4 ms·
For an obvious counterexample, they could have raised everyone's salary by a million bucks, or 10 million. Productivity remains unrelated to pay, labour power
by 8note 4y ago
For an obvious counterexample, they could have raised everyone's salary by a million bucks, or 10 million.
Productivity remains unrelated to pay, labour power is the real decider. If you're irreplaceable, you can demand high wages. If somebody is willing to do you job for a thousandth the price, you're screwed, even if they suck
- icelancer 4y agoThis statement: >> Productivity remains unrelated to pay, labour power is the real decider. Is in stark contrast to your next one: >> If you're irreplaceable, you can demand high wages. Extremely productive people carry high replacement costs. Very productive individuals have labor power. Whether they choose to band together and use it like a guild or a union is a separate matter entirely.
- Dylan16807 4y agoBeing irreplaceable is very different from high productivity. Being more productive than your peers barely gets you anything in most jobs.
- icelancer 4y agoThis is simply not true in technical fields, specifically software development. The most productive developers have high labor mobility and high rates of pay. If you don't think so, try employing the industry's most productive developers and see how cheap (or not) it is.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIf you're 50% more productive than someone else, that's a lot of productivity, but it's very hard to measure in a software development situation. I'm not really talking about the top handful of people.
- robertlagrant 4y agoNo, it is productivity. You're talking about how hard it is to measure productivity in some jobs. Not whether or not productivity is valuable.
- Dylan16807 4y agoBeing replaceable is mostly about what special things you can do. If you do lots of quality work, but most potential hires can do the same thing slower, then you are productive but easy to replace. (A reasonable amount slower, not a ridiculous factor.)
- robertlagrant 4y agoCan you give an example of being irrepleacable?
- Dylan16807 4y agoAt the extreme end, being the only one that knows how some machine works, or how some code works. Or this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/nrnf5j/part_1_of_2_an_absolute_epic_entitled_ahole_gets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/nrnf... At the less extreme end it's having a bunch of internal knowledge that isn't documented and is important to keeping things going. Or having business skills that whoever is in charge of hiring doesn't know how to hire for. Or knowing a programming language or framework that's fussy to learn and only 2% of your normal hiring pool knows. Very different from just being fast.
- robertlagrant 4y agoYou are describing productivity in each case. I think you could reduce each example you give to speed, as things will slow down until a replacement is eventually found, but it's simpler to call it productivity.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
- robertlagrant 4y agoProductivity isn't unrelated to pay. Your pay ceiling is your value to the company - your productivity. Your pay floor is max(your salary, what a competing company will offer you).