> Best case people find out that people are getting paid rapidly different amounts for the same job, get angry, and leave.
This is only a problem if the disparity does not match the difference in contribution. I'm sure most of us have been in situations where ourselves and two other people have the same job and are earning roughly the same, and we perceive the situation as massively unfair because one of them should be earning half as much, and the other twice as much. I've been in teams where I would have been perfectly ok with specific people earning twice as much as myself. It's ok to admire someone's skill, be motivated to reach it, and accept that they should earn more in the meantime.
In practice ego makes truly merit-based compensation impossible to implement. We just often think too highly of ourselves. The other obstacle is that the difference in contribution from a low-performer to a high-performer varies widely with profession, with software development being (in my opinion) one of the widest.
This is true in theory. In practice, most managers either do not understand what "performing well" for an engineer means, or willfully go against what they know to be true due to internal incentive structures. For example, favoring those whose contributions are more visible in the short-term, even if net negative over time. Through such a lens, someone who is competent at executing a longer term vision, or refuses to do only those tasks that are visible, is a low performer.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.
regardless of "process", work items should be tracked (in the problem solving record for our future selves sense, not time keeping sense), so you can follow those. If you're a non-technical manager, then either a) the implementation goes super smoothly and the estimate the dev team initially gave you is all the progress update you need, or b) it doesn't go super-smoothly and you should be involved in any discussions that arise. If you find yourself asking "when is it ready?" you've likely gone astray.
This actually sounds like a workable idea, but the implementation would be extremely thorny (impact on covenants, governance, voting rights, non-listed companies, etc) and take forever to get done. It would also punish everyone equally, even though they clearly do not share equal blame.
You probably want, in addition to your proposal, executive stock-based compensation to be awarded in a different share class, used to finance penalties in such cases where the impact is deemed to be the result of gross negligence at the management level.
Don't know the details here, but email is still very much broken, and a number of large companies, including in the financial sector, are spoofable even after checking the usual boxes.[0]
It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.
edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.
> 2) assuming that what you are building is something the user wants - until people use it, you have no proof for this. Lots of startups fall into the trap of building stuff that nobody wants or needs.
> You have to pitch and explain the thing to them and even then they still might not get it. Only when you show them the thing and they like it will you get some confirmation that this might be something they want/need.
If you have to build first in order to pitch and show it, then necessarily you've had to assume that what you were building is something they want. Maybe your point was to get new features quickly into the hands of users to test the assumption early, but that has its own significant downsides.
I like the way you phrased it though, in terms of "don't assume foo" instead of "do bar", because it implies that there's really no replacing good old-fashioned _thinking_ with blindly following a 5-step plan to success.
It argues for validating your assumptions as quick as you can. Which is why mvps, prototypes, and click demos can be a good thing. It doesn't always work though. Digging in and burning through a few million of investor money before your product encounters real users, is the expensive way to do it.
I can accept that this is effective with most companies, and I don't blame you for doing what you can to increase your chances, but in an ideal world each side is their genuine self.
I understand that some people see an interview as a sales meeting, but in the end, if it works out, what results is both sides having to interact with each other on a daily basis ideally for a long time.
An employment relationship is in the end a relationship between people. Embellishing in an interview just makes that relationship uncomfortable.
> in an ideal world each side is their genuine self.
You're hired primarily based on other people's estimate of you. They'll hold you in higher esteem if they like you. I don't see how you get from "it's a relationship between people" to "you should be your genuine self". Interacting with others always involves a certain degree of masking, unless you are implausibly neurotypical.
>An employment relationship is in the end a relationship between people.
I view it as a product sale. Me selling my knowledge and skills, they buying it. Similar to how they sale or rent their software to the customers.
A company is not people, a company doesn't have soul. It solely exist to make shareholders profit. People at the company I will have relationships with, and I try to have good relationships.
I never lie, just tell the story they way I benefit from it.
>what results is both sides having to interact with each other on a daily basis ideally
If I foresee that I might dislike the interaction in the future, I can just move over.
Fully agree, and it's probably intentional. It's not entirely fair, but I suppose most countries would do the same given the chance. Clearly it's not how you want to get ahead as a country, since all it takes is for the world collectively to decide it no longer wants to bear that cost, and then you can only keep it through force. Inflation becoming a well-understood phenomenon with the general population also threatens it.
If China plays its cards right, the US is going to start having a bad time still this decade. The US should be aggressively trying to reach a more balanced economy. The distribution of not just wealth, but of the ability to generate wealth, leaves the US on very shaky ground.
Despite its many problems, the U.S. still enjoys the largest consumption of any country. People are banging down the door/wall to move here; we don't see people clamoring to emigrate to China. China's demographics spell doom for the foreseeable future.
Not only would China need to play its cards right, it'd need to win the lottery to overtake the U.S.
> If you actually printed money, which does not have interest to be repaid, then the amount of circulating money would've increased permanently.
You have to get your head around the fact that this is an open-ended system, the music never has to stop so long as the sun rises and we stay on this monetary system. The same way people still get "wealthier" from stock market appreciation, even though there is a buyer for each seller, so too does more debt indeed mean a permanent increase in money supply[1].
This is only a problem if the disparity does not match the difference in contribution. I'm sure most of us have been in situations where ourselves and two other people have the same job and are earning roughly the same, and we perceive the situation as massively unfair because one of them should be earning half as much, and the other twice as much. I've been in teams where I would have been perfectly ok with specific people earning twice as much as myself. It's ok to admire someone's skill, be motivated to reach it, and accept that they should earn more in the meantime.
In practice ego makes truly merit-based compensation impossible to implement. We just often think too highly of ourselves. The other obstacle is that the difference in contribution from a low-performer to a high-performer varies widely with profession, with software development being (in my opinion) one of the widest.