'Peanut butter' pay raises could cost companies their top performers (cnbc.com)

it is management that is successfully convincing people that it is a tough job market - it is not - it is same as before. I am a contractor, have more work offered than I can take (same as before, maybe even slightly more). four friends/former colleagues got new jobs since the beginning of December, each had multiple offers and got decent to significant pay increases compared to previous positions.

How exactly should the state "capture" value generated by these firms? Would it pay the employees more? What would the competitive advantage be? If the jobs are bullshit, why wouldn't some other firm capture the same value without those jobs, making even more profit with less overhead?

I also found his thesis compelling, but it’s built on bad social science: https://open.substack.com/pub/gilpignol/p/bullshit-jobs-was-...

> I don't understand why you think you're not worth being paid a livable salary.

I haven’t said that at all. I think I’m worth a two-digit percentage of gross revenue in the executive market and have a track record of strategic prediction, untapped market identification, proven competence at leadership, and the tech chops to working-prototype my own ideas to faster than I can explain and delegate them and to assess and address top-tier engineers trying to slack off under the hood on a formal implementation of same.

But this isn’t a conversation about how I value myself as an executive. This is a conversation about how I value being paid as a worker. Workers don’t get paid enough to be strategic visionaries. Workers can sleep at night and don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath. I like being a worker, I’m an excellent worker, and I stand by my above comments on the topic of peanut butter raises: so long as executives and strategists and workers all receive peanut butter raises without unfair bias towards the formers, they seem perfectly fine to me. When executives get double-digit raises and strategists get paid worker wages, I get offended and angry and find alternate employment or outright change careers.

(Yes, if you’re being paid less than seven or eight figures a year to provide long-term strategic vision and development to your company, you’re probably being cheated out of the wage they’d pay you as strategic consultant to do that same work. Study your written job definition more closely and stop donating unpaid-volunteer work to your employers. If they object, ask them to revise your job description and increase your pay accordingly. This is all bog standard corporate worker stuff that everyone here already knows.)

Well, after all most people would rather live in SF in 2026 than 1968.

[dead]

It doesn’t feel unfair to be paid unevenly to me? I guess one upside of the whole prosociopath thing is that I don’t feel cheated by that particular circumstance. I feel cheated when someone is given authority without proper skill and experience, to the degree that I suspect other people do about pay, though. A lot more harm is done by assignment of authority to incompetence (in a non-training context, anyways) than is done by decoupling pay and competence.

However: I’m extremely hostile to overall wages as a fraction of revenue being held artificially low to increase the imbalance of payouts in favor of executives and shareholders. I think it’s appropriate to pay executives more because they bear a higher proportion of legal exposure than non-executives; I do not think it’s appropriate how most executives treat workers raises as a “cost center to be minimized” differently from their own pay as a “profit center to be maximized”. Similarly, I think that there’s a solid argument for paying your company’s long-term strategy cross-functional team according to having to bear the long-term responsibility and awareness of risks and so on. You can’t ask a base wage worker to care about your company; that’s a lot to ask, and requires an additional share of payment than just a day job would.

No disagreement about the harmful-when-present workers, though!

Yes. My raise each of the last two years was 2%, same as everyone else's. That's less than inflation for most things so I'm slowly backsliding.

That’s been the norm for most jobs forever. It’s why the average software job tenure has been ~2 years for over a decade. You only get an increase in salary by finding a new job where companies have to actually compete for talent(sans the past 2 years of this market).

Getting a new job is onerous in tech with how we interview and companies made the bet that they’d do better off not increasing their labor costs across their employee base and dealing with a higher per position recruitment cost for a smaller number of roles.

Exactly this, if you stay on the ship you only get everyone else's job. It sounds like you're more valuable which is the trap, because there is no more money in the banana stand.

I'd rather make -20% less and work with people who don't drive me crazy while having an equity stake in the company. It may not pay off, but I'll tell ya what, my blood pressure is a lot lower!

> while others still keep getting recruiter messages on LinkedIn and can get a new position in a matter of weeks.

many of those are blasts, and the jobs they are hiring for are vaporware.

i wasted a lot of time as a younger worker thinking that headhunter and recruiter chats on linkedin were worth the trouble.

make no mistake, sometimes they are, but for easily 50% of tech workers they're a waste of time

It is bimodal, but I am pretty sure almost nobody is getting hired cold in a couple of weeks.

They just keep their radar on and stay in touch. It's a whole job in itself.

Making things seem effortless is what makes them so attractive to begin with. Confidence and options come with the experience.

Nah that's dumb. I grew up poor. I make awesome sandwiches now.

I find dipping a cashew in is even better. The cashew becomes your scooper. The combination is divine.