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Comment by Ferret7446 | Hacker News Reader

That was always the "winning game". Only problem is that's a lot of work. The more things change, the more they stay the same; if you want more money, work harder. People who don't want to work harder complain that other people make more money because they either don't understand or are in denial about the amount of work the people they envy put in.

Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.

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The elephant in the room is health insurance. We have a system where even if you have a fairly good income, buying insurance as an individual (or as a small company that isn't buying in a volume high enough for insurance companies to want to give you a discount) means that you'll in all likelihood be paying a lot more for a lot less coverage. The ACA attempted to solve this by having insurance companies offer plans on "public exchanges" by state and then subsidizing the costs, but because most people making good money get insurance through a job with benefits rather than buying it directly, in practice there aren't really any options on the public exchanges calibrated for people with high incomes. (Plus, if you live in a red state, they've likely refused to take the subsidies, which means either the prices are higher or the plans are even more meager based on what the insurance companies expect people without benefits through employment to be able to afford, or both).

> Plus, if you live in a red state, they've likely refused to take the subsidies

No. Individual states can refuse Medicaid expansion, but that does not have any bearing on the health insurance marketplace / premium tax credit ("subsidies"), which states cannot opt out of.

That's no longer true. You can have ICRA etc plans, for the tax benefits.

The truth of the matter is that employers pay a humongous share of the health insurance bill, and if you shop directly, you will pay that 100% on your own.

You do have to put in a little more effort, but as an employer you can build a hybrid plan and contract with certain networks, and lower your bill tremendously.

They're still maybe right. In CA, it's pretty common for the best plan you can buy as an individual to be half as good as whatever your employer offers and to cost twice as much as the combined employee+employer contribution.

How does ICHRA fix that? What's this "contracting with certain networks" you're referring to?

Define work harder. I think it is worth defining as it is ambiguous and could mean one or more of:

1. Longer hours at work

2. Same hours working but adding time learning

3. Ruthless optimization of time at work.

4. Working smarter (which probably means learning new skills).

5. Doing stuff that makes you uncomfortable. E.g. honest feedback, applying 2 levels above current, hand up to lead messy project etc.

Write down 10 of your TODOs that generate income. As per natural law, it's likely that 1-2 of those TODOs will have 80% of the impact while the other 8-9 will have almost no impact. Now here comes the interesting part. You propably already know the 8-9 tasks that have almost no impact, but as per another law, those are also the easiest tasks (checking mails and such). On that list the TODO that feels like the biggest hassle and you least want to do will likely have the biggest impact. Sit down and just do it. Now, without delay. That already makes you more productive than 98% of your colleagues.

> People who don't want to work harder complain that other people make more money because they either don't understand or are in denial about the amount of work the people they envy put in.

I assure you, I have never in my life worked 20 times harder than someone making minimum wage.

No executive has ever worked as hard as the girl pushing carts at your local supermarket or the "Illegal" hand picking the fruit you eat for 12 hours a day for less than minimum wage or the teen mechanic dealing with a "2 hour" warranty job on a vehicle rusted to shit.

There is no such thing as knowledge work that takes that much out of you. Sure, thinking hard and making choices all day will exhaust you, but you won't stop moving at age 55 because your body was literally used up for pennies to make someone else wealthy.

If you fly business class, you are the elite making your wealth by skimming from people doing the real Labor. Your wealth is enabled by a paper and some writing. You contribute nothing.

You can be the hardest working burger flipper at McDonald's, but you are not going to be as financially secure as someone coasting on a FAANG salary.

A burger flipper cannot flip 20x the burgers. There isn't really any way to produce more output flipping burgers. Even if you could, if there isn't a queue of people waiting to collect their orders, there isn't any point in producing more blindly.

The person responsible for designing the process that thousands of franchises use probably does make a lot of money.

Work harder on the right things. Digging holes in your backyard with a shovel is hard work but nobody is going to pay you for it.

I bet if you could make it interesting, YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/Whatever could make it possible to get paid to dig holes in your backyard.

You could argue that the value is in the entertaining filming/acting/story telling etc, but if the videos are about digging holes then I think it's valid to say someone is paying you to dig holes.

Yeah i hate what you are suggesting, because soon there are uninteresting people chasing every subject trying to convert it into a career. Just leave some things alone ok and quit strangling my hobby with both hands

I don't pay my employees based on inputs like how hard they work, I pay based on outputs.

Any other system of incentives would be insane.

Things are different if you're e.g. a lawyer and have billable hours.

I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs. For me it's almost impossible to get it objectively right.

Maybe this doesn't apply to your case, but how would you measure outputs of say product development, or any data related project. Lot's of things don't have a good measure of output before the thing is done. Maybe your product / analysis improves profitability by 10x or maybe it was a flop and lost money.

Tangential, but I'm also seeing the quality of measures going down, with AI it seems that the number of [emails|code|analysis] produced is again a good measure.

> I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs.

Measuring outputs or inputs (hard work) is always hard. Did someone get the thing that was asked done both quickly and correctly? Do they do this consistently?

I also find inputs harder to measure because someone could be in the office 12 hours/day, but on Facebook the whole time. They could also just spin their wheels doing 'fake' work.

I spend some time going through what programmers wrote over the past years and many of them were rewarded for getting things done quickly with no complaints.. The more diligent ones probably didn't last since they got things done correctly which takes a lot more time and thought.

It's why I said quickly and correctly. I think it's a cop out to say someone was slow because they were building it correctly. Famously, the old space shuttle software was developed very slowly because it had to be 100% correct at all times. Most software does not need that level of correctness. Part of a SE's job is to understand that.

I pay a lot of attention when someone claims to have solved a problem I suspect to be NP-hard. There are a lot of possible explanations, for example they may have an incorrect measurement function or they may have chosen a simpler related problem that isn't really NP-hard, or both.

Fast, quality, cheap.

Pick two.

You don't have to pick two exclusively. They are all connected sliding scales. Part of engineering is figuring out where the slides need to be.

Plenty of things are made fast, at high quality, and cheaply.

Some things just aren't very hard to make.

> I don't pay my employees based on inputs like how hard they work, I pay based on outputs.

It's crazy how many times I have to explain this to people, and it's usually when they ask me for a raise.

In software engineering it isn’t necessarily the winning game. FAANG salary vs self employed isn’t that a case of “work hard and it’ll come”.

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