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Very hard for me not to have this opinion now after working in a few different companies where half my coworkers seem to not be doing much more than jerking off

by jrsj 4y ago

Very hard for me not to have this opinion now after working in a few different companies where half my coworkers seem to not be doing much more than jerking off all day and at best accomplishing a days worth of work in a week. How could anyone who has had this experience NOT want greater variation in pay that’s at least somewhat correlated to effort/performance? This stands out more to me in an office environment but the dynamic existed even when I worked at McDonald’s. Nobody wants to have to carry dead weight.

goatlover 4y ago
Reminds me of the old Soviet saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". But there seems to be a rise in popularity of the idea that meritocracy and competition is bad and everyone should be paid the same. Killing incentive seems like a bad economic policy to me that's already been tried.
- andrepd 4y ago
  It's not that meritocracy in abstract is bad, it's that it is a fiction which does not really exist, certainly not in our capital-skewed status quo.
  - bostik 4y ago
    I tend to be mostly supportive of meritocracy as a driver, but with a pretty wide carve-out. When you declare something to be a meritocracy, you also have to answer one fundamental question: who gets to define merit? Taken to its (il)logical extreme, unchecked meritocracy is a route to a mix of mercenary rule and nepotism.
  - pydry 4y ago
    Yeah, I find it weird that proponents of wealth inequality think that theyre defending meritocracy. They're overtly or inadvertently defending "the magic of compounding" which is the ideology of the parasite - precise antithesis of meritocracy. 3rd generation trustafarians are not 1000x more productive than a burger flipper. Theyre less productive. We'd probably have orders of magnitude less inequality with some kind of genuine meritocracy. War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength and Income Inequality is Meritocracy.
    - jrsj 4y ago
      The phrasing used by the poll in the article probably resulted in the vast majority of respondents think in terms of differences in pay and not in terms of investment income. I’m not a fan of wealth inequality, but some degree of income inequality is useful as an incentive. Concentration of wealth is only loosely correlated to that & evening out wages wouldn’t do much of anything to change it.
  - Gravityloss 4y ago
    But meritocracy is different from income inequality. Some examples. Society 1 has classes. The small owning class has all their income from their inherited investments. While the majority are peasants. If you are a peasant, no matter how hard you work, you won't get any more pay and thus cannot do investments. Society 2 has no real classes. Taxes on inheritance are high. Education is free. Startups are supported by the governments. Rich people's offspring don't usually just live on investments. In families, generations and even siblings move up and down between rich and poor status all the time. Society 1 and 2 might have the same income inequality by some metric. Yet 2 is much more meritocratic than 1.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      The problem with society 2 is that people have very few incentives to start new companies, except if they can use the startup to reach into the pot of government subsidies for less effort than any other job. In other words, the people who start companies will be the nephews of the officials who control the pot of money. This is what happened in the Soviet Union. The economy hollowed out under this set of "fair" rules because human nature was left out of the equation. Corruption wasn't allowed, but it happened on a massive scale because it was effective. The more "fair" system resulted in greater income inequality than the unfair capitalist countries! Forget income inequality. The metric we should be tracking is median income (in real terms). Wealth of the normal household is what we want to optimize, so optimize for it. Horribly unequal capitalism has been great for the average person. "Fair" systems, not so much. "Meritocracy" is a bad word for what people who like capitalism actually want.
      - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
        Uh, going from 2 to Soviet Union is quite the leap. The way 2 is described, it is more like your average West European country today, depending on what GP believes is "high" inheritance tax. 2 would work just fine for many years, especially if inheritance tax was progressive. Don't underestimate the good will of some people, and the need to excel above others for some other people. As long as the incentives aren't flat-out dead and the people in charge aren't corrupt to the bone.
