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There's nothing wrong with paying everyone under a specific job classification the same. Say, your shipping clerks. Nothing whatsoever wrong with that. What

There's nothing wrong with paying everyone under a specific job classification the same. Say, your shipping clerks. Nothing whatsoever wrong with that. What is insane is having them vote on it. That makes no sense. The only exception to this might be a very small group of reasonably well educated (in business as well as their craft) individuals. They could objectively look at the business and just as objectively make decisions. At that point you, effectively, have a quasi de-facto multi-CEO situation, which could be cool if the business is not going anywhere past that point. Impossible to scale.

rdl 13y ago
It's different when it's a 5-15 person startup, or a consultancy or other essentially partnership organization like that, vs. a more hierarchical organization. I'm a big fan of being transparent with financials and other metrics in early-stage tech companies (absolutely in the seed range, and in A; it becomes more debatable in a 50-150 person organization.) Mainly because it is good for people to know what numbers actually matter -- if a company is cashflow-constrained, it does make sense to burn time on building vs. buying certain products, or looking for sales which are lower revenue but paid up-front. If a company has a specific milestone, it might be making otherwise non-optimal decisions (like selling something at negative margin). Management probably should be highlighting these issues, but sometimes it is better to have the raw data. In Silicon Valley hiring now, particularly for dev/design/devops/product, you actually are competing for people who could start a business on their own, and who are likely to do so in the future, so they value having access to this information and learning about how decisions are made. One of the key things is accepting that you probably will not retain people for 10 years, and maybe not even for 4, but if you can get great work for 1-2 years, that's better than 0 (or mediocre work for 5).

rdl 13y ago

It's different when it's a 5-15 person startup, or a consultancy or other essentially partnership organization like that, vs. a more hierarchical organization. I'm a big fan of being transparent with financials and other metrics in early-stage tech companies (absolutely in the seed range, and in A; it becomes more debatable in a 50-150 person organization.) Mainly because it is good for people to know what numbers actually matter -- if a company is cashflow-constrained, it does make sense to burn time on building vs. buying certain products, or looking for sales which are lower revenue but paid up-front. If a company has a specific milestone, it might be making otherwise non-optimal decisions (like selling something at negative margin). Management probably should be highlighting these issues, but sometimes it is better to have the raw data. In Silicon Valley hiring now, particularly for dev/design/devops/product, you actually are competing for people who could start a business on their own, and who are likely to do so in the future, so they value having access to this information and learning about how decisions are made. One of the key things is accepting that you probably will not retain people for 10 years, and maybe not even for 4, but if you can get great work for 1-2 years, that's better than 0 (or mediocre work for 5).