[ExI] idea

Fri Oct 12 16:31:45 UTC 2018

I get it: if I were young now, I would work for peanuts  spike

I did work for peanuts - $5000 a year but with a faculty apt. that cost me
$60 a month.  I had a chance to go to a big time school, publish or perish,
etc.,and also a local TV show as a permanent guest (and who knows what from
there), and decided I just wanted to teach students, and so I turned down
possible fame and fortune and billions of people treating me with adulation
and offers of sex and free jet rides, and all the rest. I was a
conservative then and a Baptist.  If you can believe that.

I am thrilled that I did what I did   bill w

On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 9:09 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *William Flynn Wallace
> *Sent:* Friday, October 12, 2018 6:20 AM
> *To:* ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] idea
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> I am not a CEO, I am only a rocket scientist.
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> spike
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> Very dry, sir, positively Saharan.
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> Now why can't paying the highest for employees be compatible with a
> different strategy for the CEO?  bill w
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> You can do that BillW, but my point is that competent leadership is still
> going to cost skerjillions of bucks.  Top executive talent will go where
> the pay is best.  Maximizing profits (the company’s and their own) is how
> they got that skillset to start with.
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> Paying higher than standard has been done.  Henry Ford did it
> successfully.  He had a new-ish technology in a new industry, and paid his
> men way higher than they could make elsewhere.  That worked for a while.
>
> I live in an area where that strategy generally isn’t followed: they pay
> what the labor costs, yet they still get good people.  Reason: good people
> will take those jobs and do the hell out of them.
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> We hear all the flapping about immigration, but a quieter aspect of that
> whole question isn’t talked about so much: highly skilled and highly
> educated people with money can generally come to the states and get their
> immigration legally.  They do.  My own area has really filled up with smart
> ambitious Chinese and Indian people, here on H1B and other temporary
> immigration arrangements.  They take up jobs paying way below what many
> would consider below a practical living salary.  They cram into a tiny
> apartment with nothing in it besides beds, and live the Silicon Valley
> life.  Shrugs.
>
> With that eager and willing labor pool available, paying above the
> supply-set standard might make more problems than it solves.
>
> On the other hand…
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> Companies can find ways, a good CEO and find ways, to make their company
> appealing.  Steve Jobs was a master at this.  By all accounts he was a
> total asshole, but somehow managed to surround himself with people who
> shared his vision.  So these innovative outfits such as Tesla and Apple can
> pay starvation wages and still get people to cram the PR department with
> excellent resumes, if… if they can provide interesting work.
>
> I get it: if I were young now, I would work for peanuts, provided the work
> is interesting.  I would choose that over a high-paying boring job.
>
> Tesla is training skerjillions of Indians and Chinese how to make good
> electric cars.  Apple is training them to make good computers and write
> good software.  There is no reason to pay them enough to rent an actual
> apartment, ja?  In the long run, we all win.
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> spike
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> On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 7:57 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *William Flynn Wallace
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] idea
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> >>…Sounds like a great place to work.  Who steers the ship?  Why does she
> steer the ship?
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> >>…spike
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> >…Ah, there's the rub.  IN today's climate high level management people
> are given enormous golden parachutes in addition to giant salaries.  This
> may be a trend that is hard to modify…
>
> >… bill w
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> Ja.  Big companies compete with each other for high-level management
> talent.  If your company took all those millions it pays the CEO and
> distributed it to the lower-level workers, your company will soon be run by
> an incompetent CEO that no one else would hire, the one that replaced the
> previous CEO who left for high wages at your competitor.  Your company is
> quite unlikely to survive for very long.
>
> The whole notion fails to take into account that CEOs are not in direct
> competition with lower level workers.  Lower level workers compete against
> each other, CEOs compete against each other, companies compete against each
> other.  When I worked in engineering at Lockheed, my salary was influenced
> by the salaries of similarly skilled rocket scientists at Boeing, not by
> what the CEO made.  I am not a CEO, I am only a rocket scientist.
>
> spike
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