If you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys as employees (Robert's Rule #2)

[Tweeted 2011-04-26]

One day, as I talked to a CEO-type friend of mine, we discussed salaries. This guy, for whatever faults or adornments his personality may have, is a shrewd businessman. His experience in labor relations and negotiating with unions back in the day has served him well over his career, and while a lot of employers complain about salary and benefit packages making up 60% or more of their operating expenses, my friend made his opinion clear -- if you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys as employees.

Now, I've happily worn the label code-monkey more than a few times in my life, but I want to project absolutely clarity on this -- we are not talking about a code-monkey here, this is more of the "trained chimp" variety -- you know, as in "a trained chimp could [do x] better than [your insult target]".

Before you go off on some "monkeys don't eat peanuts" tangent, skip it. The metaphor may break down when compared to actual monkeys and actual peanuts...but ignore that for a second. While money breaks down as a motivator (watch Dan Pink's animated lecture), it actually works pretty well as a motivator up to a point where, as Mr. Pink says, you "take it off the table". When you think about it, that pretty clearly coincides with a few other theories, such as the Law of Diminishing Returns or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

One of the things I find interesting around this rule is the idea of outsourcing. If the primary motivation for 'outsourcing' is to find a less expensive workforce rather than utilize some aspect of collective unconscious or first-hand cultural experience/knowledge to improve local market penetration (e.g. in language localization) or implement a 24-hour workday (e.g. to reduce time-to-market for defect resolution or improve customer service), you will get what you seek, because, and let me be clear about this, there is amazing talent outside of [insert your country here]. However, even as ingenuity, hard work, and skill do not recognize borders, neither do apathy and inattention. The bottom line in this regard is this...if you want something built cheaply you can find people to build it cheaply, but in the end what you have is worth less than what you paid.

There are exceptions that prove this rule -- people who are very highly skilled and highly valued by their employer who are receiving peanuts when their monetary compensation is compared to what they would receive from other organizations. In the estimation of these exceptional people, their compensation package is not 'peanuts' -- likely because they receive significant non-monetary compensation (at this point, if you haven't watched Dan Pink's lecture, you really need to watch it).

One of the other things I find interesting around this rule is it's corollary -- if you're getting paid peanuts it's time to determine whether or not you're a monkey. It's likely that I find this interesting because it reflects a pivotal point in my career when an employer, many years ago, tried their best to convince me that I was little more than a trained chimp while I was certain that was untrue (and doubled my salary by changing jobs to prove it). Of course it could have just as easily gone the other way...I could have been little more than a trained chimp fresh from university, and likely was. Diligent practice made me better than I was and, hopefully, that will continue.

Oh, and for what it's worth, no monkeys were harmed in the writing of this post...in fact, no actual monkeys were used in any way.