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https://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workp...
> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…
Isn't it the case that with this sort of system that if you increase your skills, your company is more profitable and therefore you all get paid more? (Which is a common system in capitalist America - the exact same job with the exact same skills at different companies pays differently based on the company's ability to pay, and year-end bonuses are often linked to the company's profits that year. And employees who ge…
Your reward is not commensurate with the opportunity cost of improving your output. It gets worse with larger companies.
> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…
What you will see is that, for example, instead of top managers of a co-op making hundreds or thousands more than the median employee as in a public corporation, they make a more sensible amount which still attracts and sustains the best talent in the enterprise.
I find worker-owned businesses very interesting. Obviously getting paid the same regardless of role may be an obstacle to attracting highly skilled people, but if salaries are competitive and established in function of role and experience, in a transparent way, that could be great.
There is an excellent book called 'Maverick' about a Brazilian manufacturing company that, while not owned by the workers, gets much closer than almost any other business. I highly recommend that all founders read it https://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workp...
The first successful non-hierarchial company that comes to my mind is Valve.
I recall reading that Valve has a higher revenue per employee than any company in the world...
Edit: profit, not revenue
> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…
Seriously. Can you imagine trying to hire a skilled professional who has put years of effort into acquiring a skill when you won't pay them any more than a retail cashier?
I'd be interested in the economics of founders selling to their employees from a founder's point of view. It seems like a way to protect a founder's legacy after they exit. Where does the money come from? Do the employees get a loan and then the money from the loan go to the founder? Does the founder provide a loan to the employees and receive regular payments on the loan? Do the employees have to have cash? Do all e…
Employee Stock Options Programs (ESOPs) are the way most conduct this transaction. It's frequently a way for a founder to sell to employees due to relationships/promises, to get a higher valuation than the market offers, or, like with options, to incentivize productivity and retention. The employees can get a loan with the business as collateral but the founder/s is going to hold a note as well. Assignments of stock…
> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…
> skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me. The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from…
If successful people couldn’t pass ownership onto their heirs, the value of ownership itself would drop dramatically. If Bud and Sam Walton knew they couldn’t pass on their business to their kids, they would either have never done it in the first place or they would structure the business to close out well before they died. Neither of these is good.
Most complaints about rational capital allocation, including this one, are based on a failure to generalize or punch through enough layers of indirection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously. Can you imagine trying to hire a skilled professional who has put years of effort into acquiring a skill when you won't pay them any more than a retail cashier?
In a world where that was the expectation for everyone, sure. Professional jobs are a hell of a lot more interesting/rewarding than being a cashier. I don’t think you’d have programmers quitting to do service work if they weren’t making more money.
Salaries already price in the “interestingness” of jobs.
> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…
Skillfulness to me implies giving a crap about the world you share with others. Skilled, in comparison, is a consolation price. > One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. That's the most repulsing? Nothing about children and old people being murdered en masse? See above, more skillful grand…
Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do these things when commenting here? They reliably degrade discussion, and we're hoping for better than internet median.