[amelius]

Imho, if you're successful without working hard, you have "hacked" the system, and like any form of hacking this should be punishable, in this case e.g. by degradation.

If only we had a system where (special) judges were able to determine who works hard and who doesn't and from there decide who gets what amount of pay, and who deserves a promotion. We could actually have a fair society.

[pjc50]

Working out what constitutes "working hard" would produce all sorts of bizarre situations; a number of disabled or chronically ill people would be richly rewarded for simply showing up at all.

Then there's the arbitrage possibilities; are the judges globally uniform? (How are you going to achieve that?)

Then there's the classic Keynsian "usefulness" problem; you can have a whole load of people working hard digging holes and another group of people filling them in, and that constitutes hard work?

All of us would of course be out of jobs and toiling in the fields, as there is nothing so dangerous in this environment as a process improvement. Making the work easier would reduce compensation, so there's a really strong incentive not to improve the process and to sabotage anyone who attempts to do so.

No, I think we have to have the humility to understand as humans that we can't know the answers to this with any kind of precision, and to be more humble in the judgements that we must make,

[vageli]

> Imho, if you're successful without working hard, you have "hacked" the system, and like any form of hacking this should be punishable, in this case e.g. by degradation.

> If only we had a system where (special) judges were able to determine who works hard and who doesn't and from there decide who gets what amount of pay, and who deserves a promotion. We could actually have a fair society.

Why should pay be based on how hard one works? I know when I started my career I had to work _much_ harder, because I had not yet been around the block so to speak. As time went on I became much more efficient with my time, experience makes it easier to see patterns, etc.

So if the metric is how hard one works, as I get better at my job I'd actually get paid less?

[amelius]

Well, if you like you can replace "works hard" by "is efficient". Or something in between, depending on what you think is fair.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

There is no "if you like." It's your statement, justify it.

[tuesdayrain]

So a highly skilled person who finds their job easy should be paid less than a low skilled person who struggles to do basic tasks? I don't think that would turn out well.

[bigred100]

This sounds like much more of a hell than sometimes having to chat with a coworker you don’t like (judges monitoring you and punishing you if you don’t work hard enough).

[amelius]

Why? Your boss is judging you and your coworkers all the time. A real judge would at least make it a fair judgement.

[darkerside]

Where to start... You know this site is called Hacker News, right?

[amelius]

Right :) except that hacking into people's minds is typically frowned upon here, which is partly the kind of hacking my comment refers to.

[ellius]

This is the same impulse behind many disasters of history. It's a classic "who watches the watchmen?" problem. You can't perfect human society, and attempting to do so through the blunt centralization of power into the hands of a supposedly enlightened elite has rarely worked out the way it was intended.

[wolco]

Remove value and determine pay based on effort? Overtime people would take on unsuitable roles and productivity would go down.

We would be better off paying people more for easy work. People would target what they exceled at. Productivity increases. Our quality of life would increase but some jobs wouldn't get filled.