3 ms·

>If there exist jobs that produce $1MM in value but that have a going rate of 200k, then there should be more of those jobs: either the company doing the work s

by gozur88 10y ago

>If there exist jobs that produce $1MM in value but that have a going rate of 200k, then there should be more of those jobs: either the company doing the work should expand, or it should have competitors. How could you possibly determine how much value your efforts are producing? How much value are you assigning to the risk the founder and investors are taking? Maybe your $200k job is producing $200k in value. Or even less. >The fact that tech companies bemoan how hard it is to find employees suggests that we aren't at this equilibrium. Tech companies always pretend it's impossible to find employees. That's not reality, though. That's a political strategy.

matthewowen 10y ago
> How could you possibly determine how much value your efforts are producing? How much value are you assigning to the risk the founder and investors are taking? Maybe your $200k job is producing $200k in value. Or even less. I'm not disputing that there's difficulty, and that it might not always be possible (although we can often estimate and assign a confidence level). But the parent comment claimed that even if we did know, value shouldn't pull salaries up: that's what I'm responding to (side note: the parent also implied that we can know what values are, since he acknowledged their use as a floor for salaries).
- hinkley 10y ago
  In college I spent a couple summers doing repair work in the shop of a family friend. I got stuck with a boondoggle repair and when it got into day 2 that I was still working on it, and the manager got pissed off and tried to take over for half an hour before he figured out why it was taking me so long. Then we had a shocking conversation about the fact that while he was paying me $x/hr, I needed to be booking at least $10x/hr in repairs, so I needed to work faster. It seemed so unfair to me until I spent a lot more time working in small companies. The repairs were a profit center, and the labor I was billing was keeping the utilities turned on, buying replacement tools, consumables, paying for my lunch break, covering rework, a hedge against me injuring myself, paying for the shop van I used to run inventory between stores, paying taxes, business licenses, my manager's salary, the owner's salary, paying for Bob to wander over and consult on a repair I wasn't sure about, paying the interest payments on the loans, and covering the loss leaders that got us repeat customers who needed repairs in the first place. Things like trade-ins and entry level equipment. At your programming job, every manager above you in the chain, every support team that you use to get your work done are all being paid out of the money billed for you. Yes you may be writing $1M in software a year, but the company wouldn't exist and you wouldn't have any sales without those other people, so all of that overhead gets subtracted from your value. Ironically and possibly painfully, a company can exist for months without a single programmer, but it can't exist long without a management chain.
  - matthewowen 10y ago
    I don't disagree with any of this. I'm not saying that if an engineer writes software that increases profits by $1MM then they have realized $1MM in value: it's a team sport. But I don't think that prevents us talking at all about the value of the work that is done in a job.
- IncRnd 10y ago
  Do you have quarterly goal setting reviews? People generally find that a formal process such as this will answer the questions you pose. For example, you may discover that someone else got that promotion that you were eyeing, because they provided 15x value compared to you - 7 patents, 3 products architected that opened up new areas for growth, etc.
st3v3r 10y ago
"How much value are you assigning to the risk the founder and investors are taking?" Absolutely 0, because they're not the ones doing the work.
- gozur88 10y ago
  Really? You think people should risk their money without compensation? Where can I find such people? And what makes showing up at the office and typing on a keyboard such a holy use of time that it alone deserves compensation?
  - andrepd 10y ago
    I know what you mean. It's the current system that's messed up, that just by holding money you can create money. It generates all kinds of fucked up inequalities.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      You can't create money by holding money. You create money by risking money. There's a huge difference between the two.
      - johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
        You create money by borrowing. You win money by risking money(). You earn money by being useful in what you do. ) In Icelandic, "win" means "work".
        zaroth 10y ago
        This is pleasingly precise, but besides the point.
    - thinkloop 10y ago
      Holding money generates nothing, you have to at minimum risk it in a savings account or the index, or for real gains, playing roulette on a start-up.
simons 10y ago
> Tech companies always pretend it's impossible to find employees. That's not reality, though. That's a political strategy. Genuinely interested to hear an expansion of this. How would pretending that technical employees are hard to recruit, benefit a company politically?
- gozur88 10y ago
  If you can convince the general public the tech industry will wither on the vine for lack of skilled labor, you can get Congress to raise the H-1B cap, allowing you to drive down your labor costs.

