
76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery, not money, most important - wbelk
https://medium.com/@wbelk/76-of-high-performance-employees-say-trade-mastery-not-money-most-important-in-career-decisions-e0c457884d2e
======
simonsarris
What a weird setup for a false dichotomy.

> My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money.
> But why?

When you come across a peculiar result, "But why?" shouldn't be the first
question you ask. Maybe more like "What have I missed? What am I not
accounting for? What am I conflating or grouping together? What assumptions
did I make, and did I allow my respondents to make any implicit assumptions?"

Did the author ask what the cutoff is for money? Is it non-zero? Is he
suggesting that his data shows that 76% of HPEs would rather be starving
artists with great recognition? Or is there an implied "gobs of money" that's
already on the table? I'm guessing the latter.

There is no acknowledgement that "not motivated by money" and "not motivated
by more money" are two very different things. The way he phrased the question,
there's no way to parse out what's implied. He simply asked:

> Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by
> earning money?

Lots of people may answer one or the other for very disparate reasons.

> The mysteries are hard to explain.

Or maybe the author crafted the same poor questions that usually fill these
surveys. The data he gathered is probably useless.

There are no profound mysteries here. Just the average tea leaves reading.

> an HPE’s connection to their trade resembles more a mysterious spiritual
> illumination and growing devotion than it does an evolution of practical
> decisions aimed in a concise direction.

 _Tea leaves._

~~~
walshemj
And when you ask this sort of question people will lie about how important the
say money is.

~~~
cookiecaper
Yes. Whenever you're collecting feedback from a person (or group of people),
their own self-image and ego is _by far_ the most important factor in their
responses.

It would not even be considered a lie by most. There's just not necessarily
any relationship between their self-conception and reality. People are
terrible at assessing their own motives (and from this arises marketing, whose
goal is to program the target to believe they desire a specific
product/brand).

Most people do not see themselves as greedy, and I would guess the respondents
to this survey are not in dire financial straits, so they wouldn't make an
exceptional circumstance override for themselves (assuming they're the type
who'd take such a survey seriously enough to consider that in the first
place).

The question, essentially, can be interpreted as "Do you consider yourself
noble or non-noble?" Of course, most people consider themselves noble.

This same ego-driven self-narrative is the reason that someone can take a lot
of hollabaloo, dress it up in gaudy language, throw in some charts and
equations to support the pre-conception, and get people to believe it's
insightful and credible.

------
alphonsegaston
The thing that's so weird about a Late Capitalist society like the U.S. is the
amount of time spent ritualizing inequality into a quasi-religious phenomena.
The lower classes have no desire for wealth, but instead an ascetic mastery of
whatever lot the divine order of the market has handed them. Meanwhile, our
gilded class of saints must be free and untroubled by worldly concerns(mostly
taxes), so they can harness their benevolent energies towards curing the ills
of we small mortals. I guess it makes sense given our history of religious
nuttery, but I never expected to live in such a "mythical" world.

~~~
dmix
Why would high performing employees with office jobs be "lower class"? As
others mentioned once you hit a certain income threshold and job security,
then you can start prioritizing the parts of the job you enjoy. This is who
the article is talking about.

This means keeping a $60k job instead of sacrificing your happiness for
$90-100k.

That's hardly quasi-religious phenomena. It's a luxury of skilled people
living in a western society.

If anything it's the result of the push back _against_ capitalism, such as the
type of comment you just made. We're all told since we're kids to do what we
love. And to since the late 1980s this anti-consumerism Fight Club-style
mantra has been pushed hard to the point it's basically mainstream now, which
is why marketing is so hard these days, even kids see through ads and demand
authenticity.

The primary issue of inequality is largely the result of the fact that ~90% of
recent job growth since the 2008 recession has been temporary/contract jobs,
with little job security. These aren't the type of people who are valuing
'mastery' over money'. Middle class job growth is largely dead. And big
incumbents dominate markets and global economic systems push wealth to a few.
Entrepreneurship has also declined recently. There's plenty of reasons.

I don't suspect it's some cultural, original sin, type of thing that we should
all feel guilty about.

