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My PM doesn’t tip me when I complete a ticket quickly; I don’t tip QA when they catch a bug in my code; the on-call engineer doesn’t tip me when some docs I wrote save them a few hours of time fixing an issue I saw during my last on-call rotation. And yet! The company seems to keep making money and doing well, and we all seem to like each other (mostly, except for that one guy, but he doesn’t like anyone).

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tip based jobs are overwhelmingly minimum wage. of course we can argue whether that’s cause or effect, but the point is, it makes very little sense to compare literally “the minimum allowable threshold for legal employment” to professional salaried employees.

It makes all the sense because a common argument in favor of tipping is “it improves service” or that it “rewards good service”.

In reality, it’s a gesture of pity for those who earn little, and who we don’t want to pay properly via decent wage regulations and increase product prices, but we want them to dance for us and have them hope we will toss a few coins their way. In the process, we get to feel good like benevolent dictators who have chosen to be generous and share their wealth.

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