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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

This, and similar moans, really misses the point.

Employment is a social contract, looking for a compromise between two positions:

* Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy.

* Employees, and the society made up of employees, want stability, employment rights etc. as salary work is a backbone of societal stability.

Employers will happily pay the lowest amount of salary that will convince someone to work for them - COL being a key consideration. Employees will negotiate on the basis of the value they bring, but in principle, there is no moral obligation for employers to pay a wage that's fair, based on the value of the employee work, perhaps above ~subsistence levels.

How it works out, we'll see. Perhaps societies agree that strong-arming employers to pay equal salaries, regardless of location, will work - that's how unions, weekends and paid holidays came to be in the developed world (sorry Americans). But neither is a fundamental human right, and rather a societal contract, negotiated between labour takes and makers.

For a different take, should it also be unfair for someone qualified, living in a lower cost-of-living location, to offer their employment to the same company for less? This seems like normal salary negotiation to me.

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> there is no moral obligation for employers to pay a wage that's fair, based on the value of the employee work, perhaps above ~subsistence levels.

is there moral obligation to do your job well instead of let's say watching youtube and doing bare minimum not to get fired?

It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people but not from companies made of these people. Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks.

> It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people

Do we though? We expect people to not break the rules, e.g murder or steal. We don't expect people to stop eating meat, polluting the earth, or generally to stop being extremely selfish. If we expected everyone to be moral you and I wouldn't be spending money on vacations and buying computer games but on trying to save poor kids in Africa and Bangladesh.

Over the years, I realized that everyone is selfish and will literally throw you under a bus for the right amount of money, or some other acceptable incentive. Laws keep people in line, except for the few who break them and get away with it.

Maybe I'm hanging around the wrong people (I often wonder where all the "right" ones are), but that's how it is. And if I don't play the same game, I'll keep getting fucked until I die. It's really depressing.

Once you make claims like "everyone is", it sounds like you've given up on evidence, or have a tautological (always true) definition.

Empirical evidence says otherwise (about altruism): see the work of Daniel Batson - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Batson

As for good people, there are many. There are thousands who give at least 10% of their income to the most cost-effective charity they can find - https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

There are thousands of people working very hard on the most effective solutions to the world's most important problems - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

There is plenty of hope. Find better people, work to improve yourself, the world, and others.

“Or some other acceptable incentive.” Ok sure, that leaves the opening wide for any possibility including “throw your friend under the bus or I will literally shoot you in the head,” “this 1 billion will be distributed to the needy if and only if you block your friend from receiving a promotion” or even more realistically, “friend 1 gets a promotion or friend 2 gets a promotion.”

At any rate, for smaller things, my experience is that most folks will not throw you under the bus. At high stakes, it really just depends on whether the relationship with you (and folks you might complain to) and/or relationship to whatever intrinsic value system matters more or less than the stakes.

This cynical outlook it's definitely helpful, but I believe the truth is more gray. It's quite likely and understandable that my friends will throw me under the bus if they see their livelihood in danger, but so far it hasn't been the case for measly higher pay. And yet I have depended on the kindness of strangers who had nothing to gain by helping me enough times to acknowledge that it's not selfishness what engages human behavior. As always it kinda depends on the framing, you can even say that it's on my best interest to act for the common good, so even altruism is selfish, but then you'll have a useless definition of altruism.

Everony is selfish yes. Throw you under the bus - not sure about this one. Might be you need better friends.

I think you might be hanging around the wrong people. I’ve rarely met people with the ethics (or lack) you describe and certainly haven’t stayed in their presence if i can help it.

We should nudge and pressure people to be better (whether using some 'dark arts' or with kindness).

Once you learn about the horrors of the animal abuse happening thanks to the money with which you buy meat, I think it's the right thing to stop. And similarly, to encourage others to decrease their meat consumption by letting them know that by buying meat, they are very likely going against their values (just ask them if they would pay to torture a dog, for example).

Instilling better norms in a society is hard work, but it's a good thing. Thanks to the efforts of our predecessors, we now look down on beating one's wife, for example. Let's join together, and make it the norm to give 10% of our income to the most cost-effective charities we can find (see https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ )

> And similarly, to encourage others to decrease their meat consumption by letting them know that by buying meat, they are very likely going against their values

Well, people know. Maybe they don't KNOW know, in the sense of actually visiting a slaughter house and smelling the blood, but I'm sure most people know about animal shipments, tiny cages, and that gassing or slashing animals throats isn't a picnic. Personally I donate money to an animal protection program (probably don't donate enough). Conversations I have with people in my life about this are overwhelmingly futile and people become quite hostile when you talk to them about this.

