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Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produc

Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth, they usually just leave them be, that's how you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates other pathologies, but in some sense is less harsh than tech.

zem 3y ago
> someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth that probably describes a lot of people in tech megacorps too
- lupire 3y ago
  It's nearly impossible to measure the marginal contribution of someone one in a non sales role.
  - ivancho 3y ago
    And yet somehow most people in charge of resourcing and budgeting for projects, teams and companies have some idea of who to hire, how much to pay them, etc. How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure? It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if those people could estimate their own contribution, or, god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.
    - chatmasta 3y ago
      > How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure? The floor is mostly arbitrary (see the wage collusion scandal between Apple and Google for an example), and then beyond that it's a question of who is the most productive, effective at getting things done, etc. So while they do have "something to measure," these metrics can be uncorrelated with profitability - or even negatively correlated with it. It's possible for a productive team to spend their time on an unprofitable project, while another team barely works but ships a profitable product.
      - ivancho 3y ago
        Profitability is not the only short-term metric. In poker I know when a bet is worth it, even if it ends up not winning the pot (unprofitable). Is your argument that business people are just randomly guessing and have no idea how much profit they could expect to make by spending specific amount of payroll?
        chatmasta 3y ago
        Yeah pretty much.
- ivancho 3y ago
  Big tech, yes, lots, but an extra skill required there is to recognize and actively avoid ambitious managers, who would sacrifice/burn out their own team for self-advancement. Lots of churn in big tech is purely from that. Small tech, I think the capital pressure is much higher, so just getting a steady good deal on labor is not enough, leadership there is constantly optimizing and trying to upgrade the labor value without matching comp (ie, people are expected to always be acquiring more skills, giving internal talks/lectures, mentoring etc, and those who don't, well, they turn out to not be a good culture fit).

zem 3y ago

> someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth that probably describes a lot of people in tech megacorps too

lupire 3y ago
It's nearly impossible to measure the marginal contribution of someone one in a non sales role.
- ivancho 3y ago
  And yet somehow most people in charge of resourcing and budgeting for projects, teams and companies have some idea of who to hire, how much to pay them, etc. How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure? It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if those people could estimate their own contribution, or, god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    > How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure? The floor is mostly arbitrary (see the wage collusion scandal between Apple and Google for an example), and then beyond that it's a question of who is the most productive, effective at getting things done, etc. So while they do have "something to measure," these metrics can be uncorrelated with profitability - or even negatively correlated with it. It's possible for a productive team to spend their time on an unprofitable project, while another team barely works but ships a profitable product.
    - ivancho 3y ago
      Profitability is not the only short-term metric. In poker I know when a bet is worth it, even if it ends up not winning the pot (unprofitable). Is your argument that business people are just randomly guessing and have no idea how much profit they could expect to make by spending specific amount of payroll?
      - chatmasta 3y ago
        Yeah pretty much.
ivancho 3y ago
Big tech, yes, lots, but an extra skill required there is to recognize and actively avoid ambitious managers, who would sacrifice/burn out their own team for self-advancement. Lots of churn in big tech is purely from that. Small tech, I think the capital pressure is much higher, so just getting a steady good deal on labor is not enough, leadership there is constantly optimizing and trying to upgrade the labor value without matching comp (ie, people are expected to always be acquiring more skills, giving internal talks/lectures, mentoring etc, and those who don't, well, they turn out to not be a good culture fit).