

Everyone gets paid on commission - cwan
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/everyone-gets-paid-on-commission.html

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patio11
I think there is going to be a huge tension in the future between two facts of
the status quo:

1) There are vast productivity differences between knowledge workers. (Say,
for the sake of argument, a factor of ten between best and worst.)

2) There are generally narrow bands of pay within a single occupation at a
single company. (Say, for the sake of argument, a factor of two.)

My company has gotten the Japanese metrics religion. We track productivity for
all of the engineers at the company -- it isn't an exact science, but the
numbers roughly comport to my sense of who are extraordinarily talented and
who still need seasoning. Since it is a Japanese company, all salaries are
equivalent, to the yen, to the company's published salary standards.

It takes an effort of will for me to not compare the discrepancies between
those two sets of numbers.

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skolor
I assume this is in response to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836842> .

If it is, then Godin is dead wrong. Even if it isn't, he's still fairly wrong.
His example of "commission" is not someone working on commission at all, its
someone who is having their performance measured to a much higher degree than
was possible in the past, and fired because they didn't live up to the
expectation. If it was truly "commission" then the bloggers would be getting
paid per hit, rather than taking a salary.

Yes, people able to closely measure everything is something which is coming,
and coming quickly, but it does not make every job "on commission". It just
means you have to do your job, do it well, and not be able to fake it and ride
on someone else doing it for you.

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kneath
I've always loved the idea of working on commission. But the problem is we're
moving towards a culture of _punishing_ on commission and _rewarding_ on
experience / perceived effort.

I wonder how many columnists who write highly trafficked articles are getting
bonuses? Or Raises? My bet is very few, and the few who do get them are
fighting hard for them.

It's sad, because I've seen the same thing happen in my past working at an
agency. People on highly unprofitable projects eventually get fired/demoted,
while people who are routinely running 150-200% of their billable capacity are
not rewarded.

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zck
There's a danger in simply looking at the immediate audience. The Velvet
Underground is an example of a band who, although they never became very
popular, were quite influential. Having an influential, respected reporter on
staff might not pay off for years, but it may become worth it over the long
run.

~~~
unalone
Better than the Velvet Underground as an example: Look at Zappa, whose album
Freak Out! provided the technological impetus for the Beatles to record Sgt.
Pepper's, which then got all the attention for its tech experiments.

Zappa was never as acclaimed as the people that followed him, but constantly
pushed music forward and brought a lot of new ideas with him. By any metric
other than influence, which can't be tracked, he was not a particularly
successful musician. He wasn't even critically acclaimed at first, because
people thought atonal rock would kill music forever.

Metrics are good for some things. Other things cannot and never will be
measured.

~~~
zck
That's true, and I'm kind of disappointed in myself for not thinking of Zappa.
I do think the Velvet Underground might be a better example, because you have
to explain less -- people know they're influential.

~~~
unalone
Zappa came to mind largely because I'm still not happy with how he's treated
by the music media. Here's a guy who changed the face of rock, inspired the
greatest band of all time as much as the Beach Boys did (though _they_ get
mention), and was a huge figure both in jazz and modern classical music,
possibly the best guitar soloist of all time, and makes a label that launches
the likes of Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits, and he only gets mention as a
"freak" outsider by most sources. The outsider culture in music infuriates me,
because the most cutting-edge musicians get less than lip service almost
everywhere. Trying to find the cutting edge is still ridiculously hard today:
Looking for new music, I have a damned hard time doing it, because the
attention is never on what's new.

Ahem. Rant over. Velvet Underground is certainly another terrific example.

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roc
The comparison to working on commission isn't useful unless that short-term,
single-axis measurement is the extent of performance assessment.

Hypermeasurement doesn't require or imply that all firms will become short-
term, single-axis focused.

So, while true at a high level of abstraction (we're all ultimately employed
and thereby paid, based on our performance), at any useful level of detail the
premise isn't very useful.

