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Comment by cat_plus_plus | Hacker News Reader

Even the biggest corporate CEOs get confused by socialist talk and end up recreating some of socialist inefficiencies in their own companies. Why would I invest exceptional effort or take risk working on far fetched projects if exceptional success in terms of market share or profits will not be rewarded? If I am good, I can work 6 hours a day and still be the most productive employee on the team. How does one-fit-all compensation policy motivate me to do more or to stay on rather than finding a place that will pay me to be productive to my full potential?

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What if I told you that the time and effort required to develop and deploy accurate tracking metrics for every employee's individual productivity and the negative externalities that would fall out of openly stratifying worker pay based on these minutiae (worker dissatisfaction, turnover, degraded performance, poor reputation among potential new hires) would outweigh the benefit your marginal increase in motivation and job satisfaction brings to your employer?

Say I have a fairly good idea how to make a #3 product in a category a #1 product in a category. But, my work life balance would suck for a couple of years and I would have to be more adversarial with others to get them to pull their weight and not waste time on bad ideas. Eventually, if it works, existing employees will benefit from growth and new ones will want to join a success story.

Or maybe I am mistaken and someone else is more capable of making the top product, in which case I might still get my own team out of growth. Let there be some meritocratic process and ability to assume responsibility for risks and reap the rewards. But if there is no potential reward, why should I suffer from overwork and inevitable interpersonal conflict when stuff needs to get done? Why should anyone? Eventually the whole product will be cancelled since it's not making headway and all of us will move to new gigs.

Socialism is when workers own their workplaces, and receive the full amount of value that their labor creates, rather than that value being arbitrarily allocated by the owners of the firm. It has absolutely nothing to do with your imaginary concept of everyone getting assigned identical compensation. Bizarre post, you may as well have typed some gibberish word rather than "socialist".

Well, I don't think we made net profit yet and I don't want to work for free.

Socialism is when capitalism does its usual thing?

In China, during Mao Zedong's era, factory workers would laugh at and scorn other workers who worked harder than others. This is the direction that Microsoft is headed with their policies.

I don't think that's a tactic unique to or originating from communist China. I've heard stories about coopers in England beating up bright sparks who worked faster than the pace the workers had settled on. I think that's just how physical laborers sometimes ensure that people are working at a sustainable pace, such that people at every stage of their career can work alongside each other without destroying their bodies. (I personally neither condemn not condone this, it seems like bullying to me so I'm inclined to condemn but I've never worked in an environment like that so I withhold judgement.)

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