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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.

We will invent narratives to protect our ego and will happily keep other people down (including ourselves) instead of confronting this.

"He just got promoted because he's more outgoing, he's not more talented than me!"

Ok let's assume thats true. But if your job involves spending 40 hours a week with someone (more than your family), it turns out humans value being around charming, outgoing people. Is this wrong or is it the market accurately assessing relative value in the context of the actual work (collaborating with other humans)?

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>People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.

Mediocre and average employees like the idea of reducing inequality, because the mediocre employees stand to financially benefit and the average employees can expect little to no change in compensation while reaping emotional rewards.

For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.

If they're truly high impact and high competence they should be able to signal that value in high impact high competence ways.

The reality is that in most industries competence and impact has very little to do with compensation. Compensation is the result of political status games, not demonstrable ability.

> For highly paid employees (high impact, high competence, whatever the reason), reducing inequality goes against their direct financial interests. Inequality gets reduced by dragging their compensation down, not increasing everyone else's.

Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality.

Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others. If you want to pay someone outside of band, give them a different title.

If someone performs unexpectedly well, give them a bonus/promotion etc.

It's deeply sad (but unsurprising) that so many people can only focus on their particular benefit (especially when the vast majority of that benefit is context dependent).

Like, if you hired John Carmack or Fabrice Bellard and just told them to take tickets, they'd probably be an average performer at best. If you told them never to take initiative, they'd perform badly. So lots of performance is dependent on context, there are very few "good" employees in a vacuum.

>Speaking as someone who's been a super high performer in some roles, and a terrible performer in others, I definitely want to reduce inequality. Like, it's entirely unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others.

Then give your money to people who don't negotiate as well. In practice, you don't: your revealed preference speaks louder than your stated preference does.

Wanting to live in a better society should not preclude me from doing better in this one.

And the transaction costs on such an approach would be too large, as I'm sure that you know.

M I note that you don't address the notion of context dependent high performance.

> it's unfair that I (because I negotiate well) get better options than others

No its not. This is a skill that is useful when exchanging value with other entities (the basis of the economy). You're being compensated for having that skill.

Would you hire a salesperson or head of procurement or media buyer with bad negotiation skills? How about a developer who can't properly negotiate with teams demanding their time to properly allocate themselves where needed?

Just because someone is 'good' at negotiating higher comp in the interview process, doesn't mean that will have an high impact on the business.

As an EM, a person's current salary is an anchor. If someone is paid at the bottom of the band, but then later the company learns about their high impact, they aren't given a raise, they are told to push harder and get promoted.

And then when they are promoted, they are probably at the bottom of the next band.

if a person threatens to leave, the EM (rarely) can magically wave a wand to increase the salary, but they can promise to put them up for promotion next cycle.

> People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.

It goes other way round too. It might just be that the your higher salary is not rational, you got lucky or got unfair advantage.

Like, in the bottom of your comment, you made up situation that might just not apply. Or might just not counteract anything

Or, might be directly damaging - agreeing with everyone makes you popular, but causes a lot of damage in the long term. Lying about important stuff makes you popular, but causes damage to company and everyone else.

People go out of their way to rationalize and defend unfair or damaging systems.

My point was that the "you got lucky or got unfair advantage" narrative that people use to explain why other people are successful and they are not is motivated reasoning.

So it's far more likely these comments are over-indexing on the "its all luck/unfairness" explanation than the "it's all rational" explanation given there's 100X more people who will have their egos protected by the former positioning (the ratio of executives to worker bees is like 1:100).

Nah I think that almost everything is luck based.

It’s more that the “i work hard and hustle everyday” narrative from successful people is to protect their little egos from the realisation that 90% of their success is pure luck / chance / chaos.

You didn't confront my core assertion.

Yes, both parties use motivated reasoning to protect their ego.

But there's 100X more of the worker bees than there is of the uber-successful.

Therefore any discussion like this one will over-index on the luck explanation.

We're obviously not at risk of assigning too much agency to successful people here on HN, an internet forum filled with frustrated leftist upper middle class last men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

And my point was that "no he was not lucky, it was entirely fair with no luck or advantage (and no fraud, lies etc)" narrative is frequently motivated reasoning too.

> the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.

I'd like the boss to do his work and write down the rationalization. Then, when we have an objective measure of the rationalization of the wage, I can work towards getting a higher wage myself.

The biggest opponents of wage transparency (and many other things) are incompetent managers refusing to do their work.

Signed, a high earner.

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