It's a challenge talking about this topic. It's very easy to come off as "I'm better than you" or "you are a bad person". But these conversations can be productive and non-offensive.

I encourage people to see a wide continuum between eating 100% meat and eating 0% animal products. I express that I understand the challenges in decreasing one's meat consumption. I point out that it's not all or nothing - you can be "mostly vegan" (while still consuming animal products sometimes).

It's best to have conversations like this when the person is asking, not because you "caught" them eating an animal product.

Because of how grim the reality is for animals raised for food, most people are reluctant to be exposed to what it means. They will hope that (and not look for evidence against their belief that) the meat they buy comes from a better place (it's worth pointing out that in the US about 99% of meat comes from factory farms).

As I said - people's values are likely aligned. Polls consistently show that people do not approve of animal abuse.

The final argument that made me drastically decrease my meat consumption was the empirical fact that individual choices matter:while supermarkets are not 100% responsive (buying 1 item less decreases their next order by 1 item), they are responsive to demand. And if they buy in batches (which they likely do), you have a chance of triggering a "next-larger" batch order. On average it all works out to an (economic) elasticity of less than 1, but a far cry from 0 (depends on type of meat, but rough figure of 0.5 is a sensible underestimate).

Did you actually manage to convince anyone to stop eating meat, who wasn't already having major doubts about what he was doing to begin with? If so how?

I have had many friends share with me that they have decreased their meat consumption.

I am not under the illusion that I was the person who caused that change. Change rarely works this way. Our decisions to do something (especially this drastic) are composed of numerous influences.

Part of change is about what people expect to be the new normal. If all your friends are ok with homosexual marriages, you'll likely change your point of view soon enough anyway. If many of your friends at least mention that they are concerned about factory farm abuses of animals, you might one day decide to eat one less hamburger.

Change is much easier when younger; I changed during college years. I'm now 35 and I'm sure to have nudged at least some of my friends to eat less meat in the last decade. Much of it probably was just my consistency. If your friend tries a fad diet, you can ignore it. If their diet lasts 5 years, you'll at least want to learn more about why and how.

It's an important issue to change others' opinions on. A great book about this subject is "Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change" by Nick Cooney

We do expect each other to be reasonably moral. It’s understood though that everyone has limits and is fundamentally flawed, so at the end of the day a few things have to be written off. Exactly how many things you write off, interestingly, contributes to your own moral standing.

I don't think we expect everyone to be reasonably moral, at least I don't live with that expectation - that's just setting yourself up for disappointment. Yes, most people don't murder or rape, but we're still quite a selfish and survivalist creature. Although we know perfectly well the amount of suffering the meat industry causes, most of us are fine with consuming meat and dairy, as long as we don't need to see the images of how the meat gets to our plate. Mostly because it tastes good; red meat is actually unhealthy. That's just one tiny example that leads me to think we're not reasonably moral. I'm not saying we can't be taught morals, but we have a long way to go till we can say what's happening is "reasonable".

Food science findings (which tend to be unreliable) aside, eating food is something that’s hard to fault someone else for doing. The fact that most people eat meat alone is something that makes it more of a reasonable thing to do, even more so that we typically don’t find out about the conditions of cows, chickens, etc. until we are already mostly grown and hooked on the stuff.

Morality is a complicated thing to define[citation needed] but I would posit we actually generally have a high moral standard for each other in the west. We expect each other to not lie pathologically, push others away when they take advantage of those around them (e.g. scammers, con artists) enforce the rules of monogamous relationships (for the vast majority), return lost belongings to each other, encourage food safety, and so on.

And you can find secular explanations for all of those, but most people are just taught that those are the right things and stick to it. Sure, some of the integrity of those areas are eroding over time, but generally speaking society is still held together with morals.

Its not eating food that I have a problem with. Its choosing steaks, pork and beef when there is a huge amount of alternatives. The fact we are brought up like that and are hooked does not make it any better or morally sound. The fact that everyone is doing it makes it Ok in your eyes? Please explain. Everyone was a nazi in Germany at a certain point.

