5 ms·

Well, it's also a financial reality...

michaelt 9y ago
If my efforts have made my employer an extra $X per annum, the financial reality is the company has an extra $X per annum. We can debate how that $X should be divided between workers, executives, creditors, shareholders and reinvestment. But there's no "financial reality" that means workers' share has to be zero. Every organisation has rules and budgets and procedures, but they're made by people and if they don't work right they can be fixed by people. It's not like the CEO received the budget from God on stone tablets on a mountain 2000 years ago. If I wanted to work in some calcified bureaucracy where rules were more important than outcomes and worker performance was irrelevant, I wouldn't be working in the private sector!
- err4nt 9y ago
  Ultimately money is finite - no matter how much you have or how it's allocated. What if there literally isn't any more money left to be given by the time they're done giving raises?
  - kthejoker2 9y ago
    You're missing their point entirely. If my efforts made the company an additional $10,000 per year above and beyond what they would have made, they can offer me a raise of up to $10,000 without affecting any one else's chances at bonuses or raises.
    - manyxcxi 9y ago
      Not if your efforts were wiped out by a project that went sideways and lost 20K on another side of the company. It's also highly unlikely that your singular effort created 10K more profit. That 10K was likely the culmination of a number of people who had varying levels of participation in the effort. Unless you're working at a company that tracks your hours to every single possible project you're working on, there's often a huge blind spot as to where exactly your effort is going as it pertains to revenue. Unless your in professional services or some other type of billable position, then I actually agree with your notion to a degree... With regards to people in billable positions, I once workthink d for a company that did something I really thought was neat. At the end of every quarter they'd announce a profit sharing rate based off of whatever it was that defined the rate. Since we were all billable this rate was at $X per billable hour. So if you billed more, you participated in a greater share of the revenue. I frequently saw $10-20K quarterly bonuses based entirely off my effort. It was quite motivating. Because the profit sharing was the same rate for everyone and took in to account the entire company's financials, you were assured that your billable efforts were going to be rewarded on the same scale as the next person.
    - err4nt 9y ago
      And if you make a mistake that costs the company $10k is it also okay to withhold $10,000 from your pay that period too? You seem to be tying reward _directly_ to profit, while ignoring the risk involved. Usually the higher the risk, the higher the opportunity for reward - but if it fails, the business needs to absorb the risky loss and insulate the workers as much as possible. This means that when there IS a big profit, part of that profit needs to be kept for future losses too in order to smooth things out so they don't have to do layoffs if they have a bad month. If you fly too close to the sun and your weekly pay directly relates to the value you put in that week you'd might have job security but you'd have absolutely no income security!
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

If my efforts have made my employer an extra $X per annum, the financial reality is the company has an extra $X per annum. We can debate how that $X should be divided between workers, executives, creditors, shareholders and reinvestment. But there's no "financial reality" that means workers' share has to be zero. Every organisation has rules and budgets and procedures, but they're made by people and if they don't work right they can be fixed by people. It's not like the CEO received the budget from God on stone tablets on a mountain 2000 years ago. If I wanted to work in some calcified bureaucracy where rules were more important than outcomes and worker performance was irrelevant, I wouldn't be working in the private sector!

err4nt 9y ago
Ultimately money is finite - no matter how much you have or how it's allocated. What if there literally isn't any more money left to be given by the time they're done giving raises?
- kthejoker2 9y ago
  You're missing their point entirely. If my efforts made the company an additional $10,000 per year above and beyond what they would have made, they can offer me a raise of up to $10,000 without affecting any one else's chances at bonuses or raises.
  - manyxcxi 9y ago
    Not if your efforts were wiped out by a project that went sideways and lost 20K on another side of the company. It's also highly unlikely that your singular effort created 10K more profit. That 10K was likely the culmination of a number of people who had varying levels of participation in the effort. Unless you're working at a company that tracks your hours to every single possible project you're working on, there's often a huge blind spot as to where exactly your effort is going as it pertains to revenue. Unless your in professional services or some other type of billable position, then I actually agree with your notion to a degree... With regards to people in billable positions, I once workthink d for a company that did something I really thought was neat. At the end of every quarter they'd announce a profit sharing rate based off of whatever it was that defined the rate. Since we were all billable this rate was at $X per billable hour. So if you billed more, you participated in a greater share of the revenue. I frequently saw $10-20K quarterly bonuses based entirely off my effort. It was quite motivating. Because the profit sharing was the same rate for everyone and took in to account the entire company's financials, you were assured that your billable efforts were going to be rewarded on the same scale as the next person.
  - err4nt 9y ago
    And if you make a mistake that costs the company $10k is it also okay to withhold $10,000 from your pay that period too? You seem to be tying reward _directly_ to profit, while ignoring the risk involved. Usually the higher the risk, the higher the opportunity for reward - but if it fails, the business needs to absorb the risky loss and insulate the workers as much as possible. This means that when there IS a big profit, part of that profit needs to be kept for future losses too in order to smooth things out so they don't have to do layoffs if they have a bad month. If you fly too close to the sun and your weekly pay directly relates to the value you put in that week you'd might have job security but you'd have absolutely no income security!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]