Mediocre and average employees like the idea of reducing inequality, because the mediocre employees stand to financially benefit and the average employees can expect little to no change in compensation while reaping emotional rewards.
For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.
[–] disgruntledphd2 1 day ago
[–] pembrook 1 day ago
No its not. This is a skill that is useful when exchanging value with other entities (the basis of the economy). You're being compensated for having that skill.
Would you hire a salesperson or head of procurement or media buyer with bad negotiation skills? How about a developer who can't properly negotiate with teams demanding their time to properly allocate themselves where needed?
[–] anonym29 1 day ago
Then give your money to people who don't negotiate as well. In practice, you don't: your revealed preference speaks louder than your stated preference does.
[–] disgruntledphd2 1 day ago
And the transaction costs on such an approach would be too large, as I'm sure that you know.
M I note that you don't address the notion of context dependent high performance.
[–] itake 1 day ago
As an EM, a person's current salary is an anchor. If someone is paid at the bottom of the band, but then later the company learns about their high impact, they aren't given a raise, they are told to push harder and get promoted.
And then when they are promoted, they are probably at the bottom of the next band.
if a person threatens to leave, the EM (rarely) can magically wave a wand to increase the salary, but they can promise to put them up for promotion next cycle.
[–] TheOtherHobbes 1 day ago
The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.
Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality.
Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others. If you want to pay someone outside of band, give them a different title.
If someone performs unexpectedly well, give them a bonus/promotion etc.
It's deeply sad (but unsurprising) that so many people can only focus on their particular benefit (especially when the vast majority of that benefit is context dependent).
Like, if you hired John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard and just told them to take tickets, they'd probably be an average performer at best. If you told them never to take initiative, they'd perform badly. So lots of performance is dependent on context, there are very few "good" employees in a vacuum.