This explains one thing I have recently noticed about myself. I am a software developer, and I dislike being the only developer on a project. I assumed that my aversion was something about effectiveness. But now I realize that "talking to other developers about code" is an important extra payment that I learned to expect in my job.
Interesting. I prefer working on smaller projects where I do the entire thing myself from start to finish. This is mostly because I don't particularly enjoy familiarizing myself with somebody else's code.
Although if I get stuck I will ask my fellow devs for input, and I enjoy showing them whatever cool thing I did once it's polished.
At my current workplace I fill the role of ad hoc programmer, where I'm the guy to ask if somebody needs some small tedious thing automated or parsed I'm the one who can get it done quickly.
I also don't prefer making software intended for other people to use. If something is a background data monitor or something it doesn't need a shiny intuitive UI or anything like that. I just need to write it and set it up to run every x days or whatever. If people besides me and other devs will need to use something, that adds an entire layer of tedium in the form of usage guides and more exhaustive (layperson friendly) documentation.
Seems to me that this is one of those messages that managers try to tell each other, but it often gets distorted in the game of "telephone".
The part about "money isn't everything, other things can be just as important, perhaps even more" is well understood. The part that is missing is that the "other things" should be something the employee actually cares about (and that it can be different things for different people)... as opposed to a standard set of "benefits" that someone in the HR department decided are cool (and cheap) but many employees see them as mostly worthless.
Examples of benefits I don't care about: various discounts for services that I mostly don't need (and which taken all together make less than 1% of my salary, so why are we even wasting time discussing this?)
Examples of benefits I care about (but maybe other people don't): autonomy, work from home, not working in open space
I'd call those absences of drawbacks, not benefits - you would have had them without the job.
1The other side of this post is to look at what various jobs cost. TIme and effort are the usual costs, but some jobs ask for things like willingness to deal with bullshit (a limited resource!), emotional energy, on-call readiness, various kinds of sensory or moral discomfort, and other things.
Haha, that's absolutely correct! But without the job I wouldn't get paid. So I guess the standard deal is getting paid in return for a set of things, and I dream about getting paid for a subset.
I mean, in theory, the employer should care about getting the work done, being there to fix the bugs and provide support, being available in case something else happens, and maybe a few more things... but spending most of my time in an open space is just unnecessary suffering for an introverted person, and a financial expense for the employer, so... haha, nope. For some reason it is important to be surrounded by other people, even when I happen to be the only person on my project (or the only team member not from India).
But when I worked in finance, people would sometimes shake their heads and ask why bright 20-year-olds would take the huge risk of moving to New York for unstable and uncertain careers as musicians, actors, or starving artists.
I think many (maybe most) people who do this aren't reasoning explicitly about their own future happiness (or whatever their future self would value). It seems likely that many act far more myopically than that; they may do it for status incentives, but where that doesn't come with considering whether this is what they actually want.
There are other myopic reasons to do things like this: satisfying some internal narrative or consistency or not wanting to back down from some position or plan once it would be embarrassing. All of which could still be things one intrinsically values, but which I'm extremely sceptical most have actually thought about. If you're shaking heads at people at all, this does then still seem like something you'd shake heads at.
One thing I find weird is that most of these objects of payment are correlated. The best paying jobs also have the best peers also have the most autonomy also have the most fun. Low paid jobs were mostly drudgery along all axes in my experience
One thing you touched on, but didn't delve into, is that the various "pay" components will having varying marginal utility at different levels.
For example, if you're literally starving, "coolness" won't matter much, you need enough money to buy food! But if you have enough money, you start caring about other things.
Perhaps having some social interaction is important, and you would sacrifice other things to have at least some of that in your job. But, beyond a certain point, the value diminishes, and would likely go negative, as the constant socializing gets tiring, and distracts from work you actually would like to do.
I think a good manager would be good at optimizing against those utility curves. They would pay people enough, but not more, than they need to not be upset about low pay. They would recognize that one team party per quarter might be valuable to the team, but parties every week would not be appreciated. They would give people opportunities to socialize, but also, to avoid getting dragged into socializing when they would really rather be focused on the job. And so on.
a good manager would be good at optimizing against those utility curves
Yup! One of the best things a manager can do is to know their people, which allows them to tailor their communication, motivating words, and all other behaviors in a way that will be most effective for the target recipient. It is a beautiful thing to see in action, and it is a great aspiration to have in professional life.
For jobs which pay in other things, the employees often band together to provide for each other. Take gossip. As a teacher you get an awful lot of interaction with people, but there are limits on its content and form. However, you still get to gossip with other teachers, support and get supported in turn. (And this codependency has implications for the manager's role and capabilities in the team.)
I would say that 'meaning' is a long-term consideration (school-year scale or longer) but 'gossip' is a short-term fix. The fix should be also acknowledged.
The casual boosting of Sam Altman here makes me quite uncomfortable, and there's probably better examples: One could argue that his job isn't "paying" him as much as he's "taking" things by unilateral action and being a less than trustworthy actor. Other than that, this was an interesting read!
The casual policing of positive comments about Sam Altman is unnecessary. Is this Sam Altman sneer club? Grok the author's intent and choose your own example. SA is a polarizing figure, I get it. He can be a distraction to the point of an example, but in this case I thought it made sense.
