>"You are a cog in our machine. We do not care for you. We only care for your work. We will pay you insofar as you can execute on our vision. Further, you will be paid according to how hard it is to replace you. If you can be replaced by someone who executes significantly better, relative to your pay, we will tell you to leave."

Isn't this the ideal of wage labor and the reality of 98% of jobs? I've never even suspected that my corporate employer cares about me as a person aside from how I produce, and have never suspected that I'm being paid by them for any other reason that it would cost them a lot more than they pay me to find somebody to replace me. I don't mean to say I haven't had great friendships and working relationships with management, but to the business, I'm a line item. When I notice a business making decisions contrary to the bottom line, I suspect corruption, not corporate affection.

They're a cog in my machine, too. I can only depend on that cog if it behaves rationally.

I agree it's the reality for a majority if not the super majority of jobs. I also think it could be the ideal of hourly wage labor: which is to say that the company wants nothing more than what they can motivate you to do with money, and that you want nothing more from the company than their money.

Looking back, I see I made my comment in the context of Silicon Valley behemoths and startups: companies that can both pretend to, and potentially change some fundamental way of doing things.

I think the difference in my mind between "creative" companies and normal ones is the "potential", achievements outside of a strictly defined expectations of contract, for both the business and the employee. Maybe a great insight, a new tool... anything that greatly benefits both the business and the employee, especially if the employee uses the product(s) and believes in the mission.

When you take away that potential (by saying employees are just cogs in a machine), you might take with it the creative spark that these hopeful companies ostensibly rely on. In my mind, that "potential" is the real joy of a job, which is my reason for the (slightly snarky) comment that "cog in the machine" is only acceptable "if the company requires joylessness to turn a profit". If I could, I would edit that post to be more clear/to take into account businesses which do not require any specialness.

At least for my central point, "the more dishonest, the worst the culture"... I believe that stands, especially in circumstances where a person is (somehow) manufacturing toilet paper and their supervisor is telling them they are (somehow) on their way to curing cancer.

> If I could, I would edit that post to be more clear/to take into account businesses which do not require any specialness.

That I'm creative (amongst other things) is why they pay me well. My successful experiments have a record of adding value well above my pay even if aggregated with my many unsuccessful experiments, although I try my best not to keep it that way for long. I'm not sure I've had any technical job with completely "strictly defined expectations of contract", I think that's a red herring. It sounds nice that the most creative and innovative projects/companies give less of a shit about the bottom line; I personally think that the bottom line is the fuel for creativity (didn't have much money when I was younger.) Anybody can sell your product with unlimited money to spill, but doing it with the best profit margin possible is creativity.

I like to think I'm a special snowflake...

In my experience, most employers think this way, but they don't like to acknowledge it. I've had bosses that talk a lot about "win-win scenarios" and how we're all working together to this common goal, all the while creating a very worker-hostile environment where people are pushed to work much more than they feel comfortable with, with regular emails praising the workaholic who works so much he never gets to see his kids. The unspoken message is, this is what we expect of everyone.

These same people get profoundly uncomfortable if you respond to their platitudes with reality. They prefer to keep up this illusion of cooperation, because it makes them feel better.

I've said this before, but how I wish software companies based on the cooperative model[1] were more of a thing. It's not healthy for people to be treated like worker bees. Corporations should be a collaborative effort, and the wealth and decision-making should be distributed proportionally.

In a way, the structure of our corporations both reflects and influences our society. A recent study has shown that the US is now more of an oligarchy than a representative democracy. Would we be happier and better off if "working for" was replaced by "working with"?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

We are in the very, very early stages, but my startup[1] is working on an open source toolkit for building cooperative companies.

[1]: https://infinite.ai

That is awesome! I'll be keeping an eye on this.

I was with you until that employees are deserving of the proportional wealth. The people who took the risk to found the company are deserving of that.

I meant proportional to their participation. Naturally, the founders should have more of a stake, but certainly not 1000x the stake of Joe Engineer.

