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The one-salary experiment, ten years in

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Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#231

Post by emiliobumachar »

ng12 wrote: post #8

People have written books on this stuff. There's an entire field of research on this subject and I think tech people discount it for being "too MBA". One of the most important findings is that pay generally will never motivate employees, but it will reduce their incentive to leave. Generally most job factors affect one of two separate but related scales: motivation to stay and reluctance to leave. Entirely non-surpri…

Switch the topic to executive compensation, and all of the reasonable research-based arguments about how much does money really motivate a person go out the window.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#232

Post by Waterluvian »

flukus wrote: post #92
Waterluvian wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what's most telling is what you did after that meeting. Did you quit and go work elsewhere? Don't get me wrong, I don't think companies should be so short sighted as to nickel and dime employees. But your one true source of leverage is to actually get up and leave.

There's a lot more leverage than that depending on the particulars of the story. It may have been OP that identified a saving that could be made and their leverage is a future unwillingness to identify such things. Maybe they'll stop questioning things and "code to spec" in future. Maybe they'll ignore those erroneous errors they notice throughout the day and wait for a bug report in production. Companies that don't…

To me that seems just plain immature.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#234

Post by dtech »

sjapkee wrote: post #233

>We don’t believe in a hierarchy or in more important people. You shouldn't believe in this. This is fact.

Valve is a well-known company that works like this. People who've left say that hierarchy and power structure still exist, but is informal and hidden.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#235

Post by reallydontask »

fsloth wrote: post #223
wting wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe grandparent was referring to proactive raises. Reactive counter offer raises typically don't work because the employee's mind has been made up to leave. Compensation is usually only part of why someone decided to leave.

"Compensation is usually only part of why someone decided to leave." Bullshit. When you have a family to feed and loans to pay compensation absolutely is a critical part of why someone might decide to leave. Any employer who tries to shame employees into accepting lower compensation than what the market offers by appealing into loyalty or misplaced honor are absolutely just trying to screw the employee over. Best emp…

I think the issue is that feeling underpaid is an issue that grows in importance with time as your spending power decreases and your hard work is not rewarded so that at some point it doesn't matter any more what the company offers.

If you are doing interesting work, are treated well and keep getting regular raises then it's going to be a lot harder to want to leave even if you might be underpaid according to market rates.

Granted this will only work if you are within a certain small percentage of market rate, ~10% and your financial circumstances allow it.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#236

Post by reallydontask »

henrikschroder wrote: post #149
rjp0008 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay everyone more that gets expensive quick. Seems like it could be cost effective to give almost rock bottom raises and just replace the people who aren't 100% into it.

Sometimes, the cheapest way to pay for something is with money. If you want a good, happy, motivated, loyal workforce, you have to pay for it.

Let's say your work is dull, your line manager is a bully that shoots down most of your ideas and then takes credit for the ones that get implemented. All success is due to him/her all failures down to the team.

There is no career path neither towards management nor towards principal engineer/architect

The commute is 2 hours each way and there is a strict work from the office policy.

HR is known to not provide generic references but to ask your line manager to provide references

How much money would it take for you to work in such environment?

The point is that money is only part of what makes people happy, motivated and loyal.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#237

Post by wccrawford »

lawn wrote: post #219

What happens when a skilled and very hard worker gets the same raise as someone who's not as skilled and not working very hard? For example if the skilled one solves the hard problems the less skilled one cannot solve. And if the lazy one spends a bunch of time on facebook. It isn't about the salary in absolute terms. It's about recognition and to be appreciated for the good work he's doing. But instead he gets the l…

In a customer service job, I was once scolded for not doing someone else's work (in another department!) after finishing my own work early. I had been trying to go home early because I had a test the next day. I finished 15 minutes early and was on the way out the door when I was told to do someone else's work who had sat around most of the day.

I refused, and was called into the office the next day with 3 managers. By the end of the meeting, I told them that I would "work at the same, slow, plodding pace as all the rest of the workers and this situation will never happen again."

They actually accepted that as a success on their part. Amazed, I left the office and made good on my promise for the rest of the time I worked there.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#238

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #189
mutatio wrote: post #188

The approach seems fanciful - especially if applied to organisations with more diverse roles - for example would they really pay a janitor the same as a top level developer? The cynic in me feels the fact they don't have a broad spectrum of roles (20 total employees); the organisation is engineered to not be disparate in terms of expertise. More cynicism: most "lowly" roles would be outsourced to service companies an…

You can always outsource cleaning and other service jobs and say proudly "We maintain our principles". You can even try this with some high paid but infrequent job like system architect.

You can say you maintain your principles, but you clearly aren't of you're not paying _everyone_ the same.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#239

Post by precisioncoder »

SeanDav wrote: post #191
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the ~8 years I've been a customer, my mobile provider has upgraded my free SMS/MMS plan from 5 hours and 5GB to unlimited hours and 40GB. The price has gone from ~$15 to ~$20 and that's it. There's no way for me to get the same plan at that price if I was a new customer.

You are lucky. Sadly, this is very much the exception, although we can only hope it becomes more common. Human nature being what it is, people hate change, so companies can gouge existing users and offer incentives to new users to get them to change.

Recently my telecom has starting sending me regular texts (~3-6 months) "We've improved our service, you now have X more mb/month" "We've strengthened our infrastructure, your bill has been reduced from x/month to y/month, if you'd prefer more data you can reply with MOAR DATA to this text and we'll keep you at the same price and give you X more data."

Knowing that I'm continuing to upgrade while doing nothing increases my satisfaction and I haven't even shopped around since I switched to them.

Re: The one-salary experiment, ten years in

#240

Post by unnouinceput »

dalbasal wrote: post #211
ui-explorer12 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing happens when you've been with a mobile/telecom/etc company for a long time. They milk you for every penny they can get and give all the promo pricing to new customers. The pay sales higher commissions for new sign-ups and treat existing loyal clients like garbage. It really bugs me to have to waste the time to change providers for everything every ~2 years, but I'd feel like an idiot if I left thousand…

solid comparison. There's a parallel here to the employee/consumer side too. A telco wants new customers. The way to do it is price, but lose if they cut everyone's price by 20% to gain 10% more customers. So price selectively. Companies want to hire the most when the market is best (that's why the market is good). That might require 20% higher salaries, but they don't want the whole salary bill to increase. So, they…

"Btw, it also works the other way, in bad markets. In bad labour markets, the salary you have is probably better than the salary you can get, and new hires earn less.

Here, the company management hears about low wages their competitors pay and fume that it's impossibly hard to lower salaries across the board."

ohhh, you're a young one, no? Companies do that all the time, by closing entire divisions, calling it "restructuring" and making your above the market salary disappear over night by re-branding the positions. That's how they do it legally. Fire you because your position doesn't exists anymore and hire you again if you want at a lower salary doing the same job with same tools and even same PC/chair.

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