Your Best Employees May Need Superstar Pay

30 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "Your Best Employees May Need Superstar Pay" (uploaded 2026-07-30). The excerpt is a monologue by a single speaker labeled "SPEAKER A" arguing that compensation for AI-skilled developers should be reimagined along 'superstar' lines—high base pay, supermax-style contracts, performance or story-point awards, and upside-sharing (e.g., a percentage of client upsells). The speaker warns that without such changes wealth concentration will grow and could spark social backlash. Metadata includes a thumbnail URL and the 2026-07-30 timestamp; no Eric Siu is identified.

Chapters

How are you guys thinking about compensation when it comes to the AI-pilled people? People should be compensated like athletes. Like if you're LeBron James, for example, you get a supermax contract. Someone else at the table, they compensate their developers just a lot of money. Their developers can make up to 7 figures and they start at a good amount initially. Maybe you have to pay your superstar athletes. Maybe you're awarding people based on these story points, or maybe you're giving people a percentage of upside based, you know, let's say a client's paying 10 grand a month and then they upsell to 100 grand a month. Then on that 90 grand difference, maybe you're getting like 10% of that. I think we need to reimagine compensation and I don't think it's going to happen overnight, but I think a lot more people are going to start to think about this. But I do think compensation needs to adjust as well. Otherwise, it's the rich are going to get richer, and then, you know, the pitchforks are going to come out.