5 ms·

Wouldn't it make more sense to provide a contract saying that if you stay with the company longer than X months, your wage/salary goes up by a certain amount? O

Wouldn't it make more sense to provide a contract saying that if you stay with the company longer than X months, your wage/salary goes up by a certain amount? Or even multiple such milestones? Seems like a much better incentive structure.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
That anti-aligns the interests of the employee and the employer. That's a fantastic deal for the employer: they get the employee's commitment to stay for that long for free. The employee, on the other hand, gets far less out of the situation. It's an okay deal for managing the risk around hiring, say, an entry level employee, because in exchange for the temporarily discounted salary the employer is more likely to hire someone in a higher-risk hiring pool. For an established employee, the benefits are a lot less tangible unless it comes with certain guarantees of continued employment, or other concessions from the company.
- _greim_ 4y ago
  > ...they get the employee's commitment to stay for that long for free. Hmm, I'm definitely not proposing people should work for free. > It's an okay deal for managing the risk around hiring, say, an entry level employee... This is what I had in mind. Mitigating risk on the employer side isn't such a bad thing if it helps more people penetrate the skillset barrier who'd otherwise be excluded. Rank-and-file who train new hires benefit as well. It's soul-draining to invest myself into someone who ends up just using that investment as a stepping stone to other things.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    1. I wasn't clear: the employer's getting the commitment itself for free. The labor is still being paid at the labor rate. 2. When I wrote the objection, I was more thinking about the retention of established employees: it's relatively common in my industry to offer a bonus of some kind in exchange for your experienced employee committing to not leave in the next, say, two years. In that context, replacing the immediate bonus with a promised raise / promised bonus is problematic in that it benefits the employer (employee is more motivated to stay), while not restricting the employer (the employer can still lay off the employee at any time, having spent nothing). In contrast, most of the time the retention bonuses are only forfeit if the employee quits or is fired with cause, so if the employer has given an employee such a bonus it serves as a level of commitment to not lay off the employee, because they've already paid extra to retain them.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

That anti-aligns the interests of the employee and the employer. That's a fantastic deal for the employer: they get the employee's commitment to stay for that long for free. The employee, on the other hand, gets far less out of the situation. It's an okay deal for managing the risk around hiring, say, an entry level employee, because in exchange for the temporarily discounted salary the employer is more likely to hire someone in a higher-risk hiring pool. For an established employee, the benefits are a lot less tangible unless it comes with certain guarantees of continued employment, or other concessions from the company.

_greim_ 4y ago
> ...they get the employee's commitment to stay for that long for free. Hmm, I'm definitely not proposing people should work for free. > It's an okay deal for managing the risk around hiring, say, an entry level employee... This is what I had in mind. Mitigating risk on the employer side isn't such a bad thing if it helps more people penetrate the skillset barrier who'd otherwise be excluded. Rank-and-file who train new hires benefit as well. It's soul-draining to invest myself into someone who ends up just using that investment as a stepping stone to other things.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  1. I wasn't clear: the employer's getting the commitment itself for free. The labor is still being paid at the labor rate. 2. When I wrote the objection, I was more thinking about the retention of established employees: it's relatively common in my industry to offer a bonus of some kind in exchange for your experienced employee committing to not leave in the next, say, two years. In that context, replacing the immediate bonus with a promised raise / promised bonus is problematic in that it benefits the employer (employee is more motivated to stay), while not restricting the employer (the employer can still lay off the employee at any time, having spent nothing). In contrast, most of the time the retention bonuses are only forfeit if the employee quits or is fired with cause, so if the employer has given an employee such a bonus it serves as a level of commitment to not lay off the employee, because they've already paid extra to retain them.