Lockstep Salaries Are Making a Comeback
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I fail to see any material difference.
Pay isn't public, but titles are. So if you are in the company you can see the landscape and know if you should be in the group of people with the better title. This would mean that although women might not be as inclined to negotiate, it would become clearer to people where themselves and others should be with their titles, so discrepancies between performance and title and pay would be more obvious.
Maybe I've just been on my own too long, but I at least want the allusion that I'm being paid a fair market rate, instead of that which is 'fair' to my co-workers or company.
Those of us who are passionate about what we do, and work very hard, should run from something like this. I'm very open to conversation as to why that's not a good idea.
Buffer is an example of what seems like a cool product and company...but their salary system, IMO, favors Buffer. Not the people building the product. I'd never work for them.
I have met a few academics that would definitely bet their paycheck on academia having much more politics than companies.
Yeah, I agree that I don't think equal pay eliminated politics.
Can't tell if you are being sarcastic.
The most profitable and selective law firms are such because they've built up very strong brand names and client relationships over time. They make an employee's career; an employee doesn't make the firm's success. As a result, the employee doesn't have the negotiating leverage to demand a higher salary, and the firm has a strong incentive to ensure harmony and control costs among its workers.
Law uniquely aligns with lock-step (like consulting) because... 1. the workers are homogenous (i.e. 3+ years of law edu) 2. the tasks are homogenous (similar to consulting) 3. the end-game is identical (i.e. partner-track/shareholder)
In law people take lower salary for partnership just as in startups devs buy into equity. Since equity / partnership for a few is cheaper than labour the company makes money hand over fist.
I don't. I want to be paid way above market rates. "Fair market rates" in some industries is breathtakingly low.
If you're going to have lockstep salaries then you also better have solid onboarding and training programs and an actual promotion process other than "if you aren't bored and stay a while you'll get promoted".
for example:
* screen actors guild * nhlpa - national hockey league players association
Maybe y'all in Silicon Valley can be under the delusion that programmers somehow have a terrible, terrible job, but I live in Michigan, and that delusion is not available to me. I try not to talk about the details of my job too much with our friends... it's... discourteous.
That is not to say that it's all hunky-dory or that if one could get over the step of organizing that a better deal might not be available; see the recent lawsuits over salary collusion, for instance, which is strong evidence there is at least some "better deal" theoretically achievable. I mean exactly what I said in my first paragraph, not as an attempt to slide in another point quietly... it's really difficult to get anything organized under these circumstances.
I would much rather have levels with merit bonuses than have to rely on being a good negotiator. I could be the best programmer in the world sitting next to the worst programmer in the world, but if she negotiates better than I do, she makes more. Or vice versa. And I don't think that's particularly fair.
Have you done anything about this?
To be fair to them, it's not quite so easy though. You can bring underpaid people up to "fair", but you can't really bring overpaid people down, so you still wind up with some unfair (imo) compensation going around.
Incidentally, the last time I got a raise was when I became a manager and became more aware of the exact compensation numbers for the rest of my team. My plan for the next time I get a raise was to ask them to give it to some of my underpaid team members instead, but I'm leaving this company soon, so I won't be able to see if that strategy would work or not.
Negotiation is primarily about your value prop. Workers who understand this ensure they are contributing the most to the bottom line of the company and have the data to back it up.
Changing the color of buttons,etc generally adds far more to the bottom line than making the code run a little bit faster / use less hardware. (obviously there are exceptions, but you can only cut costs to zero where as revenue can grow infinitely)
eg. I bet the invention of the Like button vastly outweighs the invention of HVVM for FB in terms of adding to the bottom line.
Actually, the NBA CBA has that loophole covered. If a veteran player accepts a minimum salary contract, the team only has to pay the minimum salary for a player with 3 years of experience. The league pays the difference, and the difference does not count against the salary cap.
So, the minimum salary scale for veterans is not a disincentive against hiring a veteran who is willing to play for the minimum.
If it takes me 2 hours to do a project and someone else 4, by doing that project they have 2 more hours of experience than me. This is especially important when people do the exact same task every day instead of developing a wide range of skills.