It doesn’t make it OK, it just makes it bad and reasonable. If I’m in Nazi Germany and all my friends and family are Nazis, and my neighbor too, I’m going to think less of my neighbor but not exactly hold it against him as much as if there were 100 Nazis in the country and he was one. There’s reasons people have at that point for being Nazi, even though the thing is ultimately terrible. Group dynamics, which are more or less baked into our (epi)genetics, for one.

In America we pretty much all get a pass for buying clothes, for instance, which has some considerable moral strings attached to it. We could make our own, but that’s just not a reasonable way to live life here. You would have no company if that was the way you chose to spend your time, so it would be a sad existence, and as humans we are wired to want to behave like those around us.

Well you kinda solidify my argument that we don't expect people to be moral, at least not 100% or not even 50%. We expect them not to break society's rules, and whatever capitalism allows - they can do, with no social stigma. We give each other a free pass because we know change is hard (is that the functioning of a society striving to be moral?) Now whatever capitalism allows - meat, unbridled consumerism, extreme selfishness etc, these are things with severe side effects. In the case of buying clothes the suffering is a bit more subtle (I suppose you refer to worker's conditions in poor countries), and since it's paying for someone's job somewhere you could argue it's in the grey area. But the meat industry isn't in the grey area, it couldn't be more black than it is.

I wouldn’t say it couldn’t be a grey area. For many, it’s easier to get fresh meat than it is to get fresh vegetables, such as if you’re a farmer in a food desert but you have livestock, or even if you’re just living in a place like Alaska where a lot does not grow. There are also dietary restrictions leading some people to need a higher than average or even entirely carnivorous diet.

Bottom line is that while there may be morality inflation, i.e. when you judge the modern lifestyle on an absolute scale, it looks bad, that there is still a range of acceptability, and if you venture outside of it, that’s no bueno. That doesn’t mean we don’t expect people to be moral (100% would be “perfect”).

> is there moral obligation to do your job well instead of let's say watching youtube and doing bare minimum not to get fired?

You can choose to do well to avoid being fired.

You can choose to do well to chase a promotion.

You can choose to do well because the work interests you.

But you are not morally obligated to do anything, and if your employer is not very good at evaluating your work, then — like a man who buys a gym membership and never goes — that's on them.

Who's morals are in question here?

Both you and GP seem to be talking from an amoral perspective. To many people there is certainly a moral obligation to put in an honest effort and pay fair wages.

I certainly don't think of my approach as amoral. Rather, I think it's not immoral to negotiate down a salary based on fair yardstick (COL). Annoying, perhaps, but not immoral.

It's immoral to exploit your employees, lie to them, not keep to a contract, deny them the growth opportunities they were lead to believe they have etc. But to negotiate a lower pay, that's not immoral. As an employee, take it or leave it.

To be clear, I'd love to get a SF salary and live in an Alpine valley in Italy or France. Maybe the world will come to that arrangement. But if not, I wouldn't call it immoral.

It's not based on COL, though, it's based on what your company perceives as your peers in the new area. As pointed out in other threads, working in London will net you about 1/3 of the salary as SF, even though the COL is nearly the same.

Moral is subjective. There also many people that their is moral obligation to not put honest effort or pay fair wages.

I think an extremely large percentage of America would disagree with you, though. The puritan work ethic is absolutely the backbone of society for a lot of americans.

Only for the employee, though, never for the employer. When the employee doesn't work he's a slacking <epithet>, when the employer overworks the employees or pays poorly it's "go find another job". It's religion for the masses, capitalism for the rich.

That's my whole point, and it works the same in Catholic countries, too (at least in Poland).

> is there moral obligation to do your job well instead of let's say watching youtube and doing bare minimum not to get fired?

of course not. I do that all the time and don't think I'm doing something imoral. it's up to the employer to figure out that I could do more tickets. I'm not stupid to say: hey, I finished my tickets, give me more work :))

> Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks.

Look at many of the products we make together. Why would we hide behind laws that protect bad practices and think those same companies take a moral high ground on this issue. It is, and always will be, due in part to fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, about the money.

Funny how Target and Costco are still in business, since they're both public and pay living wages to their employees.

The duty of a business is to keep the business healthy. This whole "profit at any cost" is a fairly new development.

Yeah, Milton Freidman has a lot to answer for.