~~~
alphonsegaston
>Why would high performing employees with office jobs be "lower class"? As
others mentioned once you hit a certain income threshold and job security,
then you can start prioritizing the parts of the job you enjoy. This is who
the article is talking about.

Because they're foolish enough to believe that themselves in solidarity with
the oligarch class, when really they're only temporarily useful to them.

If you think "high-performers" are part of the elite or are going to escape
from this neo-feudalism unscathed, well, enjoy this sermon.

~~~
gozur88
>Because they're foolish enough to believe that themselves in solidarity with
the oligarch class, when really they're only temporarily useful to them.

Not everyone takes the Marxist view of society in which we're perpetually
locked in a class struggle, with enemy classes and those with which we're "in
solidarity".

~~~
psyc
I don't think it makes any sense to call that a 'view' \- other than the trite
philosophical sense in which everybody's worldview is their own. Not sure what
part of Marx's analysis of class struggle would actually depend on personal
opinion in any meaningful way.

~~~
gozur88
Because it doesn't reflect reality? Do you really feel like you're
"struggling" with other classes?

~~~
rublev
>Because it doesn't reflect reality? Do you really feel like you're
"struggling" with other classes?

Do you feel okay in the head?

~~~
gozur88
Absolutely. I don't carry the same burden of paranoia that other people seem
to have. You?

------
madengr
Money isn't everything, but it sucks being poor. The older I get, I'm finding
money is more important. Between the costs of college savings, retirement
savings, medical savings, you'd better be paying your high performance
employees well. They may like their work (like me), but money still talks.

Regarding the medical savings it's a race to the bottom for employer provided
benefits. I no longer have dental insurance at a Fortune 50 company. Medical
insurance has increased 3x and now it's essentially a catastrophic plan with
$10k max OOP. Far cry from 10 years ago. I put $600/month into HSA for a
family of 4. Been doing this for several years and still can't save up the
$10k. The damn OOP is now higher than the max HSA contribution.

Whenever I do get a raise, it just goes into another expense for some other
benefit that has been cut.

$17k/yr 401k max * 2 people = $34k

$12k/yr edu savings * 2 kids = $24k

$7.2k/yr HSA contribution (that's a fucking car payment).

$26k/yr mortgage

It all adds up.

~~~
BatFastard
I can appreciate what you are saying, esp with health care.

However as I grow older I find money matters less to me (and not because I
have a lot of it), I would just much rather ENJOY my craft. Crazy deadlines,
horrible tech debt, bad management, are all things I have been thru and do not
wish to repeat.

"Life's too short to be in a hurry" \- batFastard

~~~
a3n
I'm sort of experiencing that now, and not in a good way. I'm out of work ATM,
and so when I work on something technical, I work on it because I want to and
when I want to.

I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at
an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because
I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain
date.

For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history
of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on.
Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was
used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return
to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a
history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like
Bacon.

You'll have to follow your own nose to get past this link to Bacon. It's not
that far.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character)

That isn't directly craft-building, but it does contribute to an appreciation
for my craft.

Disclosure: I am not an HPE.

------
jarjoura
Could it be because they're already at the highest earning brackets?

------
valuearb
Another angle to this beyond the data being useless because of how it was
collected.

High performance workers likely recognize that skills get them paid, so the
opportunity to get better skills should always come before money, if you want
to earn the most money.

Example: A young engineer is offered a job at MSFT at $100k per year being a
cog on a team doing maintenance on an existing product. Or they can go to a
startup for $60k a year doing cutting edge development of an innovative new
product. Clearly the second opportunity likely has the best career benefits,
and probably the highest career earnings.

~~~
js8
I would personally go with the first option, in your example. "A bird in the
hand is worth two in the bush."

