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.
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.
On the issue of talent pool we have another experiment going. We don't require anyone to work from our office, work from wherever you feel like. I'll blog about that next but to answer your question, it has an extremely positive effect on hiring highly skilled people.
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.