alt Hacker News> I don't understand why you think you're not worth being paid a livable salary.
I haven’t said that at all. I think I’m worth a two-digit percentage of gross revenue in the executive market and have a track record of strategic prediction, untapped market identification, proven competence at leadership, and the tech chops to working-prototype my own ideas to faster than I can explain and delegate them and to assess and address top-tier engineers trying to slack off under the hood on a formal implementation of same.
But this isn’t a conversation about how I value myself as an executive. This is a conversation about how I value being paid as a worker. Workers don’t get paid enough to be strategic visionaries. Workers can sleep at night and don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath. I like being a worker, I’m an excellent worker, and I stand by my above comments on the topic of peanut butter raises: so long as executives and strategists and workers all receive peanut butter raises without unfair bias towards the formers, they seem perfectly fine to me. When executives get double-digit raises and strategists get paid worker wages, I get offended and angry and find alternate employment or outright change careers.
(Yes, if you’re being paid less than seven or eight figures a year to provide long-term strategic vision and development to your company, you’re probably being cheated out of the wage they’d pay you as strategic consultant to do that same work. Study your written job definition more closely and stop donating unpaid-volunteer work to your employers. If they object, ask them to revise your job description and increase your pay accordingly. This is all bog standard corporate worker stuff that everyone here already knows.)
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I was with you until the end.
This is a public forum and thus nothing is ever bog standard because presumably every week new people join with varied to no experience in the ways of the corporate world. Further, much of the software ethos is about being a worker/owner, which rarely comes true and takes some time to realize is incorrect.
Worker could mean IC only, or IC and managers.
Managers could include owners or not.
A worker is worth the least the employer thinks they'll stay for. I've heard one too many new, smart-ass line manager say "oh, I got her/him cheap".
To advocate for oneself as a worker, it requires continuous calibration, documentation of results, and well-timed initiative to expand within degrees of freedom that would be desirable to maximize bottom-line results directly or indirectly.
> Workers can sleep at night don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath.
Boundaries. Those aren't the problems of a worker. It's best to be an excellent worker if one is going to be a worker, but that's still not enough. It also requires communication: advocacy, persuasion, and showcasing results to get the job, keep the job, and then to periodically justify and negotiate more income above the rate of inflation. Below the rate of inflation is a pay cut.
Be exceptionally useful, helpful, and professional.. just don't help managers find ways to pay you less or work yourself out of a job unless you already have a thriving side-hustle. ;) 996 and crash schedules are for the birds.