

Salary, from an employee's perspective - dclowd9901
http://ddrewdesign.com/blog/salary-from-an-employees-perspecti-1

======
quasse
_" Software development tends to make it pretty easy with things like Github
to track development, so I figure when the time comes to start hiring people,
I'll have a decent way for myself to track people."_

This last bit sounds like the start of a trip down a bad road that's been
traveled before. Unless this guy is planning on reading carefully over _all_
of his employee's code to see how much "passion" it contains, what he's
proposing is essentially payment based on how many times you commit, or by
lines of code, or some other equally meaningless metric. All he's going to end
up doing is creating cynical employees who save their last push to GitHub for
Sunday so they can get their 10% passion bonus for working during personal
time.

Personally, if given the choice between a salaried position and equivalent
hourly pay, I'd rather just be paid hourly. People treat the move to salary as
a reward for employees moving up in a business, but it also removes the direct
reward you get for working an extra 20 hours to bail your boss out or ship a
product on a given week. There's this nebulous idea of annual bonuses for hard
work or high performance but honestly putting those extra hours on my time
sheet and being paid for them is enough for me.

~~~
Volundr
I agree with you, and I don't. With the way many companies seem to treat
salary, I'd certainly rather work hourly, but that's really not the way salary
is supposed to work (or does where I work).

When your hourly, if you start feeling sick in the middle of the afternoon go
home, you have to put it on your timecard and it shows on your paycheck.
Similarly, if shit hits the fan and you pull an extra 20 hours cleaning it up,
you have to put it on your timecard and it shows on your paycheck. Seems fair
right? And it is. But both you and your employer are spending a fair amount of
effort on simply making sure your _time_ (not work) is accounted for
correctly.

Salary done right is when both you and your employer agree to skip the bean-
counting. They have around, say, 40 hours worth of work they'd like to hire
you to do, and they'd like to pay you 'x' much to do it. Now when it'd a
lovely spring day and you decide to take an afternoon walk with your
significant other, eh you still get paid the same. All caught up and don't
feel like being at the office anymore? Eh take off. Whose counting? At the
same time when there's a fire in the server room and you all pull all nighters
bringing things back up, no one needs to waste time figuring exactly how much
time you spent.

The problem with the way so many companies are doing salary currently is that
the company is very happy not to count the extra hours you spend at work, but
insist on an exact account of the time you didn't. Hell, they usually even go
so far as to give you an allotment of time your allowed to not spend at the
office. That double standard is the problem with most salaries, not the
concept of salary itself.

------
aashishkoirala
Halfway through the article, this started to sound like rationalization for
paying your employees less. Am I wrong? Should I have read through to the end?

~~~
dclowd9901
I hope it didn't come off that way. You shouldn't be getting paid less, but
instead, at bare minimum and equitable amount, and additional if you're the
kind of employee who is constantly pushing.

