[code_scrapping]

If we're discussing the capitalist society, the salary does represent in a very literal form your worth to the company, and by consequence probably your skill level too. I'll admit that it's more complicated than that.

What you should not associate with your salary is your own sense of worth or success, because there you're on mentally unstable grounds.

But in my original response I just gave a random example, and you're right that we should not expand the discussion in that direction.

[Hammershaft]

The definition of "worth" in that context is also contingent on factors that have nothing to do with the quality or social value of the skill that salary supposedly represents.

Can you create an exaggerated perception of your skill in others? To what degree does your skill have latent demand vs effective demand? To what degree has your skill been monopsonized? To what degree does your skill apply to solving problems that are currently externalized?

Some simple examples: An amazing social worker could change the lives of dozens if not hundreds of people, however, since those people are broke & homeless, her target demographic is unable to compensate her for what she does (latent demand), and her salary is very meagre and state subsidized. An expert in environmental restoration could save a strip mining conglomerate millions of dollars while improving the health of hundreds of thousands of people in communities downriver, however because that conglomerate chooses to externalize those costs onto those communities, that environmental expert also ends up recieving a meagre state subsidized salary.

[burade]

Lmao no it doesn't.

Your salary is simply the amount of money you have convinced a company to pay you. You could waste 3 years making 100k a year only to deliver a failed project that resulted in 0 revenue.

[Domenic_S]

No, they're right but I can see how you interpreted it. They said salary is "your worth to the company" -- meaning, the amount of money they're willing to part with to have you, or to keep you from working elsewhere (your "worth" to them).

I think you took it to mean actual calculated dollar-value driven-by-the-eng worth. Even thinking about that, your example is wrong because it ignores expected value (EV) of a project which takes into account risk. For example, if your theoretical project has a 10% chance of generating $5mm/yr and a 90% of completely failing, the EV of the project is $500k/yr - so it's totally worth it to pay an eng $100k/yr to work on it, even if it fails.

[bonoboTP]

No they mean that bullshitters, asslickers, and manipulative but charismatic and confident politics players often get more recognition and salary than the objectively skillful and technically competent, value delivering people.

Sure you can redefine "worth" to include scheming and taking undue credit and deflecting blame, but it's a stretch.

[RobertKerans]

To keep things in track in the spirit of the originating comment, do those people not fit exactly what the commenter was talking about? That they may be average/below average at many things, but they have spent a great deal of time to become well above average at, say, understanding how to manipulate people (which I stress may not be a conscious decision to be a bad person), rather than having, say, expert knowledge of automobile mechanics? I mean it's a shitty thing, but it's not really about "worth" per se, it's about skill, and that skill doesn't have to be ethically positive/neutral

[bonoboTP]

That becomes a tautology. It's well possible that a toxic manipulative person enters a company, destroys a lot of value production and efficiency by pitting people against one another, taking credit for apparent wins and pushes losses to others and into the future and still makes it quite high in promotions. Perhaps at some point they get booted, but they can do a lot of damage, perhaps make skilled people leave rather than enter an uncertain fight when they have high job market value, leaving the more desperate to stay who don't dare to stir things up. Meanwhile others don't feel responsible for helping a cold megacorp so they just want to get out of this with the best CV and social standing and a good reference.

You must interpret "worth" in a tautological manner if you consider the toxic persons behavior valuable. It's an organizational pathology. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's good or teaches us we need to re-evaluate what we consider value.

Cancer can displace useful cells and kill the organism. It doesn't mean that "well in the end it was for the better anyway since cancer cells are more worthy since they ended up winning". That's twisted logic. Also note that megacorp won't die so easily and the effect of one such person may not show up visibly until after they've voluntarily left for a better job to another place to repeat the cycle.

[RobertKerans]

You are making a couple of assumptions here:

1. that someone with what would be considered a morally/ethically negative skill would inevitably damage an organisation, or that an organisation would not want someone with that particular skill.

2. that the cancer analogy is at all useful. A company or org is not a body (it is a legal entity with a specific purpose), and a person with what I've called morally negative skills is not a cancer cell (they are a thinking person with actual goals that may align and actual skills that may be required).

I can pull out innumerable examples from politics or business here. Take the current US incumbent. Or, as I'm from the UK, the current prime minister, or his home secretary. Of course, to an observer who feels they are a cancer (I do!) they are what you describe. And they will always force other people out who would seem to have [call them] positive skills that would make them better suited [from my viewpoint], sure. But none of that means they aren't skilled, or that they do not have (fairly obvious, as I think about it) "worth"

[dragonsky]

In my experience there is a correlation between income and inability to deliver on projects. Seems some people spend all their time convincing management of there value rather than delivering on their jobs.

[richardwhiuk]

Assuming that the labour market is efficient, which is manifestly not true.

[kodoque2]

In the same way that we should distinguish producing wealth and extracting wealth, we should distinguish worth and ability to signal worth.

[fallingfrog]

No, salary reflects leverage- how hard you are to replace. Not the amount of value you generate. There are lots of ways for a company to figure out ways to make you easier to replace, thereby decreasing your leverage, and the difference between the amount of value you generate, and the amount they have to pay you, is their profit.

[HowTheStoryEnds]

It represents your cost to the company: something they try to keep down and which gets countered by their need to have you, the scarcity of your position and most importantly your willingness to walk away.

If people got paid their actual worth to the company there probably wouldn't be much profit to go around at the end.

[thescriptkiddie]

In capitalism your salary is by definition less than your value to the company. Additionally, there is a tendency for wages to be reduced to the social minimum.

[dragonwriter]

> In capitalism your salary is by definition less than your value to the company.

No, it's not.

Under ideal market conditions, the price of any good (including labor) is exactly equal to its value to the marginal purchaser (and, also, to the marginal seller.)

[Supermancho]

> Under ideal market conditions

Human on Human interactions, which are required for the majority of employment, employ game theory to ensure that your pay is below your value. When talking about labor groups/unions you can approach an ideal scenario. Even those will have variation that are manipulated by human to human interaction.

There are no "ideal market conditions". The real conditions are such that, statistically, you will be underpaid in comparison to your value within a company. Sometimes you get lucky and drop into an upside down position, which is overpaid, but that's the best wage slaves can hope for.

[dragonwriter]

> Human on Human interactions, which are required for the majority of employment, employ game theory to ensure that your pay is below your value.

Sure.

But now we're talking about “in practice” not “by definition”.

[Supermancho]

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice – in practice there is” (Yogi Berra)

I do not use the "ideal market conditions" theory to describe what happens in practice, because it has little utility (except in predicting some very constrained trends).

[thescriptkiddie]

If the company pays you exactly what your labor is worth, how exactly are they supposed to make money?

[Der_Einzige]

Not expecting a non-commie to come in and advocate for the labor theory of value on HN! Kudos to you for having the balls to do it!