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Comment by kris-s | Hacker News Reader

> At one point, after getting a promotion and a raise, I computed the ratio of the amount of money my changes made the company vs. my raise and found that my raise was 0.03% of the money that I made the company, only counting easily quantifiable and totally indisuptable impact to the bottom line.

Would profit/revenue sharing help with this?

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Except supply and demand drive your pay, not how much you make the company. Now, if you can't make the company at least as much as you cost, then you're out of a job.

Those "I made the company X" arguments are only interesting if it was an action/idea that you were uniquely responsible for. If it's something most equally qualified people would have done in that role, it's not that interesting.

Even if you were uniquely responsible and it’s something extremely difficult hat few could accomplish, there is no way to prove it and the company usually treats you just like any other idiot hired at your “level”.

if you have such unique and powerful skill that you can attribute to this level of value production, then your only option is to found a startup and extract 100% of that value from said skill.

Not true. Making the company X amount or your out is thinking to linear. There are profit centres and profit eater departments. Keeping your job is more political than values based.

The idea of a "profit eater" department makes no sense to me. Sure, your IT department or janitorial staff or whatever aren't being directly handed money by clients, but your business would not be able to run without them. Surely they're only a negative profit center by a very myopic, naive definition of the term?

> your business would not be able to run without them.

but can your business earn more if had more of them? If yes, then it's a profit center. If no, it's a "profit eater".

> but can your business earn more if had more of them?

But that's true of everything. If you hire 100% more salespeople (generally considered a "profit center") but don't also hire a proportionate number of extra devs and IT and janitors you're not going to make more money either.

Simplifying a bit, but there's "right amounts" of all types of employees - if you don't have "enough" devs/salespeople/support staff/IT/janitors, then hiring more will result in you making more money.

No. Profit sharing gives you money based on the overall profitability of the company. However, even if your contribution is enormous, it's unlikely to make more than a barely perceptible change to the overall profitability of the company, meaning the impact on your own pay will be tiny.

Profit sharing works by trying to make employees feel connected to the success of the business, but they don't make sense based on any kind of effort/impact/reward calculus.

"even if your contribution is enormous, it's unlikely to make more than a barely perceptible change to the overall profitability of the company"

Too bad this rationale isn't routinely applied to senior managements/officers, eh?

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