>One question for you: If you knew your employers finances (Semco gives all staff a 2 week course on understanding the books), and could see that if you didn't take a pay cut now, you would lose your job in 3 months as the company would go bankrupt, would you vote for a pay decrease or say fuck it, I'm keeping my salary the same and damn the consequences?
Really depends. If I felt the company would take a long time or have a low probability of pivoting and recovering, I would probably vote myself the highest salary I could and ride it down/start looking for another job. I assume quite a few others would feel the same way.
When this situation happened at Semco (Brazil has had a lot of problems with its economy over the last 20 years) management put forward keeping salaries the same, but letting people go. The employees countered with everyone getting salary cuts to see them through the down turn, with the hike back to normal levels agreed on beforehand.
I don't know if it was about wether or not the company the company would turn around, but it seemed a lot more based on loyalty to the company (plus all staff, even assemblyline workers set their own work hours) and no one really wanted to go back to working at a 'traditional' company. I think that in software dev a lot of the jobs are fairly the same work environment-wise, so your take probably could work if you are only at work for the money (and I know, everyone has bills to pay, I have a family so it would be a tough call for me to make as well but I don't think I would just try to hike my salary and hasten the doom of the company if they've treated me awesomely over the years)
Really depends. If I felt the company would take a long time or have a low probability of pivoting and recovering, I would probably vote myself the highest salary I could and ride it down/start looking for another job. I assume quite a few others would feel the same way.