The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

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nlawalker an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.

	▲	mastazi 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Can you give some examples of jobs that are usually done by salaried employees and are paid by output? All the examples I can think of, are usually done by independent contractors.

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cm11 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.

	▲	NooneAtAll3 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		while productivity is correlated with salary, generally the ability to ask for a raise, to defend your pay and office politics navigation would be more impactful on average

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raincole an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.

	▲	jandrese 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's not really true. Pay raises have lagged behind productivity gains for decades now and the gap is only growing wider.

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kbar13 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.

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majormajor an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There is a lot of regulatory stuff, particularly around benefits, that push people towards nominally 40hr salaried contracts even if they don't need all 40 of those.

"Salaried" vs hourly is increasingly a scam anyway, but all that benefits stuff is something that would have to evolve. And it could, if people find the political will.

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hexis 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

typically there is a floor, at least de facto.

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Cakez0r an hour ago | parent [-]

The contracts I've seen have an explicit floor, not a de facto one. I.E. The contract says the minimum number of hours you need to work. Some countries also have overtime laws which create a ceiling.

Either way it doesn't change that being paid for your output is the realm of entrepreneurship and submitting bids for project work.

	▲	gbear605 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.

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bwhiting2356 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When you work for a startup, or a zero-to-one project, it's hard to say you're even paid for your output. You're paid for probabilistic/expected future value output.

	▲	RevEng 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Every meeting, every memo, and every prototype is output in terms of the employees doing that work. Whether it's directly saleable is irrelevant. The investors base the value of their investment on the expected future value of the company, but the people being to do the work are being paid for the work they are doing regardless of what the future value of the company becomes. That is if they are paid a salary. If they are given shares, then that compensation is entirely dependent on future value.

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aetch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work

	▲	zdragnar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		At least in the US, there are regulations around what constitutes "full time" employment, and many benefits (such as insurance) are tied into being offered only for full time employees, or at different tiers between part and full time. As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.

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bigmadshoe an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?

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Aurornis 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Can’t we demand a piece of this?

You can demand whatever you want. You could demand a million dollar salary if you wanted.

The challenge is that there are a lot of very qualified devs who would do it for less.

Labor is a market. Supply and demand determines your wages.

There are always hand-wavey arguments about unionization fixing this, but when other developers are hungry for those jobs and willing to go around the union to work them for pay then that doesn’t really work at scale.

There are several unionized software development groups in the US. They don’t have a good track record of getting significantly higher pay or even getting their demands met from their limited strikes.

	▲	bwhiting2356 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I was in the musician's union for 12 years before I got into tech. There were some silly rules, like someone couldn't be both a musician and and orchestrator on the same show, because it's "doing 2 jobs". It's like saying you can't be full stack. You couldn't fire people who were bad at their jobs and stopped putting in any effort. There was a profit sharing agreement that the union rejected, because it would come at the expense of higher base salaries, and then they wondered why there were only big producers that first developed the show out of town. Some rules I actually liked. Rehearsals started and ended _exactly_ on time to avoid overtime (showing up late was the only reason you could be fired, which was a useful compromise). But generally, the union was the yin to the producers yang, and an adversarial position as worker advocate was where they wanted to be, they didn't want more ownership. If someone gave me the chance to join something more like a worker-owned coop, where the workers on the business and vote on how it works, I would actually be down. There's a grocery store down my street like this and it's a great place. I don't know how this would actually work in tech. If there's no startup capital, no one will have a salary or benefits for years until there's a profit (if at all). And capital comes in exchange for ownership of the future upside.

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throw0101a 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> Can’t we demand a piece of this?

If your company is publicly traded, you can buy its stock.

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sieabahlpark an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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