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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

If you want people to be fairly compensated for the work they do, forget salaries, look at the companies growth and profits. I think all employees should get a taste of any dispersal of profit, divided evenly, based on time served since the last payout. (Annually?)

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Should employees also forego income to enjoy their share in a company’s losses?

Investors risk losing money and should be rewarded for the risk. But its only money.

Employees risk something far more valuable, their time. You can never get that back.

Employees would forgo _some_ money (their bonuses) and they would have wasted all that time working for an unprofitable business.

That's what most of us in silicon valley with stock based compensation experience. If your company goes from $1 earnings per share to -$1 earnings per share, then your total comp can be cut in half as your vesting stock becomes worth less.

Divided evenly?

Even if there's an order a magnitude difference in productivity between workers?

It's why standard base pay plus 'incentive/commission' tends to work the best.

Let me expand. Everyone gets paid the same base rate. Then you give an incentive based on KPIs that AREN'T easily manipulated by an employee. For example, a good KPI might be on Time delivery of a project or ticket. Bad KPIs would be things like lines of code or number of tickets closed.

Since we are talking fantasy land, why not?

The base compensation could be the skill / productivity part of the reward.

But who is to say the 8 hours of life risked by the kid in the mail room is worth less that then 8 of life risked by the CEO. We all only live about 80years. We only work for about 40 of them. If you show up and do your best every day to make the company successful, then that's good enough for me.

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