It's really essential to find that great talent that has 15 years of experience in ASP.NET/J2EE.
As to developers, it's really just a question of what the baseline is. If company X pays mid level developers 200k / year then they will have little issue attracting or retaining talent.
If that's really going to happen, executives are going to need to be at least as precise than an assembly programer when setting metrics.
> you have to be super careful about what you measure.
Do you really think you can design metrics so perfect that they won't be gamed? Even if it were possible (I'm pretty sure it isn't), could you do it without undermining cooperative team dynamics that create organizational value? I'm not saying all metrics are bad, but I am saying that turning up the heat with up-or-out is the equivalent of turning the "competition knob" to 11 and that it has a large number of obvious failure modes which make me puzzle over your declaration of its efficacy (unless you meant it in the tautological sense, but that would be silly?).
I'm further puzzled that you brought Enron up as an example of incentives done correctly. Most people think of them as a case-study in runaway incentives and how turning the competition knob to 11 inevitably causes, well, exactly what happened to Enron. When the choices are "cheat or get fired," your company will inevitably fill itself with cheaters. Unless your metrics are perfect, of course, but are you willing to bet your company on it?
Nope. I think it's super super hard. I think a lot of executives will say, oh we'll just add "Up or out" to dial up the competition knob, and then they'll self destruct.
Executives make great decisions all the time. Unfortunately most of those decisions involve "close enough" thinking. Up or out introduces razor sharp edges. Everything appears better than fine, hell it appears fantastic. Until it isn't. and when it isn't it's terminal.
I used assembly specifically to highlight the care that must be taken. I wanted to evoke images of bricking devices. Very few executives have the mindset that if i'm not certain i'm right, then i'm wrong. Often their thinking is squishy at the edges, and that's just the cost of doing business.
I do think if it's possible to do "Up or out" effectively, that corporation would be formidable. If gaming the metric advanced the corporation's goals, that would be amazing. But, super hard. Folks selected for being the smartest guy in the room are most likely to fool themselves into thinking they can handle it.
"Care must be taken" simply doesn't cut it; the comparison to assembly programming is ridiculous. For most devices it's hard to screw up badly enough to brick them and even if you do you are out, what, a few hundred dollars? Also, the feedback is unambiguous and instantaneous. Screw up a big organization and you are out millions or billions with only vague, ambiguous feeback that arrives years after you institute the policy. Even a comparison to rocket science doesn't come close to capturing the difficulty involved because rockets are designed to be separable into subsystems which obey well-characterized physical laws whereas most creative processes can't be broken down so rigorously.
The hypothetical perfect incentive system is like the hypothetical analog computer which gives you infinite accuracy and precision for free: it only appears to be an exciting possibility if you neglect all of the factors that limit its efficacy in practice.
Somewhat less effectively, sales. Car salesmen have horrible reputations, but lots of technical sales are smart, knowledgeable and helpful. I think the long term relationship aspect helps.
Even less effective, but still clearly in use is finance. Insider trading and collusion are tough to prove, and there's not much incentive to keep the system in check. But finance clearly takes advantage of up or out.
Bricking a device is a fine analogy. Sometimes the slippery slope argument is not a fallacy. I think this is one of those times. You seem to agree, we're just not clear on stakes. I think the slippery slope exists in a 2 person startup all the way up to microsoft or google.
Perfect anything is a pipe dream. "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those others that have been tried". If somebody wants to try a social experiment with their investors money, best of luck to them. It's unlikely i'd invest or be interested in working there though.
Therefore, Lockstep salaries are more vulnerable to office politics and employees pretending to achieve, in order to 'look good' and get a better salary.
Instead of negotiating for salary, just negotiate for title, if you have a title that no one else has all the better.
I never knew that this was called "lockstep salary", but it's essentially how all of the unions work.
It hurts many employees because it takes away all your negotiating power.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
Grow the fuck up. If one cannot learn how to effectively communicate, then one will face the consequences.
revealing this could easily lead to having staff hired away once the levels are figured out.