Great people aren’t just motivated by money. They’re also motivated by things like great coworkers, interesting work, and prestige. In the private sector, you see companies like Yahoo go into death spirals: Once good people start to leave, the quality of the coworkers goes down, the prestige of being a Yahoo employee goes down
Another fascinating thing that I hadn’t realized here until it was pointed out to me is this also means that Yahoo has to pay more, as a consequence of being able to offer less non-financial compensation. Because great people like working together, this essentially means that you can get a ‘bulk discount’ on them, because part of their compensation is working with each other.
If Yahoo wants to buy the best people, it has to pay more.
But if Yahoo lost the ability to recognize the best people, it can simply pay the same, hire people who are not good enough to get the same salary in a better company, and be unaware of the situation.
(My work experience is mostly in small companies, and there it is not generally true that the shitty ones pay more. They sometimes even pay less, and somehow succeed to get employees that are in my opinion… average… but have a very strong impostor syndrome which tells them that a shitty job is the best they can get. I suppose this happens when you have a company who cannot recognize good people, but can still recognize and fire the bad ones. The bad ones get fired, the good ones with healthy self-confidence leave on their own, and what remains is this.)
Another fascinating thing that I hadn’t realized here until it was pointed out to me is this also means that Yahoo has to pay more, as a consequence of being able to offer less non-financial compensation. Because great people like working together, this essentially means that you can get a ‘bulk discount’ on them, because part of their compensation is working with each other.
If Yahoo wants to buy the best people, it has to pay more.
But if Yahoo lost the ability to recognize the best people, it can simply pay the same, hire people who are not good enough to get the same salary in a better company, and be unaware of the situation.
(My work experience is mostly in small companies, and there it is not generally true that the shitty ones pay more. They sometimes even pay less, and somehow succeed to get employees that are in my opinion… average… but have a very strong impostor syndrome which tells them that a shitty job is the best they can get. I suppose this happens when you have a company who cannot recognize good people, but can still recognize and fire the bad ones. The bad ones get fired, the good ones with healthy self-confidence leave on their own, and what remains is this.)