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Comment by vidanay | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'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.

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.

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