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Comment by _hyn3 | Hacker News Reader

> So you saved the company $10k a month and got a $200 meal in gratitude? Awesome.

You seem to be assuming that a $200 meal was the only compensation the person received, and they weren't just getting a nice meal as a little something extra on top of getting paid for doing their job competently and efficiently.

But that's the kind of deal I make when I take a job: I do the work (pretty well most of the time), and I get paid. If I stop doing the work, I stop getting paid. If they stop paying, I stop doing the work. (And bonus, literally, if I get a perk once in a while like a free steak dinner that I wasn't expecting)

It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.

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Yeah? Well, proper rewards make those savings and optimizations more common. Otherwise most people will do the work needed just to have work tomorrow.

It creates a perverse incentive to deliberately do things a more expensive way at the beginning and then be a hero 6 months down the line by refactoring it to be less expensive.

Ha ha, software developers already have this incentive. Viz: "superhero 10x programmer" writing unmaintainable code to provide some desirable features, whose work later turns out to be much less awesome than originally billed.

Of course the truth is more complicated than the sound bite, but still...

Depends. There are people who put in the absolute minimum work they can get away with, and there are people who have pride in their profession.

That's independent of pay scale.

Granted, if you pay way below expectations, you'll lose the professionals over time. But if you pay lavishly no matter what, you get the 2021/2022 big tech hiring cycle instead. Neither one is a great outcome.

A business that relies on people having pride in their profession won't scale. Proper rewards scale.

We demonstrated in 2022 that they don't.

There is no single mechanism that does. Paying well is always a component in attracting talent (see my original comment)

It is not a guarantor of quality/motivation. That's ongoing leadership work. And part of that is maintaining/kindling pride in people's work (and firing the ones who are just there for the money)

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