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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

Working condition are factored in demand and supply, unless the market is very small. Every position is hire-able if the you pay for it.

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> Every position is hire-able if the you pay for it.

I completely disagree with this. I have a friend who recently turned down a job that would have been a significant pay increase because he didn't like the sound of the working conditions (which would have also included relocation to a new place).

Many of the times that I recall when friends have left their jobs, the reason they left is not necessarily because they weren't being paid enough, but because they became tired of their job, or something changed at their employer that made working there less tolerable.

The reductionist reply to this is that the employment offer didn't meet your friend's threshold for "pays enough". Theoretically, if they offered your friend $1,000,000 USD per year, he would have accepted the job. The economic viability of that pay is a different topic.

I'm not sure about this. I think it easily met the threshold for "pays enough" in an absolute sense, but so often the whole sentiment of "pays enough for what they're asking from me" goes unsaid. And sometimes people value whatever personal thing they might be giving up (like being able to live with their loved ones) more than even a very large amount of money.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who would not take $1M/yr in blood money to work for companies they see as immoral (Google, Facebook, Raytheon, Philip Morris, etc.). Obviously you can find plenty of people who will, but money isn't everything to everyone. Especially people with in-demand skills who can find good jobs elsewhere.

What about $1B/day? Surely people will take jobs at immoral companies for that much money. After a short time, they can simply take ownership of the whole company and run it in a more moral manner.

Nope. As I would always question what immorality I participated in that funded the initial pay.

So you'd rather let immorality continue indefinitely, rather than work for a day (or should I say, "work" for a day), take your billion in pay, and then buy the company? That seems like extremely short-sighted thinking.

Some years ago, when my name and association with amzn were still sort of hot, a wall st. company offered me "7 figures+" to go work for them for a year or so. I lived in Philadelphia at the time, was just starting up a new relationship, was raising my daughter as a stay-at-home parent by choice ... I said no. I think there was no amount of money you could have offered me at that point in time which would have been enough to make me say yes.

To generalize: I think there are situations where no amount of compensation will make the offer worth taking. How common they are ... that's a different story.

I think the argument is that there is a salary at which there would be someone taking the job, assuming the market is large enough. That someone doesn’t need to be specifically you in your situation.

Of course, it’s still conditioned on the mentioned assumption.

That is one of the arguments here, certainly. But there's another also being discussed that concerns whether there is always a salary level high enough to get a particular individual to take any job.

A particular individual? Definitely not. Not everyone can be motivated by money.

But there's no way that a position cannot be filled with high-enough pay, provided the position isn't extremely unsafe or something like that. If you offer $1 billion per day for a job, someone will take it. This doesn't guarantee competency though, or that they'll come back the next day.

I was a manager, at a very cheap company that paid "competitive" wages (i.e., below market).

I had to work quite hard to make the team a pleasure to work at.

It seemed to have worked. When they finally rolled up US engineering, 27 years after I joined, the employee with the least tenure had a decade.

These weren't losers. They were highly experienced C++ image processing pipeline engineers.

Good managers make a difference.

100% this.

People want to be happy. Once a person's financial needs are more-or-less met, it will be very hard to convince them to leave, even for substantially more pay, if they know their new job will make their lives materially worse for ~8h/day.

Curious, what sort of things did you do?

We wrote host (and a bit of embedded) image processing pipeline software. Color correction, distortion correction, demosaicing, etc.

Also, a fair bit of device control stuff.

[EDIT] Oh, I just realized that you meant what kind of manager stuff.

It's a bit complicated, but, TL;DR, I insisted on treating each of my team as an individual. I learned about them, understood their personal priorities, learned what type of coding they were best suited for, got them involved in as much of the lifetime of the project as possible (not a little silo).

I also did not burn them out. I actually did stuff that the company HR people wouldn't like, like let them flex hours, and gave them slack, when they were going through personal stuff.

I also never lied to them; or to my bosses. It's entirely possible to keep secrets, without lying.

This would not work for many teams. I was fortunate, for having the types of employees that I did, and my company basically supported me, and gave me a fair bit of agency.

He factored in the cost right. Different people factors it in differently. And that is how market rate is decided. I refuse to believe that the company can't find another candidate who is willing to take the job if the pay is good.

Nope.

There are bad condition scenarios that would require far more compensation than filling the position delivers value.

"Not worth it" is a very real thing.

Assuming you need some level of competence, if you have sufficiently bad working conditions and wanted to rely solely on pay, then at some point you'd have to pay enough that someone could quickly retire, which means it'd be impossible to find experienced hires.

Average wage of drain cleaner in US is $52,930[1] and for mining machine operator which is among the riskiest job it is $81,741[2], not exactly a quickly retiring wage.

[2]: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/hiring/mining-machine... [1]: https://www.talent.com/salary?job=drain+cleaner

Sure, there's a supply component as you say. If you need some level of competence (i.e. you can't just hire whomever), that strategy isn't going to work.

If someone can make six figures already as an electrical engineer or programmer or something, then even if you offer $1M/yr for your totally crappy job like another poster said, the best you'll get is that they'll do it for 6-12 months and quit. Try to put golden handcuffs on, and they'll just start coasting once they've gotten enough. Try to prevent that (e.g. have a clawback if you fire them), and they won't take the deal because they don't trust you not to screw them.

On a similar note: assuming that a business is run rationally and only hires people it needs for the business to run, eventually the inability to fill the position should lead to the business collapsing.

In this sense, on long-enough time scales, positions that cannot be filled no matter what compensation is offered don't exist. (QED/s)

This is assuming that all the people have equal grounds to negotiate on. There are also seasonal workers, illegal immigrants, slaves, etc

... workers in general in countries without workers' rights...

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