201–210 of 564 posts
It's framed as a gift in order to manipulate the negotiating position. The fact is both employer and employee benefit from it, but if the employer can emphasize the benefits to the employee they can extract a bit of value from the relationship.
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Very much this. It makes the process of salary negotiation completely tied to perception rather than reality, which isn't necessarily bad for the employee. It just means that the justifications for a higher salary need to change from "your salary offer is too low because it shouldn't depend on where I live" to "your salary offer should be higher because I can improve your business in x, y and z"
> your salary offer should be higher because I can improve your business in x, y and z I just don't think this is true for the overwhelming majority of employees, including developers.
The cynical answer to that question is ”you don’t need to be in the office to do your work, but your manager does need you in the office to do his work”.
Unless you believe managers don’t do useful work, that doesn’t even strike me as a very cynical take. I disagree with it though, I manage a distributed team and I can do my work fine without the team being in the office. I think the serendipity arguments for on-site are much stronger than “manager doesn't trust team member to be productive on their own” which the entire world discovered was bullshit during the corona…
I find it kind of amusing (and annoying) that employers like to play the salaray game as it fits their needs. I got interviewed a few times, and some stated that they cannot pay the salary I was asking, because i don't live in a high-density, high-cost-for-living area, while others argued that they have to respect their local salaries, which are below what I would expect in my area. I'm yet to meet the employer that…
It's called the "job market" for a reason. Both sides (employers and employees) are trying to maximize their returns. It's never going to be solely about the value we as developers (or any other occupation) bring to the company.
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Except the market ain't going to bear it, not for a long time anyway. If I am a CEO of a remote-first company and it truly doesn't matter for me where the employees are located it makes no sense to overpay for labor in high cost of living area. So if there's a company A that pays $X in high COL area, and $X/3 in a low COL area. And then there's a company B that pays $X/2 everywhere. Then people from the low COL area…
> But eventually the market forces will do their thing. After you're necessity for that market equalization is long gone. We're in a situation where the wealth class can literally wait it out for more than a generation for market conditions they prefer to normalize. The Market is manipulated and owned, and not by us. The tipping point is past, and the majority of society has yet to realize, our only hope at this poin…
And who is 'us' in that comment?
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Of course. Having a job is comparable to being in prison. By those standards every single human to ever live has been in prison. Humanity will only be free once we're in a post-scarcity society.
> Of course. Having a job is comparable to being in prison. https://wikidiff.com/simile/comparison
Unrelated, but what a definition… using the same word to define itself, and several times.
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It is a market. Employers and consumers will pay what they have to be satiated. If they can’t afford that, they’ll have to make do with less. If something is priced too high and there are viable alternatives, they’ll consider those alternatives.
"Market" is just another way of saying "Power differential." Most corporate cultures are inherently authoritarian, with money being used as a proxy for power. Empirically there is plenty of evidence that given a choice, many businesses would rather maintain the power differential and complain about "lack of applicants" than increase pay and suffer a corresponding diminution of authority. Stock is an even more specifi…
Why does any company every pay more than the legally required minimum, then?
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I am not sure why that would be an issue. I am 'just a coder' all I do is pushing and pulling things from git.
- You can easily steal code - if you were working on a company laptop with USB device protection (can't connect drives to transfer without approval) and heavy website moderation (can't send code to yourself), leaking code would prove way more difficult. Compare that to just copy+paste on your personal computer. (ofc it's possible to steal from company laptops too, but you'll leave a very visible trail). - You're a se…
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Of course, this is very much what a business is . It's an engine, running on the difference in energy between two or more goods or services. In fact, if you think about it, the upper limit to profit margin is profit_margin = (price_sell - price_buy) / price_sell Look familiar?
Wow, how have I not heard of this framing before? So then, are there equivalent analogies to the laws of thermodynamics? An equivalent entropy as an arrow of time?
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> It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live. That's like saying the price of goods and services should be about the cost of producing them. No no no: the price is about what buyers will bear. In the same way, salaries are about what the worker will bear. If there is an arbitrage lever to maximize profit, any business will use it.
Why shouldn’t the price of goods be the cost of producing them?
But that tendency comes with a lot of asterisks.