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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

> Otherwise, they might be right about you not deserving it.

#3 results from a fundamental confusion people have that pay is based on people "deserving" something. Like it's an expression of virtue or your worth as a person or a reward for doing something good.

It's not. You're paid based on supply and demand and your negotiating skills, nothing more. It's not a golden star from your teacher that you're a nice boy. It's whatever you were able to convince the company the monetary value of your contribution is worth. That's all. Get over whether someone deserves this or that. I'll solve this once and for all: nobody deserves anything. You're responsible for figuring out how to provide value and capture it.

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> You're paid based on supply and demand and your negotiating skills

Your ability to negotiate your own salary is pretty orthogonal to your ability to do most jobs. Some jobs definitely require the ability to negotiate in the form of compromise, but rarer are the positions where the brinksman-style of salary negotiation (where you credibly would scuttle the entire deal) would be useful. It should be pretty easy to figure out within a year how a new hire compares to the existing employees and were they _should_ be on the salary totem and set them on the proper trajectory from there.

There would certainly be other knock-on effects from true salary transparency, but bias towards salary negotiating skill is much closer to bias towards people-who-look-like-me than it is to bias towards people-who-generate-value-for-the-business.

You make it sound like your salary is just meaningless points, but of course the reason coworkers might resent a seemingly overpaid person is that they’re actually very meaningful points that are fungible across everyone’s salaries. And it’s totally compatible with what you’re saying if it turns out that salary transparency itself affects the supposed “negotiating skills” of the highest earners.

I do believe in getting paid what's deserved and what's deserved changes as the market changes.

What's unfortunate is that people aren't willing to see the change go downward ever and then also argue that others can't go upward because... well then you yourself "can't" go upward.

What's deserved is for people to be compensated fairly. If the company is compensating someone unfairly and can't compensate someone fairly because of then, then that is a definite and clear problem.

Whatever your definition of fair is, whether that's "deserving" or "market forces", it's still the same argument.

> I do believe in getting paid what's deserved and what's deserved changes as the market changes.

Well there's 2 major theories of thought about that.

One is that the holders of the capital decide how much to pay, and they make the bulk of the market. You get paid what you negotiate.

The other is that the worker will never be paid what they are worth. In other words, their surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.

And in this country, we're seeing the beginning of the second with Antiwork and the Great Resignation. Many of us Zennials are really tired.

"fair" and "deserving" have the same problems. It's just adding unnecessary moral dimensions. What's fair is whatever both parties mutually agreed to. If you agreed to be paid $X and employer pays you $X, then that's fair. Whether they might have possibly agreed to pay you $X + %10 or $X + 20% or whatever is irrelevant. What they're paying other people is also irrelevant. You saw the number, you said "ok" and that's that.

If you were theoretically willing to pay $5 for a gallon of milk and you walked into a store and they were selling it for $2, I'm sure you wouldn't insist they take the extra money. It's the store's job to figure out how much to charge for milk. It's your job to figure out how much you're willing to charge for your labor.

"What's fair is whatever both parties mutually agreed to"

You could argue there's an important caveat of symmetric information around this interaction if you want to talk about fairness. Asymmetric information is frequently considered an unfair advantage (see insider trading) but is also recognized as the source of much profit (see auction winner's fallacy), but you have to at least recognize that employers by and large have a huge information advantage in the labor market currently.

There's also asymmetric information with the milk. I don't know what it cost for the producers, or how much the store paid wholesale. Maybe it's only $0.05 a gallon on their end. Who knows? The only thing that matters is if the retail price is something I can afford and am willing to pay.

It's true that employers are privy to a lot more salary information than employees. I know I said what other people are paid is irrelevant, which I think it is in terms of fairness, but you should be (and, legally at least, in the US, are) free to take that information into account when deciding what you'll accept. It's still up to you to make that decision and hold employers to it. They aren't going to offer up higher salaries out of the kindness of their heart or some sentimentality about fairness.

> The only thing that matters is if the retail price is something I can afford and am willing to pay.

Unfortunately that's not quite true. Milk (and other foodstuffs) are a requirement to live. People are "willing" to pay more for that because they don't really have many other options. So it's ripe for abuse.

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