tiggybear

I think the expectation that I have random projects that I'm passionate about to be more disrespectful of my time. I have to compete against an unknown, I don't know what the other people interviewing will be doing for their projects so I have to try and make it more impressive than projects I don't even know about.

It's much less stressful and takes much less time to give me a basic to intermediate coding problem to solve on my own with a pre-set number of days/hours to work on it.

Just find the pharmaceuticals these greedy assholes are dependent on to stay alive, buy up the manufacturing rights, shut down production, and get rid of some of the world's problems. Could probably could get a kickstarter going, I'd donate.

Honestly, I think the socioeconomic status of your parents should be more heavily waited in "diversity" measures than skin color.

it's about power

>What is the reason to not get a salary accordingly to my seniority, expertise and work output?

I've said this many times and will say it again, most people's salaries are more closely aligned with their leverage than their output. Now leverage can be value too, so it's a complicated picture to unpack and I won't get into it too much.

People who are benefitting more so from leverage (which tends to be the people with the best salaries) will HATE this move. Salary transparency would take away their leverage and they would have to focus more on their output to justify their high salaries.

If we had more equality, which would be a result of forcing all salary info to be public, you wouldn't have to worry as much about being robbed.

Depends how you look at it. I think rich people are more likely to look out for each other. You can often see this in the way our laws work, if the middle and lower classes are screwed over it's a huge fight to bring justice. But if rich people are screwed over, justice seems to come at a swift pace.

I think rich people treat rich people better and poor and middle classes tend to treat each other like trash but treat rich people like they are gods.

Your paid based on your leverage not how much your output is worth. If supply of workers with your skills goes up, your leverage to negotiate goes down and so does your wages.

Labor does not get to share in economic growth, they get to split an ever decreasing share of profits. The more people that are available to sell their labor, the more pieces that shrinking pie has to be cut into.

Don't forget about the entitlements of the business owners. Many, many, many believe they are entitled to highly skilled and highly educated workers without paying them enough to afford the shittiest house/condo within an unreasonable commute to the office.

So at some point it isn't the workers that are being unreasonable. And I'm really curious what you think that point is? What defines who is being unreasonable among the business owner or worker? Or is that just dictated by which socioeconomic class you fall into?

Then quit supporting these companies by working for them!

The elite have this country over a barrel, it sucks. All anyone that isn't rich can do is to choose to die before they will work for these companies.

We've got tons of young men and women that sign up to be in the armed forces who happily go die to enrich the already wealthy...and we celebrate them!

So as a society can we start shaming workers that work for Palanatir, Comcast, Pfizer, Equifax? You being on your death-bed and unable to afford food is not an excuse to make the world worse. Die with some fucking integrity.

My friends that are residents in podunk Illinois are making 65k/year. It goes very far there.

Yea, if you break down all their on call hours and shit, it's not very much hourly. But they still make more than most people in their small city.

I don't think his basis for rejecting that premise is fair.

That's like rejecting the premise that certain vegetables taste good to us because they are good for us! Our senses evolved to pick out things that are good for us.

Actually we have known for a long time that most people's salaries are completely decoupled from the value they create. I've never seen anyone claim the opposite except for business owners and middle management.

Everyone wages are more so tied to how much leverage they have. Increasing one's output has never been a great recipe for increasing compensation, however, increasing your leverage (get a new offer, get a government certified monopoloy, lower the supply of people with your skills, etc) will do wonders for your wage!

Seriously, though.

I mean Googlers tend to be highly socially conscious, independent-thinking, and financially secure employees, right?

Seems like a perfect company to test some new tech collective bargaining attempts. What happens if 80% of googlers organize through an app, stand up and say we are all walking out the door if we don't start acting more socially responsible through A, B, and C initiatives.

So many of them were ready to quit over a coworker with differing opinions, I would think many more would be willing to quit over a company having evil actions. After all, actions > opinions.

Do bad engineers not get fired?

Sales can get a percent of the value they generate because they have more leverage than engineers. Plain and simple. They have direct relationships with customers and the value they bring in is easier to show.

This line from the article was pretty gross to read, "Do your engineers like programming? Might they even do a little programming on the side sometimes for fun? Great. I guarantee your sales people never sell enterprise software for fun."

Personally, I don't do that much programming for fun and a lot of the crap I have to do for work I would never do for my own projects. It reads as though they are aware that they can get away with paying engineers less because they like to create valuable things just because. So it's easier to trick them into giving up the valuable things they create for cheaper.

Who cares why someone creates something? No businessman is entitled to someone else's creation because it was created for fun.

I mean, if all these VCs and founders are sooooo passionate about their work, they should't need equity or much of salary, right? It's the same line of thinking, but of course it doesn't apply in those situations for...reasons.

Work for yourself?

Whenever we need to hit consultants for some work, we NEVER make them do technical exercises. We just trust their word.

However, the people that want a steady paycheck are put through much more tedious tasks for less pay.

Had a final interview over Skype once (they were supposed to fly me out - but I guess decided to be cheap at the last minute) and then they he me to do white board coding exercises in a google doc. It was a really sucky way to do an interview.

Was so disappointing because I was really excited about the company until they made me do that.

Why is there no SJW outcry over this like there was for James Damore?

