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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

If you let something other than more money motivate you to work harder, you're a sucker. If you are working in the private sector, the transaction is pretty clear: they give you money, you give them labor. If, by some psychological trick, they get you to give them more labor for the same amount of money, then I think you've been had.

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There are other forms of compensation. I get enjoyment from building things, for example. It's worth remembering that labor is a transaction, and to treat yourself as a professional and a person worthy of self-respect, but if my employer creates a good environment for me and gives me interesting projects to work on, I will accept that as one form of intangible compensation. If two employers offer the same compensation but one has shitty projects and a terrible work environment, I'm taking the more pleasant one every time. Based on your position I should just flip a coin.

EDIT: Case in point, economics has an imaginary unit of value (the util), because there are forms of value other than income.

on point! agree with you!

The upvote button is sufficient.

Then why not becoming an entrepreneur and creating the environment you desire and share it with others.

I did not choose this path and so far I have not regretted it. Additional responsibility empowered and accelerated me. For the most part, the critical limiter on my growth is what people trusted me to do. The more they trusted me with the better I became, the smarter and more capable I became. That's still happening.

I'm pretty sure that if someone gave me the ability to be CEO of Google for a year I would be a vastly more advanced person than I am today. I would take that job unpaid in any respect. I would even gladly take the job of guy-who-is-defacto-CEO-of-Google-but-no-one-knows-it-and-he-is-under-NDA-to-never-reveal. i.e. it isn't the signaling value. It is the responsibility. This is continuous-approximable all the way to a job like a janitor which you'll have to pay me in the ballpark of a million dollars a year to do and I can't see myself doing it for long. So obviously there's some intermediate-value theorem type result where one of the benefits crosses in value over the other.

Ideally, I'm operating around that space.

> For the most part, the critical limiter on my growth is what people trusted me to do.

Yep, same. I didn't get a job for a year because I'm not experienced enough (graduated 2018 near the top of my class and so on, jobless for past 18 months now). And the companies I applied to most of the time don't look at my resume because (1) I suck at writing it and (2) a lot of experiences get unfairly discounted (creating part of the trust problem). When people did trust me I:

- Taught developers to become a junior web developer and get jobs (yep ironic)

- Prevented a company for reputational damages because their whole developer team walked out and I basically coded their long awaited big update (in a team the first 6 weeks, and then 6 weeks by myself). Without the update, the clients of said company would not have been happy.

- Gave lectures to university students about player frustration and making a website within 4 hours even if you don't have any skill.

- Help people obtain their OSCP certificate.

Just some examples to list. I know that I'm bad at the interviewing game, I'm working on it. My problem is that I'm a generalist, and people don't like to hire generalists I've noticed.

I wasn't experienced at any of this, yet I made it happen. It seems not everyone is familiar with the concept of utilizing transferable skills, and putting trust in such a thing.

They should teach interviewing skills and handling your managers / gaining more trust at university though, because it's a waste of productivity that people who can handle more are not trusted to handle more.

That's an excellent employee-centric viewpoint. What about the other side?

People are typically capable of a range of performances.

Employees, being human, don't always perform at the upper range of that performance through the duration of their employ.

Also, the only real way for an employer to 100% know this range is to observe the employee working for a while. So employing anyone is a gamble unless you make someone sign a contract and ensure they have the financial backing to pay the contract if they don't deliver. (People with such financial backing typically don't need you as an employer and your relationship will be a business one and not an employer/employee one)

Employers are of course free to terminate those that fall under a threshold of performance immediately and replace, but this is potentially inefficient due to costs associated with hiring, onboarding, etc.

So is it better for an employee to use soft skills to try to keep performance as high as possible or commit to higher overhead incurred due to turnover? Different industries have different tradeoffs here.

> employing anyone is a gamble unless you make someone sign a contract and ensure they have the financial backing to pay the contract if they don't deliver

I have NEVER heard this happening, can you cite an example? It seems utterly implausible even for consulting companies, let alone for individual contributors.

BTW, of course employing anyone is "a gamble" and it's for far more than the employee's salary/benefits. A bad hire can be far worse than just subtracting the hire's salary and getting nothing in return. There's at least an opportunity cost of not picking the good hire and losing out on a lot of productivity.

I have a lot of managers. Some of them give me a ton of praise and constructive feedback. I like working for those ones more and work harder for them. Turns out, social trust is a basic premise of positive human social interaction and not just for suckers.

An interesting if cynical take, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with the article.

I’ve personally found that working as slowly or lazily as possible without getting fired makes most jobs more difficult to bear. This article isn’t at all about maximizing output, it’s mostly about ensuring happy and functional teams working on projects that utilize their skill sets (all these things happen to lead to higher output, sure).

