5 ms·

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hour

• kbar13 4mo ago
  is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.
  • hexis 4mo ago
    typically there is a floor, at least de facto.
    • Cakez0r 4mo ago
      The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling. Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.
      • gbear605 4mo ago
        At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.
      • dcrazy 4mo ago
        Employment contracts are virtually nonexistent here in the U.S. While the norm is “40 hours”, actual requirements vary by employer, may or may not be communicated in writing, and can change at the employer’s whim. If you make under $107,432 per year (which is around starting salary for fresh graduates at FAANG), you are entitled to overtime pay (minimum 1.5x) for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.
  • majormajor 4mo ago
    There is a lot of regulatory stuff, particularly around benefits, that push people towards nominally 40hr salaried contracts even if they don't need all 40 of those. "Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.
    • pseudalopex 4mo ago
      What regulations prevent an employer to give benefits to employees before 40 hours? And how do some employers give benefits before 40 hours despite them?
• aetch 4mo ago
  I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work
  • zdragnar 4mo ago
    At least in the US, there are regulations around what constitutes "full time" employment, and many benefits (such as insurance) are tied into being offered only for full time employees, or at different tiers between part and full time. As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
• cm11 4mo ago
  I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.
  • NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
    while productivity is correlated with salary, generally the ability to ask for a raise, to defend your pay and office politics navigation would be more impactful on average
  • komali2 4mo ago
    In my experience, productivity effects on salary is a rounding error. There are only two significant contributing factors for salary: 1. Your home address and 2. Your visa status Productivity might get you a 5k raise more over your colleague on a 160k salary. Meanwhile the same engineer in Taiwan is more productive than you and getting paid 40k while working for the same company on the same product, and putting in more hours to boot.
    • tstrimple 4mo ago
      Or the engineer could be working for a certain company in South Korea and get a bonus multiple times their annual salary because of their union contracts tied to profitability.
  • tstrimple 4mo ago
    This is a naive view. Companies will literally pay you as little as they can get away with. If they think they can hire someone “equivalent” according to HR for less money they will often do so. Actual contribution means nothing unless you’re willing to walk away. I’ve literally seen an intern with less than one year of experience when hired into a company where a senior architect who has been at the same firm for 16 years made over $40k less than them. The former intern was great. I had no real complaints. And he was more ambitious than the senior architect. But he stayed with the company two more years before jumping ship for another significant pay raise while the senior architect is still there making about the same amount as he did five years ago. It doesn’t matter how much value the senior architect delivers if he doesn’t demand his increase in pay.
• raincole 4mo ago
  They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.
  • jandrese 4mo ago
    That's not really true. Pay raises have lagged behind productivity gains for decades now and the gap is only growing wider.
    • 9rx 4mo ago
      Pay raises have kept pace with human productivity gains. Robots have pushed productivity well beyond the human capacity. But robots are not willing to work for free either, so...
      • goatlover 4mo ago
        Humans use robots and computing to be more productive.
        • 9rx 4mo ago
          Exactly. Hence why productivity has increased while wages haven't. Wages have increased alongside the productivity increases of those wages, of course, but wages are decidedly for human labor, by very definition, not robot (computing, automation, whatever you want to call it) labor. If you want to capture the value of robots you need to use your human capacity to deploy robots, not to sell your labor.
          • jandrese 4mo ago
            That sounds like a roundabout way of saying that the capital owners have captured the gains from productivity without increasing the compensation to the workers. But this belies the fact that the workers had to grow more skilled to operate and maintain those machines. They took on additional costs in education that are not being compensated. They're being asked to get more work done by being higher skilled, but the bosses are collecting all of the additional revenue generated.
• sieabahlpark 4mo ago
  [dead]
• nlawalker 4mo ago
  Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.
  • mastazi 4mo ago
    Can you give some examples of jobs that are usually done by salaried employees and are paid by output? All the examples I can think of, are usually done by independent contractors.
    • toofy 4mo ago
      i think we could say with a high level of certainty that someone with a subpar output will typically be punished in some way. it feels very disingenuous to pretend there aren’t expectations of a certain level of output.
      • mastazi 4mo ago
        For sure, but incentives are different when your pay is perfectly proportional to output rather than having a salary.
    • gravypod 4mo ago
      Anything commissions based might fit the bill?
      • Maxatar 4mo ago
        Commission is not salary.
    • nlawalker 4mo ago
      Not by output, for output - as in, not paid per unit of output, but paid for achieving a sufficient level of it, the definition of which frequently changes. That's baked into the definition of salaried.
• bigmadshoe 4mo ago
  Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?
  • Aurornis 4mo ago
    > Can’t we demand a piece of this? You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted. The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less. Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages. There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale. There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.
    • bwhiting2356 4mo ago
      I was in the musician's union for 12 years before I got into tech. There were some silly rules, like someone couldn't be both a musician and and orchestrator on the same show, because it's "doing 2 jobs". It's like saying you can't be full stack. You couldn't fire people who were bad at their jobs and stopped putting in any effort. There was a profit sharing agreement that the union rejected, because it would come at the expense of higher base salaries, and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town. Some rules I actually liked. Rehearsals started and ended _exactly_ on time to avoid overtime (showing up late was the only reason you could be fired, which was a useful compromise). But generally, the union was the yin to the producers yang, and an adversarial position as worker advocate was where they wanted to be, they didn't want more ownership. If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works, I would actually be down. There's a grocery store down my street like this and it's a great place. I don't know how this would actually work in tech. If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.
• bwhiting2356 4mo ago
  When you work for a startup, or a zero-to-one project, it's hard to say you're even paid for your output. You're paid for probabilistic/expected future value output.
  • RevEng 4mo ago
    Every meeting, every memo, and every prototype is output in terms of the employees doing that work. Whether it's directly saleable is irrelevant. The investors base the value of their investment on the expected future value of the company, but the people being to do the work are being paid for the work they are doing regardless of what the future value of the company becomes. That is if they are paid a salary. If they are given shares, then that compensation is entirely dependent on future value.
• spike021 4mo ago
  At my most recent role we were definitely being judged by output metrics (both jira tickets completed and github prs merged). They showed us the jellyfish tool they used to check those metrics. Well, some of it. Regular ICs themselves didn't have that access.
• 4ndrewl 4mo ago
  The reality is huge swathes of the middle of large organisations are paid to take the blame for the layer above them. AI wont solve that.