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by lmilcin 1582 days ago
Salary based on your "experience" as measured by the number of years you survived sitting by the computer.

This is absolutely, fucking dumbest idea I ever heard.

Say you have two engineers that both have 10 years of experience, one is barely scraping by and one is working his ass off and significant contributor to the team.

They earn the same money and, more importantly, they both know it. And the team knows it. And the manager knows it.

Can you guess which one will feel treated unfairly and will start looking for a new job?

Imagine a good employee comes to you and says she is going to leave because she has been offered better salary somewhere else.

You have now only two choices:

1) break the commitment you made to entire company,

2) let her go.

You can also decide to promote her, but management is really a different job and you lost your team member anyway.

Over time your business will accumulate people who just barely passed your recruitment process and are just barely competent to avoid being let go.

If you think you will keep the better one just because you say some nice words and give them recognition token, guess again.

Let me explain what this means: it promotes people who sit idly by the computer (because they gain regardless of their involvement) and punishes people who actually give a shit and who try hard being better every day.

It punishes your business HARD. In most businesses, most progress is being done by small minority of employees. And now you are leaving gates open and saying you are not going to even try to keep them doing good job.

2 comments

> Ambitious people like achieving goals.

Like coming in, making the biggest impact they can eg. do a large spectacular redesign, leave for 10% pay jump immediately and never sticking around for that maintenance nightmare that were hidden in the details?

Incentives will always be a tradeoff because you can't measure skill.

> Incentives will always be a tradeoff because you can't measure skill.

Oh, so because it is hard let's just stop trying?

You can't measure skill accurately. But you can try to find correlations and you can measure other things that are as much or even more important like... erm... results?

It's the dead sea effect. All the good people evaporate leaving only the salt.