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Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

“Large corporations pit worker against worker,” said Joe Gasperov, president of ILWU Local 63, which represents the clerks. “I feel sorry for the truckers. They’re exploited. They’re paid by the load, not the hour, so they assume all the risk of terminal delays. And some companies care more about saving a buck than servicing the trucks.”

Let's not pay by what you produce (number of loads), but by how much time you take, and drivers will not care about the delays, and the ILWU will not care about delays, and you will have a more efficient, egalitarian system? Yeah, right. Then you will get ILWU types driving trucks and taking their time is all you will have in the end.

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There is a structural problem though, where the truckers don't have the leverage to minimize their downtime.

It could be that truckers that arrive on time for a pickup get a payment from the port when they experience an excessive delay. Incentive for the port to perform, harm reduction for the trucker, etc, but they don't have it in place because they can get truckers without it.

Salaries work pretty well in most places.

Yes, as I responded above where typically you are in an office or report to someone regularly. Sales people make some of the highest salaries on a low salary with commissions for the sales they produce.

> Let's not pay by what you produce...

Aren't...a ton of jobs paid by the hour, or salaried?

Shouldn't we, according to this logic, only pay software engineers for lines of code written?

Maybe. People hire by the hour or salary after an interview, and supposedly vetting the employee to be able to produce an expected amount of work at a reasonable quality, while being sequestered in an office under supervision (usually). A trucker is on the road, and until the latest in GPS tracking and packages with sensors, was pretty much their own person. It would be reasonable to gauge their work performance by the load.

The commodity you sell as an employee is time. Piecework is dumping risk in the employee.

Should developers be paid by the lines of code they produce?

Should developers keep their job if they fail to deliver every sprint and miss deadlines? At the end of the day we are all judged by output; it just so happens that output is more easily measured in trucking (ie the status is binary) than in development.

People are paid based on what they have the leverage to demand, not based on what's right or wrong.

Regulated taxi fare formulas usually include both time and distance. A mile in a traffic jam will be based on time. Ten miles with no traffic will be based on distance. Why should truckers not get paid for sitting in a traffic jam if cabbies do? It still costs the trucker time that he can't be doing/working something/somewhere else.

Because then they might take excessively long breaks and get paid for not working. It would be extremely difficult to audit time spent working while being plagued by inefficiencies vs time spent messing around. Paying per delivery aligns incentives and is easy to audit. It also incentivizes truckers to push on dock workers to be more efficient which is in the entire supply chain's best interest.

You can make the same argument against paying developers a salary. Ditto on paying managers a salary.

Yes you could which is why you have contractors. However, it turns out that with "creative" work it's a lot harder to implement that payment model without having an incentives problem.

If lines of code were a useful commodity in themselves? Yes it would be reasonable. Now we know that is not the case and any attempt to do so would ens in foregone disaster.

The reason not to do things like that is if said metrics can do more harm than good. However freight is pretty commodity by definition. Aside from not doing damage to goods and people, throughput is basically the only things that matter in that context.

Employees demanding a "standby base rate" would also be sensible if they were required to wait while lacking work to do.

What about by files of code they produce? Or webpages or assets? I imagine some contractors work this way.

Why can't what developers produce be commodified?

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