76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
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Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#2Could it be because they're already at the highest earning brackets?
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#3In a simplistic sense, the "esteem" and "self-actualization" levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#4Meanwhile their bosses retire in their thirties and do whatever they want. Funny people
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#5That survey feels like the sort of thing I've filled out to get a temporary free trade publication subscription.
But what's interesting to me is that my current situation has enough twists to it that I literally could validly answer with several different conflicting choices on a number of those questions.
So... I'm not going to fill that out - doing so would induce too much stress against my internal need to be accurate in my answers.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#6OK, try paying below market rate and see how long your best engineers hang around then.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#7What a weird setup for a false dichotomy.
> My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money. But why?
When you come across a peculiar result, "But why?" shouldn't be the first question you ask. Maybe more like "What have I missed? What am I not accounting for? What am I conflating or grouping together? What assumptions did I make, and did I allow my respondents to make any implicit assumptions?"
Did the author ask what the cutoff is for money? Is it non-zero? Is he suggesting that his data shows that 76% of HPEs would rather be starving artists with great recognition? Or is there an implied "gobs of money" that's already on the table? I'm guessing the latter.
There is no acknowledgement that "not motivated by money" and "not motivated by more money" are two very different things. The way he phrased the question, there's no way to parse out what's implied. He simply asked:
> Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by earning money?
Lots of people may answer one or the other for very disparate reasons.
> The mysteries are hard to explain.
Or maybe the author crafted the same poor questions that usually fill these surveys. The data he gathered is probably useless.
There are no profound mysteries here. Just the average tea leaves reading.
> an HPE’s connection to their trade resembles more a mysterious spiritual illumination and growing devotion than it does an evolution of practical decisions aimed in a concise direction.
Tea leaves.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#8Don't kid yourself, - its because monetary reward is already implied.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#9Once you already have all the money you need it turns out not to matter as much anymore. Not surprising at all.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#10OK, try paying below market rate and see how long your best engineers hang around then.
At Berkeley they are doing exactly that. If you've ever seen the movie "At Berkeley" there's a scene where the university president discusses that very issue, the University of California system cannot hope to match the salaries offered by the private universities. It would be instructive to go over the list of who stays and who decamps to Stanford.