9 ms·

I think for lower-paying jobs, then they are paying you to sweat, and there also is a tighter correlation there with productivity. But higher-paying jobs are a

I think for lower-paying jobs, then they are paying you to sweat, and there also is a tighter correlation there with productivity. But higher-paying jobs are all salaried rather than hourly, which seems to indicate that society has already decided pretty low on the scale that more valuable jobs and work has less and less of a correlation with your hours worked. And at the top end, we pay people exponentially higher salaries, with CEOs making hundreds of millions, which in no way means that they're working thousands of times more hours than everyone else. The easiest way to get promoted isn't to work more hours, it's to manage other people. So leverage and scale of impact seems to be what society has decided is most valuable.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
In theory, salaried positions pay you for adding value, not for your time. In practice, people on salary often work more hours, not fewer hours. (When I had a corporate job, one manager once joked to me "I make less than minimum wage for the hours I put in.") We tend to pay better for positions of trust. This may or may not involve more skill and such positions are often primarily given to people with certain traits, like upper class white males. Certainly, some people have gotten the memo on how to line their pockets for less time and effort. But I think we generally do a somewhat poor job of elucidating how to get paid for the value you provide rather than for who you know, what you are, how many hours you clock, etc. If we want a better world where good things happen, this is a problem. It actively creates social injustice and also maximizes for teaching people to get over rather than add value per se.
- brtkdotse 6y ago
  > In practice, people on salary often work more hours, not fewer hours. (When I had a corporate job, one manager once joked to me "I make less than minimum wage for the hours I put in.") How I wish that stuff like this, instead of being worn like a badge of honor, was seen as a dunce cap. Why _the hell_ would you work more than agreed to?
  - uncledave 6y ago
    Agree with this. My father was conned by this attitude. He was never at home and died a month after he retired. The people telling you to work hard and promoting that ideology are the ones who will benefit, not you.
- ilammy 6y ago
  > In theory, salaried positions pay you for adding value, not for your time. A significant part of salary is basically payment for availability: for that when you need to do a specific job, you already have a person hired and onboarded which you can immediately assign the job to. As opposed to looking for a contractor on a short notice (and paying them more for this short notice).
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Yeah, I was responding to this: But higher-paying jobs are all salaried rather than hourly, which seems to indicate that society has already decided pretty low on the scale that more valuable jobs and work has less and less of a correlation with your hours worked. A quick google gets me this: While 40 hours of work per week is considered full-time, the average salaried employee does not often exceed 45-50 hours per week. This is because, according to Upcounsel, “If a job requires 55-60 (or more) hours to perform, many would consider it a poorly-designed job.” Even then, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that almost 10 million American employees in all industries work 60 or more hours per week. https://www.bamboohr.com/hr-glossary/salaried-employee/ https://www.bamboohr.com/hr-glossary/salaried-employee/
- jmchuster 6y ago
  Ah, sorry, in my industry (tech) most of our salaried jobs pay way better than minimum wage when considering your dollar per hour worked. So I'll happily work 50 hour weeks instead of 40 hours ones when I'm getting paid 10x as much. It's really quite a nice tradeoff vs, say, having to work two full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. It even compares quite nicely to other high-paying industries, e.g. in i-banking you work 80-100 hours a week the first two years (still making six figures mind you), but then those who survive get promoted, with a nominal salary bump, but the main difference being that you now get to work more normal 40-50 hour weeks. I don't know if I would use the word "trust". I'd probably characterize it more as "responsibility". You get paid more because you are the one responsible if those who report to you don't deliver. Your boss will only yell at you, not your reports. Management does not require necessarily _more_ skill, but still requires a skillset nonetheless. If you can make 100 people 10% more efficient, then theoretically you are worth 10 people. I _do_ believe that you need to be able to make your managers "trust" you in order to get promoted, but that's talking a bit more about how to actually move up in the corporate world. I also don't know if it's really that much a mystery how to make more money. Move into management. Move into higher-paying industries, like finance and tech. Own your own business (half of it being defacto making yourself a manager). I think mostly people don't have the privilege that allows them such mobility. You can usually get promoted to shift manager pretty easily within retail by, um, just never being late. But moving higher probably requires various social skills (such as gaining trust mentioned above) that certain upbringings will give you a massive head start on. Many industries require advanced degrees that require a heavy initial cash disbursement. And so on. Or are we saying, that you've chosen an industry that doesn't pay well because you personally like it, and want to get paid more? That's difficult if your company/industry just doesn't have that much excess money to throw around. Or are we talking about how to get paid more for your job without switching into management? There's probably an upper limit to what you'll get paid (usually companies have pay bands for each position), based on what the company considers to be the maximum value that can be provided by that position. So you want to make sure that you're getting paid commensurate with your output relative to your peers. And I guess that requires similar skills to getting promoted positions, but with a much lower bar, usually just around convincing your boss that you're generating the value that you are. If you've capped out that pay band, then your options are to convince the company to rethink their value system (generally impossible), switch to a different position, or switch to a different company.
eevilspock 6y ago
The assumption that the free market's "decisions" represents "what society has decided" is both bad and dangerous. If anything, society has abdicated its decision making responsibilities. That a CEO is "worth" hundreds of millions is an artifact of a system that is owned and operated by those the system identifies as valuable. Hmmmm....
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  No system is free from this. Human beings will corrupt any system they're a part of. The trick is to overthrow the system every now and then.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

