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Comment by regentbowerbird | Hacker News Reader

You make very good points and I personally agree with you fundamentally, however your example is a bit exaggerated: there are very few jobs where just "working harder" will lead to a 10× jump in compensation. Making 600K$pa would put someone in the top 1% of earners in the US, obviously not something generalizable to the entire population.

I do agree one must stay on the lookout for opportunities where working harder is rewarded, and also that one should try finding some joy in work. But also that one must stay realistic in their expectations, and that much joy is to be found outside of work (relationships, hobbies, discovery, leisure, etc).

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My first job out of college was at a telco making $72k / year.

I worked my tail off. Worked late. Never missed deadlines. Signed on after hours. Learned a lot. Followed process. Took lots of pride in my work.

And I got a lot better at what I do.

When 2 members of my 3 person team departed and all of the work fell to me, I asked for a raise to $90k. Seemed reasonable to me taking on the work of 3 people given my track record.

I was told that wasn’t possible. So I interviewed elsewhere with my updated resume and turned in my notice. Within a day of turning in my notice I got a counter offer.

Apparently, one of the corporate policies at this telco was to only offer significant raises for retention purposes if the employee had another offer. Which was nuts but apparently the only way to find out if you were valued was to interview elsewhere.

At that point, I was so annoyed that I decided to leave anyway…to another job where I worked long hours and was on call. But I learned a lot.

The hard work paid off and I haven’t actually had to interview for a job in about 15 years.

This is what I think about when I hear people talk about not putting in the extra time. If I’d done that, done only the job exactly according to minimum expectations I would have collected a paycheck…and probably been stuck in the same place.

>Apparently, one of the corporate policies at this telco was to only offer significant raises for retention purposes if the employee had another offer.

Yes, and I'm not sure if I feel completely negative about it. On the one hand, just pay up if the value is there, don't play games, right? On the other, the employer is "calling your bluff" about it being, more or less, about money alone. In the end, the policy works, I think.

Yep. The older I get, the more I understand it too.

I consider it a red flag when employers take antagonistic positions, such as “calling my bluff”.

That shows a clear level of disrespect and willingness to play games with my life — and is the sort of outcome one should expect if you allow departments like HR to engage in dark triad behaviors inside the company.

HR treating employees like cattle to exploit is a Day 2 failure mode.

Sure. It’s also really common.

Sure — and literally flies your planes into the ground.

Ask Boeing.

Sure - and do you think that means it doesn’t exist after that, or will cease existing at any point in the future regardless of how much we want it to?

Sure — we see that behavior routinely destroy companies who engage in it, while the opposite causes corporate growth.

This creates a constant flux of new companies engaging in healthy partnership with their employees and old companies cycling back to rekindle growth — and which removes the ones who engage in that problematic behavior, persistently.

So that behavior always brings about its own cessation.

See my point about “Day 2”.

Engaging in Day 2 policy is a choice; working with Day 2 companies is a choice.

There’s nothing at all which requires this phenomenon, other than people make lame excuses as if dark triad behavior is some unavoidable law of physics.

Sure - except plenty of companies and gov’ts are steady state this way and don’t end up destroyed by it. At least any faster than any other companies/gov’ts seem to be.

You’re ’just world’ hypothesis’ing all over the place here.

I’m not saying it’s good behavior. It’s far more widespread than you’re giving it credit for, and it has far less connection to bad results than you are giving it credit for.

Often, the ‘good’ companies just paper over it better, but it’s still the same policy - but fewer folks end up seeing it so directly.

How else can an employer decide who to give a raise to or not? What prevents everyone from asking for a raise?

I think the employer-employee relationship, especially when it comes to salary, is inherently antagonistic because our interests are basically 100% oppositely aligned. An employee always wants to be paid more; an employer always wants to pay less.

> an employer wants to pay less

Your dark triad mentality is showing through:

An employer doesn’t have an inherent reason to pay less — they have an inherent reason to increase value of the company.

That people conflate the two goals of the company is purely a result of unchecked dark triad thinking in HR — and the preference of exploitation over growth.

This is a Day 2 failure mode because the substitution of your real goal (“make more money”) for a dark triad goal (“maximally exploit my workers”) leads to self-defeating behavior on the primary goal: you make less money by exploiting your workers.

However, as it satisfies the desire to abuse from unhealthy people, we tend towards that defective behavior when dark triad behavior isn’t regulated appropriately.

