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There probably is a world where you get paid per line of code or story point, but you might not like it. When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your
by closeparen 2y ago
There probably is a world where you get paid per line of code or story point, but you might not like it. When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your entire professional capacity. In a creative field like ours, part of that price encodes a bet that you might be one of those rare workers whose contribution exceeds their cost many times over. If everyone is able to titrate their contribution to the exact level of management’s expectations, like by context-switching to childcare or another job when their assigned workload is done, then the budget for the role is going to be exactly what that bare minimum is worth.
What could break us out of this jam is either radically more individualized compensation structures, or other costly signals of commitment and engagement that are as meaningful to the firm as transporting your physical body to be somewhere for 8 hours a day.
I think there’s an interesting world of co-presence technology beyond the Zoom call that could be relevant here, but explorations in this area are also a stone’s throw from rather dystopian employee surveillance regimes, so it’s hard to say.
- 2mlWQbCK 2y agoIndividualized compensation and treating everyone like expendable faceless factory workers instead of teams of professional hired to work together on solving problems seems to me to be the real problem today, not a solution. We're supposed to work on really difficult problems, but we're not given the freedom and resources to think and collaborate in meaningful ways to solve problems. Instead it's a constant push for individuals to sit alone and display how productive they each are, alone, at completing jira tickets. Managers care more about being able to measure individual performance than about actual results. If they cared about results they would allow teams to work as teams. Agile had a lot of good ideas, but I never saw any of it lead to anything good in reality.
- closeparen 2y agoIf your responsibility is to the team's mission, and the end of this mission is not at hand, then there's really no limiting principle other than the number of butts-in-seats hours your work culture considers reasonable.
- callc 2y ago> When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your entire professional capacity. Nah. I’ve got free time with a full time job. I’ll do what I damn well please with it. “Salary = ownership over worker” is the most authoritarian working class vs ownership class things I’ve heard Let’s make laws that help the vast majority of people: workers.