Slashdot Mirror
Company Testing Standardized Salaries Is Struggling
jmcbain writes: In April 2015, Dan Price, the CEO of online payments company Gravity Payments based in Seattle, announced that all employees would have their salary bumped up to a minimum $70,000. Slashdot covered this news. Since that time, however, things have not gone well. Some employees quit because they felt it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises. Furthermore, after reducing his own salary from $1M to $70K, Mr. Price is now renting a house 'to make ends meet'. On an unrelated note, Mr. Price's brother, who is a co-founder of the company, is suing him.
Imagine that.
Differences in pay exist for a reason: Because different people perform functions of different value to the company.
This sounds like something out of an Ayn Rand novel. It's very similar to something that happens in Atlas Shrugged.
Same thing happened at walmart when they bumped their lowest paid workers up to the minimum wage.
http://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/wal-marts-pay-raise-creates-thousands-of-unhappy-workers-its-pitting-people-against-each-other
Senior workers got no raise and feel disrespected.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I've seen minimum wage go up by 40% since I entered the work force, but my own salary has only gone up by 25% in that same period.
You know that the minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation in over two decades, right? So if your wages are doing even more poorly than the minimum wage, you're getting fucked and hard. But you're complaining about the people who are getting fucked way harder than you, because them getting fucked slightly less hard means you get fucked slightly harder. What about the people doing the fucking? Maybe you should stop attacking your natural allies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But you don't understand! it's absolutely unfair that Timmy had 3 marbles and got 3 more, and he had 10 marbles and only got 2 more! ITS NOT FAIR!!1! He demands at least 4 marbles or he's going to flip his shit and go full on ballistic temper tantrum followed by pouting for the rest of the afternoon!
Don't leave out that the business is booming, doing much more business than before, and getting tons of applications from high quality candidates attracted by the higher wages.
So yes, the transition might be bumpy. But nobody's salary went down, so they're all making at least what they agreed to for their job. It seems weird to me that people are angry that while they got a raise, but so did lower paid workers, so they aren't making as much more than the other guy as they used to.
A good writeup is at http://www.forbes.com/sites/mi... .
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
And in the meantime those two selfish assholes who quit solely because they couldn't stand to see other people not treated worse than them have made themselves radioactive. Why would I ever want to hire people who might throw a huge public tantrum and quit because I don't treat other people badly enough to soothe their ego?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Those who can contribute significant, above-and-beyond value naturally feel that people should be rewarded in proportion to their contributions.
Those who cannot contribute significant, above-and-beyond value naturally feel that everyone should receive equal rewards, regardless of their contributions.
By setting policies that pander to the second group, you wind up losing members of the first group, resulting in a company full of under-performing slackers. No surprise such a company doesn't do well.