I wouldn't necessarily say that wanting to pay an employee less is "exploitive," just as I wouldn't label an employee's desire to make more an attempt to exploit the company either. I'm just saying that those are opposing goals that are going to make it difficult to build a fully aligned relationship between the two parties.

Not sure I really understand how this position relates to the Dark Triad concept. I thought that these days DT was really only bandied about by people in the pick-up community with something to sell to frustrated men.

I would call attempting to earn more than a fair share of the value you create “exploiting the company”. You’re the one creating a false impression by insisting that those are the only goals one could have in this situation:

You can interact in modalities besides trying to maximally exploit your partner — and game theoretically, those cooperative modalities are dominant.

The mistake you’re making, due to viewing the world through a Machiavellian lens, is supposing that’s the only or even optimal strategy — when empirically and theoretically it’s not.

That you closed out with a lame insult (“muh incels!”) shows perhaps my comment struck closer to home than you’re comfortable with.

I have worked for two big American companies (global headcount ~300-400k) and two big companies from Europe (global headcount ~50-70k - hard to find any bigger that have their HQ here).

These "dark triad" corporate failure modes you describe I've always suspected are a distinctly US-American phenomenon and I have always avoided companies headquartered in the US because of this. We do have exploitative companies founded here as well of course but their practices pale in comparison to what I've seen people go through at the American counterparts.

And this is why pay transparency is a legal right, as part of discussing working conditions with colleagues.

Then again, I think the next step to move towards is to recognize that we techies are going towards "factory code-work", and to respond with unionization appropriately. And unions arent just for getting more money, but also demand for payment of overtime, sane vacation policies, remote work, and more.

And yes, I'm an 8-n-skate. Want me longer? Fuckyoupayme. I dont work for free.

Never. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Accept a counter. Never. Why?

If they didn't recognize your value before and they only recognize it when you threaten to depart, they aren't respecting you any more w/the counter; they're just using that to stave off the impending issues that arise and will likely take any future opportunity to recoup that 'loss'.

I actively advocate, in advance, for my team. They have clear expectations on what the next step in their career w/us is and have a general idea of what to expect salary wise when they reach it. If they're looking, it means that I have failed them in my #1 core competency and priority as a leader to ensure they are getting what they need out of their day to day and I would prefer they openly communicate with me in advance of their feeling a need to look.

If you are not getting this out of your current leadership, find a new job where your leader will be someone will be that advocate for you. Very often, people are a company's most valuable asset and they should work hard to retain that asset without rigamarole.

I wish a had a manager like you, even just once in my life.

sighs deeply

Keep up the good fight. I hope your people appreciate you.

They claim to like me and, being that several of them have worked with me at multiple companies over a 15 year span and at least one other has requested I take them with me in the future, I would probably say they appreciate my style.

That said, to respond to another commenter, policy can certainly cause friction with this sort of methodology and I have definitely run into it in the past. But, leaders exist to navigate company politics so their direct reports have more time to deal with the work they do; any friction encountered that is insurmountable points to deeper organizational issues and can (and in my case does) necessitate my moving somewhere that allows me the autonomy to build strong teams and develop high performing teams.

It doesn’t harm to negotiate. Yes, there was clearly a failure, but it could have been a middle management or HR level fail. Or a poor policy.

I think the first thing I struggle with in this worldview is that companies don't think about roles as "how much value" they bring to the business. If they did, most ICs would be paid far more highly. But since employees negotiate as individuals, and companies negotiate as huge orgs (or cartels of orgs a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...), an employer is able to pay you just enough so that you won't leave.

Without a competing offer, how can they be sure that you'll actually leave? Showing them that you can forces their hand. But you're still extremely unlikely to be receiving anywhere close to your supposed "value" to the business, and unfortunately mere managers can't really change such a fundamental misalignment.

Yeah. You don't get paid for hard work, you get paid for experience applied to lucrative problems.

IMO, you don't get paid for experience either. You get paid the minimum amount your employer thinks they can get away with without you leaving, capped at some fraction of the value you add,(less overheads, risks, etc).

Actually you get paid and promoted for making your vp and csuite earn brownie points.

Thats where the experience comes in

...which is the "applied to lucrative problems" part. VPs and C-suites get brownie points by making money.

Not always. It could be for starting new lines of business or just plan political wrangling. May even be something that loses the company money.

It's common for performance based RSU grants to stack up to this sort of total comp over a few years.

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