[sarkozy]

I think it's a good idea to encourage everyone to try to get paid more, since (a) corporations make massively disproproportionate wealth relative to employees and (b) programmers are bad at the type of social and interpersonal skills that are required for negotiation.

That said, as someone who has been through this, I think your advice is a naively optimistic oversimplification of the forces that hold programmers back from getting paid more and, for the most part, people who follow your advice will still end up getting paid less than business analysts and project managers for cultural reasons expressed by some of the answers on that page.

The only difference is, with your approach, they may feel as if they have done everything they could, rather than suffering in quiet resentment (and, from a psychological perspective, this is not to be underestimated).

[yummyfajitas]

(a) corporations make massively disproproportionate wealth relative to employees...

Depends on the corporation. Walmart only makes about $10,700/employee in profit, for example (about $6/hour if all employees work 35 hours). Since walmart typically pays $10-12/hour at minimum, employees are capturing about 2/3 of the value they create.

http://www.advfn.com/p.php?pid=financials&symbol=NYSE:WM...

Of course, the numbers will be wildly different at a software company. Most programmers don't capture anything like 2/3 of their created value.

[sarkozy]

That undermines my assumptions. Thanks for the link. I'm very surprised a company of Walmart's size has such low profit per-employee. I would have assumed some accounting tricks were responsible but maybe it's the nature of their business.

[_delirium]

Walmart is the canonical example of a low-margin / high-volume business. Especially during their growth phase, every time they would find a way to reduce costs, they would funnel that savings into lower prices, rather than taking the savings in the form of a higher profit margin.

[yummyfajitas]

Very true, Walmart is a bit of a loaded example.

But I found data more useful to the tech industry. If MS or GOOG pays their employees $200k/year, then employees are capturing about half of the value they create [1]. Worse than Walmart, but not that bad.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-s...

[1] This is actually a fallacy, since it assumes all returns are due to labor, not capital.

[eru]

To address the fallacy: Just state that labour and capital get half the returns each. We don't need to decide who or what creates value to make that statistic interesting.

[firemanx]

It's a retail business - they are inevitably tied to the price they get from the manufacturer, and compete extremely strongly with a million other places, big and small. That really limits the margins they can make. Some retail businesses can get slightly higher margins due to exclusivity or just general scarcity, but overall the vast majority of profit is probably due to either 1. Cost Savings or 2. Economies of Scale such that you can eek some additional padding out of your vendors (WalMart is notoriously aggressive with vendors).

[clistctrl]

you literally just changed my world view, thank for showing me this.