The moment the thought surfaced, even Jiang Yixin herself felt it was a little absurd.
But why did bosses pay employees to work?
Was it to benefit society? Of course not. The reason bosses were willing to pay salaries to hire employees was because they expected those employees to generate more revenue for the company than their wages cost.
Simply put, employees could make money because their skills were valuable.
And different skills were priced differently. According to the most basic relationship between market supply and demand, the greater the demand and the scarcer the supply, the higher the premium a skill could command—in other words, the more valuable it was.
Everyone knew that AI talent was the most valuable right now. Why? Because the artificial intelligence market was in the midst of an explosion. Capital was pouring in frantically, market demand for related talent was enormous, and there were very few people who could actually do the work.
For the same reason, programmers had made so much money a few years ago because the market demand for programmers had been high while there were not enough people who could code.
Going back further, finance professionals, even those in civil engineering and architecture, had earned good money during certain periods because demand had been high and supply had been insufficient at the time.
Thinking a level deeper, why did so-called "hot industries" appear in different eras, allowing everyone in those fields to earn high salaries, only for those same "hot industries" to become unpopular a few years later, leaving college graduates unable to find work at all?
There was a fundamental reason for this: the long training cycle for talent and the lag in people's career choices.
Take civil engineering, for example.
Twenty years ago, China was carrying out massive