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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

> If they find out their co-workers are making more money to do the same job, they are likely to take action.

Here’s the rub: “same job”.

Sure, this is a reasonable attitude to take if it’s genuinely the same job and each worker is creating genuinely the same value.

But everywhere I’ve worked, comparable jobs are defined as graded job families, and it has been very obvious that there is a diverse range of work being done within a grade/job family, with individuals bringing a diverse range of experience, skills and performance.

For two individuals to have the “same job” is a rare thing in knowledge work.

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Often the person doing a more complex or impactful job has a lower wage than a new junior coworker. This can happen with employees that have been at the company long, whose wages have stagnated. When a company hires new people at current market rates, those new people will have a higher wage, for what can be the same or 'easier' job.

Yes, this is what the quitting is about. There would be no reason to quit if someone more valuable than you also earns more; that just makes sense.

This is a reasonable attitude to take if workers are given credit and compensation based on unfair political factors, and in general, factors other than performance or special needs. It does not matter if the worker performs a task different from yours, so long as their wage is unfairly inflated so as to take away your share of the surplus of revenue.

Therefore, it seems beyond risky to say that knowledge work makes roles so vague and uncertain that people cannot know when they are being exploited. The pay gap between the C-suite and the main producers at a knowledge org is just as bad as at an org focused on physical production.

If after a moment's thought you still think that we cannot organize to reduce the pay of executive class because the executives do work different from ours, I encourage you to reflect more deeply on this. It's perfectly reasonable to demand that your bosses and seniors get paid more fairly, even though their job differs from yours.

Work assignment does not equal ability. A phd can be assigned lowly management work, lets say tracking stuff, creating excel sheets and powerpoint presentations. That decision is made by the company and department. Does that mean they should not be compensated for the skills they posess? Surely not.

Lets not even start with the metrics used to gauge someone's results. If they even exist, they are consistently useless.

Ability doesn't equal value to the company. If you have Einstein in and all he does is sweep your floors, you pay him a floor sweeper's wage. You pay for value.

No I agree, but if you hire Einstein for Physics lectures, but for whatever reason let him mop the floors, you still take into account his abilities.

Fellow floor moppers might say "Einstein mops slower and worse then me, I want more than his salary", but that would not attribute abilities and that it is not his first choice to mop floors, the company made that strange decision.

If you hired him for lectures and he doesn't do them, then you fire him. Or if he does them and mops, then maybe he needs a raise!

Ability and opportunity also doesn't equal output - There are plenty of 'high ability' people that will do the bare minimum, and plenty of 'lower ability' people that will push, work hard and deliver more.

Agreed. Yet it seems insanely hard to measure output...

If the bare minimum gets the job done the same as the overachiever grinding as if their life depended on it, fair judgement would rate the output the same, right?

Absolutely, assuming the inputs were the same (ie that you don’t have to chase the ‘bare minimum employee and don’t have to give more support to the ‘grinding’ one).

Personally i’ll take the grinding person any day though, they tend to be much easier to manage.

>You pay for value.

There is a ceiling - the company pays what it thinks it can get away with, you accept pay according to what you can get. It's almost never according to the monetary value you provide.

Capitalism gonna capitalism regardless.

If you're upset that one or more of your peers is earning more than you you'll probably ask for more. Then you'll decide whether or not to walk depending on what happens, where walking means taking your chances in the open market. Same as it ever was.

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