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Wage compressionen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_compression
1149 sats \ 13 comments \ @anon 5h econ
I'm interested in hearing any opinions on this.
For example, have you had experience with it as a low-skilled worker, a high-skilled worker, or as an employer?
And what's the best article on this? Most articles I've read seem quite shallow, so I picked the Wikipedia link.
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42 sats \ 4 replies \ @anon 3h
I'm particularly confused about this:
Similarly, Cabrales et al. (2008) proposed that lower level employees experience disutility from working with higher level employees and would prefer to work in a more equal firm. Because of this, lower level employees must be compensated in order to convince them to work with higher level colleagues. Lower level workers receive extra wages which are uncorrelated with their productivity, leading to wage compression.
This makes no sense to me. Lower level employees can learn more from higher level colleagues. Why would they need to be compensated to work with them (and not the other way around)? What's the disutility? The source PDF no longer exists.
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50 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 3h
Higher level employees are often complete dickheads to the people below them. The pay premium is for putting up with it.
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42 sats \ 2 replies \ @anon 3h
Interesting, this is also what leadership thinks I'm doing, but they don't believe me when I tell them that I'm not being an asshole and that the new hire would agree. They also don't want to ask the new hire if that's how they actually perceive it, because they think the new hire isn't mature enough to be honest. I'm pretty sure the new hire doesn't think I'm being an asshole. I'm pretty sure they appreciate that I am giving them the feedback they need, the feedback they don't receive from leadership.
I make sure I am not an asshole to them by ensuring they know I'm not giving them a hard time for no reason, but because I want them to learn and grow. I'm in constant communication with them, and I don't think leadership is, yet they presume to know what the new hire is thinking.
What I'm doing is kick up and kiss down, and not the other way around.
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25 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 3h
If you have any doubt about how you’re coming off, try dialing back the flow of communication just a little.
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 2h
You mean with the new hire? I did, but not because I think I might have been an asshole, but because I do not want to be responsible for them anymore. Now I'm just watching from the sidelines so leadership can see for themselves if/that they are struggling without feedback.
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50 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 3h
I’m most accustomed to this coming up in the context of minimum wage increases.
That’s an artificial compression of the wage distribution and you see the distribution “try” to spread back out as wages rise for the next few rungs on the ladder.
The cause there is that you need a large enough gap between jobs to incentivize workers to work hard enough to earn a promotion.
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42 sats \ 3 replies \ @anon 3h
The cause there is that you need a large enough gap between jobs to incentivize workers to work hard enough to earn a promotion.
Yeah, this is my problem currently. I consider myself more skilled, not even counting that I’ve been with the company for three years, but I am getting paid the same as someone who joined this year, has fewer skills, and whom I consider myself a mentor for, because they seem to struggle without a mentor (I don't want to see them struggle unnecessarily).
I don't see why I should continue to take on more responsibility than them, like reviewing their code and the most critical code, when they don't review my code or the most critical code, since they don't yet have the experience to do so, which leadership even acknowledges.
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25 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 3h
That might balance itself out if you receive a bonus or promotion before they do.
A lot of times, though, you just have to ask yourself if the pay is worth it and ignore who’s getting what.
Don’t be shy about advocating for yourself either, though. It’s fine to put yourself forward for recognition.
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42 sats \ 1 reply \ @anon 3h
A lot of times, though, you just have to ask yourself if the pay is worth it and ignore who’s getting what.
I'd love to do that, and I do feel bad for comparing myself with others, but decisions like this make me lose faith in leadership. It feels like the work I did in the two years prior is not recognized. This is also just one of many areas where I think leadership is failing.
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25 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 3h
I know that feeling and it probably comes from having a job you care about, which is good.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 43m
I'm not sure this computes with reality, the definitions are pretty flimsy, especially when you consider data comes from large corps that employ a lot of bodies and their productivity is measured by business unit rather than individual.
Anecdotally I was on a team of 6, that on paper were overlapping roles with relatively similar titles... but as you can imagine the skill range among the 6 was not perfectly distributed. We could have gotten just as much done, or maybe even more with less bodies given there's always a percentage that are a net negative.
What's high vs. low skilled in that scenario when we're categorically the same in the eyes of megacorp? Why does the new guy get 80-90% of the salary of the guy without whom the whole unit falls apart?
Cost of living is probably a factor, a low skilled and high skilled person have the same baseline cost of living, getting paid more turns into lifestyle inflation. So there's an effective minimum for someone to sell their days to megacorp, and what megacorp can quantify beyond that is marginal.
Depending what's defined as high skill, the wage complaints contrast to compression... inequality. Top earners are pulling even further away from entry level workers because of asymmetry, someone that can engineer a widget that megacorp can sell a billion of is a billion times more valuable than someone that can turn a screw on said widget.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Now_Singularity 3h
It could be worse.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 3h
It can always be worse, right?
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