6 ms·

Well would you pay 10 dollars a liter to fill your car up, when you can get perfectly good fuel for $1.50 a liter?

mouzogu 7y ago
very bezosian. not sure you could, or should, apply this analogy to a human being though.
benreesman 7y ago
I’m not sure I follow the analogy, but I certainly pay extra for high-octane gasoline when I’m filling up a performance automobile.
- uk_programmer 7y ago
  But you wouldn't pay £1.30 for high octane petrol when you could pay £1.25 across the road.
fsloth 7y ago
There is a difference between a team of people, and the set of people working individually. An extreme example - there is a reason a SEAL team is called a team. This is the problem with wage discussions. People equate a measurable commodity like gasoline to the number of hours worked at a specific job. Sometimes this is a sufficient analogue, but often times reward mechanisms are more complex than that. There is a good reason rewards mechanisms in jobs are a lively field of academic study. People just forget this does not only apply to top managers.
- uk_programmer 7y ago
  I am a contractor and I would expect to be paid the market rate for my skillset. The market rate for a .NET developer in the UK is about £350-400 a day (outside of London) in the UK. An Angular JS developer gets between £450 and £500. Thus at the moment (despite not being fond of it) I am (re-)learning Angular JS in my spare time so I can go for these higher paid roles. The same is generally true for the salaried market. I appreciate there is a bit of a difference with a team of people. But generally how else are you going to gauge the compensation of any individual reliably other than market rate?
  - fsloth 7y ago
    "But generally how else are you going to gauge the compensation of any individual reliably other than market rate?" If you were a business owner, what would be the correct referral market rate if the people whose compensation you are gauging is a tight knit team with years of experience on your specific business and customer needs?
    - Xylakant 7y ago
      Another thing that often gets forgotten is the cost of (long term) employees leaving. They take so much institutional knowledge with them. I'm currently watching a case unfold at a client where all people with intimate knowledge of a crucial component left - the cost of training up new people on that component will eclipse any reasonable increase in wage that they could have given to the team, not even accounting for the increase in bug-rate while the new folks figure out all the pitfalls that software tends to accumulate over time. Documentation helps, but people knowing their way around the code is better.
      - uk_programmer 7y ago
        I think us developer overstate how important we think this is. Unless time to market is a consideration then they will probably just accept throwing people at it and then get some poor souls to clean up afterwards.
        kqr 7y ago
        That probably costs more, though. Software engineering is mainly knowledge work. This means the majority of work consists not of building stuff, but acquiring and organising knowledge. I've read somewhere that about 50% of the job is gathering information. When a person leaves after having spent two years at a company, it might look like you get to keep everything they've been working on, but this is far from true. If the 50% assumption is correct, a person leaving after two years means you throw a full year of work into the dump. This is a huge cost, but it's hidden.
throwqwerty 7y ago
but people aren't commodity goods so what exactly does that example prove?

very bezosian. not sure you could, or should, apply this analogy to a human being though.

I’m not sure I follow the analogy, but I certainly pay extra for high-octane gasoline when I’m filling up a performance automobile.

uk_programmer 7y ago
But you wouldn't pay £1.30 for high octane petrol when you could pay £1.25 across the road.

fsloth 7y ago

There is a difference between a team of people, and the set of people working individually. An extreme example - there is a reason a SEAL team is called a team. This is the problem with wage discussions. People equate a measurable commodity like gasoline to the number of hours worked at a specific job. Sometimes this is a sufficient analogue, but often times reward mechanisms are more complex than that. There is a good reason rewards mechanisms in jobs are a lively field of academic study. People just forget this does not only apply to top managers.

uk_programmer 7y ago
I am a contractor and I would expect to be paid the market rate for my skillset. The market rate for a .NET developer in the UK is about £350-400 a day (outside of London) in the UK. An Angular JS developer gets between £450 and £500. Thus at the moment (despite not being fond of it) I am (re-)learning Angular JS in my spare time so I can go for these higher paid roles. The same is generally true for the salaried market. I appreciate there is a bit of a difference with a team of people. But generally how else are you going to gauge the compensation of any individual reliably other than market rate?
- fsloth 7y ago
  "But generally how else are you going to gauge the compensation of any individual reliably other than market rate?" If you were a business owner, what would be the correct referral market rate if the people whose compensation you are gauging is a tight knit team with years of experience on your specific business and customer needs?
  - Xylakant 7y ago
    Another thing that often gets forgotten is the cost of (long term) employees leaving. They take so much institutional knowledge with them. I'm currently watching a case unfold at a client where all people with intimate knowledge of a crucial component left - the cost of training up new people on that component will eclipse any reasonable increase in wage that they could have given to the team, not even accounting for the increase in bug-rate while the new folks figure out all the pitfalls that software tends to accumulate over time. Documentation helps, but people knowing their way around the code is better.
    - uk_programmer 7y ago
      I think us developer overstate how important we think this is. Unless time to market is a consideration then they will probably just accept throwing people at it and then get some poor souls to clean up afterwards.
      - kqr 7y ago
        That probably costs more, though. Software engineering is mainly knowledge work. This means the majority of work consists not of building stuff, but acquiring and organising knowledge. I've read somewhere that about 50% of the job is gathering information. When a person leaves after having spent two years at a company, it might look like you get to keep everything they've been working on, but this is far from true. If the 50% assumption is correct, a person leaving after two years means you throw a full year of work into the dump. This is a huge cost, but it's hidden.

throwqwerty 7y ago

but people aren't commodity goods so what exactly does that example prove?