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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

This has been a thing for a long time and I've thought about it quite a bit, but I still have no solutions.

I'm pretty sure it just comes down to bean-counting: "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $100k" vs "we have a new fulltime permanent asset for $120k" is effectively the same thing, and there's a clear "spend money, acquire person" transaction going on. Meanwhile, "we spent $20k on an asset we already have" is.. a hard sell. What are you buying with that $20k exactly? 20% more hours? 20% more output? No? Then why are we spending the money?

It's certainly possible to dance around it talking about reducing risk ("there's a risk this person leaves, which will cause...") but it's bogged down in hypotheticals and kinda a hard sell. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.

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"What are you buying with those 20k?"

You keep a good thing going, you buy oil for the machinery, you keep your part of the bargain and do the maintenance. You pay the correct price for the stuff you are lucky enough to have been getting on the cheap.

I like the directness of the question: "Why should I pay more when it won't burn down right this instand if I don't?" This is a question asked all over, and it is dangerous, keeping anything going requires maintenance and knowledge in how to maintain it. That goes for cars and it goes for people.

This is not business, it is miserly behaviour, it is being cheap.

The miser will find himself in a harsh, transactional, brutal world. Because that is the only way for people to protect themselves against him.

>What are you buying with that $20k exactly?

This incentive is entirely backwards. It should be "what are we losing with not spending that 20k?". You lose out on someone used to the company workflow, you waste any training you invested in them, you create a hole that strains your other 3-4 100k engineers, and you add a time strain to your managers to spend time interviewing a new member.

if you really believe you can buy all that back for 120k as if you ran short on milkk, you're missing the forest for the tree.

>Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just fire staff for a week then re-hire them at a new salary.

if society conditions a workforce to understand the issue, sure. But psychologically. you'd create an even lower morale workplace. Even for a week, people don't want to be dropped like a hot potato, even if you pick it up later as it cools. People want some form of stability, especially in an assumed full time role.

In my view, I have observed many good, underpaid engineers because they choose stability over higher pay. Most people are happy with slow and stead pay rises while working at the same company. Companies know this and pay accordingly. Only your top 1-10% of employees need more careful "TLC" to give higher raises and regular off-cycle feedback: "You're doing great. We are giving you a special raise for your efforts." You can mostly afford to lose the rest.

>You can mostly afford to lose the rest.

I guess that's how we got here to begin with. We take a workforce and treat is as expendable instead of as a proper team.

I suppose it will vary per industry but I can't imagine an other kind of engineering being comfortable just letting go of people mid-project because "we can afford to lose them".

This. Accepting bad terms become a problem after a while, non-solidarity with the profession.

Employers get straight up lazy, by having soft negotiating employees to ignore. This laziness will bite them.

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