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While this is a simplistic view that might help you feel good about taking advantage of someone, it is ridiculously easily abused. And, quite frankly, scares me if I think about it for too long.

I don't want a society where there are people left behind simply because they did not make a job out of making more money. Nor do I want a society where services performed by folks leads to a massive wealth imbalance in workforces that don't have people specifically tasked with keeping this from happening. Especially with how anti union/similar setup current cultures are.

And to be clear, I realize that that ship has somewhat sailed. Nobody was specifically tasked with making sure women/minorities were paid fairly. As a result, we have an obvious problem. One where the incentives have aligned such that many companies do not have an incentive to fix it. (There has to be a term for the occurrence where virtue signaling is high, but actual virtue is punished. Anyone know it?)

That is, you are absolutely right in many senses. But I worry that as long as not all companies are paying more fair wages, than there is little incentive to be the one company paying fair wages. (There are incentives to pay above normal pay, but that can still be below fair. See again current women's pay gap.)

So, can you reduce it down to folks are ultimately paid what they are worth. And if they simply shopped themselves around they could get more, but they didn't so they have accepted their low worth, so they are, ipso facto, worth less. Great. I just think we have plenty of evidence that shows that doesn't actually work.

No different than shopping for a car and buying the first one you see. You HAVE to shop around for your career. Holy crap, it's the biggest investment of your life. If you don't care, it's nobody's job to care for you, and it shouldn't be. ALWAYS shop around or don't complain when you find out you're being paid below market.

My main problem with this is it is victim blaming, at large. And again, leads to situations such as women and minority pay being significantly lower for no good reason.

At an individual level, it is good actionable advice. At a societal level, it really is just victim blaming. And it is hard to day where the line is between those views.

Failure to self-educate, negotiate or maximize your leverage does not in any way make someone a victim.

What sick thought crept its way into our collective consciousness that has made us glorify being a victim above all else. We have been fooled into holding up literally the opposite of success as the highest virtue.

I haven't glorified being a victim. Quite the contrary. I just refuse to glorify anything the exploits and relies on someone being a victim.

That is, my question is what sick thought made it acceptable to take repression and holding down of full segments of a population under the guise of them individually not standing up for themselves acceptable?

Seriously, the evidence is quite clear that this attitude is complete nonsense and only works for people that have certain advantages already. I get that you feel you have worked hard for your position. So have I. I also get that I was additionally lucky that I was able to reap the rewards of my hard work. Many aren't. And to be ok with that is a truly disgusting collective consciousness problem.

>Seriously, the evidence is quite clear that this attitude is complete nonsense and only works for people that have certain advantages already.

Ahem... citation needed

I've been referencing the still existing pay gap between men and women. Same for minorities.

For this attitude to be accurate, the problem is simply that women and minorities are not educating themselves and/or are not "shopping themselves around." If you want me to cite studies showing that specifically is false, quite frankly I don't have time to dig around for that. You could find studies showing it is true.

The still existing pay gap for men and women, when women make 105% of what men make for the same job title and experience?

You need to study more.

Sounds like you have a source. Because that is a rather bold claim.

Is this necessarily a bad strategy? How much extra time investment in understanding the auto market and checking various different options is required to guarantee you'll make a better choice?

Then compare the cost saving, and time spent on the above, to the marginal cost of your free time. Have you saved anything?

This absolutely depends on how much your time is worth. You're right that saving money on car purchases might not be worth it all that much to someone who makes $200 an hour.

However, careers are what sort of determine how much our time is worth...so it generally ALWAYS makes sense to shop for multiple job offers.

virtue signaling is high, but actual virtue is punished

Hypocrisy?

I worded it wrong. I meant the incentives are high for the signaling, but actually inverted for the acts.

My example was supposed to be that you are rewarded for looking fair, but it would actually be detrimental to be so.

Deception and hypocrisy, I think, are related to this, but I feel they are a little different, too. Don't know if I can explain why. So perhaps I'm just wrong on that feeling?

As software engineers in America, you have quite a great deal of financial freedom. No one is coercing you into accepting a job offer because life is hard and you just don't have the time to shop around for job offers.

If both parties sign an agreement with complete agency, who is getting abused? How can it be "unfair" if you both parties freely agreed to the exchange?

That's assuming that job openings are aplenty. The reality in most cases is that if the company doesn't like me, they can just wait for the next candidate. But if I don't like the company, it doesn't really matter because I need to pay the bills next month.

(inb4 "What happened to your fuck-you money?" As if it's always the employee saying "fuck you".)

I think that's related to the tipping culture in the US. Employers can pay their employees shit, and almost everyone is happy with that because it makes things cheaper in general.

> If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount.

You are confused about cost and value.

I have seen a lot of people with high salaries that are more of a problem than a solution for the company. As an example, you can look at the executive that fired Salesforce red team at the DefCon.

Companies and upper management are usually bad at evaluating the value of employees. In some cases even punishing good employees while rewarding more ass-kisser types.

So you can be worth a lot, but be paid quite low. As cost and value are not always correlated, and rarely match each other.

