Hacker News Reader

- Seriously, having lower salary does not make people care more. There are plenty of lazy people who don't care who are not paid maximum possible.

- You will have people unwilling to work on risky projects. Good engineers assigned to troubled projects will be resentful more then normally and leave faster.

View on HN

> Seriously, having lower salary does not make people care more.

It does, when coupled with variable pay they could lose if their project doesn't work out.

> There are plenty of lazy people who don't care who are not paid maximum possible.

And those lazy people will then find jobs at other big companies, where they don't have to work hard and still make more, more appealing.

What if employees were offered a substantial degree of choice in which projects they're assigned to. At that point, risky projects would need to have commensurate rewards attached. Does this solve the problem?

Valve, for example, seems to take this sort of approach, and while it's not without criticism, it seems to work okay for some people.

That will attract gamblers and repulse systematic workers who care more about craft itself and less about estimating, choosing and negotiating projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com