How do you imagine the better career earnings that come from the 2nd offer? At
the next interview, they ask him, "what was your previous salary?" Then ten
years, five companies and five frameworks later, he (if lucky) finally matches
his MSFT competitor at 130k.

~~~
cableshaft
Can confirm. I've been living that life the past decade. Worked for two
startups that unfortunately didn't succeed as employee #3 for low wages
(~$50k) in my 20s, because they seemed like great opportunities (and to be
fair, I did learn a lot and I am proud of a few of the products that came out,
even though they weren't successful) and I'm still struggling to get my wages
up anywhere close to what gets casually tossed around as 'easy to get' here on
a daily basis.

And pretty much every single company I interview with makes sure they ask what
my previous wage was before giving me an offer, and surprise, surprise, the
offer they give me is only about 10-20% higher than my previous wage, and
waaaay below market.

I'm not in SV though, so wages are a little lower here on average anyway.

------
gbrown_
It's not explicitly stated but reading this I get the feeling the idea of
"trade mastery" is centered around the individual when reading this post.
Personally the most significant developments in my career and skills have been
when working with others who are better than me. For me that means finding a
workplace with skilled individuals who are capable problem solvers in their
own regard (their own specialty and methods - with overlap of course). Second
to that, and only by a very slim margin is that in such a workplace I would
want be working on an interesting product/ service.

So prefacing this with the fact I am currently on a good salary. Would I take
a pay cut to work in somewhere where I am more closely surrounded by
superlative talent? Fuck yes I would.

------
pjungwir
> 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money.

"Primarily" is a pretty slippery word here. So they _are_ motivated by money,
but motivated more by mastery? In that case, how much more? Is it close?

Also, money has diminishing marginal utility. The first $50k of your salary is
worth more than the next $50k, and so on. So how much are these people already
compensated? If they are the top performers, chances are they are already the
top earners too. How much do you have to earn before marginal mastery is worth
more than marginal money?

Finally, how do you make this actionable when hiring? If you offer me more
salary, I fully trust I will receive it. If you promise me greater mastery (or
autonomy, challenge, better peers, making-the-world-a-better-place, etc), I
will tell myself that everyone says that. Anyway, I've learned that good work
is correlated with good salary, so seeking high compensation is a trustworthy
proxy for seeking better mastery. As an employer, how would you answer that?

Of course there is also the question, To make his comparison, how is
motivation even quantified and measured? The truth is his whole survey is
suspect, but it's interesting nonetheless to see what a willing suspension of
disbelief leads to.

------
zelos
OK, try paying below market rate and see how long your best engineers hang
around then.

~~~
HarryHirsch
At Berkeley they are doing exactly that. If you've ever seen the movie "At
Berkeley" there's a scene where the university president discusses that very
issue, the University of California system cannot hope to match the salaries
offered by the private universities. It would be instructive to go over the
list of who stays and who decamps to Stanford.

~~~
jhpankow
Wow if people go to Stanford for more money I can't imagine how low Berkeley
pays.

------
danielamitay
In a simplistic sense, the "esteem" and "self-actualization" levels of
Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

~~~
bhaak
Or in the even more simplistic Herzberg's dual-factor theory: Money is just a
hygiene factor.

If you have not enough, it will negatively impact job satisfaction and
motivation.

OTOH if you have enough, it doesn't raise job satisfaction or motivation.

------
blahman2
Meanwhile their bosses retire in their thirties and do whatever they want.
Funny people

------
archeantus
This is what matters to my job satisfaction:

1\. Fully remote 2\. Great pay 3\. Developing for a platform I am passionate
about (iOS)

I am fortunate enough to have all three of these things right now, but anytime
I've considered making a job change, being fully remote is the requirement
that continues to surface as the most important thing to me (and my wife :).

------
ianbicking
I thought the latter part of the article did a good job of getting out of
standard incentive-thinking.