For the part of looking elsewhere for a better salary, I agree. The managers are doing a poor job and moving around is the only option. This is a huge cost to the companies that lose expertise and need to train new employees and show how much overpaid their managers are because pay and worth are not related, and this is big a problem.

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/salesforce-fires-two...

>If you'd shopped around, you'd have been worth more. But you didn't, so you weren't.

Isn't that circular logic? By that logic, nothing can ever be undervalued, because its fair value is defined by how much it's sold for.

If you want to go all supply-and-demand, an employee's value is still not what they request, it's what it would cost to replace them, on average

Not circular logic, it's excactly how it works. Someone offers you money for your time and if both parties find an agreement on how much that time is worth, they've determined a value that is acceptable for both parties. No one is forced to employ or be employed.

"No one is forced to employ or be employed"

Pretty sure most people who live paycheck to paycheck would disagree.

They need to work to earn a living, but they are not forced to be employed if they think the wage is too low. That would be slavery. But I see the point that this degree of freedom poses a problem for work with a low entry barrier.

>no one is forced to be employed

Er, can you clarify? If you don't work, you don't eat.

Like the thousands of unemployed people? Some haven't eaten for years.

That's not what he means, just like that's not what you mean.

Circumstances can differ quite a lot, and claiming that everyone is paid fairly because they aren't leaving is just crooked.

You are correct - to the company he's worth the amount it would take to replace him.

Plenty of people can negotiate to get closer to that so negotiating a raise isn't pointless - but lateral moves are often easier.

Although you can be more valuable in a different company - for eg. if your current company isn't good at utilizing your specializations.

> "that's what you're worth"

Your argument is sound, but this is really unfortunate phrasing.

It's actually what your work is worth. Not what you as a person is worth, and it's important to keep those things separate, both for sanity and rigor.

Your value to society is the value of your work which in everyone else's context is your value.

No one cares if your apartment is clean which is why no one pays you to clean your apartment.

Except the entire point is that the demand sets the amount of money you earn and not your capability. You could be einstein in the sahara and yet still be stuck doing subsistence farming. The GP projects this demand based income as personal worth even though multiple income levels are possible which would imply multiple "worths". What you do doesn't define your worth. A system for rewarding and punishing somebody for good or bad work already exists. There is no need for some bullshit "value" or "worth" concept that is attached to the person.

So no one cares if I let my parents rot to death once they cannot take care of themselves anymore. Got it.

Or if you drop your kids off at school and never come back for them. Nobody is paying you to look after them, right?

which is also why our society has a huge problem about child-rearing and old age care.

it has value to society, massive value. If no-one does it, society collapses pretty quickly.

But we don't pay people (women, mostly) to do it.

> Your value to society is the value of your work which in everyone else's context is your value.

But certainly you must interact with people outside of your job?

Ah, so Steve jobs was worth $1/year.

$1 CEO salaries are just to let them avoid paying FICA (Medicare/Medicaid). Don't be fooled by this marketing tactic which is really just a tax dodge.

Sigh. In what version of the world do you believe Steve Jobs ever went a year of making $1? Even if his tax return showed income of $1 for that year (it never did) the net worth of his assets increased significantly during the year and the value of that would be captured eventually.

I don't, but people who believe one silly thing often believe others so I thought you might. Let's go with some other examples: open source software. Breastfeeding. Ooh, how about literally every person in America under 10 years old? They're all worthless and society wouldn't be negatively affected if they disappeared out of existence? After all, close enough to 0 of them are being paid by anyone.

Her got paid by stock dividend. Had a pretty important share in Apple Inc.

If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount.

That's how much that counterparty has offered. It may not necessarily be how much you're worth to that party, let alone some other party.

They may be bluffing. They may not have enough money at the moment. And so on.

If later on they get $10 million income and they can't continue without you, then even though they are still paying you $X you can easily find out you're worth more by threatening to leave.

You're worth whatever it costs to replace you in the open market.

>If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount.

If you have money saved you always have another offer. The biggest leverage you have as an employee is saying "no thanks" and leaving. As long as you're willing to do that you can demand whatever you want.

> the reason why, yet you're paid table scraps -- it's because that's what you're worth.

That doesn't make any sense and sounds like everyone is always paid fairly. That's far from true.

If you think you're not being paid fairly, do something about it (e.g. demand more, or quit and do something else for money).

If you can't get more, you're not being exploited. You're taking advantage of the best option available to you.

I hope you recognize, that the statement that everyone is always paid fairly is false. Thinking otherwise borders on some kind of serious ethical blindness.

Where did they make that statement? All I'm hearing GP say is if the only way to know your worth to the market is to test it. There is no other way to measure what your employment is worth.

It was phrased that way above, read carefully. If all they meant was "if you aren't paid fairly, leave and find a better place", that's OK, but that's not how it was phrased (which was quite improper).

It's not that simple, because the other option is don't work. If you value your time more than anyone is willing to pay, that means your value is greater than your highest offer.

> Coworker was building a new house, and when it came to the numbers it was let loose that it was going to cost about $700K. This didn't seem like much

Not much? I hate you Silicon Valley!

Companies that hire consultants for tech are incompetent technically. That comment means little.