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Many people feel open salaries and professional organizations inadequately handle specializations. In University sectors there have been effects like: CS lectu
by TimPC 9y ago
Many people feel open salaries and professional organizations inadequately handle specializations. In University sectors there have been effects like: CS lecturers not allowed to be paid more because positions are harder to fill vs say Fine Art History lecturers. I'm not saying that's bad overall, but I can certainly see why CS lecturers might not like it.
I think it's fairly easy for these models to fail at bringing in experts because they put extreme downward pressure on the gains from expertise and aggressively enforce regression to the mean. If someone makes twice as much as someone else you have to justify it not just in terms of market demand and a personal outlook on the skillset but also in terms of the morale effects of paying someone else twice as much openly. I'm not sure that's good for many parties and I'm quite certain it's bad for at least some. I think the likely effect is fewer people in security and fewer people in AI at the companies that do these things.
- pmoriarty 9y ago"CS lecturers not allowed to be paid more because positions are harder to fill vs say Fine Art History lecturers" Why does this sound backwards to me? If a position is hard to fill, wouldn't you want to pay the person more so that they don't leave? Conversely, if a position is easy to fill, wouldn't the university pay less, since if the person leaves they'll be easy to replace? How does paying someone less because their position is hard to fill make any kind of sense? What am I missing here?
- opportune 9y agoI assume the university has a policy in place that all lecturers are to be paid the same. And the original commenter was alluding to this precisely because it is backwards.
- dv_dt 9y agoBecause another game is being played in parallel to the direct one you're thinking about. In the parallel game, if you let people who expect good salaries go, you do go through more immediate replacement costs, but are likely to eventually come across people who aren't so demanding of their salaries and get an accumulation of those, then the employer can win out in the longer term. I don't know if this strategy even has to pay off in actuality, in the long term, but that actual performance of the strategy isn't as important as maintaining that model of control of labor costs.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chiph 9y agoIt's so no one's feelings are hurt if they find out that the new associate professor in the hard-to-fill position is making more than a tenured full professor in a different department.
- js8 9y ago> How does paying someone less because their position is hard to fill make any kind of sense? What am I missing here? I don't think you're missing anything. Free markets (or supply and demand) are perfectly symmetric. That's why they cannot enforce any kind of morality, like meritocracy, whatever it is. Only people can do that and it will always have a cost in the completely free market.
- TimPC 9y agoI think what you're missing here as that unions often limit the ability to respond to market conditions in much the same way government does. Responding to specific minutiae is not terribly hard if they personally harm you. Accounting for them in an impersonal regulatory framework being made at arms-length is a much harder problem even if that framework solves other problems.