efficient,ā then maybe āless concerned with efficiency.ā
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Same here. Iām in tech Everyone here worked their way up and most at the top are ridiculously smart and capable. Of course some companies arenāt like that.
This kind of thing varies by industry and company radically though.
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Thatās interesting. Iām a CPA and worked previously in public accounting for a local firm auditing private businesses of varying sizes. In my experience, the owners, CEOs, and CFOs (regardless if they started the business or not) were knowledgeable about all parts of the business and were smarter and worked harder than their employees. The CEO of the John Deere dealership with 20 locations may not have been able to repair a tractor, but he knew his way around the repair shop and could talk knowledgeably about tractors and farming with any customer that walked in the door.
You say ābig firmā auditing āmid size companies.ā Are you referring to mid size public companies? I wouldnāt refer to any public company as āmid sizeā in the grand scheme of the corporate world.
I donāt know if it has to do with the size of the company or not, but I suspect @jerosen may be right about it varying by industry as well.
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was your business experience in the finance industry?
My wife worked in finance too and she was at one of the big 4-5 accounting firms initially.
I think sheād probably share your attitude towards the management of companies she dealt with in finance.
I have no doubt that there was a decent amount of schmoozing done by the partners in my firm, some more than others. And staff definitely did grunt work, for sure. But in March and April, I canāt remember a Saturday I didnāt see the managers and partners at the office plugging away same as me. I was doing the grunt work on 1 to 4 audits at a time and they were reviewing work on 6 to 15 at a time. They had a lot more responsibility and a lot more to keep straight, plus the schmoozing, which can often suck depending on the jerk you have to schmooze. I hated how much more I was expected to bill as a staff, but non-billable work is still work. Thatās one of the reasons I left public accounting. If their job was the ultimate prize, I didnāt want anything to do with it. Their job sucked.
Two minor details : My wife is/wasnāt a CPA. Iām not in IT specifically (tech is much broader and they arenāt interchangeable terms). Not that it really matters for the discussion. I just donāt want there to be confusion.
I think most of the people complaining would complain about both.
The venn diagram between people unhappy with gender wage gap and income inequality is high overlap.
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How do you know the income inequality issue has jumped the shark?.. when people start complaining about the place where you would actually expect income inequality - between bosses and employees. Bosses that bill multiples of their employees, bring in clients, have decades of experience, and would be desirable employees for many other companies vs. employees straight out of college, no experience, competing against lots of similarly credentialed peers for a limited number of positions. I call that supply and demand, not income inequality.
FWIW, I think you are ignoring the intangible benefits of starting your career in public accounting. Maybe you would have been retired in your 40s had you been a staff accountant somewhere instead of starting in public accounting, but the fact is, you did start in public accounting and that start had value that you later turned into a great career. I know for a fact I wouldnāt have the job I currently have if it werenāt for my public accounting experience. Also, I actually think I was paid pretty well for the amount of work I did. I took a huge cut in pay when I left public accounting and I was fine with that.
I agree 100% with the ābest way to move up is to move outā view. If I moved out more, I would definitely be doing better.
Just as odd as I find your comment that you made a million dollars on wall street schmoozing people for 8 years then went back to school to become an accountant.
My datapoint about my paycut isnāt representative. I left auditing/accounting completely when I left public accounting. However, my office did recently hire a staff auditor from a public accounting firm and he took a paycut (not huge though) to come here. His workload, travel, and hours are WAY less and his responsibilities are similar. But to your point, I did see a lot of people leave my old firm for more money. Those people did actually get a promotion and had more responsibility, albeit fewer hours, than as staff and senior auditors. I doubt any of them took jobs where they could golf once a week though.
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followed by :
When you lecture people about assuming things its best not to have done so in the previous paragraph.
Ah, I missed that. 
OK I guess Iām the one assumingā¦
Iād say that supply/demand is the bigger cause. Income inequality is going to exist naturally as a result of simple supply and demand. Thats most of it.
Doctors, lawyers, engineers, management, etc all make high incomes because of high skill requirements and/or high barriers to entry.
Janitors, groundskeepers, burger flippers, etc make low wages because there are low skill requirements and little barrier to entry.
Various jobs in between with varying skills or barriers to entry get paid between.
This all sets up most of the income inequality which is pretty natural in any capitalist economy and has existed forever.
Capital income is another big part of income inequality. That has little if anything to do with the job market.
People sitting on 7,8 or 9 figures of wealth are going to have very high incomes simply from earnings of their wealth. The more that income inequality gets out of balance the more money accumulates in the hands of the top 10% [eta : I should have probably said 0.1% here] and then the more the income inequality goes further out of balance.
Tax policy impacts it too. Income inequality is generally measured after taxes and cash transfers. e.g. Swedenās income inequality is very low in large part due to their high tax and generous govt. benefits.
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Interesting read along the current line of discussion :
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Great read. So what is to be the better option for case of discussion, highly tax the .01% or try to improve the stance of the other 99.99%? Obviously trying to increase education and upward mobility of the middle class is a must, but our country is founded on the ideals of capitalism. What do we do when capitalism fails and such inequality becomes present?
Trickle down finance doesnāt work and those highly paid, highly in-demand skills are needed but nobody has those skills. In the past, highly paid and in demand positions cause a flock and eventually an oversatuation to those jobs (read IT programmers, law office, healthcare, etc). However, even when even those degrees donāt provide specific in-demand skills to fulfill the need there becomes a fundamental flaw where education and experience leaves a gap for highly trained and in-demand professionals.
Maybe, eventually, the capitalist supply and demand will work itself out with ever increasing wages to fill the need, but that still doesnāt account for the huge disparity among the 1% and the other 99%, much less the articleās discussion of the huge disparity of the .01% gap among the 1%.
Inequality isnāt a failure of capitalism. Inequality is guaranteed in any society that values freedom.
This is where I believe the flaw lies - our societyās view of work vs. higher education. We are doing a better job training kids for skilled labor, but not as good as we should be. But we are still looking down on those kids and pushing the idea of a bachelorās degree right out of high school onto too many kids.
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Exactly. You can be equally poor ala Venezuelan socialists or you can reward people for the accomplishments in a free market and everyone benefits from their efforts, innovations, services, etc, but of course some more than others. The standard of living of everyone in the US is way higher than a century ago because of all this innovation thatās incentived by a free market where most of the gains on your effort go to you (and only ~1/3 or whatever to the government in taxes).
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Inequality is present in any system. Do you really think the Venezuelan peasant is equal to the politican or military?
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