In theory, salaried positions pay you for adding value, not for your time. In practice, people on salary often work more hours, not fewer hours. (When I had a corporate job, one manager once joked to me "I make less than minimum wage for the hours I put in.") We tend to pay better for positions of trust. This may or may not involve more skill and such positions are often primarily given to people with certain traits, like upper class white males. Certainly, some people have gotten the memo on how to line their pockets for less time and effort. But I think we generally do a somewhat poor job of elucidating how to get paid for the value you provide rather than for who you know, what you are, how many hours you clock, etc. If we want a better world where good things happen, this is a problem. It actively creates social injustice and also maximizes for teaching people to get over rather than add value per se.

brtkdotse 6y ago
> In practice, people on salary often work more hours, not fewer hours. (When I had a corporate job, one manager once joked to me "I make less than minimum wage for the hours I put in.") How I wish that stuff like this, instead of being worn like a badge of honor, was seen as a dunce cap. Why _the hell_ would you work more than agreed to?
- uncledave 6y ago
  Agree with this. My father was conned by this attitude. He was never at home and died a month after he retired. The people telling you to work hard and promoting that ideology are the ones who will benefit, not you.
ilammy 6y ago
> In theory, salaried positions pay you for adding value, not for your time. A significant part of salary is basically payment for availability: for that when you need to do a specific job, you already have a person hired and onboarded which you can immediately assign the job to. As opposed to looking for a contractor on a short notice (and paying them more for this short notice).
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Yeah, I was responding to this: But higher-paying jobs are all salaried rather than hourly, which seems to indicate that society has already decided pretty low on the scale that more valuable jobs and work has less and less of a correlation with your hours worked. A quick google gets me this: While 40 hours of work per week is considered full-time, the average salaried employee does not often exceed 45-50 hours per week. This is because, according to Upcounsel, “If a job requires 55-60 (or more) hours to perform, many would consider it a poorly-designed job.” Even then, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that almost 10 million American employees in all industries work 60 or more hours per week. https://www.bamboohr.com/hr-glossary/salaried-employee/ https://www.bamboohr.com/hr-glossary/salaried-employee/
jmchuster 6y ago
Ah, sorry, in my industry (tech) most of our salaried jobs pay way better than minimum wage when considering your dollar per hour worked. So I'll happily work 50 hour weeks instead of 40 hours ones when I'm getting paid 10x as much. It's really quite a nice tradeoff vs, say, having to work two full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. It even compares quite nicely to other high-paying industries, e.g. in i-banking you work 80-100 hours a week the first two years (still making six figures mind you), but then those who survive get promoted, with a nominal salary bump, but the main difference being that you now get to work more normal 40-50 hour weeks. I don't know if I would use the word "trust". I'd probably characterize it more as "responsibility". You get paid more because you are the one responsible if those who report to you don't deliver. Your boss will only yell at you, not your reports. Management does not require necessarily _more_ skill, but still requires a skillset nonetheless. If you can make 100 people 10% more efficient, then theoretically you are worth 10 people. I _do_ believe that you need to be able to make your managers "trust" you in order to get promoted, but that's talking a bit more about how to actually move up in the corporate world. I also don't know if it's really that much a mystery how to make more money. Move into management. Move into higher-paying industries, like finance and tech. Own your own business (half of it being defacto making yourself a manager). I think mostly people don't have the privilege that allows them such mobility. You can usually get promoted to shift manager pretty easily within retail by, um, just never being late. But moving higher probably requires various social skills (such as gaining trust mentioned above) that certain upbringings will give you a massive head start on. Many industries require advanced degrees that require a heavy initial cash disbursement. And so on. Or are we saying, that you've chosen an industry that doesn't pay well because you personally like it, and want to get paid more? That's difficult if your company/industry just doesn't have that much excess money to throw around. Or are we talking about how to get paid more for your job without switching into management? There's probably an upper limit to what you'll get paid (usually companies have pay bands for each position), based on what the company considers to be the maximum value that can be provided by that position. So you want to make sure that you're getting paid commensurate with your output relative to your peers. And I guess that requires similar skills to getting promoted positions, but with a much lower bar, usually just around convincing your boss that you're generating the value that you are. If you've capped out that pay band, then your options are to convince the company to rethink their value system (generally impossible), switch to a different position, or switch to a different company.

eevilspock 6y ago

The assumption that the free market's "decisions" represents "what society has decided" is both bad and dangerous. If anything, society has abdicated its decision making responsibilities. That a CEO is "worth" hundreds of millions is an artifact of a system that is owned and operated by those the system identifies as valuable. Hmmmm....

nickthemagicman 6y ago
No system is free from this. Human beings will corrupt any system they're a part of. The trick is to overthrow the system every now and then.