It is something for authors to be on the lookout for though. Some examples invite "missing the point." Sam Altman is increasingly one example of a name that invites distracted thoughts other than the point intended.
I understand that this hit a bad tone, but I do kind of stand behind the original comment for the precise reason that Altman has been particularly good at weaponizing things like "fun" and "high status" which the OP plays right into.
Crossposting this essay by my friend, Leila Clark.
A long time ago, a manager friend of mine wrote a book to collect his years of wisdom. He never published it, which is a shame because it was full of interesting insights. One that I think a lot about today was the question: “How are you paying your team?”
This friend worked in finance. You might think that people in finance, like most people, are paid in money. But it turns out that even in finance, you can’t actually always pay and motivate people with just money.
Often, there might just not be money to go around. Even if there is, managers are often captive to salary caps and performance bands. In any case, it’s awkward to pay one person ten times more than another, even if one person is clearly contributing ten times more than the other (many such cases exist).
With this question, my manager friend wanted to point out that you can pay people in lots of currencies. Among other things, you can pay them in quality of life, prestige, status, impact, influence, mentorship, power, autonomy, meaning, great teammates, stability and fun. And in fact most people don’t just want to be paid in money — they want to be paid some mixture of these things.
To demonstrate this point, take musicians and financiers.
A successful financier is much, much richer in dollars than a successful musician. Some googling suggests that Mitski and Grimes, both very successful alternative musicians, have net worths of about $3-5m. $5m is barely notable in the New York high society circles that most financiers run in. Even Taylor Swift, maybe one of the most successful musicians of all times, has a net worth of generously $1b; Ken Griffin, one of the most successful financiers of all time, has a net worth of $33b.
But more people want to be musicians, and I think it’s because musicians are paid in ways that financiers aren’t.
Most obviously, musicians are way cooler. They get to interact with their fans. People love their work. They naturally spend their days hanging out with other cool people – other musicians. They can work on exactly what they want to, largely when they want to – they’ve won the American Dream because they get to work on what they love and get paid! And in that way, they get paid in radical self-expression. (This is a little unfair, because I know some financiers who think that work is a means of radical self-expression. Knowing their personalities, I believe them, but it doesn’t help them get tables at fancy New York restaurants the way Taylor can.)
I don’t want to be too down on finance. People are different, and it’s a good fact about the world that different people can be paid in different ways. My math genius friends would hate interacting with most fans and musicians. They instead have stable jobs, rent beautiful apartments in New York and solve fun technical problems all day with their friends. That’s exactly how they want to get paid.
But when I worked in finance, people would sometimes shake their heads and ask why bright 20-year-olds would take the huge risk of moving to New York for unstable and uncertain careers as musicians, actors, or starving artists. I probably asked this question myself, when I was younger. Hopefully this provides some insight to the financiers.
So how do you make sure you get paid the way you want to? From what I can tell, the best way is to pick the right industry. It’s fairly straightforward to tell how an industry pays. Politics pays in power. Finance pays in money. Music and art pay in ‘coolness.’ Nonprofit work, teaching and healthcare pay in meaning and, a friend reports, sometimes a sense of superiority over others too.
There’s an exchange rate between many of the currencies you can get paid in, but it’s pretty bad. You can sort of buy coolness with money through philanthropy, but it’s very expensive. You can sort of turn power into money (and money into power), but you have to be careful about it if you don’t want to go to prison for corruption. In general, I’ve found it’s usually easier to accumulate what you want through time and work than try to convert between currencies.
My manager friend was an expert in understanding this. He ran a fairly boring back-office department, but it was widely considered one of the best teams around. He was, presumably, limited in how many dollars he could pay – back-office is not sexy – but instead paid his team a lot in autonomy and great peers. If someone wanted more fun and less money, he figured out how they could spend some time on a slightly useless but super-fun technical project instead. He worked hard to find interesting people for the team, and then put in more time and effort to make sure people actually got to know each other. By thinking creatively about the problem, he was able to pay people in ways other than money.
But this isn't just for managers. I think it's a useful framework for deciding what to do next. For a long time, I thought I wanted money – so I reverse-sorted my job options by salary and picked the one at the top. But at some point I realized that making more money next year was going to cost me other things I cared about, like purpose, fun and autonomy. Money was no longer my main constraint. On reflection, I’m happier now to take something that pays fewer dollars in exchange for more of the other things I want.
If you look at it this way, some jobs that seem to pay poorly actually can pay quite well. That low-paid government job pays in stability. That precarious journalism job pays in status and influence. Working at a startup pays in fun, autonomy and potentially fast career growth, even if the value of your equity goes to zero.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still the case that some people get paid more and some people get paid less. Some people have jobs that don’t pay very much money, status, prestige, autonomy or anything else. Many such jobs exist, and they’re bad. Some people have jobs that pay lots of all or some of these – Sam Altman's job, for instance, pays in dollars, status, coolness and fun (most of the time). It’s important to pay attention to how much you’re getting paid overall, when you sum up all the currencies.
But the next time you switch jobs, I suggest you think about this a little. If the salary seems low, is it because you’re actually getting paid in something else? If it’s high, what are you trading off for it, and are you okay with that? What do you actually want to be paid in, and are you getting it?