Free Article By Paul Glen of C2
Consulting
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The Meaning of Money
Over the past decade, industry salaries have
been on a roller-coaster ride. This year's survey data shows a return to level
ground, which makes this a good time to re-evaluate how we think about money. It
seems our love affair with lucre has developed into a bit of a dysfunctional
relationship.
Now don't get me wrong. I like money as much as
the next person -- and more is better -- but I'm concerned that we may have
created some misconceptions about its meaning.
As a manager and consultant, I have noticed
that few issues elicit as much emotion from technical staffs as salary. For a
bunch of folks who typically eschew emotion, we can get really worked up about
money. I've seen more tears and screaming about it than about any other
managerial issue.
It's not that we're starving. Few fully
employed people in the IT industry are filing for food stamps or could qualify
as the working poor. And this year, with 3% pay increases, the news is not too
bad. So what's it all about?
The problem is that we've allowed money to
become wrapped up with a number of other issues. We use it as a tangible symbol
for other intangible values.
Status. We use money as an indicator of social
status. As herd animals, we really like to know where we stand in relation to
our peers, and money is one key measure.
Personal worth. We use money as a symbol of how
much our organizations value us. The more they pay us, the more they must feel
that we are good and valuable people.
Progress. We expect that income over a career
should continually rise. As we progress, so should our value and commensurate
compensation.
Fairness. Most important, we use money as a
gauge of the organization's fairness. We compare the value we deliver and expect
to be reasonably compensated. We estimate the value that we add compared with
our peers and expect that each should be compensated according to his relative
contribution.
So frequently, when technical people,
uncomfortable with squishy emotional things, feel undervalued, unloved, abused
or unfairly treated, they complain about money. It's the safe, concrete way to
express what they don't like. It's easy to say, "Bob does a worse job than I do
but is paid better. That's not fair." It's hard to say, "Why don't you respect
me and my contribution as much as you do Bob's?" But they are really the same
thing.
And that's where the problem comes in. Money's
not really about any of those things.
In aggregate, how much we get paid is not a
function of our moral worth but of supply and demand. The ups and downs of
salary numbers are based less on the value we deliver to the organization and
more on the fluctuations of the market for people with our talents.
During the boom years of the '90s, I hired
young college graduates at salaries in excess of twice the average income for a
family of four in the U.S. When they asked me for career advice, I'd always tell
them the same thing: "Save your money." And they would look at me as if I were
speaking a foreign language.
"You don't get paid this much because you're
morally superior to the janitor. It's just a matter of supply and demand, and at
some point, things will change. Don't build a lifestyle around the assumption
that you will always make more. In fact, if you think about it, if the company
had to lose one person, a young programmer or the janitor, whom do you think
we'd miss first?"
As the market for technical skills continues to
globalize, we need to get clear about what money really means. And perhaps more
important, we need to get better at expressing our feelings about worth and
values and fairness separately from the symbol to which we've grown so
accustomed.
© Copyright 2005 by Computerworld Inc., One
Speen Street, Framingham, MA, 01701. Reprinted by permission of
Computerworld. All Rights Reserved.
