Reminds me of the video/book from Daniel Pink on Drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
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
#42Money isn't everything, but it sucks being poor. The older I get, I'm finding money is more important. Between the costs of college savings, retirement savings, medical savings, you'd better be paying your high performance employees well. They may like their work (like me), but money still talks. Regarding the medical savings it's a race to the bottom for employer provided benefits. I no longer have dental insurance…
I can appreciate what you are saying, esp with health care. However as I grow older I find money matters less to me (and not because I have a lot of it), I would just much rather ENJOY my craft. Crazy deadlines, horrible tech debt, bad management, are all things I have been thru and do not wish to repeat. "Life's too short to be in a hurry" - batFastard
I'm sort of experiencing that now, and not in a good way. I'm out of work ATM, and so when I work on something technical, I work on it because I want to and when I want to.
I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain date.
For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on. Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like Bacon.
You'll have to follow your own nose to get past this link to Bacon. It's not that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character
That isn't directly craft-building, but it does contribute to an appreciation for my craft.
Disclosure: I am not an HPE.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#43The thing that's so weird about a Late Capitalist society like the U.S. is the amount of time spent ritualizing inequality into a quasi-religious phenomena. The lower classes have no desire for wealth, but instead an ascetic mastery of whatever lot the divine order of the market has handed them. Meanwhile, our gilded class of saints must be free and untroubled by worldly concerns(mostly taxes), so they can harness th…
Why would high performing employees with office jobs be "lower class"? As others mentioned once you hit a certain income threshold and job security, then you can start prioritizing the parts of the job you enjoy. This is who the article is talking about. This means keeping a $60k job instead of sacrificing your happiness for $90-100k. That's hardly quasi-religious phenomena. It's a luxury of skilled people living in…
>Why would high performing employees with office jobs be "lower class"? As others mentioned once you hit a certain income threshold and job security, then you can start prioritizing the parts of the job you enjoy. This is who the article is talking about.
Because they're foolish enough to believe that themselves in solidarity with the oligarch class, when really they're only temporarily useful to them.
If you think "high-performers" are part of the elite or are going to escape from this neo-feudalism unscathed, well, enjoy this sermon.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#44Another angle to this beyond the data being useless because of how it was collected.
High performance workers likely recognize that skills get them paid, so the opportunity to get better skills should always come before money, if you want to earn the most money.
Example: A young engineer is offered a job at MSFT at $100k per year being a cog on a team doing maintenance on an existing product. Or they can go to a startup for $60k a year doing cutting edge development of an innovative new product. Clearly the second opportunity likely has the best career benefits, and probably the highest career earnings.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#45I have asked the wife on several occasions if I could get out of software and take a job doing something else for less money. I am tired of software... at least in the corporate space. Don't get me wrong I love writing software.... but the general incompetence of corporate software development has killed my spirit.
I am a web guy whose primary job is at a major dot com and here are the problems as I see software generally.
Good web developers are hard to hire. They tend to be equally in demand compared to their Java counter-parts in the corporate space, but there are something like 11x more Java positions. The reason is because Java developers are easier to find. This creates several problems.
Since good web developers are hard to hire your choices are to retask a Java developer without training or hire a web developer that isn't good. The results are similar: cutting corners until you are drowning in tech debt and then blaming someone/something else.
Higher salaries won't solve this problem because it takes time and practice to get good at anything, but demand for skills in the workplace are immediate. Contrarily, higher salaries without solving for the missing skills (the primary cause of the problem) just encourage under-qualified talent to more vigorously defend or fight to attain positions they are not entitled to hold. The phenomenon is so incredibly common it has the name imposter syndrome.
The primary difference between a good developer and a bench warmer is confidence. A good developer is going to care far less for playing politics and defensiveness. If it doesn't work out for a good developer they can go get an equally sucky job somewhere else and probably make more money, so the motivation for politics is largely lost. Less good developers do not have such confidence that they can quickly acquire another position elsewhere or are holding their current positions for reasons not directly related to their craft, such as seniority entitlements.
As the previous paragraph eludes to the real difference between good developers and everybody else is motivation. When you are primarily motivated to merely retain your employment you will perceive your place in that environment far differently. These guys will do everything possible to not rock the boat if job stability is everything. It also means that technical competencies at the job should normalize into some happy medium so that you aren't exposed for being an imposter.
The reason why the incompetence is so pervasive is because demand is crazy high and without regulation of any kind. In almost every other professional career there is regulation, typically licensing. You cannot be a doctor, lawyer, real estate agent, engineer, pilot, and so forth without a license. You can be a politician though.
After doing this for several years in the corporate world I am really tired of the stupid games people play. Since I have two simultaneous careers in separate unrelated industries I can really see the dysfunction that many people happily tolerate every day. I am ready to do something else like become a teacher or make my secondary career my primary even though this means less pay.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#46What 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 assumpti…
> The mysteries are hard to explain.
Ah, yes. The mysteries. They are indeed hard to explain if the author is illiterate in Economics, like most people are (which isn't something to be ashamed of)
Fortunately for us, the mysteries are easily explained by taking a sophomore course in intermediate microeconomics and reading over just 1 lecture:
http://mirceatrandafir.com/teaching/econ306/Chapter_05_6spp....
The important part:
> More realistic case: labor supply curve bends back (substitution effect dominates at low wage rates and income effect dominates at high wage rates)
It turns out that most people start valuing things other than money, ONCE a certain level of wage has been reached. Other studies suggest that the level is somewhere around $70,000, with corrections for the cost of living. No mysteries here at all, and probably one of the more solved and trivial problems in Economics in general.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#47What 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 assumpti…
> There is no acknowledgement that "not motivated by money" and "not motivated by more money" are two very different things.
Not only that, but also, I think, personally, I am more motivated by fairness rather than by specific amount of money. I could imagine myself working for 30% less with no complains, but if you're going to give that slacker over there a 10% more than what I get, I will be unhappy.
Curiously, this never appeared in any questionnaire that I had to fill in asking about my motivation.
And note to the author: Please, don't "optimize corporate environments for the High-Performance Employee", in fact don't optimize at all, just let the people who know what they are doing to work. I am sure there is a more useful way you can contribute to the society.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#48What 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 assumpti…
And when you ask this sort of question people will lie about how important the say money is.
Can you not lie (in the sense of not being honest, not in the Smullyan's sense) to the question "are you motivated by money"? If I answer no, regardless of the truth, I open myself to be treated unfairly compared to people who answer yes.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#49What 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 assumpti…
Another thing, if you believe you can get paid for high performance, then money is the effect and not the cause. Work that doesn't allow you to maintain your skill level will cut off your future earnings, regardless of whether it is high or low pay in the present.
Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important
#50Maybe, but how many of those high-performance employees are already making buttloads of money? How many of them are just scraping by around the poverty line? It's pretty easy to say money isn't important when you already have it.