Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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In a well-managed company, you are paid for a business outcome. The amount of sweat you emit to achieve that business outcome has exactly one use for the company: a gauge of how high the bar for outcomes can be raised on you. It is not a gauge of how well you should be compensated. Those gauges aren't even labeled in the same language, and they're kept covered by an oily tarp.

There are any number of things you can do to lock in your current level of compensation while systematically lowering your effort. You can:

* Get faster at producing the outcomes the business is looking for; the easiest way to do this is often to examine your entire work product, spend cycles to isolate the bits that the company is actually valuing, and stop wasting time producing things the company doesn't truly value. A less effective but more time-honored (by geeks) approach to this strategy is "automation".

* Take steps to pivot your role in the company to one that produces outcomes the company values similarly to your current one, but that require less effort on your part.

* Take steps to gradually lower the bar on what's expected of you.

You didn't ask me, but I categorically disagree with the idea that hard work correlates to better pay in a typical company.

Being on this site implies disagreement with the idea that hard work correlates to better pay in a typical company. HN, to a great extent, reflects the ethos of startup culture in general and PG in particular. That, in turn, means that the median HN reader is on board with statements like "a large company can't accurately measure your work; no one incapable of measuring your work can compensate you appropriately for working hard" and "part of the point of joining or founding a startup is to let the market judge your hard work directly instead of filtering that judgment through layers and layers of corporate bureaucracy - even though you risk that that judgment may be 'your hard work is worth zero dollars.'"

This is not to say that I like that state of affairs - I agree with Keynes when he says "Nothing corrupts society more than to disconnect effort and reward." The fact that in the average company, effort and reward are distantly and indirectly related, I claim is a major, major, social and moral problem. That state of affairs corrodes the rule of law and attacks the stability of a society. Stability is a prerequisite to entrepreneurs getting interesting things done - remember the recent article here about Argentinian entrepreneurs and the crippling effects of a currency that collapses every decade or two? Stability means, to pull from PG's essays again, that honest accumulations of wealth won't be plundered. Stability of that sort is a prerequisite to rewarding entrepreneurship - and that sort of stability is disappearing in the US, generally on account of the very same people who are responsible for disconnecting effort and reward at typical corporations. The financier class (and the political class that they have purchased - in this regard, the last four US Presidents are clones of one another) is eating everyone's seed corn. That's deeply harmful to those of us who want to have our labor judged by the market, because without stability and the rule of law, it is impossible for markets to operate efficiently.

As companies get larger the likelihood that they are well managed decreases significantly.

A moment's reflection refutes this. In the world's most advanced economies most people work in and for large companies because they have outcompeted the small companies that weren't as good.

Seriously, how many 100 person companies does it take to be as capable as IBM?

True, but managing larger companies is also inherently harder, maybe that's what the grandparent intended to say?

There's a difference between (a) good management, (b) returns to scale, and (c) gains from specialization and division of labour. What you see most in large companies in advanced economies is (b) and (c); in so far as you get (a), I would argue much of it comes from applying specialization to management itself: doing the kind of strategic management that is not possible in small companies dominated by tactical concerns.

I don't think your claim of most people working for large companies is quite true. Maybe I just feel it is misleading.

http://www.sba.gov/advocacy/7495/8420

I'm pretty sure that in a well-managed company, someone who didn't contribute would be let go. I'd like to leave off the always-contentious question regarding "effort vs. contribution".

So to alter the question: how to improve compensation in a hypothetically well-managed company, without busting 60-hour weeks?

If I rephrase and edit my previous comment maybe it'll stick better. I had three ideas for you:

* Analyze what you do, figure out the portion of it that your employer cares about, and stop spending so much time on the other portions. Example: the carefully crafted prose in your per-public-method comments might be permitted to suffer.

* Instead of campaigning for a raise, campaign for a role change to something that uses more of your cleverness and less of your sweat. For instance, maybe you'd be better off as a product manager.

* Sandbag estimates to bring unrealistic expectations back into line.

I wondered what had happened to it! Thank you a lot for your input.

I am - of course in a business sense - very interested in raising my market value to my current (and future employers), and am always looking for ways to enhance it.

I whole-heartedly agree with this. Especially the sandbagging estimates. Software Development is extremely difficult to accurately estimate, and I have found if I don't sandbag estimates, I almost always go back and explain that something took longer than expected. If I don't, I almost always have someone knocking on my door asking where something is at.

My person rule of thumb for this is to take the time I originally estimated, double it, then add a little more, especially if it's 8 hours or greater.

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