- mojzu 4y ago
  I'm not sure this is true, at least I haven't come across more than a handful of people advocating for pay equality. My experience has been that people increasingly believe the systems we have now are not meritocratic or very competitive and have grown more disillusioned with them as a result (very anecdotal obviously as it's based on sources I read/people I know/etc.)
- nemo44x 4y ago
  It’s called “equity” in newspeak. We’ve gone from “equal opportunity” to “equal outcomes”. This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. Interesting that it’s also self serving.
  - modo_mario 4y ago
    >This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. In the US? Hasn't there been a serious growth in wealth inequality there over the past 25 years?
- elliekelly 4y ago
  No one thinks meritocracy is bad. Many think the modern meritocracy is a pretense used to justify rewarding people not for their efforts or contributions but because of their inherent “worthiness” as a member of the wealthy class.
  - jona-f 4y ago
    Well, i think meritocracy is bad. The job should go to the most suited and not to someone who has earned it cause of past efforts. People hope those two are the same, but in practice they might not. Meritocracy favors career-bureaucrats, who make up whatever metric that defines the merit.
    - resonious 4y ago
      This kind of sounds to me like we're defining merit as some kind of points system where you get merit just by expending effort. Like if I work really hard at digging a hole in the dirt somewhere, I can then use my amassed merit points to get a promotion. I think most people would count being suited for a job as having high merit.
- wesapien 4y ago
  Your post reminds me of a reddit comment by a Russian who said they would welcome Communism back so they can be like children again.
ThalesX 4y ago
I don't know. I also feel that I work more than let's say half my colleagues at whichever company. Mostly because I really really really enjoy what I'm doing. That being said, I'm not really sure how their salary impacts my life. I negociate to what I want for what I do and that's that.
- jrsj 4y ago
  Your ability to negotiate a salary at all is a function of a diversity of salaries though. Limiting that in favor of more equal pay across the board means you’re more likely to be stuck getting paid what others are getting paid regardless of your personal efforts.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    Equal pay for a particular role seems very in line with the market efficiency theme. For better pay, you need a better job where the effort required is actually higher.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      Only if the roles are specified with essentially infinite precision. Would you expect "sales representative who makes between $199k-200k in sales" and "sales representative who makes between $205-206k in sales" to be separate roles at a company?
hotpotamus 4y ago
How much harder than you did the CEO work for how much more pay than you got at any of these companies?
- 988747 4y ago
  CEOs are not paid for working hard, they are paid for BEING RIGHT, aka making the right strategic decisions. Bad CEO can bankrupt the company, good CEO can grow it's revenue ten times. You pay CEOs for their experience and expertise in running companies, not for the number of hours worked.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    CEOs are wrong all the time, they are also paid so much for being fired there’s a term for it: “golden parachute”
    - Jcowell 4y ago
      Yeah the OP comment doesn’t make sense to me. Right or wrong a CEO will probably make more than you regardless.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      If you paid the CEO of McDonald's the same amount as a burger flipper, you are going to get someone who is wrong much more frequently. When we see that CEOs get things wrong, that seems to be more of an artifact of the future being hard to predict than any individual being stupid.
      - micromacrofoot 4y ago
        Ask a CEO to flip burgers and you'll find they'll make a lot of mistakes too. CEOs have specific education and/or experience to help them make better decisions. They suck just as much as anyone else at unknowns.
        4y ago
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Obviously, but your examples are too obvious. Should a subpopulation of entrepreneurs be able to coast by on brand recognition and first mover advantage after an initial burst of effort? Should manual laborers be paid jack for doing a job which puts them at high risk of being stuck socioeconomically, despite putting in loads of effort? People want harder work to be more rewarded, but the saying is "work smarter, not harder" for a reason.
