Salary, from an employee's perspective

I agree with you, and I don't. With the way many companies seem to treat salary, I'd certainly rather work hourly, but that's really not the way salary is supposed to work (or does where I work).

When your hourly, if you start feeling sick in the middle of the afternoon go home, you have to put it on your timecard and it shows on your paycheck. Similarly, if shit hits the fan and you pull an extra 20 hours cleaning it up, you have to put it on your timecard and it shows on your paycheck. Seems fair right? And it is. But both you and your employer are spending a fair amount of effort on simply making sure your time (not work) is accounted for correctly.

Salary done right is when both you and your employer agree to skip the bean-counting. They have around, say, 40 hours worth of work they'd like to hire you to do, and they'd like to pay you 'x' much to do it. Now when it'd a lovely spring day and you decide to take an afternoon walk with your significant other, eh you still get paid the same. All caught up and don't feel like being at the office anymore? Eh take off. Whose counting? At the same time when there's a fire in the server room and you all pull all nighters bringing things back up, no one needs to waste time figuring exactly how much time you spent.

The problem with the way so many companies are doing salary currently is that the company is very happy not to count the extra hours you spend at work, but insist on an exact account of the time you didn't. Hell, they usually even go so far as to give you an allotment of time your allowed to not spend at the office. That double standard is the problem with most salaries, not the concept of salary itself.

I think your take on how I would have used Github is a bit misunderstood. I meant more that I could see if this person was contributing to other projects, or just generally what sorts of projects they worked on. Certainly, pay-per-LOC is not even remotely intelligent. And not everything has to scale.

I think the other problem that your hourly pay situation doesn't address (aside from what Volundr mentioned), is that it robs the person of their ability to actually get better at what they do by substituting valuable expansion time with labor time. Most people don't grow in their jobs alone. Most companies don't want their employees to grow. Learning, trying, failing, and mastering take time that companies don't want to spend money on. This is why passion time is so critical: It lets the employee do new things, and new things make them better and smarter.

If I had never taken my off-work time to do my own iOS apps, I would never have learned native iOS development, seeing as my company wouldn't have lost out 3 or so months on teaching me. My passion for software is the only thing that made me better, and the company got a lot of value from it as I brought new coding principals and patterns along with me that I applied to make my work software better as an indirect result, but there's no structures in place to make sure I don't become disenchanted with my employer as I grow beyond it.

I hope it didn't come off that way. You shouldn't be getting paid less, but instead, at bare minimum and equitable amount, and additional if you're the kind of employee who is constantly pushing.