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I agree with all above, and I'll go on a slight tangent.

I dislike the "genius" and "gifted" labels because in the long run they're excuses why you're not one. "It's ok that he got a better salary - he's a genius!". With a "nature" argument, you don't have to think about the "nurture" argument - your actual skill. Then you can give up without being ashamed.

99% of the people you'll actually meet are averages with interests and luck to manifest their skills in the right way. And on the other hand, I've attended local Mensa chapter meetings to see first-hand that "geniuses" can in 99% of cases be just ordinary people with some special interests on which they may or may not capitalize.

So - always value contextual knowledge, skill and effort, and encourage yourself and other people to develop. Because otherwise you just like to play the lottery and complain how the numbers are too random to your liking.

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The labels 'genius' and 'gifted' look convincing until you read about 'accidental genius' - genius acquired after a serious illness or injury.

'genius' is just a particular configuration out of millions or billions in which a brain can form. Brain's real estate is malleable like a city's. So, no reason why one cannot configure it to one's liking. Now, the procedure to do so might not be as easy.

I also think that there is not much difference between an alcoholic (any addiction for that matter) and a workaholic genius. The reason is that both do not know what drives them.

I would like to read more about accidental genius, are there any scientific papers or books you would recommend?

I note that there are many sensational media stories about accidental genius, and zero accidental geniuses who leveraged their genius to become absurdly rich/famous/powerful. I am therefore very skeptical about whether accidental genius really exists. All this is tangential to your point of course.

Salary doesn't reflect skill level or worth to the company. It's at best correlated and shouldn't be part of this discussion.

If we're discussing the capitalist society, the salary does represent in a very literal form your worth to the company, and by consequence probably your skill level too. I'll admit that it's more complicated than that.

What you should not associate with your salary is your own sense of worth or success, because there you're on mentally unstable grounds.

But in my original response I just gave a random example, and you're right that we should not expand the discussion in that direction.

Assuming that the labour market is efficient, which is manifestly not true.

The definition of "worth" in that context is also contingent on factors that have nothing to do with the quality or social value of the skill that salary supposedly represents.

Can you create an exaggerated perception of your skill in others? To what degree does your skill have latent demand vs effective demand? To what degree has your skill been monopsonized? To what degree does your skill apply to solving problems that are currently externalized?

Some simple examples: An amazing social worker could change the lives of dozens if not hundreds of people, however, since those people are broke & homeless, her target demographic is unable to compensate her for what she does (latent demand), and her salary is very meagre and state subsidized. An expert in environmental restoration could save a strip mining conglomerate millions of dollars while improving the health of hundreds of thousands of people in communities downriver, however because that conglomerate chooses to externalize those costs onto those communities, that environmental expert also ends up recieving a meagre state subsidized salary.

Lmao no it doesn't.

Your salary is simply the amount of money you have convinced a company to pay you. You could waste 3 years making 100k a year only to deliver a failed project that resulted in 0 revenue.

No, they're right but I can see how you interpreted it. They said salary is "your worth to the company" -- meaning, the amount of money they're willing to part with to have you, or to keep you from working elsewhere (your "worth" to them).

I think you took it to mean actual calculated dollar-value driven-by-the-eng worth. Even thinking about that, your example is wrong because it ignores expected value (EV) of a project which takes into account risk. For example, if your theoretical project has a 10% chance of generating $5mm/yr and a 90% of completely failing, the EV of the project is $500k/yr - so it's totally worth it to pay an eng $100k/yr to work on it, even if it fails.

No they mean that bullshitters, asslickers, and manipulative but charismatic and confident politics players often get more recognition and salary than the objectively skillful and technically competent, value delivering people.

Sure you can redefine "worth" to include scheming and taking undue credit and deflecting blame, but it's a stretch.

To keep things in track in the spirit of the originating comment, do those people not fit exactly what the commenter was talking about? That they may be average/below average at many things, but they have spent a great deal of time to become well above average at, say, understanding how to manipulate people (which I stress may not be a conscious decision to be a bad person), rather than having, say, expert knowledge of automobile mechanics? I mean it's a shitty thing, but it's not really about "worth" per se, it's about skill, and that skill doesn't have to be ethically positive/neutral

That becomes a tautology. It's well possible that a toxic manipulative person enters a company, destroys a lot of value production and efficiency by pitting people against one another, taking credit for apparent wins and pushes losses to others and into the future and still makes it quite high in promotions. Perhaps at some point they get booted, but they can do a lot of damage, perhaps make skilled people leave rather than enter an uncertain fight when they have high job market value, leaving the more desperate to stay who don't dare to stir things up. Meanwhile others don't feel responsible for helping a cold megacorp so they just want to get out of this with the best CV and social standing and a good reference.

You must interpret "worth" in a tautological manner if you consider the toxic persons behavior valuable. It's an organizational pathology. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's good or teaches us we need to re-evaluate what we consider value.

Cancer can displace useful cells and kill the organism. It doesn't mean that "well in the end it was for the better anyway since cancer cells are more worthy since they ended up winning". That's twisted logic. Also note that megacorp won't die so easily and the effect of one such person may not show up visibly until after they've voluntarily left for a better job to another place to repeat the cycle.

You are making a couple of assumptions here:

1. that someone with what would be considered a morally/ethically negative skill would inevitably damage an organisation, or that an organisation would not want someone with that particular skill.

