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The boss who put everyone on 70K

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351–360 of 381 posts

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you can buy a 50" LED 4K TV for under $300, why would you attempt a repair of any older tech TV that is "probably repairable" for a couple hundred bucks? Take it off the wall; find a repair place; make an appointment; schlep it over there; wait for the results; pick it up; put it back on the wall vs drive to BestBuy and buy a newer, better TV and put the old one on the curb and be done with certainty tomorrow. A…

It makes sense if you can repair it with a few $0.15 capacitors and an hour of your time. I repair my electronics when they fail, and it saves me a lot of money. Somehow, it's become cool just to throw perfectly serviceable stuff in a landfill rather than watch a YouTube video and learn a little soldering.

Yes, I'm also personally very likely to tear it apart and see if I can replace any failed electrolytics, but that's only applicable to 0.5% of the population or less. I'm doing that as the least hassle way to get a working TV again (less research, less driving, no changing the TV mount, etc).

99.5+% of people are better off economically and time-wise to throw away any out-of-warranty TV undiagnosed and buy new.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious where this poster got that figure. I haven't found anything like it, in fact a pretty consistent 145k average salary. I would also be wary of average vs. median, as there's some real crazy outliers out there.

$145k for Bay Area salaries? I’m assuming this doesn’t include the wild bonuses and options I keep hearing about, because given how living expenses are, that seems like a negative ROI

Well yes, because bonuses and options aren't guaranteed salary.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#353

I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal. Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually cares about his employees and is being genuine here. He's a good person, making a private business decision to increase the pay of frankly his lowest paid workers. In a city where the average tech worker earns $275k a year, he believes its the right thing to d…

Saw a video of Price saying that his minimum salary may have indirectly raised housing costs in his city and that is not a problem he can solve but something that the city must. I don't know the figures but I would guess that any effect that he had caused was minimal. He really does come across as great guy. If I was more local I would probably look to work for him.

It is very unlikely that a 100 person company in an already gentrified neighborhood would have any effect on house prices.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a sister-in-law that I recently learned is making $275k in a tech job in Seattle. She has no college degree or formal training. She has just learned things on the job over the years. I was frankly astonished. That is more than double what I make as a senior software engineer 3 hours away in Portland.

As a software dev just to the north in Vancouver, BC at 110k CAD: that's bananas money.

When last did you change jobs? A year ago I did and set a hard minimum at 120, and managed 2 offers as high as 160 and took a lower one due to more interesting work and great environment. And had to cancel 3 more on site interviews that knew my range was 130-140. My previous job had a 2% raise over 3 years, with a salary out of touch with the current ranges. It seems the only way to get a raise much of the time is new work (and practice negotiating!)

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this raise in 2 years at my current employer. If anything, I'm not putting in as many 60+ hour weeks as I was 2 years ago. What's the incentive? "We'll pay you more, so you can work more and deal with more stress and, one day, you can have a heart attack at you desk. "

It's like the saying goes, if you get paid 100k to work 80 hours/week, you're getting paid 50k.

Yeah, you might as well get two $50k jobs for better redundancy.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#356

I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal. Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually cares about his employees and is being genuine here. He's a good person, making a private business decision to increase the pay of frankly his lowest paid workers. In a city where the average tech worker earns $275k a year, he believes its the right thing to d…

There is a lot of good intentions here but we did run a very large scale experiment for 69 years on about 300M people. It was called the Soviet Union and the results weren't pretty economically for the people. So the concern remains how long this can last, how brittle is this and how much can it scale.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#357

I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal. Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually cares about his employees and is being genuine here. He's a good person, making a private business decision to increase the pay of frankly his lowest paid workers. In a city where the average tech worker earns $275k a year, he believes its the right thing to d…

There is a lot of good intentions here but we did run a very large scale experiment for 69 years on about 300M people. It was called the Soviet Union and the results weren't pretty economically for the people. So the concern remains how long this can last, how brittle is this and how much can it scale.

You cant generalize things that far. But for sake of argument: you are saying that they failed the challange at aliexpress/amazon level distribution - using pen and paper.

I chat with 2 russian chaps working on the technicalities of that challange (coding the model in sofware) they had an interesting thing in common. They both had parents who tried to work the paper administration in soviet days. They told their kids countless horror stories about misplacing a bit of paper excluding entire regions from goods, like no shots. The parents were extreamely entugiastic about computers when they came onto stage. That! That is what we needeed!

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#358

I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal. Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually cares about his employees and is being genuine here. He's a good person, making a private business decision to increase the pay of frankly his lowest paid workers. In a city where the average tech worker earns $275k a year, he believes its the right thing to d…

There is a lot of good intentions here but we did run a very large scale experiment for 69 years on about 300M people. It was called the Soviet Union and the results weren't pretty economically for the people. So the concern remains how long this can last, how brittle is this and how much can it scale.

I can't tell if you're naive or simply trolling.

"There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible."

-Henry Ford

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of good intentions here but we did run a very large scale experiment for 69 years on about 300M people. It was called the Soviet Union and the results weren't pretty economically for the people. So the concern remains how long this can last, how brittle is this and how much can it scale.

I can't tell if you're naive or simply trolling. "There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible." -Henry Ford

Raising minimum wage is not same as paying equal wages to all (which is what this article describes). No one is trolling and comparison to Soviet experiment is close, if not exactly the same. Please read the article.

Re: The boss who put everyone on 70K

#360
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really. It just said a couple people resigned in protest.

Never understood this. This is like complaining you are unhappy that other people should even have a good life. It's one thing to aspire to have a good life. And totally different to derive your happiness from watching others suffer.

If their salary was docked to pay for the raises then I can totally see why they left.
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