Comment by vladimirralev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vladimirralev | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are wrong. The employer has accountants, lawyers, HR, business. You are not equally-equipped parties. You can't really afford to have your own contract lawyer, labor lawyer, IP lawyer, accountant, financial advisor and salary market researcher. You have to trust the company to do these things for you. Even when something is in writing there are 100s of subtle ways to screw you over, especially with shares or options. Sometimes companies will not share any information about the value you are bringing in. There is a big information asymmetry between you and the employer, so you just have to trust them to distribute the payouts fairly. Often the pay distribution is unknown and legally confidential. So even if you try to make an argument with some stubborn manager that you are severely underpaid you can't start throwing teammates under the bus for disclosing their salaries. It's a toxic environment to have to continuously confront your management to do their job properly. Otherwise you are losing money because of their incompetence. Not to mention the losses in terms of stress/health when you are forced to actively confront your management.

The other big aspect of the same issue is the implied responsibility - for example when you are consulting for a third party. Lets say you are paid $10 per hour while your company charges the customer $300 per hour and the customer expects a solid $300 per hour delivery. Now that puts you in a weird situation, because the context of responsibility and ownership is very different. It affects how you think about the code. It's like the difference between life-support critical software and useless departmental tools. It is up to your company to define the scope of responsibility. You can't force it, you don't have the business input to figure out what they need. May be they just need a cheap and stupid code monkey.

You're exactly missing my point.

Your comment is written from the perspective of someone who feels like the inferior party in the relationship. You're not. You always have the ability to say 'no' and walk away from a situation. Are you confused by your compensation? Request full explanation until you're no longer confused and understand your risks. (Understanding risk and reward and making judgments in the face of uncertainy is an art, not a science. Nothing is without risk.) If you don't get that explanation or your spidey sense tingles, saying they might be bullshitting: walk. If you're not sure what you're selling your time for, don't. You're selling tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of your time. Would you sell a house or car if you weren't absolutely sure what you were getting return?

Don't be a dick, just be a peer. And confident. If you're a good person doing quality work, you're valuable. Very few companies run with no employees. Don't mistreat. Don't be mistreated.

>Your comment is written from the perspective of someone who feels like the inferior party in the relationship. You're not. You always have the ability to say 'no' and walk away from a situation.

Yes, except if you need food and shelter, and have been searching for a job for like 4-5 months (or longer) without much luck...

Lots of Americans tend to think like they all are millionaires (or are soon to be) when discussing business and taxation issues, whereas it's a country with higher inequality than most of the western world, tons of royally fucked up people, and most of them will stay that way for all their lives (plus, far more of them will be impoverished and drop out of middle-class than turn from middle class into millionaires).

A vocal portion of the HN community seem to be SV developers whose biggest problem is "How do I get these recruiters to stop calling me?"

Needless to say, these people are in a much more powerful negotiating position than, say, the 9.5% of Nevada residents who are unemployed [1]. And even the Nevada residents are better off than the 20% of people worldwide living on less than the PPP equivalent of $1.25 per day [2].

I think the posters in this thread should state which of those audiences they're writing for.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100974182 [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17312819

I think you are glossing over if not the asymetry in information, than the assymetry in the opportunity cost. 'Walking away', as you put it. Testing the market in this way is stigmatized by future employers (collusively, perhaps) on the one hand. On the other hand, companie have deeper pockets to cushion lumpy productivity/profits. The issues and dynamics are a lot different for a higher level position, where an executive, for example can trade off his reputation to find a new job, perhaps has a sizeabel net worth in any event, and has the contacts and hierachical access to information in the company to no only understand ways of adding value but vulnerabilities of the company as well. This is why you see golder parachutes and etc. These people are <leaving> so they will no longer be productive. You are paying them to go away, quietly, without damaging anything on the way out.

Walking away is easy provided you already have a job. This is why it is a bad idea to wait until you don't have a job before looking for the next one. If you ever do have that problem, take what you can get and then start looking for something better straight away.

Excellent point.

