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I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal. Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually
by bloblaw 7y ago
I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal.
Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually cares about his employees and is being genuine here. He's a good person, making a private business decision to increase the pay of frankly his lowest paid workers.
In a city where the average tech worker earns $275k a year, he believes its the right thing to do to make sure everyone that works for him at Gravity can earn enough to afford rent, food, and some fun.
Say what you will about the merits of decision, but it takes real leadership to make it and stand by it. I happen to think he's doing the right thing and I hope other companies choose to follow suit.
- Ligrev 7y agoGenuinely curious, not judgemental here. How did the usually-much-better-paid people feel about this? Did they complain that their salaries were now closer to the lesser paid people? Like, I could see somebody not feeling like that's fair so I'm wondering how the morale was impacted by that.
- wjp3 7y agoIf you read the article it covers that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- amflare 7y agoIt doesn't really. It just said a couple people resigned in protest.
- kamaal 7y agoNever understood this. This is like complaining you are unhappy that other people should even have a good life. It's one thing to aspire to have a good life. And totally different to derive your happiness from watching others suffer.
- seattle_spring 7y agoIf their salary was docked to pay for the raises then I can totally see why they left.
- ksec 7y agoMy guess is they think they are 10x better than those 70K and yet they are only making 200K. So obviously they want a raise too.
- dominotw 7y ago>average tech worker earns $275k a year I need to move to bay area this year. thats my sole mission this year.
- alexbanks 7y agoI'm curious where this poster got that figure. I haven't found anything like it, in fact a pretty consistent 145k average salary. I would also be wary of average vs. median, as there's some real crazy outliers out there.
- fahadkhan 7y agoPedantic note. You probably mean mean (or mode) vs median. They are all different types of averages (amongst others).
- rootusrootus 7y agoI'm guessing OP did in fact mean median, since the point is that outliers at the top can really skew the mean. Median gives a more realistic idea of what people are typically earning.
- skookum 7y agoPresumably from stories like this one earlier this week: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/seattle-tech-workers-earn-279k-year-average-double-wages-every-sector/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/seattle-tech-workers-earn-279k...
- fahadkhan 7y agoSaw a video of Price saying that his minimum salary may have indirectly raised housing costs in his city and that is not a problem he can solve but something that the city must. I don't know the figures but I would guess that any effect that he had caused was minimal. He really does come across as great guy. If I was more local I would probably look to work for him.
- rejschaap 7y agoIt is very unlikely that a 100 person company in an already gentrified neighborhood would have any effect on house prices.
- me_me_me 7y agoFurthermore if you are paid decent wage you can afford to buy a house, further cutting down the rent prices. It boggles my mind how people spin the stories to protect professional landlords, a class that does nothing but extracts productivity.
- banannaise 7y agoSadly, there's a strange knock-on effect of all the professional landlords: Instead of aspiring to own a family home, a lot of millennials aspire to become landlords, either by buying big and renting part of the space, or by buying small and using it as a springboard to buy bigger and rent the original place. It's a vicious cycle, especially since they often don't have the capital to easily absorb damage or maintenance costs, leading to the properties deteriorating rapidly.
- sytelus 7y agoThere is a lot of good intentions here but we did run a very large scale experiment for 69 years on about 300M people. It was called the Soviet Union and the results weren't pretty economically for the people. So the concern remains how long this can last, how brittle is this and how much can it scale.
- zaptidizap 7y agoYou cant generalize things that far. But for sake of argument: you are saying that they failed the challange at aliexpress/amazon level distribution - using pen and paper. I chat with 2 russian chaps working on the technicalities of that challange (coding the model in sofware) they had an interesting thing in common. They both had parents who tried to work the paper administration in soviet days. They told their kids countless horror stories about misplacing a bit of paper excluding entire regions from goods, like no shots. The parents were extreamely entugiastic about computers when they came onto stage. That! That is what we needeed!
- echlebek 7y agoI can't tell if you're naive or simply trolling. "There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible." -Henry Ford
- sytelus 7y agoRaising minimum wage is not same as paying equal wages to all (which is what this article describes). No one is trolling and comparison to Soviet experiment is close, if not exactly the same. Please read the article.
- aarpmcgee 7y agoI read the article. It pretty clearly states, many times, that 70k is the minimum wage, and says nothing about equal wages.
- 7y ago