3 ms·

Most people see this, and yet the reaction of many is to be deeply, passionately outraged that two people could ever be recognized or compensated differently.

jancsika 3y ago
The problem here is that once you have a metric for outsized compensation you make it 10x easier for a cheater to snatch it up merely by turning it into a target. (Lines of code, commits, etc.) What's worse is that your metric is as likely to be out of sync as code comments. If you're lucky you can notice that a) a new "10x" is actually adding value in a way you never thought to measure, and b) you already spent that 10x money on the employees whose "10x" is hacking your metrics as targets. More likely, you just notice "a" and not "b." I think the outrage over this goes all the way back to the Greeks. IIRC Plato had a Socratic dialogue about the politician generally beating the expert in debate because the politician is an expert in persuasion. "Being an engineer" isn't a solution because, as you imply, at some point the engineer has to pay the bills. And it's at that point they are out of their element and subject to the politician who specializes in persuading engineers to do things. If I were wrong, engineers would have long used a web-of-trust to publicly post their salaries (or perhaps anonymized statistics derived from them) to ensure companies aren't taking advantage of anyone at scale. Edit: clarification
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 3y ago
  Sure, it’s difficult for people outside the group to reliably ascertain who actually contributed what and how it relates to the final output’s quality. Collective grading in group projects is a sacrifice of a small bit of justice for a great deal of administrative convenience - not the last time that will happen in a student’s life. But when a system does bother with individual differences in contribution, inequality is seen as necessarily unjust. I don’t see how you can live through a group project and believe that. Some people contributing much more than others or being much more competent than others is eminently plausible! That’s how most things go!

jancsika 3y ago

The problem here is that once you have a metric for outsized compensation you make it 10x easier for a cheater to snatch it up merely by turning it into a target. (Lines of code, commits, etc.) What's worse is that your metric is as likely to be out of sync as code comments. If you're lucky you can notice that a) a new "10x" is actually adding value in a way you never thought to measure, and b) you already spent that 10x money on the employees whose "10x" is hacking your metrics as targets. More likely, you just notice "a" and not "b." I think the outrage over this goes all the way back to the Greeks. IIRC Plato had a Socratic dialogue about the politician generally beating the expert in debate because the politician is an expert in persuasion. "Being an engineer" isn't a solution because, as you imply, at some point the engineer has to pay the bills. And it's at that point they are out of their element and subject to the politician who specializes in persuading engineers to do things. If I were wrong, engineers would have long used a web-of-trust to publicly post their salaries (or perhaps anonymized statistics derived from them) to ensure companies aren't taking advantage of anyone at scale. Edit: clarification

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 3y ago
Sure, it’s difficult for people outside the group to reliably ascertain who actually contributed what and how it relates to the final output’s quality. Collective grading in group projects is a sacrifice of a small bit of justice for a great deal of administrative convenience - not the last time that will happen in a student’s life. But when a system does bother with individual differences in contribution, inequality is seen as necessarily unjust. I don’t see how you can live through a group project and believe that. Some people contributing much more than others or being much more competent than others is eminently plausible! That’s how most things go!