Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 77 posts

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#11

Post by jhpankow »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #10
zelos wrote: post #6

OK, 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.

Wow if people go to Stanford for more money I can't imagine how low Berkeley pays.

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#12

Post by gbrown_ »

It's not explicitly stated but reading this I get the feeling the idea of "trade mastery" is centered around the individual when reading this post. Personally the most significant developments in my career and skills have been when working with others who are better than me. For me that means finding a workplace with skilled individuals who are capable problem solvers in their own regard (their own specialty and methods - with overlap of course). Second to that, and only by a very slim margin is that in such a workplace I would want be working on an interesting product/ service.

So prefacing this with the fact I am currently on a good salary. Would I take a pay cut to work in somewhere where I am more closely surrounded by superlative talent? Fuck yes I would.

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#13

Post by kough »

simonsarris wrote: post #7

What 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.

Exactly what I came here to comment. Once you're guaranteed to make no less than $X00,000/year, of course you'd start thinking about the work itself.

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#14

Post by madengr »

Money 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 at a Fortune 50 company. Medical insurance has increased 3x and now it's essentially a catastrophic plan with $10k max OOP. Far cry from 10 years ago. I put $600/month into HSA for a family of 4. Been doing this for several years and still can't save up the $10k. The damn OOP is now higher than the max HSA contribution.

Whenever I do get a raise, it just goes into another expense for some other benefit that has been cut.

$17k/yr 401k max * 2 people = $34k

$12k/yr edu savings * 2 kids = $24k

$7.2k/yr HSA contribution (that's a fucking car payment).

$26k/yr mortgage

It all adds up.

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#16

Post by walshemj »

simonsarris wrote: post #7

What 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.

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#17

Post by alphonsegaston »

The 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 their benevolent energies towards curing the ills of we small mortals. I guess it makes sense given our history of religious nuttery, but I never expected to live in such a "mythical" world.

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#18

Post by JamesBarney »

simonsarris wrote: post #7

What 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…

Also people lie.

I imagine that lots of people who say they aren't motivated by money would also leave their company for more money.(some for a little more money, and some for a lot more money)

Re: 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important

#19

Post by ng12 »

People have written books about this stuff (the field is called Organizational Behavior) but in classic Sillicon Valley fashion we have to reinvent the wheel. Higher pay will rarely attract employees, but it will prevent them from leaving. Low pay will increase the odds that other reasons (lack of motivation, work, environment) will cause an employee to leave.
Post reply on HN