But I still have the feeling that simply asking for explanations puts you at risk. Being annoying is a risk. They know that they are not giving you the information you need to do your own valuation. A common tactic from managers is to maintain ambiguity, only to be resolved later against your interest. Many companies have an established scheme with plausible deniability by design. Even if they explain everything to you, you might not be qualified to understand it. I've seen a founder tell me that I don't have to pay for my stock options to become stock, a mistake that is worth $100K+ and I wouldn't have known that if I didn't speak with a financial advisor.

You just can't have the private company information, competence and time to double check everything your management is saying and supposed to do for you. It's just trust in the guy who is in position of power.

"Don't mistreat. Don't be mistreated."

Well, tell that to Ryanair. They seem to be doing quite fine mistreating their employees [1]. I find it difficult to understand why people are working for them, but there must be reasons why.

You're suggesting only one option, and that option is to walk away. True, you can do that. In fact that is the ONLY thing you can do. From employer perspective, you're just a resource. Which is relatively easy to replace if there's enough money in their pockets.

Even the "walk away" solution is dictated by the employer, because the reality is that they effectively say "agree to our terms or p*ss off". So walking away is you picking the option #2.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/10063697/Ryanai...

If you can be easily replaced by a cheaper "resource", you're clearly not as valuable as you think. Your "walking away" obviously benefits both parties (you're not mistreated, employer gets things done cheaper) -- everybody's better off for it. Where's the problem? Do you feel entitled to that job?

I find it amazing people will fight the laws of supply and demand tooth and nail, although it's probably the most solid and universal part of economics (and nature).

You need to re-read the gp comment. Knowing what you're worth is different than what companies value your worth. A company may undervalue or overvalue your work - the responsibility is on you to determine if you're getting screwed or not - it isn't dependent on what others are getting.

I think I understand correctly. What I was trying to say is that if I am able to determine that I am being screwed over, this is management's fault and not my fault. It's management's responsibility to fix it. I shouldn't have to hire salary researchers and lawyers with my own money to create a report that I can use as an argument for my manager to consider it. And definitely must not put me in conflicting position with management over it. Otherwise I'd have to leave and nobody wins.

And what the article and several commenters are saying is that it absolutely is your responsibility. Why? Because you can control your own actions, you can't control management's. Management isn't obligated to pay you anything, and you aren't obligated to work for them. They choose to pay you something and you choose to work for them; you also choose how much to work for them, and your choice might relate to how much they choose to pay you (and if they continue to choose to pay you).

Leaving is absolutely the right choice if the amount they're willing to pay you is wildly out of whack with the effort you're putting in and value you're creating, because it frees your time up to work for somebody else who will value you (and pay you) more. Everybody wins.

There are some very subtle aspects in this discussion and we are talking about the same from different angles. I absolutely agree with everything you are saying.

But this is not the case I am discussing. If you are able to prove objectively that you are not getting a fair share of the value you bring and management doesn't fix it, then everybody loses. You lose what you could have gotten, and they lose because now they have a resentful and demotivated employee. You don't even have to leave or you can't leave until you find another job. It's not that hard for an employee to do the bare minimum and not get fired or demoted.

Well then, you can continue to be controlled economically by your employers, because nobody in the market --- nobody --- is putting your own individual interests before those of the company, except for you.

Personally, I wouldn't want an employer going through lots of effort to figure out what's best for me. I think they'd do a crappy job of it.

I've been a consultant for a while now and I have this conversation every week or so. What you said goes both ways, nobody has your company's best interest over their personal interest. So you better have my best interest in mind if you want me to have your best interest in mind. It's only fair :)

The employer doesn't have to figure out what's best for you. What's best for them is also best for you. Like almost everybody else, I am driven by respect. If the company measures performance based on profit, so do I. If it's a non-profit, so am I. If you give me what you value most I will do the same. Can't go wrong with that.

This is largely true, but it is why it is better to negotiate with the would-be employer with you as the supplier and them as the customer. In other words, it is better to be self-employed and negotiate your own rates on that basis.

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