- jrsj 4y ago
  In a simple poll like this though more complex topics won’t be on peoples minds, that’s a flaw in how this was conducted.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    I don't think that is a flaw when the majority of people don't even have the knowledge to think further on these topics, and people tend to act rather simplistically most of their lives anyway. In your own example, think about what would happen if all these dead weights suddenly became more competitive. I don't think the working class fully realizes what will happen when we boost it some more, despite recent events in the 20th century inflating the working class at the benefit of entrepreneurs and the detriment of (already participating?) workers. Like ideally, if I was in such a situation, I'd want my coworkers to work more so I could slack. In reality, I don't think them working harder would benefit me in the long term, due to numerous other factors (myself, the boss, wealth pipelines, etc.)
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
If compensation was all about hard work then coal miners would be billionaires. The arguments about income inequality largely come down to the fact that there is very little correlation between hard work and compensation. Instead the large difference in income are correlated with factors generally considered beyond people's control. I would have a hard time becoming a real estate tycoon because I don't have a father who can grant me a small loan of a million dollars, for instance.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  These conversations are rarely productive because no attempt to find common ground is made. For example you just assume that a coal miner is hard work. I assume a coal miner is easy work. You seem to think things like physical exertion, working conditions, or danger define what is “hard work” while I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work. The average coal worker has almost no chance of failure. They are told where to go, told what to do, told how to do it. They do it and then get paid. Easy work. Writing a successful novel is hard work. The author just sits in an air conditioned room in front of a computer for 6 months clicking keys on a keyboard. So why is that hard work? Because they are most likely going to fail to complete the novel, or even having completed it, are likely to fail at gaining a significant audience. Most people who try fail, hence hard work. Neither of us is right or wrong, we just have different world views. Finding common ground between our world views is a critical first step to having any productive conversation.
  - ranko 4y ago
    Miners have a pretty high chance death while on the job - according to https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osar0012.htm https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osar0012.htm, the US death rate in 2007 (because that's the first figure I found) was 24.8 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared to 4.3 in all private industry. Sounds like a much higher "chance of failure" than most other jobs.
    - the_lonely_road 4y ago
lkxijlewlf 4y ago
I get you. I've had that opinion as well. But anymore, I realize that's not my problem. What I want is my share. When a company says, "Best year ever!" and my share is a 2% raise, fuck that.
- andrepd 4y ago
  That is literally what socialism means: you get a stake in the place where you work.
  - dgfitz 4y ago
    That isn’t quite accurate and it’s dangerous to twist definitions like that. so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/ noun a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
moolcool 4y ago
I'd argue that the dynamic you're talking about is a part of a free market though. Like you could use your McDonald's example to make the opposite point that you're using it for. You could say "A lack of pay, recognition of effort, and career growth opportunity at McDonald's means that workers are unmotivated and do not give 100%. More ambitious workers who want to give more effort and be recognized for said effort move on to higher paying opportunities elsewhere".
- jrsj 4y ago
  If this were the case I would expect more people to give a shit in higher paying office environments but I’ve actually seen the exact opposite of that. Having more opportunities available allows people to have even less potential consequence for not actually trying.
andrepd 4y ago
Very nice sentiment, but unfortunately that's not how reality works. Do you honestly look at the world and see that incomes are correlated to merit/effort/performance/work?
odiroot 4y ago
> Nobody wants to have to carry dead weight. But there's a lot of "dead weight" to carry. And it has a voice and a vote.

