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Why is remote work seen as a gift?

cdoyle.me

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Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#521

Post by pelasaco »

_madmax_ wrote: post #514
pelasaco wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.

> Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team I guess that can happen. I suspect in the majority of cases, you keep your shitpay even if you become a supremely efficient pillar. Employers are not friends, they're businesses who thinks like psychopaths, so manage your expectations and get as much money as you can from them. You need them but they need you, so get the juice and move on wh…

In another hand, employees try to do as less as possible for the money they get. How many devs get hired as senior dev, because their experience (in number of years) but then turns out they are code monkey ready to really work 3 hours/day? Nobody is perfect and nobody is saint.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#522

Post by simplotek »

pelasaco wrote: post #478
HDThoreaun wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be about the value I bring to the company Your salary has never been even related to the value you bring the company. That is just the absolute maximum they're willing to pay. Your salary is the lowest your company thinks they can pay to get a suitable employee. They pay remote workers less because there are remote workers willing to work for less, simple as that.

but that's only maybe true during the hiring process. If you work well, after some months, it will be corrected.

> but that's only maybe true during the hiring process. If you work well, after some months, it will be corrected.

Never happens. I have no idea where you got this from, but someone fooled you really hard.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#523

Post by simplotek »

pelasaco wrote: post #487
red-iron-pine wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

citation needed. no shortage of threads here or reddit or elsewhere: "new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years" and the like. there is a reason jumping every 2-3 years gives a better raise than sitting in the same job.

> new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.

> Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations,

You're willing to go the extent of accusing people you never met nor have any idea who and how they are of being incompetent at a job you don't even know just to preserve your cognitive dissonance.

> Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team.

Straight out of college I worked at a place where they handed me a 1 year contract where I was paid below market rate. When I was reaching the end of my contract I asked for a meeting to review my salary. I had a meeting but it's outcome was a firm "we want you here but we will only offer you the same pay". I sat on that and on the day before my auto renewal would kick in I handed my resignation. I was immediately pulled into a meeting with my manager where they promply offered me over 20% pay hike.

Do you honestly believe I only gained importance the moment I resigned? They were the same people who said a few days earlier in no unclear terms I was not getting a raise.

The most ridiculous aspect of your unfounded personal belief is this idea there's this universal performance evaluation law where every manager and every boss is binded to hand over rigorous pay adjustments reflecting anyone's performance, and that there is no such thing as being exploited. Back in the real world, the whole economy revolves around people trying to get more value while paying less, and there's a almost universal pressure to not only eliminate any kind of leverage from employees but also make them perfectly replaceable cogs in their machine. You are pressured to not discuss salary with your peers, let alone other employees. You get what you are paid, and you should feel happy for it. If you work hard that just means your boss is getting more returns over his low investment.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#524

Post by somsak2 »

dontlaugh wrote: post #95
toyg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

What's the incentive to invent any new goods if you can't profit off of them?

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#525

Post by moqmar »

seydor wrote: post #448
aembleton wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is subjectively worse as its applying it from his viewpoint instead of an objective measure.

Regardless. In order for people like OP to feel subjectively better, they want to subject their colleagues to daily commute / office restraints.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's not really possible to solve that issue once and for all for all companies in the world, but is rather dependent on team culture and can differ between teams and be a factor in why some people choose one job and others choose another one.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#526

Post by toyg »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #323
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the current employee turned around and asked for double their wage their current employer would say no - they have leverage in that they can walk away and it would cause a lot of hardship for the company in the short term, but it's amazing how little the company is willing to part with to ensure that that employee stays.

Some companies care, and people don't leave because of that. Some don't care, and people leave. Nobody writes a blogpost saying: "i got a raise so I didn't quit", because noone reads that... a blog post saying "company has huge profits, only offers small raise, so I quit and find a better job" is a whole different thing.

> Nobody writes a blogpost saying: "i got a raise so I didn't quit"

There are plenty of blogposts from the other side, about "never give a raise to a flight-risk, because their loyalty is already shot". The business strategy is to quietly hire a (typically cheaper) replacement, then fire the uppity employee.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#527

Post by toyg »

zajio1am wrote: post #507
interactivecode wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

though you have to admit in basically all situations the employer has more leverage than a single employee.

I do not think so. Transaction costs for employee are small - several months of lost pay (before finding new employer), which would be mostly covered by severance pay or unemployment insurance anyway. Transaction costs for employer depends, they generally pay for lost productivity during training-in period and lost institutional knowledge in case of high-knowledge workers.

> Transaction costs for employee are small

Must be nice being wealthy. Most people can barely go a single month without a paycheck.

> severance pay or unemployment insurance

Lol. In the UK, severance pay is one week per year of service, i.e. nothing. Unemployment insurance typically covers only specific costs, like mortgages, and can be significantly expensive.

And this is quite good compared to what happens almost anywhere outside of Europe.

> Transaction costs for employer depends

For any well-established business with significant redundancy, these costs are minimal. Only small companies suffer significantly when losing an employee.

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#528

Post by toyg »

lunarhustler wrote: post #137
toyg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

That doesn't disagree with what I said. With remote, employers get leverage over workers and they will use it to push down their salaries. HCOL workers will eventually have to bear the new levels.

There is no real equilibrium in markets, only forces that push constantly in one direction (maximizing profits, lowering costs, increasing capital efficiency).

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#529

Post by pelasaco »

simplotek wrote: post #523
pelasaco wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.

> Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, You're willing to go the extent of accusing people you never met nor have any idea who and how they are of being incompetent at a job you don't even know just to preserve your cognitive dissonance. > Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Straight out of college I worked at…

Just reading how you write, I can Tell you: you are an average, lonely, angry and spoiled dev. IMO, Twitter is a better place for you to voice such rants.

For sure I assume that everyone did their homework and found a great company to work. That's the step 1! The step 2 is to be the best version of you. That's the most important factor on your salary, assuming the step 1!

Good luck

Re: Why is remote work seen as a gift?

#530

Post by 6510 »

pelasaco wrote: post #487
red-iron-pine wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

citation needed. no shortage of threads here or reddit or elsewhere: "new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years" and the like. there is a reason jumping every 2-3 years gives a better raise than sitting in the same job.

> new guy got hired and they;re making 10k more than me and I've been here 5 years Your mistake is to assume that you (being there 5 year) is doing your work well and over the expectations, becoming an important piece to your team. Important enough that your manager wants to secure you as part of the team. Maybe you are just average. Regardless of being 2, 5 or 10 years there.

You are so funny for thinking that. What existing employees earn is irrelevant. It is as simple as you need X now and it costs Y. Without X you possibly don't have a company anymore which costs 10 000 times Y.
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