Bargaining

Once upon a time, I got into a… heated discussion with an unspecified head honcho about salaries. Not mine, mind you. I didn’t think we were paying one of our guys what he was worth, what he could make in the marketplace. Head honcho argued that his job was to keep costs, including salaries, down. If this guy wanted better money, he should bargain harder. At the time, I knew that this was totally wrong-headed, but I couldn’t explain why on the spot. So this argument has festered in the back of my head since then.

Employees, particularly skilled, creative workers (as we programmers flatter ourselves to be) should not have to negotiate against our managers for pay and benefits.

This isn’t some sort of hippie socialist crap - there are two real, clear business reasons for this. The first is that it introduces a perverse incentive. I’m speaking in economic terms - this has nothing to do with anyone’s sex life. Not directly. The second, which is sort of related, is that it’s shitty for morale. If that sounds fuzzy-headed to you, you shouldn’t be managing anyone who’s smarter than a chimp and doing anything more complex than stamping out license plates.

The perverse incentive is simply that salary negotiations set up a system that rewards people for not caring about their jobs. Negotiating 101: The most important factor in any negotiation is the willingness to walk away. You go to buy a house, and that’s the first thing anyone tells you. Don’t fall in love with it. If you aren’t willing to walk away from it, they can take you to the cleaners.

So the people who don’t really care about their jobs, the clock-watchers, the ones who can take it or leave it, who haven’t really bonded with their co-workers, who don’t really believe in the product or take pride in their work? They’re the ones who can walk away. The only thing keeping them there is the cash, so it’s going to cost you more. The ones who aren’t like that, who are emotionally invested in the company? You’re turning that against them. You can’t imagine that’s going to make them happy when they find out.

Now, that part applies to everyone. Technical staff in particular have another disadvantage: The personality traits that make them good at their jobs work against them at the negotiating table. It’s not just through lack of people skills or anything - in order to be good technicians, they have to be bad at selling themselves.

Allow me a brief digression here. Technical staff actually operate in a different universe from the business side of the house. They’re “reality-based” in the disparaging way that our current administration uses the term. Put simply, shit will either work or fail based on the properties of the observable universe. No amount of personal motivation or focus-group work will let a spare, obsolete PC handle a million page hits a day. There’s math there. You can prove things.

On the business side of the house, to an alarming extent, believing things makes them true. If the sales guys are confident and self-assured, if they really believe that they’re great salesmen and they have a great product, people will trust them and buy stuff from them. If the managers believe that the current project is destined for success, and can keep everyone enthusiastic and focused, it’s much more likely to be successful. By contrast, once people start believing it’s doomed, they don’t work as effectively, maybe they leave, and the project fails. (This is that morale thing I mentioned earlier.) It’s all unsettlingly self-referential.

These traits which managers and sales people need to be effective are actually bad for technical folks. Arrogance means you overlook things. You miss subtleties that you’d catch if you were more cautious. Two heads are always better than one; three or four better still. (Okay, yes, there’s a limit to this.) But any technical solution will be better if you can put your ego aside and plunk your idea down in front of some other folks for a good, harsh critical review. Being able to sell them on it by force of personality doesn’t make it better. Being aware of your own failings and limitations makes it better. Being able to let go of your proprietary defensiveness makes it better. Learning to value the people who will poke holes in your designs - the ones who are “not team players” - makes it better. A considerable amount of humility is called for here.

This all makes you pretty easy meat in a salary review.

So, point two: Shitty for morale. Yes, we live in a capitalist economy. Companies compete against each other, often fiercely. But within a company, you need to cooperate, to work together, and to trust each other. Without that, a lot of energy gets wasted on internal politics, turf wars, and jockeying for position.

This is particularly acute for tech workers. Technology is complex and huge. People tend to be experts in a very narrow field. Odds are that you’ll have to cross a lot of boundaries to get anything done. Competition - feuding between fiefdoms - can slow everything to a crawl.

Also, it’s one thing if you’re managing guys who stamp out license plates. You know how to stamp license plates, you can watch them doing it, and you can measure their work by the number of license plates they stamp out. Tech guys, not so much. Much of the time, management has no real idea what these guys are really doing. Even if you could watch them all the time, it might not do you much good. It can be hard or even impossible to distinguish between smart, hard-working guys and slackers. Is the problem really hard, or are they just lazy? Is the system running well because your admin set it up right and maintains it carefully, or is he just lucky so far? Maybe he automated the crap out of everything, and now he just has to sit around, waiting for alarm bells to go off. No way to know. (A hint: If you ever have to choose between the guy who puts in 12-hours days doing everything by hand, and the guy who has a bunch of programs doing his work for him, you want the programmer. Brains scale better than brawn.)

So you have to trust these guys. You’re best bet is to put a bunch of them together and hope they’ll keep an eye on each other. That’s still a lot of trust, and why should they look out for you if you’re not looking out for them? If they think you’re chiseling them on pay, they’re likely to chisel back. It’s pretty easy to goof off and look like you’re working, particularly if you program for fun. At best, they’re not going to put a whole lot of brain power into figuring the best way to do things. The surest sign that this has happened is that the really good ones, the ones with a work ethic and motivation, will leave. They have better things to do than put up with this bullshit.

Don’t go down that road. Keep an eye on the market and pay your folks what they’re worth.