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Comment by brianfitz | Hacker News Reader

I responded to this in a previous thread, but I think I can simplify it down to the perception versus reality of the change the CEO has enacted.

What many people believe: The CEO has set a minimum compensation bar to help those with market wages below $70k.

What has actually happened: The CEO has determined that going forward, he'd rather hire people with higher market wages and more experience versus paying lower wage workers.

Over the next few years, the company will slowly shift to one with a more experienced workforce. This could pay off, and would not be that unusual. What is different is he drew a specific line in the sand and grandfathered in his hires prior to the change.

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The NYTimes article clearly states that this was motivated by concerns about inequality rather than shifting what kind of people are hiring. If you have a source that contradicts this, it would be great to see it.

"His idea bubbled into reality on Monday afternoon, when Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000."

"“They were walking me through the math of making 40 grand a year,” he said, then describing a surprise rent increase or nagging credit card debt.

“I hear that every single week,” he added. “That just eats at me inside.”

Mr. Price said he wanted to do something to address the issue of inequality, although his proposal “made me really nervous” because he wanted to do it without raising prices for his customers or cutting back on service."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-gravity-...

Sometimes we don't reveal our true motives to The New York Times.

Sure, but without a source this is just baseless cynicism.

HN is supposed to be a place for intelligent discussion: giving unsourced cynicism equal weight as evidence is creating an echo chamber for pseudo-intellectuals to parrot their beliefs.

Or is this baseless trust of a CEO in an interview with the New York Times? Surely what you propose is not a trust model for a robust organism.

Also, because somebody doubted the honesty of a CEO, you decide to talk about how they are a pseudo-intellectual in an echo chamber who parrots their baseless cynicism?

The burden of proof is on the cynic, not the person who is citing sources.

Assume I hire you as a manager in my organization and give you a hiring budget of $200k. You could decide that you want to hire 5 new college grads at $40k per year or 2 senior candidates at $100k each. Now assume that I tell you the minimum salary for any of your hires is $100k. My question to you:

What would be your incentive to hire two college grads you'll need to invest in training versus candidates with years of experience and skills?

You know what's terrible? How very unwilling nearly every company is to hire and train inexperienced workers while simultaneously complaining about not being able to find talent.

Hire and train vs hire talented is a very different strategy. Training requires more resources up front and it comes with a higher risk; it's suitable in some situations, but it certainly isn't for everyone.

Especially true in software, isn't it? I kind of get it, though. We tend to jump ship a lot. So a company isn't willing to invest time and money to train me and then I jump ship a year later to greener pastures.

I get that, but at the same time, if I wasn't treated like a disposable cog, maybe I wouldn't jump ship even if I was actively being poached? Just an idea.

I agree. We went through hundreds of interviewees who didn't pass the coding tests and it really stifled the growth of the company. At the same time, the wage rate being offered was below average because that's what we could afford at the time. I saw some potential in some folks but other team leads felt otherwise. There's a difference between being able to code and not having enough experience in a particular domain to solve the problem in 20 minutes.

My previous company hired and trained college interns and new grads, but they made the mistake assuming some sort of loyalty and didn't bother to give them a significant raise after the first full year. It's crazy, but a developer with 1-2 years experience is worth 20-30% more than one fresh out of college.

Even if he didn't decide it, it would make similar effect: higher salaries would attract more people, and the company would eventually hire better workers (if they aren't complete idiots and are capable of selecting the best of the people applied).

The implication here is that (incapable of selecting the best applicant == complete idiot).

From what I've seen/heard/experienced, hiring is amazingly difficult, and the main reason most professions don't suffer a lot is that there is a large pool of sufficiently capable people that accuracy isn't necessary, and where tech and other profession particularly suffer (and thus expose the problems that are otherwise universal) is that demand far exceeds supply.

I'm hijacking your comment a little, since I agree with your base point that attracting better people would improve their applicant pool and I fully expect they'd see a benefit from this (whether my point is correct or not), but I did want to point out one of my pet areas of concern: We all suck at hiring.

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