Why is someone good at doing something? Maybe they've responded to incentives
to develop themselves to satisfy market desires. But it seems more likely that
the person has themselves been part of some positive feedback cycle of self-
development. You can call that feedback cycle "passion" or "a love of the
craft" or "flow" or "talent" or a bunch of things – and there probably are
many distinct reasons to enter into that cycle, they aren't just words for the
same thing – but in the end there was self-motivation and a personal desire
for improvement. Why would that stop? If you got to be good through that
motivation, wouldn't you want to keep satisfying it?

------
fred_is_fred
Once you already have all the money you need it turns out not to matter as
much anymore. Not surprising at all.

------
ng12
People have written books about this stuff (the field is called Organizational
Behavior) but in classic Sillicon Valley fashion we have to reinvent the
wheel. Higher pay will rarely attract employees, but it will prevent them from
leaving. Low pay will increase the odds that other reasons (lack of
motivation, work, environment) will cause an employee to leave.

------
Stasis5001
This study is suspect. First, using self-identification as high-performance is
already troublesome. Second, the author never defines what an HPE is, and the
most concrete specification is from this article they backlink to:

    
    
      >For example, in a software or tech company they would be:
      > Software Engineers
      > Data Scientists
      > Visual Designers
      > Structural & 3-D Prototype Designers
      > Narrative Developers
    

This certainly doesn't agree with what almost anybody else uses to define
high-performance employees.

Third, the question they use to resolve this is from their survey:

    
    
      >Are you motivated more by mastery of skill/craft, or motivated more by earning money?
      > Mastery of skill or craft
      > Money
      > Other
    

I don't think we can draw any conclusion from the fact that 76% of the people
who answered this public google form chose 'mastery'.

------
badosu
The headline can be true, if you have financial guarantees to maintain a
healthy lifestyle and also connections that ensure your trade mastery is
actually employed.

If not, your psychological condition may deteriorate for the first case and
your trade mastery may not have the perceived value in the second.

As always, it's a little bit more complicated.

------
psyc
Trade mastery really does feel wonderful. But its important to remember that
in the context of _employment_ , it doesn't matter at all unless you're
allowed to practice it. Every team I've been on for the past 15 years has
systematically put figurative ball-and-chains on every developer, regardless
of seniority. It's spun as 'engineering discipline' but that's typically a
joke, and really the management is just nervous about commits in general.

Without autonomy, mastery is just a private thing you have, to use on personal
time.

------
mikeash
"My latest survey data shows that 76% of high-performance employees say trade
mastery is more important than money when considering career decisions."

"My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money."

It seems unwise to just assume, without even saying so, that what people say
motivates them is what really motivates them. People are not actually very
good at understanding their own thinking, and there are countless examples of
people (sincerely!) stating that their motivations are X while their actions
reveal it's really Y.

------
robertlagrant
All my other comments have been said, apart from: what the heck did the bit
about karma have to do with anything? If it'd said "Jesus is the reason you're
born to your parents" rather than karma, I'm pretty sure that would've rightly
attracted some anti-proselytizing comments. Karma or "the universe" aren't any
less religious ideas - are we just trained to be offended by some things and
not others?

------
bougiefever
The question on the survey was an either/or question. Do people pick mastery
over money when faced with this question because they don't want to admit that
money matters more? I picked mastery because I've already been in what I
considered a high-paying dead-end job. I was miserable, but making money still
matters a lot to me. I would (already have) picked a lower-paying job that was
more rewarding in other ways. Never regretted it.

------
rdm
That survey feels like the sort of thing I've filled out to get a temporary
free trade publication subscription.

But what's interesting to me is that my current situation has enough twists to
it that I literally could validly answer with several different conflicting
choices on a number of those questions.

So... I'm not going to fill that out - doing so would induce too much stress
against my internal need to be accurate in my answers.

------
sauronlord
Look at what people do, not what they are saying.

They are motivated by all the great things money provides (nice family life,
nice house, travel, health care)

That 78% of respondents are brained washed to repeat "do it for the
passion/masterery/unicorns".