Bit offtopic perhaps, but Netflix CEO pay is something like 15-25 times the salary of Joe Engineer.

Worth noting, but the 1000x figure that gets bandied about so often when referring to CEO pay is typically limited only to the Fortune 50 or so, and is in no way the mean pay for the top guy. S&P 500 companies lower the average to less than 400x worker pay, and most businesses have a much smaller gap than that, and across all companies, average CEO pay is something like $157k.

I guess I'm thinking of the traditional startup IPO, where the first handful of employees get "fuck you money" while everyone else only gets a small piece of the pie (despite possibly doing just as much work).

But also, more importantly, people outside the C-level rarely get a say in how the company gets run.

That's kind of a different thing altogether though, really. The "fuck you money" generally comes only in the case of a liquidity event, such as IPO, sale, etc.

To my ear, there are compelling arguments both ways. Assuming a large company, employees 1-x should probably enjoy some of that fuck you money, but clearly, at some point there's a falloff. If my company sold tomorrow, I would not have in any way been involved in its sale. Same with an IPO. Our company has been around for years, sells expensive software, has millions in revenue, and I honestly couldn't tell you whether or not we've turned a profit yet. Assuming we have, it was probably done only last year, which meant that somebody was footing the bills of a multi million dollar company for a decade or so, and that person wasn't me. If somebody was spending millions on an idea that took a decade to pay off, then absolutely they deserve more money in a liquidity event than I do, and I'd be a fool to begrudge them that.

That said, not all companies are created equally, and many get to market / revenue / profitability at different timetables with different employee counts, so YMMV. That said, the notion of 'fair' is so abstract in this scenario then I think it's safe to assume that it is universally convoluted. Hard to pin down exactly what is or isn't fair without internal knowledge I don't have.

It's not about the amount of effort that you've contributed, it's about the amount of risk you've taken on. The larger the company gets, the less likely it is in general to fail. So of course those who join sooner get more money - they took on far more risk than the guy who joined the month before the liquidity event.

As you up the chain salaries are a multiple while stock options go up by orders of magnitude.

In the US CEO/lowest paid worker is ~10x. Meanwhile in Denmark Norway is is on average something like 4x.

I think that is economic nonsense. Risk taking does not merit any rewards otherwise it would be a sane strategy to just maximize the risk of any endeavor.

Despite what some might consider common wisdom, capital and labor are equally valuable. A company will get nowhere without its workers to move it there, and it can't get started without somebody taking a financial risk.

Netflix does this far more than most. They're very clear that they're paying you to perform and that if you don't you will be kicked out ASAP.

You might prefer a company filled with B-players doing B-work for B-pay, but don't hold it against Netflix that they're honest about what they expect.

Which just translates, as many of these Netflix threads do, to constant terror that you're going to be out of a job. I'll take my game, A or B, somewhere else, thanks.

Good point on the terror. On the individual level, A/B/C players is your average self-justifying dichotomy: I'm better than those people because I work hard, I work smart etc. Yet on the system level, it's the perfect rationalization for companies too lazy to hire correctly and too impotent to own up to mistakes.

"Why couldn't these folks go above and beyond like these other teams? It must be that they are inherently not good enough. Fire them and get a new team in."

I would even go so far to say that it's the CEO's and senior management, not the employees, who push this myth the most. In somehow all formulations I've seen, the persons's boss, who is amazing (regardless of context), and her or his bosses who are also amazing, are the judges of all performers in the company. Because the system is perfect or filled with perfect people (read: the top part is), any point of failure must be the employee, by process of elimination.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch (the

Nobody good enough to get hired at Netflix is "terrified" that they'll be unemployed for longer than a week, come on.

I think the problem is more about sustainable effort.

If there was a /HN/bestof -- I'd submit this.

Might be a little egotistical for me to say, but I do like it when my writing is appreciated.

Thanks!

Read some stuff from Michael O. Church

I'd rather not.