by jrsj 4y ago

goatlover 4y ago

Reminds me of the old Soviet saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". But there seems to be a rise in popularity of the idea that meritocracy and competition is bad and everyone should be paid the same. Killing incentive seems like a bad economic policy to me that's already been tried.

andrepd 4y ago
It's not that meritocracy in abstract is bad, it's that it is a fiction which does not really exist, certainly not in our capital-skewed status quo.
- bostik 4y ago
  I tend to be mostly supportive of meritocracy as a driver, but with a pretty wide carve-out. When you declare something to be a meritocracy, you also have to answer one fundamental question: who gets to define merit? Taken to its (il)logical extreme, unchecked meritocracy is a route to a mix of mercenary rule and nepotism.
- pydry 4y ago
  Yeah, I find it weird that proponents of wealth inequality think that theyre defending meritocracy. They're overtly or inadvertently defending "the magic of compounding" which is the ideology of the parasite - precise antithesis of meritocracy. 3rd generation trustafarians are not 1000x more productive than a burger flipper. Theyre less productive. We'd probably have orders of magnitude less inequality with some kind of genuine meritocracy. War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength and Income Inequality is Meritocracy.
  - jrsj 4y ago
    The phrasing used by the poll in the article probably resulted in the vast majority of respondents think in terms of differences in pay and not in terms of investment income. I’m not a fan of wealth inequality, but some degree of income inequality is useful as an incentive. Concentration of wealth is only loosely correlated to that & evening out wages wouldn’t do much of anything to change it.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  But meritocracy is different from income inequality. Some examples. Society 1 has classes. The small owning class has all their income from their inherited investments. While the majority are peasants. If you are a peasant, no matter how hard you work, you won't get any more pay and thus cannot do investments. Society 2 has no real classes. Taxes on inheritance are high. Education is free. Startups are supported by the governments. Rich people's offspring don't usually just live on investments. In families, generations and even siblings move up and down between rich and poor status all the time. Society 1 and 2 might have the same income inequality by some metric. Yet 2 is much more meritocratic than 1.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The problem with society 2 is that people have very few incentives to start new companies, except if they can use the startup to reach into the pot of government subsidies for less effort than any other job. In other words, the people who start companies will be the nephews of the officials who control the pot of money. This is what happened in the Soviet Union. The economy hollowed out under this set of "fair" rules because human nature was left out of the equation. Corruption wasn't allowed, but it happened on a massive scale because it was effective. The more "fair" system resulted in greater income inequality than the unfair capitalist countries! Forget income inequality. The metric we should be tracking is median income (in real terms). Wealth of the normal household is what we want to optimize, so optimize for it. Horribly unequal capitalism has been great for the average person. "Fair" systems, not so much. "Meritocracy" is a bad word for what people who like capitalism actually want.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Uh, going from 2 to Soviet Union is quite the leap. The way 2 is described, it is more like your average West European country today, depending on what GP believes is "high" inheritance tax. 2 would work just fine for many years, especially if inheritance tax was progressive. Don't underestimate the good will of some people, and the need to excel above others for some other people. As long as the incentives aren't flat-out dead and the people in charge aren't corrupt to the bone.
mojzu 4y ago
I'm not sure this is true, at least I haven't come across more than a handful of people advocating for pay equality. My experience has been that people increasingly believe the systems we have now are not meritocratic or very competitive and have grown more disillusioned with them as a result (very anecdotal obviously as it's based on sources I read/people I know/etc.)
nemo44x 4y ago
It’s called “equity” in newspeak. We’ve gone from “equal opportunity” to “equal outcomes”. This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. Interesting that it’s also self serving.
- modo_mario 4y ago
  >This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. In the US? Hasn't there been a serious growth in wealth inequality there over the past 25 years?
elliekelly 4y ago
No one thinks meritocracy is bad. Many think the modern meritocracy is a pretense used to justify rewarding people not for their efforts or contributions but because of their inherent “worthiness” as a member of the wealthy class.
- jona-f 4y ago
  Well, i think meritocracy is bad. The job should go to the most suited and not to someone who has earned it cause of past efforts. People hope those two are the same, but in practice they might not. Meritocracy favors career-bureaucrats, who make up whatever metric that defines the merit.
  - resonious 4y ago
    This kind of sounds to me like we're defining merit as some kind of points system where you get merit just by expending effort. Like if I work really hard at digging a hole in the dirt somewhere, I can then use my amassed merit points to get a promotion. I think most people would count being suited for a job as having high merit.
wesapien 4y ago
Your post reminds me of a reddit comment by a Russian who said they would welcome Communism back so they can be like children again.

ThalesX 4y ago

I don't know. I also feel that I work more than let's say half my colleagues at whichever company. Mostly because I really really really enjoy what I'm doing. That being said, I'm not really sure how their salary impacts my life. I negociate to what I want for what I do and that's that.

jrsj 4y ago
Your ability to negotiate a salary at all is a function of a diversity of salaries though. Limiting that in favor of more equal pay across the board means you’re more likely to be stuck getting paid what others are getting paid regardless of your personal efforts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Equal pay for a particular role seems very in line with the market efficiency theme. For better pay, you need a better job where the effort required is actually higher.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Only if the roles are specified with essentially infinite precision. Would you expect "sales representative who makes between $199k-200k in sales" and "sales representative who makes between $205-206k in sales" to be separate roles at a company?

hotpotamus 4y ago

How much harder than you did the CEO work for how much more pay than you got at any of these companies?

