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A comment on Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Filed by Brother. Parent comment

Re:Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Fi... by komali2 on Monday July 11, 2016 @12:28PM (#12072175)
What boggles my mind is that this is just one of many cases of provable long-term return. It's trickier for HR type investments (measuring the ROI on increases wages, or putting a pool table in the break room), but another example is most governments' refusal to believe that education has a massive ROI. Despite the fact that we have economic scientists repeatedly demonstrating with overwhelming evidence that these types of long-term investments have massive ROI, people can't overcome their natural short sightedness.
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Re:Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Fi... by caseysoftware on Monday July 11, 2016 @12:51PM (#12072334)
> another example is most governments' refusal to believe that education has a massive ROI

Any education or education in specific fields or courses of study?

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Re:Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Fi... by mjevans on Monday July 11, 2016 @01:36PM (#12072752)
As far as ANY education goes, successfully providing children with a means of being a productive member of society provides them with 'things to loose' and thus they are far less likely to be a 'non-productive' as either a flat resource drain, or worse, as someone forced to find methods of employment that drain resources from others (such as crime).

I suspect you'd get the most RoI on education related to what the economy needed at the time. However if the market is compensating employees fairly* then students will likely pick what enjoy doing which also best fits the needs of the economy (as dictated by the benefits of the job).

*For example, when you have to hire employees from out of nation requiring that they make 2X or more of the median pay for the job in that area, and also allowing this valued employee to freely take any other similar offer (2X median pay in the area of the job) as well as have a fast track to citizenship.

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Re:Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Fi... by st3v3r on Monday July 11, 2016 @02:42PM (#12073252)
"I suspect you'd get the most RoI on education related to what the economy needed at the time. However if the market is compensating employees fairly* then students will likely pick what enjoy doing which also best fits the needs of the economy (as dictated by the benefits of the job)."

The problem being that much education has a minimum of 4 year lag time. So one could go into a degree program when the market is hot, only to see it cool off by the time they graduate.

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Re:Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Fi... by tomcam on Monday July 11, 2016 @01:17PM (#12072585)
> provable long-term return

Citation? As I understand it this company is not doing specactularly (revenue up, but profit down a bit), but, more important, employee happiness is down to pre-$70K levels.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/05/26/does-70000-mi...

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Re:Seattle C.E.O. Who Promised $70,000 Salaries Wins Suit Fi... by ctrl-j on Monday July 11, 2016 @02:50PM (#12073328)
The article you linked provides the apt justification of the happiness survey. The very next paragraph gives many examples that show that the employees are living arguably better lives.

So, at the cost of growing a little less quickly than they might have, the employees that are building the company up are enjoying a drastically improved quality of life.

The company isn't failing, the investors aren't losing their shirts, and the human beings who are making the day-to-day operation of the company possible, are better off. Sounds like a win-fucking-win to me.

> Employee turnover fell 19% last year compared to the average of the past six years. Gravity has been flooded with 30,000 applications, up from an average 3,000 or so a year. A monthly company survey that gauges employee happiness found a bump just after the announcement but then a drop to pre-$70,000 levels – consistent with a widely-held theory that people return to a baseline level of happiness despite positive or negative life events.

Still, Pirkle says the raises have allowed employees to move closer to the office and cut commute times, and plan for the future without living paycheck to paycheck. Retirement account contributions are up 130%, more employees are buying first homes and 10 are expecting, up from a typical zero to two each year.

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