Why are google employees not threatening to quit their jobs over this? Are the progressive employees at Google only progressive when it comes to gender?

Im hesitant to even type this, but I've had similar thoughts.

If a lot of gender is just a construct and our gender roles are rooted in a time when women were taught to be subservient to men, then it's highly possible that a lot of traits that are deemed "feminine" are just traits that were taught to women to make them subservient/less competitive/etc.

So maybe being timid, shy, soft-spoken, and like traits should not be considered "feminine" in a biological sense. They should be considered traits that make you less likely to get what you want and much more likely to be taken advantage of. And those traits were included in the feminine construct of yesterday to make women easier to control.

So maybe it's ok to discriminate against some of those traits when hiring because you aren't discriminating against biological traits but rather learned traits that may or may not make you more productive in certain environments.

In my experience, no. I don't believe quality from a repetitive process has much to do with passion.

I live in SoCal, the land of taco shops, and most are manned by wage slaves. I'm sure most are completely happy doing their job, but passionate? No. That's the owners of the trendy taco shop, not the people actually doing the labor.

I really, truly believe it is immoral to 'not care about money.' I really think all of this crap that employers shovel on us, care about the mission, changing the world, have passion for what you do every day, and take pride in trying to up your output, etc etc etc, is well, CRAP!

In a system that 100% revolves around money, it seems inefficient to heavily prioritize anything besides money.

Can you imagine going to a taco stand and saying to the cashier, "I really need 10 tacos, but before I hire you to make them for me I need to know how passionate you are about making tacos. Also, can you let me know where you see yourself in 5 years, I don't want to hire you to make tacos if you don't think you will be doing this in the future!

Additionally, I don't think the price you listed is fair. How about I give you 80% of what you typically charge, but you will also get the satisfaction that you are helping me change the world! I am building an app to automate business processes and I need to eat, the more resources you give me at a discounted price the more resources I can dump into accomplishing my dream."

I really wish all questions in interviews were illegal other than "can you do this job", "can you prove that you can do this job", and "will you accept this wage to do this job?" Everything else should be illegal and the employment laws should be changed to allow fast firing without detriment to the company.

I don't know why, but when I'm analyzing transactions within capitalism I like to frame them around a taco shop :)

This makes no sense to me.

If an entrepreneur had 20+ clients over 10 years, does that make them unable to find a client that will work for them?

The author likely has a different view of the purpose of employment compared to many.

Last time I was interviewing for jobs I took the lowest of my 3 offers. There were several reasons for this, I will refer to the accepted offer as A and other offers as B and C.

1) Large corporation vs small corporation, offers B and C were for very large corporations (one private and one public) and I took job A because I do not enjoy bureaucracy.

2) Challenge. Offer B was a job I felt I could already do 100% and everything I really wanted to do was offered as a "maybe if things go the right way you'll get to build something cool." Offer C seemed challenging, but was a different direction for my career. Offer A offered as much challenge as I was willing to accept and was very aligned with my career goals.

3) Flexibility. Offer B - no work from home until after a year, but even then it's not guaranteed and at most once a week. Offer C - it seemed like people were only allowed to work from home when there was a state of emergency/snow-closures, etc. Offer A - we are as flexible as possible, we are more concerned with getting the work done.

Also worth noting, I was the youngest person on staff when I was hired at company A. At B and C there were tons of people my age - I think this is why they had a worse work/life balance. I'm single and no kids, but most people I work with are pretty established in that regard. I believe I benefit a lot from the fact that my older coworkers won't accept crappy work/life balance.

4) Connecting with people. I definitely connected with those at company A moreso than those at company B and C. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that at companies B and C people were just going through the motions during the hiring process, so it felt very robotic.

Also, while interviewing at company A it was very acceptable to discuss the displeasures of working at public corporations (I was able to have a very blunt convo with a CxO during my interview - and we commiserated a bit on our non-optimal experiences working at them).

Well what's the justification for the tax break? If it's "well, self-employed people are important so we should just throw money at them" then that's not a very good reason. Why not have them pay 0 taxes?

While I'm personally for single-payer healthcare, I don't see why going off on your own means you should get to pay less in taxes than someone who has to work under a boss. Does it incentivize economic growth? You're not hiring anyone...

Shouldn't this be the case for most people? Increase leverage not output, or more ideally increase them both at the same time.

Without more leverage you may not be able to extract the extra value you create with more output, but without more output you can likely extract more value with more leverage. Though if you're concerned with fairness, increasing both is the way to go.

I think people just realize that employee pay is often never tied to how much value an employee provides, but rather how much leverage an employee has. This gets confusing as employers often view leverage as value, but it's a different type of value compared to volume of output (which is how many employees would define their value).

So it stands to reason that if employees want to "take charge of their own decisions" it is directly tied to the decisions of their co-workers. You can't increase your leverage if your co-workers deleverage themselves/decide they don't care about money.

I don't understand how you don't understand this.

The other day I was thinking about Uber Therapy, get a mini therapy session on the way to your destination!

Hey, you're allowed to declare bankruptcy if things go wrong, not the end of the world!

Now if you were locked into your home loan until you pay it off or die, then you probably have something to really be concerned about.

That's never been the case for any gym I've ever belonged to.