You're conflating two distinct concepts: 1) what you're obligated to agree to; 2) what you're obligated to do once we've established what you've agreed to.

You're not morally obligated to agree to literally anything, but you are morally obligated to uphold your end of an agreement.

> It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people but not from companies made of these people. Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks.

We expect different behavior from a beehive than we expect from the bees, don't we?

I’ve never thought about it before, so no, in the absence of your prompt I would have expected a beehive to just be N bees being bees.

Obviously you wouldn’t have suggested this if my expectation was correct, but it would’ve been my guess if I didn’t use meta-reasoning about why you might be giving that example.

I don't want to be a bee.

How can I be not wrong? "Entrepreneur" is not an answer.

Presumable the first step would be "philosophy", so that you can determine for yourself what "not wrong" is. Then once you find out, act accordingly.

On the one hand lying about your location to an employer seems sketchy. On the other hand COL adjusted pay seems pretty much equally sketchy.

Employers trying to adjust salaries based upon COL really isn't much different to printer manufacturers software disabling printers and selling them at a cheaper price. It's an attempt at price differentiation - in the opposite direction.

Yes, agreed, that's a sticking point.

I'm objecting to the critique of COL-adjustments on moral grounds: that it is wrong, according to some metric, to pay people differently, based on where they work remotely from. I don't think it is wrong. Maybe impractical, and maybe we agree it's a nuisance, and as workers can force the employers to reject that. But fundamentally fits in with what employment is.

When employers ask employees where they live, they may already know the answer and ask only to indirectly answer others questions.

I would think what is documented and certified when filing taxes will be important, perhaps retroactively. Jobs and new software tools may pop up to help companies better understand their geographically distributed workforce from an accounting perspective. Employees with legal challenges (past or present) have the potential to reduce productivity.

If your employer required you to move to a location with a higher cost of living, would you not expect to be compensated for that?

i.e. is it only downward adjustments for COL that you object to? and, if so, what's the logic in that (other than pure self-interest)?

I think the "requirement" part is a sticking point. If I chose to move from my small house in WV to a condo in Pitt, i would not expect my employer to pay me more because of my choice. If they required me to move to Pitt or I lose my job, I would expect some compensation.

Likewise, if I take a job and get X salary for that job, then move to a cheaper part of town I wouldn't expect to take a pay cut.

I'm not sure that's internally consistent from a logical perspective. Forget the require bit. Say it's an option.

You're employed with a salary of $X at location Y.

Your employer wants you to move to location Z with higher cost-of-living. You can either stay at location Y or move to location Z. You feel it's right that your employer increase your salary because of the higher cost of living if you move to Z.

The company is asking you to make a concession: do the same work, but in a different location.

When you ask to move to a lower-cost area, aren't you asking for the same concession? Why is that concession expected to be gratuitous vs the same concession from the company which is expected to be compensated?

The way I see it, if the company wants you to do something you would not do if not for their asking (i.e. moving) it makes sense to ask for compensation, and the compensation should be commensurate to how onerous what they want is. I would expect a relocation bonus even if moving from a high cost of living area to a low cost of living area, if moving was requested by the company.

On the other hand, if I want to do something because it is convenient for me but does not affect my work in any way (i.e. change where I work from) I would not expect my compensation to change.

If an employer asks an employee to move to a higher cost-of-living area then they're asking the employee to take on extra expense for the benefit of the employer. It's only reasonable that the employer would offer some form of compensation if they want the employee to grant that request.

If an remote-work employee wants to move to a lower cost-of-living area it should make no difference to the employer. They're still getting the same work as before, at the same cost. If the work output was worth that much before then it's still worth that much when performed from a different location.

If an employee chooses to move to a more expensive location, on their own initiative, then that is more like the second scenario than the first, and there is no reason to expect the employer to offer higher compensation to offset the cost-of-living in the new location when there is no particular benefit to the company from the move.

EDIT: fix typo

This is all true, but it's based on the assumption that one already works for a company. I don't know if the same is true for new hires.

New hires generally have their existing compensation as part of their negotiation. So if I'm already living in SF and am negotiating with a new employer for salary, my current high CoL salary gives me leverage to expect higher pay regardless if I'm working remotely. Remote work allows for flexibility but it doesn't erase CoL concerns.

I think the only way that balance changes is within a worker cooperative. It’s odd to me that there aren’t more tech based cooperatives as the entry cost seems so much lower than many other businesses. But I also suppose the opportunity costs may also be higher.

> Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy.

This is true, but there's more to it. Employers typically make a product and they still need to sell it to somebody who is not a poor monkey. Employers also need a safe social environment so that their offices do not get burn by the angry masses, and if the factory takes fire they expect the firefighters to show up. Thus, employers have a real interest in living in a safe world full of happy, well-paid people.

If only they realized this.

Of course they do. That's the whole point of expelling poor people from where they live. Who doesn't seem to know that are the employees, who prefer to trample on each other instead of (gasp!) force a collective negotiation.

> neither is a fundamental human right, and rather a societal contract

This seems like a purely semantic distinction to me. Unless you're religious and believe that humans are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" then everything you're claiming as a 'right' is just some generally-agreed social principle that your ancestors fought hard to establish.

There's a secular right and wrong too. It's not that murder is OK, with a fee of life sentence. It is wrong and should never be done, and backed up by legal penalties.

Not really true, as many people support murder by the state in retaliation for heinous crimes including other murders. Two wrongs do not inherently make a right, and our belief that murder is bad is very much a holdover from our religious roots.

employment is an actual contract, not just social.

right, but what underpins the usual rules of employment is based on what the society wants. Like democracy - it is literally a contract, written in laws. And yet it is also a social contract.

the usual rules of employment is based on what the society wants.

Until "the board" steps in and says 'no', right? That's been my experience. Proclamations and cheerleading about "we're a meritocracy, we act democratically in this company".

Times get tough (like a Global pandemic coming along), employees ask firm questions like "will the executives taking a pay cut like the rest of us?"

Response: "the board said no"

"We're all in this together"; "The board won't approve it."

"Burnout is real! Take steps to monitor it";"The board won't approve a 4 day work week"

etc. I've been in some VERY heated and passionately argued meetings in the last month as a leader, hearing my cohort leaders giving voice and in some cases giving voice myself to concerns and frustrations coming from a workforce that is growing pretty pessimistic watching how much of the internal corporate cheerleading and messaging in practice is at odds with corporate rhetoric that have manifested during our extended org-wide WFH.

Wonder if anyone else has observed the same.

So as I see it, the society leaves most of an employment contract up to the firm-employee combo (where the firm has the upper hand).

But some fundamental things are not up to the company, at least by law: can't discriminate by gender, race, age, veteran status, marital status, having children and so on. In Europe, like it or not, you must give your employees paid holiday leave, sick leave and time off to look after children. If firing people, you must give them proper notice, and cannot fire people for a long list of reasons considered illegal. If doing group redundancies, you must follow proper procedure, aiming to maximise the fairness of the approach.

My favorite recent observation along these lines was our CEO encouraging us to take a week off recently "to avoid burnout". But our PTO grants haven't changed, and so most folks don't have the time to take off.

Of course, this is the same CEO who owns three separate properties, and flew between them in his private jet, to keep his own stress levels down during Covid-19.

Your strategies are those that optimize for jobs a monkey to do: "I need someone to flip this burger or turn this wrench". Paying for cheap labor, you get cheap results. I've seen this time and again across many different industries.

When it comes to knowledge / skill based work, the high end of the spectrum is a multiple of value over the low end. Sometimes that's 1.5x, sometimes it's 10x, sometimes it's 100+x.

It doesn't matter how many scientists you hired if you didn't hire the first one (or one of the first ones) to create a working and marketable COVID vaccine, for example. It doesn't matter how many engineers you hired at 50k/year if you didn't hire the guy for 2 million / year that finally got self-driving cars working.

At a less extreme scale, it doesn't matter how many junior devs you hire to do the work if one senior dev could have done it faster and with less headaches, which happens all the time in tech. On a daily basis, in my experience at multiple tech jobs.

And let's also remember that market salaries selects for talent before the talent is even there; today's smartest students that want a paycheck go for tech careers (and some other fields). If tech stops paying well, those people go into other fields, and you don't even get the option to hire that 10xer because they don't exist. If you stop paying well but your competitors continue to pay top dollar, your competitors will leave you in the dust.

In other fields, these kinds of paradoxes often indicate that a system is broken, or is not applicable.

Perhaps free markets are not really the right system to apply when managing human resources, and especially to distributing the fruits of our collective efforts.

This is a good definition based on how Capitalism works.

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