> working as slowly or lazily as possible without getting fired makes most jobs more difficult to bear

I'm really curious about this and would love to hear more. I've long struggled to find a sustainable pace.

I get were you're coming from and the sight of my bosses' BMWs M series reminded me daily that I'm making money mostly for someone else, but money doesn't last long as a motivator.

The novelty wears off pretty quickly and you're left with less motivation for the same pay.

I should know - for years annual earnings grew at a rate of over ten percent. Still, in and of itself it wasn't enough for me to stay motivated.

That’s a very depressing take. Are there any scenarios where it’s not true?

What if I’m enjoying what I’m doing? What if I like my coworkers?

My landlord enjoys me as a tenant, but he still raises rent every year. Because he charges what the market will bear.

A wise landlord would lag the market a bit. A good tenant is worth more than an average one, and vacancy is expensive.

I "think" I have a wise landlord.

Either way, I hope for a wise one next time around.

And yet, you stay in your apartment, even though there are cheaper apartments.

I.e. money is far from the only factor motivating you. You have a number of items that matter to you, money being one of them, that lead you to choose. The same is true for jobs.

What you work on matters. Who your team is matters. What your leadership does or doesn't do matters.

> And yet, you stay in your apartment, even though there are cheaper apartments.

> I.e. money is far from the only factor motivating you.

Transaction costs are still money (or equivalent). Same for risk.

> And yet, you stay in your apartment, even though there are cheaper apartments.

How long until you recover the financial costs of moving given the cheaper rent?

Let's forget the stress and emotions and logistics of moving.

Some of my coworkers brought up the story of NASA's renegade "Pirate Paradigm" that upset the status quo and busted through bureaucratic barriers before Agile was in vogue. [0] It's a true story of a group of young engineers that created a new system for mission control that would enable missions for years to come, while the thought of it was lambasted by management.

But one quote that popped out to me was:

> By taking action that challenged the established culture of their organization, the Pirates innovated new mission control capabilities for NASA, resulting in the group’s first project, Real-Time Data Systems (RTDS), which took a year’s worth of off-hours time to create.

>>>>Which took a year's worth of off-hours time to create.

So the team performed this groundbreaking work with no extra pay, on top of their other duties. This was construed to be inspirational among my coworkers who brought it up. I can see it. It is really awesome, and I bet those engineers felt like they were on top of the world.

But to me, this is almost crazy to think that - in today's world - working for a large business the size of NASA that you wouldn't be fairly compensated while doing such immensely valuable work far above your personal scope of duty - even if you have the best coworkers or love your work. Sure, in several industries this happens all the time (especially startups, where founders perform immense amounts of work with no pay with the hope of hitting gold), but in the big corporate, government, and defense contracting worlds this is not only discouraged, but often disallowed.

[0] https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-a-group-of-nasa-rene...

What a great counter example. Very inspiring, thank you for bringing it up.

I'm having a tough time elucidating and expressing my feelings on this subject. I've gone through burnout, which was largely self inflicted tbh, with silent approval of management.. I feel like the parent poster, but I don't want to. I guess I'm struggling with the notion that employee-employer relationship is zero sum. Hobbies don't typically yield direct monetary benefits, yet I still partake. I dont't think this is going anywhere, I'm just thinking out loud.

NASA isn't a private corporation. In that scenario, compensation is a practical reality, but there isn't any profound reason to not be invested in your job.

In the private sector your job is nothing more than making profit for your boss. If, for some reason, you did something on your own initiative that made the world a better place and your boss didn't profit from it, they should be mad at you for skipping a chance for them to make money.

Consequently, the only rational thing is to give them as little value for as much compensation as possible.

You can enjoy what you're doing.

You can like your coworkers.

At the same time, your boss(es) can be from hell.

What is or isn't a "depressing take" now mushrooms into a further discussion.

And if you spend your money on anything except more money, you're a sucker. Yes?

What is money for? I thought it was to exchange for goods and services that make me happy.

laughs in introductory psychology

I disagree to a certain extent. My company pays dues for my professional certifications and so on. It is still technically money, but not directly in my hand; just money I don't have to spend. There are similar items that are less tangible.

Same with me. My company made me join a course that aligned with my learning goals and also with their plans. I think this is a good way to motivate and is a win-win situation for both.

What is a work life balance, and is it binary between work and life? Do the two cross over? Can you mix life into work?

Work is mixed with life. Already. We live dual lives.

That's an opinion, but not a fact. IMO people who work less to spend time with kids, for example, are not "suckers". People who take interesting jobs with people they like for less money than a boring easy job are not suckers.

Pretty much. All of these tricks are meant to cover for gaps in pay or toxic environments. If you want me to be “productive” spare the “motivational” bs and give me the tools i need to get the job done, pay according to my contribution and keep politics away. Everything else are stories for naive junior staff.

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