The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to "The Office" (opens in new tab)

- If you do it because you enjoy it, then you are, by article's definition, a "loser" (in terms of potential monetary gains) [1].

- If you do it in order to learn about running your own startup, then you are "sociopath-in-training" (ala Ryan from The Office).

And that's it. The author doesn't claim you cannot have happy and meaningful life as "loser" (by his definition), deriving pleasure from the work itself.

He just tells that for "losers" somebody else will reap a significant part of the monetary reward for the value that their work creates.

-----

[1] Similar principle works for "sexy" jobs - that's why poor game developers get abused so much.

The problem with working as an employee for a start-up is that you're required to have the commitment of a founder, without the upside. There may be some people who will knowingly invest their youth in buying someone else a yacht, but in my experience many startup employees are unrealistic about their chances. Most businesses aren't going to change the world or make average employees rich.

From a rational perspective at least, I think it's hard to justify being an employee at an early-stage startup unless you're there to build the experience and contacts necessary to start your own company. There are plenty of medium-sized companies out there that offer similar opportunities for employees without their bureaucracy of a bigcorp or the risk and time commitment of a startup.

It all comes down to your theory of value. Marx uses a labor theory of value that might say that a chair is worth exactly the wood and the human labor that is invested in producing it. When a chair manufacturer employs people to build chairs, they pay the employees less than their labor is worth, sell the chairs, and pocket the margin.

The market theory of value says that something is worth what someone is willing to buy and sell it for. So if you decide to work at the chair factory for $5/hr, you and the chair company have agreed that your time is worth $5/hr. If the chair company sells a chair for $50, the chair company and the consumer agree the chair is worth $50. (Of course, the chair company might be willing to sell for $20 and the consumer might be willing to pay $70, so there is a "surplus" to both sides. But that simply arises from the distinction between individual value judgments and market value.)

The market perspective is the only one where productive activity makes any sense at all. From a labor theory of value, a chair, a table, a skyscraper, or a startup is only worth the amount of labor that was invested in it. But if this was true, then wouldn't we be just as well off to spare the labor and hang out on the beach instead of working? The market theory of value says that if you invest labor, you might create something more valuable than the labor you put into it, which is the only theory that justifies productive labor in the first place. It also says that if you invest your labor into building something no one wants or is willing to pay for, you simply waste it. The labor theory of value would gel with many people's naive ideas here: I put so much work into this damned thing, isn't it worth something?

Sometimes you wind up working for an oblivious or sociopathic boss - but then you need to go apply for another job elsewhere. It's like if the closest restaurant to your house is no good: You ought to take the effort to get out of there, and that is your responsibility.

But generally speaking, even halfway decent managers and owners go out of their way to compensate their best people. Now, low-middle managers are not always halfway decent, but then, they're probably not getting directly compensated on production either. Once you get to "head of division", "head of region", and any ownership role or incentive based on real production from a manager's unit, you're going to get managers that want to pay their people well. It makes a bigger pie, so to speak.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Subheading "What a Job Is", 5th paragraph down or so:

    In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of 
    other people's. You may not even be aware you're doing something 
    people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company 
    as a whole must be giving people something they want, or 
    they won't make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars 
    a year, then on average you must be contributing at least 
    x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending 
    more than it makes, and will go out of business.

    I think the single biggest problem afflicting large 
    companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to 
    each person's work. For the most part they punt. In a 
    big company you get paid a fairly predictable salary 
    for working fairly hard.

    ....

    the company has no way of measuring the value of your 
    work.

    Salesmen are an exception. It's easy to measure how 
    much revenue they generate, and they're usually paid a 
    percentage of it. If a salesman wants to work harder, 
    he can just start doing it, and he will automatically 
    get paid proportionally more.

That's why having a cofounder can be so helpful. Hopefully, your self-serving instincts cancel out and only decisions that are mutually beneficial will make it through.

Or to put it another way, why should someone who is (arguably) producing most of the value have to stand for getting rich slowly, when the clueless middle managers fail upwards into nicer cars & long vacations, and sociopaths -- who seem to spend most of their "workday" jockeying for position, power, & prestige rather than doing useful things -- get 6, 7, 8 figure salaries & giant stock options?

The real crime is that the productive, competent people are encouraged & incentivized to coast because of the ludicrousness of the system.

Sounds objectively like a bad bargain to me.

So much so that those productive losers should start a company & try to keep the sociopaths out. in fact, if you buy that web -> lower barriers to entry -> less need for predatory sociopathic apes. They'll always try to get in, but that's another story...

I don't think so. Darwinian evolution is not just a description of a natural process. It is a powerful metaphysical principle. IE, Darwinism could happily exist in theory, without any physical form. It just happens to have a physical form, biology. But this fact is the reason that it has had such an impact on our vocabulary.

People that have used Darwinian-like thought before can apply it elsewhere. This kind of analysis draws a lot from that. I think there are few philosophical principles that have this power. I cannot think of a many pieces of philosophical work with this kind of an impact.