by gozur88 10y ago

matthewowen 10y ago

> How could you possibly determine how much value your efforts are producing? How much value are you assigning to the risk the founder and investors are taking? Maybe your $200k job is producing $200k in value. Or even less. I'm not disputing that there's difficulty, and that it might not always be possible (although we can often estimate and assign a confidence level). But the parent comment claimed that even if we did know, value shouldn't pull salaries up: that's what I'm responding to (side note: the parent also implied that we can know what values are, since he acknowledged their use as a floor for salaries).

hinkley 10y ago
In college I spent a couple summers doing repair work in the shop of a family friend. I got stuck with a boondoggle repair and when it got into day 2 that I was still working on it, and the manager got pissed off and tried to take over for half an hour before he figured out why it was taking me so long. Then we had a shocking conversation about the fact that while he was paying me $x/hr, I needed to be booking at least $10x/hr in repairs, so I needed to work faster. It seemed so unfair to me until I spent a lot more time working in small companies. The repairs were a profit center, and the labor I was billing was keeping the utilities turned on, buying replacement tools, consumables, paying for my lunch break, covering rework, a hedge against me injuring myself, paying for the shop van I used to run inventory between stores, paying taxes, business licenses, my manager's salary, the owner's salary, paying for Bob to wander over and consult on a repair I wasn't sure about, paying the interest payments on the loans, and covering the loss leaders that got us repeat customers who needed repairs in the first place. Things like trade-ins and entry level equipment. At your programming job, every manager above you in the chain, every support team that you use to get your work done are all being paid out of the money billed for you. Yes you may be writing $1M in software a year, but the company wouldn't exist and you wouldn't have any sales without those other people, so all of that overhead gets subtracted from your value. Ironically and possibly painfully, a company can exist for months without a single programmer, but it can't exist long without a management chain.
- matthewowen 10y ago
  I don't disagree with any of this. I'm not saying that if an engineer writes software that increases profits by $1MM then they have realized $1MM in value: it's a team sport. But I don't think that prevents us talking at all about the value of the work that is done in a job.
IncRnd 10y ago
Do you have quarterly goal setting reviews? People generally find that a formal process such as this will answer the questions you pose. For example, you may discover that someone else got that promotion that you were eyeing, because they provided 15x value compared to you - 7 patents, 3 products architected that opened up new areas for growth, etc.

st3v3r 10y ago

"How much value are you assigning to the risk the founder and investors are taking?" Absolutely 0, because they're not the ones doing the work.

gozur88 10y ago
Really? You think people should risk their money without compensation? Where can I find such people? And what makes showing up at the office and typing on a keyboard such a holy use of time that it alone deserves compensation?
- andrepd 10y ago
  I know what you mean. It's the current system that's messed up, that just by holding money you can create money. It generates all kinds of fucked up inequalities.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    You can't create money by holding money. You create money by risking money. There's a huge difference between the two.
    - johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
      You create money by borrowing. You win money by risking money(). You earn money by being useful in what you do. ) In Icelandic, "win" means "work".
      - zaroth 10y ago
        This is pleasingly precise, but besides the point.
  - thinkloop 10y ago
    Holding money generates nothing, you have to at minimum risk it in a savings account or the index, or for real gains, playing roulette on a start-up.

simons 10y ago

> Tech companies always pretend it's impossible to find employees. That's not reality, though. That's a political strategy. Genuinely interested to hear an expansion of this. How would pretending that technical employees are hard to recruit, benefit a company politically?

gozur88 10y ago
If you can convince the general public the tech industry will wither on the vine for lack of skilled labor, you can get Congress to raise the H-1B cap, allowing you to drive down your labor costs.