When I found myself with a mandate and a budget in a previous company, I set out to hire a team. The health, happiness, and productivity of the team overall was

When I found myself with a mandate and a budget in a previous company, I set out to hire a team. The health, happiness, and productivity of the team overall was my top priority. In terms of budget I didn't think in terms of what I got from any one individual contributor vs. what I paid. Rather, I assessed the cost of the total team vs. what the business was getting from that team. Francesco's experiment seems to rely on an assumption that he can bow out of things that teams typically need their members to do (such as daily standups) if he accepts less pay, as if the team-level work could somehow be parceled out and evaluated in a piecemeal basis in terms of budget. The issue with that is that there is a level of engagement that is non-negotiable in a team. If I thought Francesco would act as a force function for the team and help them be more cohesive, faster-moving, and results-driven, then I would bring him on-board and pay him comparably to what I paid the other members of the team who were producing equivalent results. If Francesco decided that he didn't want to do the sorts of things that the team required of him to be an active and productive participant in the team effort, then to me Fencesco's value could very well be negative.