So what kind of job/compensation should lazy or stupid people deserve?

[An_Arky]

@msmith537

An Arky - You mention you have been a working professional for 20 years but am I correct in that you are not in a management position? It’s very easy to criticize management when you are an individual contributor. Everyone criticizes their manager. They think they know everything or that the boss is a pompous jerk or an idiot or whatever. Personally, I try to manage by understanding as much about the project as possible, making my people understand what’s expected in clear and certain terms and doing what it takes to make them effective. But sometimes, you get a real jerkoff and those are always tough to deal with.

You’re also talking about project managers. The guys who supervise the actual work. Once you get another level or so up you get kind of removed from the day to day of the work. It all becomes sort of theoretical and abstract. It becomes all about managing relationships and giving intelligent sounding bullshit speeches. You get these guys coming up with pie in the sky strategies and they drive everyone crazy trying to actually implement them.

I’m more of a dotted line guy; most of the time I’m called a consultant, sometimes (like now), I’m on a team of consultants. I’ve done this for every type of manager, from the cubicle dwelling small project manager all the way up to the top executives/board members of a government agency. I’ve seen them all; no-nonsense guys who worked their way to the top and junior jets from B-school.

@msmith537

An Arky - Another point, there seems to be two schools of thought on picking managers. One is you grow them internally. You promote the people who are your best performers. The problem is you often run into the “Peter Principal”. Most people erroneously think that means people get promoted to their level of incompetance. What it really means is that when you take someone who is an good performer at one job and promote them, they may not have the skills to perform the new job. They way you help get around this is either through training or the second method of selecting management.

You create a class structure where your “best and brightest” come in at the higher level. The obvious downside to this is while you are hiring people specifically trained and experienced in management, you are taking away upward mobility from staff who actually performs the work. You can also create management that has no real experience or understanding of how things actually work in your organization.

Some companies do this but also have their new managers do a training rotation with the actual producers. But this leads to other problems as they are typically just there only as long as they need to be and aren’t particularly interested in those training stints.

You make some good points in that managers run the gamut of quality and experience, and circumstances of hiring. I don’t necessarily think it’s that bad to hire from without, but I have some of the same reservations about it. YMMV wildly.

[An_Arky]

@Scribble

You’ve been counted a lot?

:smack: reversed the m and the n

[msmith537]

@Isamu

It’s obvious where you want to take this. So let me take it there.

I work as a lawyer. I studied for 8 years at university to get the qualifications I needed to do what I do. I graduated in the top 5 in all my degrees. I do complicated work, for people who, for example, invented ways to grow human insulin on plants. In order to represent them I must understand their invention at a very deep level. In order to defend them when Dow and Monsanto come breathing down their necks, I have to be very clever.

When Mr. X of financial products Co.Y takes down 200 million in a year, as salary and bonus, do you really think he worked 1000 times harder/smarter than I did? Or did 1000 times more for the world?

I don’t know. Maybe if he created a billion dollars of wealth for people (real wealth, not imaginary speculative bubble wealth). Or if he started his own company or something that employs a few thousand people. I don’t think you can make blanket statements about rich people not deserving their wealth because a lot of them clearly do create significant value. I think you need to look at the system that puts people in that position where they collect $200 million. A have a college buddy who is a trader and he was telling me about some 28 year old kid who pulls in a couple of million a year. I don’t know enough about what they do, but at 28 is this kid really that smart or do they just send a bunch of them to the roulette table and the one who wins the most money is the financial genius de jure?

[Ruminator]

@Isamu

When Mr. X of financial products Co.Y takes down 200 million in a year, as salary and bonus, do you really think he worked 1000 times harder/smarter than I did? Or did 1000 times more for the world?

These propositions always makes me chuckle. Why do people keep thinking that the intensity of “hard work” is always directly and exactly proportionate to financial outcomes?

I used to dig ditches for $2.00/hr. (Yes, it was literally digging trenches manually with a hoe for sprinkler systems.) It was back breaking work in the Florida heat and even with gloves, I got calluses.

I now work in as an office professional and I make a lot more money doing it. I spend the majority of my time typing of documents in Microsoft Word and manipulating Excel spreadsheets. I consider myself obscenely overpaid for just typing on a keyboard and pushing a mouse around!

Was the ditch digging work HARDER than moving a mouse around spreadsheet? Yes it was! And that fact is relevant in what way?!?!

Did my ditch digging CONTRIBUTE more to the world than my “paper shuffling” as blue-collar workers would call it? Maybe it did. (To the guy that got the sprinkler system installed, it certainly did.) And I ask again, that comparison of contribution is relevant how?

The level of hard work is important but it’s superseded by market forces that prices the products of that hard work. In general, there happens to be a strong correlation between what the markets reward and the amount of work required to get those rewards. Sometimes there are outliers in that correlation that make life seem unfair but it doesn’t change the general equation.