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Comment by TheCoelacanth | Hacker News Reader

Thinking as an employer, though, is it worth an extra $100k to be able to mock you? Hell no. Politeness is free.

Is it worth an extra $100k to be able to employ dirtbags alongside you? Maybe for some jobs that involve ethically dubious actions, but probably not for most.

Is it worth an extra $100k to be able to give you a super junior title? No, titles are free.

Is it worth 2x your normal rate to get you to work overtime? Maybe, but that's pretty expensive. They would be better off if they could get another person to do it at a normal rate.

So, you might be willing to put up with those things for more money, but for the employer it is usually a waste of money pay that. It doesn't make sense for an employer to pay extra for those things unless they are really getting a lot of value out of it.

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If it is important to you to be able to mock your employees, and you wouldn't run your business without being able to be a jerk like that, then you might want to pay that extra money.

Good business? No, but not all businesspeople are good at business. People get into it for very different reasons.

I've worked for a lot of acerbic bosses. I charge extra. Right now, with things so tight, it's approaching a 100% premium. You know what? The "jerks" keep paying it, because they can't find anything else.

Are they good bosses? Hahahahaha! No. About the only thing I do is make it really clear is that I'm there for the money, and I will walk off if I don't like it. So, I get the extra pay, without the abuse.

Yes, there are many poorly run businesses. I would never debate that point.

However, this article is explicitly targeted at businesses, so obviously they should be providing advice on how not to be a poorly run business.

>Is it worth 2x your normal rate to get you to work overtime? Maybe, but that's pretty expensive. They would be better off if they could get another person to do it at a normal rate.

>So, you might be willing to put up with those things for more money, but for the employer it is usually a waste of money pay that. It doesn't make sense for an employer to pay extra for those things unless they are really getting a lot of value out of it.

Good. The whole point is to make it painful for the company to have you work overtime regularly. In fact, 2x is quite cheap and a better way to accomplish that would be to charge more for each overtime hour (so that 16 hour days would cost much more than 2 normal 8 hour days).

If the company can't extract enough value out of the employee's time, maybe they shouldn't ask them to work overtime.

> If the company can't extract enough value out of the employee's time, maybe they shouldn't ask them to work overtime.

Exactly my point. For highly-remunerated workers like software developers, companies can rarely get as much value out of poor working conditions as it will cost them in extra wages, so it is usually a poor business decision to have poor working conditions.

2x overtime means that one 16 hour day equals three 8 hour days. This is standard language among workers in the US who get paid overtime. It means you get paid 2x your hourly rate for each of your overtime hours. Also referred to as doubletime.

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