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.

Comments

Life imitating art?

[K. S. Van Horn]

This sounds like something out of an Ayn Rand novel. It's very similar to something that happens in Atlas Shrugged.

Re:Life imitating art?

[dbIII]

Needless to say, it did not work out well.

Of course it didn't, because it was a pre-determined strawman in a novel as a snarky complaint about Rand not being paid what she thought she deserved by Twentieth Century Fox in her entry level job.
Rand was so fucked up that she was comparing Hollywood employment to Soviet Russia! Read a bit about Rand's life and you'll understand where she is coming from and that she knew almost nothing about the the west and did not wish to know much about the west. She hated Stalin, but if Stalin had wanted to plant the seeds of political discord in the USA with a political movement he couldn't have done better than Rand no matter who he paid to do it.

Her fantasies are Twilight for people in a democracy that wish they could be Royalty instead, and they fuck up anyone that takes them at more than face value. The message that you could be special if it wasn't for all of those Serfs having a say in how the country is run is utterly fucked. You should have to earn the right to rule instead of being born to it like Digby.

Re:Those making more than new minimum salary

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:That NYT article in full

[laird]

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... .

Re:That NYT article in full

[Shadow of Eternity]

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?

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ha!

[geoskd]

If i just spent 100 grand on a 4 year degree and gave 2 years to this company i wouldnt be as happy about it

Why? Nobody except the CEO took a pay cut. In fact everyone got at least a small raise. These guys are actively unhappy because *someone else* got a fair shake for a change? Thats just retarded, mean and more than a little childish. I could see if they had been given a paycut, but they were in no way affected except that someone they work with got a windfall. If you weren't getting a fair wage, then why were you still working there? If you were getting a fair wage then GROW UP.