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Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

I've done a lot of hiring, and have found that salary demands are weakly inversely proportional to performance.

That is to say, people whose salary demands are at the lower end of the salary range for that career have outperformed those whose demands are at the higher end.

My sample size is small but significant. Food for thought.

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Meh. The older and more experienced I get the more I realize I work to put food in the table and to pay for my life outside. Working for “passion” is for suckers. As the dude in that one YouTube video about consulting says, fuck you. Pay me.

Pay me what market rate is and don’t give me sob stories about passion or making sacrifices to work on some life changing BS. Pay me.

Pay you for what? I don’t think many red blooded Americans resent leaders of companies that are kicking ass, reaping the rewards.

What’s eating away the civic fabric are those who put their own self interest above everyone else.

Once you get up into the millions in compensation, I don’t think the concern is that the poor naive CEO is being exploited by working for less than the absolute most they can get. Especially when the level of pay is so high, that it disproportionately impacts the bottom line.

I’m sorry, this primacy of market and money above all is sickening.

The ability to command market salary often depends on your willingness to move for a job. The labor market is not like the stock market.

So if you're supporting a family you may want a new approach for thinking about your career.

I'm supporting a family on a semi-remote job (work from anywhere, employer covers my airfare to our offices as needed), and when I unexpectedly parted ways with my previous employer last year, I doubled my compensation in 2 weeks. "F* you, pay me" is a legitimate operating philosophy as an employee when your skills are in demand. Also important to live below your means and have a 1+ year runway of savings to enable you to negotiate from a position of power, but that's a conversation for another thread.

Better said above, "Working for “passion” is for suckers."

That's interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical, and I don't even think it's relevant here, unless you were hiring executives for large but dying companies?

Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

Because those tech companies were found to have been illegally colluding to suppress wages of their workers.

It’s easier to hire cheap workers when your actions are keeping wages lower than they otherwise would’ve been.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

This is a classic red herring, totally unrelated.

If anything, that undermines the point I'm arguing against: why would these companies feel any need to collude to suppress wages if they could get better performance just by hiring cheaper workers?

Also, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc. weren't part of this suit, so again, not relevant.

I think it's more like:

person who really wants the job but is kind of underqualified > person who is highly qualified, but doesn't really want the job (unless the money is right)

edit: I'll add that, for CEOs who should all look amazing on paper and know how to sell themselves, maybe willingness to do the job for less than market is a better signal than most

> Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

Because a) at their scale they need to hire in bulk b) their business (advertising, "media"...) simply don't inspire that level of passion in anyone, so money is all they can do.

The five biggest companies in the US by revenue or profit are not data-driven tech companies.

None of the top ten US companies, by revenue, fit that description.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/

Ranked by profit, only Alphabet squeaks into the top ten at number five.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/list/filtered?sortBy=profits&f...

I’m not seeing much correlation here between rank of CEO compensation and company performance.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

The fame of the high salaries at tech companies relates primarily to technical staff, not executive pay. These companies are also located in some of the most expensive areas to live.

The top 5 in the S&P 500 are 4 tech companies and JP Morgan Chase. The top 5 by market cap are all tech companies.

S&P 500 is primarily a ranking by market cap. It’s a measure of how much the market values a stock. I can see it being a component of size (how “big”). There’s no doubt that the big tech companies are colossal entities.

The market cap of a company is largely based on a bet of the “size” of a company in the future.

Tesla is the most “valuable” US auto maker, by market capitalization. This illustrates that market cap is inherently related to predictions which have a large speculative component, which can be influenced by pure market phenomena.

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