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It’s not clear to me whether this is a “I kept wages down” story or “people stayed with the company because they liked me even though they had offers with larger numbers on them”.

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Whatevs. I won't get into it. I've been called all sorts of evil names, here, because of my experience. I won't bother giving it much bandwidth.

[Edit]

> If you think there's more to life than money, then why are you so proud of underpaying your team members?

HN has a rather ... predictable ... zeitgeist.

I mean this is like when people recount working with Steve Jobs: “he yelled at us a bunch but he also had a real eye for perfection that was really important in making sure we were doing the right thing”. Was he a good manager? Obviously the part where he knew what was good and what wasn’t could be part of that argument. But was the yelling necessary? Could things have been done without it? Should a good manager make the most of what they have or should they advocate for changes to that? I think that’s a relevant question. If you want to feel good about the way you went about something I’m not going to stop you but it seems like a relevant question to ask since a lot of people who do say this end up being absolutely awful managers. You could approach this with, say, “I focused on my employees’ job satisfaction” or “I made sure they felt their voices were heard” or whatever but just going “my employees were paid less” and expecting a different response is kind of naive on your part.

I mentioned it as a challenge, not as a good thing.

I think I'm done, here.

Have a great day!

I read it as such too. Not sure why everyone got so upset.

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