
At iwantmyname everyone has the same salary - owenwil
https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2014/05/culture-at-iwmn-part-one.html
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fishtoaster
That's a cool experiment. It's always neat to see people trying new, weird
ways to run a company.

That said, I would predict the following:

\- As the company grows, they have trouble hiring specialists or more senior
people, since they're competing with other companies for those people, but
without the flexibility to offer a comparable salary. They could solve this by
paying their highest-paid person what they're worth, and everyone else the
same, but that could be prohibitively expensive.

\- The need will develop for people who, though valuable, are plentiful (eg, a
janitor, but fill in any role here that's generally near the bottom of the pay
scale). The decision will be "We'd really like a janitor, but not enough to
pay $X", where X is their everyone-salary (which has to be high enough to
attract their most valuable people). As such, they'll be hard-pressed to hire
roles that aren't really worth that much to them.

Of course, you can solve either of those by having more money than you know
what to do with. So, if they're wildly profitable, it's a system that'll keep
working.

That's just my prediction, though. I'd love to see a followup blog post in a
few years describing how it went.

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infogulch
They might be able to get around the janitor etc problem by hiring a
janitorial service company to do it instead of a full time person. This would
work for many positions including both bottom of the pay scale and top. E.g.
at the top of the pay scale you could contract a consultant to do an in-depth
performance/security profile and recommendation report instead of hiring an
expert directly.

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sytelus
They are one bozzo away from the disaster. At small scale it is possible to
have great consistency among your hires with everybody doing everything and be
super productive. But eventually bozzos starts to creep in. Smart people will
start feeling frustrated because they are being valued same as who they
consider less optimal, less trained, less experienced or less productive.
Person A would loose motivation to go extra mile if s/he feels everybody else
aren't. It is one thing not to have bonuses, performance ratings and offer
just one flat salary but its quite another to offer same salary to everyone.

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treitnauer
It's certainly an experiment. We'll see how it goes.

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jakejake
Looking at the "about us" page the company has 8 employees. Six of them seem
to be either executive level or skilled technical employees who possibly would
earn similar salaries anyway. Then there's two that seem, from the
description, to be what I would consider more general-skilled employees. My
takeaway is that this strategy results in two employees making an unusually
high salary for their position, while the founder/owners are probably taking
less money than they could. Assuming there aren't some secret bonuses or stock
options I'd say it seems generous on the part of the owners.

That being said I think this idea is not too far off from communism which can
tend to reward people for doing the bare minimum. So I would think it would
rely on the fact that everybody at the company has the desire to work hard and
contribute a similar amount of effort. Otherwise eventually some people will
become angry that their hard work is not worth any more than somebody else's
lazy habits.

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utunga
Amazing! I assume it works because everyone is in the same overall ballpark of
skills/experience (maybe within a factor of two or something). If you were a
law firm and had 60 year old gray beards as well as young interns straight out
of school I could see it being a lot more difficult to pull off.

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fringedgentian
Do they all own the same amounts of equity in the company, as well? Or, in the
case of a sale someday, do two of those guys get rich and the others find
themselves having worked for lower-than-average salary for all those years in
the name of "fairness to all".

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Grue3
They tried this on a rather large scale in USSR, it was called "from each
according to his ability, to each according to his need". The results...
weren't that great.

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cheepin
I get the reasoning behind it, but I wonder how it affects hiring/retention.

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baconhigh
these guys are so brilliant. Yes, I use them to host all my domains.

