Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities • Hacker News Board

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#261

Post by asciident » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #174

asciident wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the things the OP listed are real merits. It's not even a game, but being a professional. Perception = you are good at communicating your work to others Connections = you have a strong network and stay informed and know who to talk to for different tasks Face time = you are easy to get along with Ability to handle office issues = you are a lubricant that make the group dynamic work If you don't do those things, t…

You have any actual backup for this? I know too many niche tech guys who do nothing of this but get work done (inc myself) and make sv money in the eu while the people who do do this make far far less as they are easy to replace by other ‘talkytalky’ people who talk and don’t get actual work done. I guess if you do both you are a winner but I have never met anyone like that; where do you find the time to network and…

Not sure how anyone would back up this. I manage managers so see this first hand. I think you're creating a false dichotomy between talkytalky and coding. Good developers will code and be professional at the same time. How do you know that the niche tech guys that you know are "getting work done"? They're doing this.

This is not about spending time chatting up people all around the office and networking. It's about responding clearly when people ask you questions, when you have your 1:1 with your manager, and in how you write your emails, etc.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#262

Post by asciident » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #229

asciident wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the things the OP listed are real merits. It's not even a game, but being a professional. Perception = you are good at communicating your work to others Connections = you have a strong network and stay informed and know who to talk to for different tasks Face time = you are easy to get along with Ability to handle office issues = you are a lubricant that make the group dynamic work If you don't do those things, t…

It is certainly possible to achieve these things by the methods you name. I'm sure some good employees do. But it is also perfectly possible to achieve good perception, strong connections, lots of face time, and ability to handle office issues, while also being really bad at your actual job, and without any of the positives you mention (except for the fairly bland "easy to get along with"). The real problem, of cours…

I think you're projecting your idea of "person who is bad at their job but good at selling / office politics" into what I wrote. Of course you need to be good at your job, but how do you even know what's useful to the company if people don't find it easy to discuss problems with you? How do you communicate how long something will take if there is a dependency on another team? Unless you're just writing rote plumbing code, these are all things you need to know.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#263

Post by tonitosou » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:25 AM UTC

galoisgirl wrote: post #200

tonitosou wrote: post #55

i dont understand why salaries should be same for a similar role. If I work twice as fast and with a better work quality than my collegue why shouldn't i get double his salary? are we in a communist country?

How do you measure that you're twice as fast?

well i do the same work twice as fast and with twice as less bugs. people are not machines we don't have all the same output and don't all deserve same money

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#264

Post by JamesBarney » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 1:32 AM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #259

JamesBarney wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most employment lawyers would be very reluctant to take a case like this for 5-10k. Litigating against a company like the one he described would cost more than he would make even if he was paid on 100% contingency fee.

I’m not sure how you made that determination. I’m no employment lawyer and facts differ by locality, but where I am there are tons of contingent lawyers who’d take that case just based on discovery costs.

I'm acquaintances with two employment lawyers and they talk shop when they're together. Their hourly rates are 300-500ish so 5,000-10,000 is 20ish hours of work. For that amount of work they are looking for an employer who is risk averse , and an employee who emotionally has moved on and is just looking for a little extra cash.

If the employer is legally aggressive or the employee is looking for a fight they would never take a case like that.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#265

Post by bdowling » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #253

bdowling wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After giving me more than one death threat, I finally quit and sued. Threatening to kill you is probably another claim beyond failing to reasonably accommodate your medical condition. It may also be a criminal threat that a prosecutor would be interested in. I would think that would strengthen your case. > Pro bono, of course, since I had no money. > ... My lawyer was unbelievably startled by this, and immediately…

Most employment lawyers would be very reluctant to take a case like this for 5-10k. Litigating against a company like the one he described would cost more than he would make even if he was paid on 100% contingency fee.

> Most employment lawyers would be very reluctant to take a case like this for 5-10k.

We don't know the actual value of the case. The defendants seemed to think that it was worth hiring "the most expensive defense firm in California".

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#266

Post by sgerenser » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 3:36 AM UTC

acituan wrote: post #119

rosywoozlechan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't benefit top earners to share salary information. If I'm making more money than everyone else and the consequences of sharing salaries is equity than it is in my rational self-interest to keep my salary hidden because I'm unlikely to get any kind of raise until equity is achieved whereas I may continue to get raises otherwise. You know what those top earners are going to do then? Quit. And then you end up w…

> It doesn't benefit top earners to share salary information Maybe one of the biggest myths is that we can appraise performance objectively and that pay is nothing but a function of that performance. In reality, this is nothing but price discrimination for the price of labor; just like it would be in an airline's best interest to squeeze the most individual dollar amounts out of every individual passenger for the sam…

But isn’t it true that that software developer salaries in many countries in Europe are much lower than the U.S.?

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#267

Post by vehementi » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #217

vehementi wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're betting, correctly I think, that most people won't actually bother quitting. So the costly scenario you're saying doesn't play out as much as you must think, and it's cheaper to let that happen occasionally and keep the rest underpaid

How does this align with turnover being so high at so many companies?

Is it high? Or is it in single digit percentages?

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#268

Post by TheHegemon » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #249

Kinrany wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say either you're still underpaid, or your employer/boss is a saint

I’m making an insane amount of money. I was way overpaid even before the most recent raise. I’ve been in the field long enough to be very familiar with going rates.

I think you may be surprised what the current rates are though.

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#269

Post by tluyben2 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

asciident wrote: post #261

tluyben2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have any actual backup for this? I know too many niche tech guys who do nothing of this but get work done (inc myself) and make sv money in the eu while the people who do do this make far far less as they are easy to replace by other ‘talkytalky’ people who talk and don’t get actual work done. I guess if you do both you are a winner but I have never met anyone like that; where do you find the time to network and…

Not sure how anyone would back up this. I manage managers so see this first hand. I think you're creating a false dichotomy between talkytalky and coding. Good developers will code and be professional at the same time. How do you know that the niche tech guys that you know are "getting work done"? They're doing this. This is not about spending time chatting up people all around the office and networking. It's about r…

In your experience; mine is different. That does not matter; you were explaining in the parent comment that if you ‘do not do this you should earn less’; I am saying and living through for the last 30 years that people who do not do that make more. So just giving a counter example that your rules might not be holy ones. We can both be right: could be a culture thing or different circles (I work with embedded devs who make the big bucks and do not generally communicate well (the ones I know!); it distracts from work).

Re: Blizzard workers share salaries in revolt over wage disparities

#270

Post by tluyben2 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

biggy_sauce wrote: post #241

tluyben2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hen you dont know your western history Seems not too many tech people like history: if they did we would not be looping Greenspuns 10th rule derivatives on everything ; nosql, microservices, js, query languages, etc.

Could you please elaborate?

Microservices for instance; companies spend a lot of money to manage microservices to end up with a really bad implementation of Erlang OTP. Bad enough to mostly see they now also created a very bad version of the monolith they should have started with and thus go back to a monolith. Or macroservices as Uber now calls them.

Nosql usually ends up as a really bad version of a rdbms with a query language that is a very botched version of sql. And then we move to postgres as it is actually better in every way.

Javascript was literally (the author wanted to implement scheme but that did not look like Java) a really badly done version of Scheme which had to look like Java. So this is directly Greenspuns 10th rule.

And we can go on: all these things have solid and scientifically sound implementations and yet we reinvent the wheel, badly and then usually drop it or try to reverse the damage by actually thinking about history for a second (wasm).