Hacker News Reader

Comment by fizl | Hacker News Reader

This is a really poor article, and I'm surprised Forbes would publish it. As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no data behind any of the assertions in the article, and the title is just conjecture by the author based on a whole lot of assumptions.

View on HN

> I'm surprised Forbes would publish it

Unfortunately much of Forbes has become nothing but a fancy blog, very much akin to Business Insider. With the amount of "contributors" posting to the site nowadays the Forbes name in the URL isn't exactly a positive indicator, if not a warning sign.

basically, forbes.com/sites/... = trash

Was Forbes ever a respectable publication though? I ask with all sincerity. It seems their volume is super high and that's about it, so they get name recognition from repetition, not sure what else from.

yeah, it used to be. It's literally 100 years old. As recently as in the 80's/90's it was a medium weight business magazine. Some time in the last 5 or so years it hollowed out and is just a republishing platform. They have a lot of algorithmically-generated articles on the stock market - this made me start blocking them. They are worthless trash now.

Opinions vary, but I never though of Forbes as respectable. They are in the "business porn" industry, i.e., uncritically presenting the latest and greatest business moves so the masses will dream about what the rich are doing.

Yes. Like the Bruno Mars song says "I want to be on the cover of Forbes magazine...". At one time that was a big deal.

You're charitable. I had always chalked that up to Bruno Mars not know what the hell he was talking about.

I'm not sure, but I'm sure they aren't now. I'm actually kind of thankful for all the horse shit they throw up before allowing you to actually view an article, because it's almost always effective at fizzling out the curiousity gap and leading me to close the page in exasperation. It's gotten to the point where whenever I see I opened a Forbes article in a new tab I just automatically roll my eyes and close it, like a Pavlovian response.

For anyone interested (I was...), here's a good recap of Forbes' "contributor" model which is based in 'entrepreneurial journalism.'

Non-professional writers get paid based on unique visitors (like presumably with this piece). So you get what you incentivize.

http://www.poynter.org/2012/what-the-forbes-model-of-contrib...

Your link really helped me sharpen my thinking.

The grain of truth behind the article is that if you move into a new position with more responsibility you will likely receive a good jump in pay. And conversely if you stay in the same position your pay rate is likely to stagnate or rise with inflation at best.

But the author has conflated this basic principle with changing companies, which I believe is a false statement in general. The effectiveness of changing company as a strategy to increase pay will vary wildly across industries and professions.

Also the few data points are for the general job market, salaries in the 40k-80k range. What happens above is another story entirely IMHO. (And so below)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com