988747 4y ago
CEOs are not paid for working hard, they are paid for BEING RIGHT, aka making the right strategic decisions. Bad CEO can bankrupt the company, good CEO can grow it's revenue ten times. You pay CEOs for their experience and expertise in running companies, not for the number of hours worked.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  CEOs are wrong all the time, they are also paid so much for being fired there’s a term for it: “golden parachute”
  - Jcowell 4y ago
    Yeah the OP comment doesn’t make sense to me. Right or wrong a CEO will probably make more than you regardless.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    If you paid the CEO of McDonald's the same amount as a burger flipper, you are going to get someone who is wrong much more frequently. When we see that CEOs get things wrong, that seems to be more of an artifact of the future being hard to predict than any individual being stupid.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      Ask a CEO to flip burgers and you'll find they'll make a lot of mistakes too. CEOs have specific education and/or experience to help them make better decisions. They suck just as much as anyone else at unknowns.
      - 4y ago

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Obviously, but your examples are too obvious. Should a subpopulation of entrepreneurs be able to coast by on brand recognition and first mover advantage after an initial burst of effort? Should manual laborers be paid jack for doing a job which puts them at high risk of being stuck socioeconomically, despite putting in loads of effort? People want harder work to be more rewarded, but the saying is "work smarter, not harder" for a reason.

jrsj 4y ago
In a simple poll like this though more complex topics won’t be on peoples minds, that’s a flaw in how this was conducted.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  I don't think that is a flaw when the majority of people don't even have the knowledge to think further on these topics, and people tend to act rather simplistically most of their lives anyway. In your own example, think about what would happen if all these dead weights suddenly became more competitive. I don't think the working class fully realizes what will happen when we boost it some more, despite recent events in the 20th century inflating the working class at the benefit of entrepreneurs and the detriment of (already participating?) workers. Like ideally, if I was in such a situation, I'd want my coworkers to work more so I could slack. In reality, I don't think them working harder would benefit me in the long term, due to numerous other factors (myself, the boss, wealth pipelines, etc.)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

If compensation was all about hard work then coal miners would be billionaires. The arguments about income inequality largely come down to the fact that there is very little correlation between hard work and compensation. Instead the large difference in income are correlated with factors generally considered beyond people's control. I would have a hard time becoming a real estate tycoon because I don't have a father who can grant me a small loan of a million dollars, for instance.

the_lonely_road 4y ago
These conversations are rarely productive because no attempt to find common ground is made. For example you just assume that a coal miner is hard work. I assume a coal miner is easy work. You seem to think things like physical exertion, working conditions, or danger define what is “hard work” while I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work. The average coal worker has almost no chance of failure. They are told where to go, told what to do, told how to do it. They do it and then get paid. Easy work. Writing a successful novel is hard work. The author just sits in an air conditioned room in front of a computer for 6 months clicking keys on a keyboard. So why is that hard work? Because they are most likely going to fail to complete the novel, or even having completed it, are likely to fail at gaining a significant audience. Most people who try fail, hence hard work. Neither of us is right or wrong, we just have different world views. Finding common ground between our world views is a critical first step to having any productive conversation.
- ranko 4y ago
  Miners have a pretty high chance death while on the job - according to https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osar0012.htm https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osar0012.htm, the US death rate in 2007 (because that's the first figure I found) was 24.8 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared to 4.3 in all private industry. Sounds like a much higher "chance of failure" than most other jobs.
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago

lkxijlewlf 4y ago

I get you. I've had that opinion as well. But anymore, I realize that's not my problem. What I want is my share. When a company says, "Best year ever!" and my share is a 2% raise, fuck that.

andrepd 4y ago
That is literally what socialism means: you get a stake in the place where you work.
- dgfitz 4y ago
  That isn’t quite accurate and it’s dangerous to twist definitions like that. so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/ noun a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

moolcool 4y ago

I'd argue that the dynamic you're talking about is a part of a free market though. Like you could use your McDonald's example to make the opposite point that you're using it for. You could say "A lack of pay, recognition of effort, and career growth opportunity at McDonald's means that workers are unmotivated and do not give 100%. More ambitious workers who want to give more effort and be recognized for said effort move on to higher paying opportunities elsewhere".

jrsj 4y ago
If this were the case I would expect more people to give a shit in higher paying office environments but I’ve actually seen the exact opposite of that. Having more opportunities available allows people to have even less potential consequence for not actually trying.

andrepd 4y ago

Very nice sentiment, but unfortunately that's not how reality works. Do you honestly look at the world and see that incomes are correlated to merit/effort/performance/work?

odiroot 4y ago

> Nobody wants to have to carry dead weight. But there's a lot of "dead weight" to carry. And it has a voice and a vote.