Show me one of these 78%-ers who will not work like crazy for a million
dollars in a single year or two

------
Mitchhhs
In a similar vein, this post on worker satisfaction found that these 8 metrics
can predict 70% of the variance in overall satisfaction at work. Quality of
coworkers was by far the highest predictor.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13997858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13997858)

------
test6554
The marginal benefit of money decreases the more money you earn. Each extra
dollar earned is less valuable to you than the previous dollar earned.
Eventually the costs of earning that dollar in time, stress, etc. overpower
the benefits of the dollar itself.

------
maverick_iceman
Who would want to come across as a greedy monster instead of someone who loves
their work?

------
kelvin0
Maybe it's because most high-performers are mostly well paid (and sought
after). Assuming this, they are no longer chasing the 'money' since they
already get it as a side-effect of they add to the projects they are part of.

------
QuantumGravy
Trade mastery also equates to future money on a scale which may render
quibbling over an extra ten grand of current compensation meaningless. Failing
that, it at least helps secure future employment, which still translates to
money.

------
qntmfred
Reminds me of the video/book from Daniel Pink on Drive
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)

------
googletazer
Don't kid yourself, - its because monetary reward is already implied.

------
austincheney
I have asked the wife on several occasions if I could get out of software and
take a job doing something else for less money. I am tired of software... at
least in the corporate space. Don't get me wrong I love writing software....
but the general incompetence of corporate software development has killed my
spirit.

I am a web guy whose primary job is at a major dot com and here are the
problems as I see software generally.

Good web developers are hard to hire. They tend to be equally in demand
compared to their Java counter-parts in the corporate space, but there are
something like 11x more Java positions. The reason is because Java developers
are easier to find. This creates several problems.

Since good web developers are hard to hire your choices are to retask a Java
developer without training or hire a web developer that isn't good. The
results are similar: cutting corners until you are drowning in tech debt and
then blaming someone/something else.

Higher salaries won't solve this problem because it takes time and practice to
get good at anything, but demand for skills in the workplace are immediate.
Contrarily, higher salaries without solving for the missing skills (the
primary cause of the problem) just encourage under-qualified talent to more
vigorously defend or fight to attain positions they are not entitled to hold.
The phenomenon is so incredibly common it has the name imposter syndrome.

The primary difference between a good developer and a bench warmer is
confidence. A good developer is going to care far less for playing politics
and defensiveness. If it doesn't work out for a good developer they can go get
an equally sucky job somewhere else and probably make more money, so the
motivation for politics is largely lost. Less good developers do not have such
confidence that they can quickly acquire another position elsewhere or are
holding their current positions for reasons not directly related to their
craft, such as seniority entitlements.

As the previous paragraph eludes to the real difference between good
developers and everybody else is motivation. When you are primarily motivated
to merely retain your employment you will perceive your place in that
environment far differently. These guys will do everything possible to not
rock the boat if job stability is everything. It also means that technical
competencies at the job should normalize into some happy medium so that you
aren't exposed for being an imposter.

The reason why the incompetence is so pervasive is because demand is crazy
high and without regulation of any kind. In almost every other professional
career there is regulation, typically licensing. You cannot be a doctor,
lawyer, real estate agent, engineer, pilot, and so forth without a license.
You can be a politician though.

After doing this for several years in the corporate world I am really tired of
the stupid games people play. Since I have two simultaneous careers in
separate unrelated industries I can really see the dysfunction that many
people happily tolerate every day. I am ready to do something else like become
a teacher or make my secondary career my primary even though this means less
pay.

------
elastic_church
ha yeah none of them are to do the same job in Poland for 1/5th the wages. its
like the question itself means something else to most people, in order for
them to say "no" to it, but every onlooker could see a clear relationship to
money.

------
inputcoffee
Okay, now ask the _highest-paid_ employees what is most important to them.

Compare.

------
st3v3r
Maybe, but how many of those high-performance employees are already making
buttloads of money? How many of them are just scraping by around the poverty
line? It's pretty easy to say money isn't important when you already have it.