2. that the cancer analogy is at all useful. A company or org is not a body (it is a legal entity with a specific purpose), and a person with what I've called morally negative skills is not a cancer cell (they are a thinking person with actual goals that may align and actual skills that may be required).

I can pull out innumerable examples from politics or business here. Take the current US incumbent. Or, as I'm from the UK, the current prime minister, or his home secretary. Of course, to an observer who feels they are a cancer (I do!) they are what you describe. And they will always force other people out who would seem to have [call them] positive skills that would make them better suited [from my viewpoint], sure. But none of that means they aren't skilled, or that they do not have (fairly obvious, as I think about it) "worth"

In my experience there is a correlation between income and inability to deliver on projects. Seems some people spend all their time convincing management of there value rather than delivering on their jobs.

In the same way that we should distinguish producing wealth and extracting wealth, we should distinguish worth and ability to signal worth.

No, salary reflects leverage- how hard you are to replace. Not the amount of value you generate. There are lots of ways for a company to figure out ways to make you easier to replace, thereby decreasing your leverage, and the difference between the amount of value you generate, and the amount they have to pay you, is their profit.

Not expecting a non-commie to come in and advocate for the labor theory of value on HN! Kudos to you for having the balls to do it!

In capitalism your salary is by definition less than your value to the company. Additionally, there is a tendency for wages to be reduced to the social minimum.

> In capitalism your salary is by definition less than your value to the company.

No, it's not.

Under ideal market conditions, the price of any good (including labor) is exactly equal to its value to the marginal purchaser (and, also, to the marginal seller.)

> Under ideal market conditions

Human on Human interactions, which are required for the majority of employment, employ game theory to ensure that your pay is below your value. When talking about labor groups/unions you can approach an ideal scenario. Even those will have variation that are manipulated by human to human interaction.

There are no "ideal market conditions". The real conditions are such that, statistically, you will be underpaid in comparison to your value within a company. Sometimes you get lucky and drop into an upside down position, which is overpaid, but that's the best wage slaves can hope for.

> Human on Human interactions, which are required for the majority of employment, employ game theory to ensure that your pay is below your value.

Sure.

But now we're talking about “in practice” not “by definition”.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice – in practice there is” (Yogi Berra)

I do not use the "ideal market conditions" theory to describe what happens in practice, because it has little utility (except in predicting some very constrained trends).

If the company pays you exactly what your labor is worth, how exactly are they supposed to make money?

It represents your cost to the company: something they try to keep down and which gets countered by their need to have you, the scarcity of your position and most importantly your willingness to walk away.

If people got paid their actual worth to the company there probably wouldn't be much profit to go around at the end.

I wouldn't say it's _completely_ separate, in the sense that within a certain field + industry combination, the salaries will be fairly stable, and from there it's a combination of skill, worth to company, being able to market yourself, be visible, and being in a position (financially and otherwise) to be able to bargain effectively for your salary. Along with your networks, looks, etc. With an added heap of some randomness.

All of these add a lot of noise, but there's still an underlying signal there. It's kind of like BMI; at an individual level, it may be highly misleading due to the variance, but at a population level, it's fairly insightful.

> Salary doesn't reflect skill level or worth to the company. It's at best correlated and shouldn't be part of this discussion.

I think that's strong. It will generally reflect perceived value, which is often caused by skill level and worth-based factors.

The genius and gifted 'myth' is also bad for the genius and the gifted themselves. I know a guy, he is clearly gifted, but due to not adding hard work stalled in his PhD.

I've seen way too many people handicap themselves this way. In my experience, someone with completely average gifts in a given area will likely never win a world competition, but putting in repeated and consistent effort can probably be better at that thing than anyone they will encounter in day-to-day life. But it's so much easier to just shrug and say oh well.

> I dislike the "genius" and "gifted" labels because in the long run they're excuses why you're not one.

They’re also excuses when you are one. “Genius here, don’t need to cook or clean.” They’re a point of failure whichever side of the fence is greener.

Most of the exceptionally gifted people I've run into in life have either also been very hard working or have run into a wall when they get to a level where their giftedness is no longer enough for them to get through every situation without also putting in hard work.

>run into a wall when they get to a level where their giftedness is no longer enough for them to get through every situation without also putting in hard work

I have hit this wall and have sometimes wished I was less intelligent but more diligent. I would be healthier and wealthier for sure.

To any intelligent but lazy young man reading this, don’t delay improving your diligence. Seek counseling and coaching if you can. Don’t let your good grades, impressed teachers and peers, and fancy college acceptances convince you otherwise.

But avoid ADHD drugs. They will wreck your body, make you numb, and sap your enthusiasm for life.

This trope is so common that I suspect we're not that smart. High school was just really easy.

It hits people at different points. Could be college, could be grad school, could be work in general, could be a promotion. But it will ultimately catch up to you.

I ask any high schooler that is heading to college if they actually study and how difficult school is for them. Most of the "smart" one tell me their classes are really easy. I tell them to expect to actually have to study and for those easy A's or B's just for showing up to become C's and D's in college.

My buddies kid actually took the advice to heart and has been getting A's and B's in college still which is good to see. I wish someone would have given me that advice and saved me an extra semester.

ADHD drugs have actually done the complete opposite for me, although I was basically the poster boy for ADHD-PI before I was diagnosed. Without counseling and coaching in tandem with the medication I can see how easy it could be for the drugs to do more harm than good.

Is being hardworking a talent or something you learn?

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