The world is "rational" in the sense that you mention, of course. The question is whether said rationality responsible for survival of societies is individual "selfish gene" type of rationality or some group rationality. A serial rapist targeting nuns will be much more successful today than you portray him – but you don't need to go down that path; a serial sperm donor will be very successful. Most people aren't serial sperm donors, including people believing in "selfish genes", and said people thus admit that their own behavior is not rational based on their own definition of "rationality" (doing everything to pass your genes along).

> As an aside, I don't understand evolutionary definitions of "rationality", not really. I mean, if the ultimate goal is to pass your genes, shouldn't you become a serial rapist targeting nuns or someone else who isn't likely to use abortion?

No, because you're likely to get caught and punished severely if you do that, probably before a significant number of impregnations (the number which is enough to have one child surviving until procreation, i.e. 1 in the modern world). Because societies that didn't do that to serial nun rapists didn't survive. Ostracising bastards ("illegitimately" born children) may also have something to do with it, ugly as it sounds.

Come on, the world *is* rational in the long run (as you said re RISC vs. x86), so if a certain behaviour is overwhelmingly popular among human societies, it probably means it worked better than the alternatives which have been tried until now.

@Larry: I think it's a combination; you need some sort of skills to sell and you need to be somewhat good at selling them, and you can trade one for the other to an extent.

Have you every noticed those employment ads that have listed DOE in the compensation column? It has been my observation that it isn't how much experience you have in a skill that counts; it's how much skill you have negotiating the salary you want.

Well, sure, likewise it's important for me to keep compensation from falling too low. As to the mating analogy – entering that territory is economic imperialism gone awry, IMO.

More than I'd make at microsoft, but the point was just that it's vastly different to play chess than to play poker. Just like when you compete for women you are probably better off not to worry about inputs and outputs like money you make, looks, etc. and expect to get rewarded simply by being better/working harder. You undoubtedly have good points you can't think of and there's undoubtedly women who will appreciate different things than the obvious, so by meeting a lot of people (advertising) and getting to know them (marketing research) you have a much better chance to find a good partnership for the business venture of love.

But sorry, I know I sound like a pompous ass. I don't really know your situation and this is probably meant to be more hypothetical than anything, but to steal your analogy from last post labor is a lot like fuel and you are the fuel provider. To a business it's most important to have a stable source of fuel, and to keep costs from running up too high.

Well, I dunno. "More than X" – what was X? Quite some people make quite a lot of money without running their own office.

Not to mention if you then screw up, as a manager, you can be let go with no resentment from other employees. They see there's a path for advancement, a future, but if your slowly but surely increasing pay becomes too much to sustain nobody weeps when a guy with a corner office and great car gets let go, especially if they did something to lose the company money.

Hopefully that didn't sound too pompous, but the gist is a business is more like a scoial heirarchy than an engine. You can't really look at input of labor and output of utility and judge value on that, even if it were easy to do so (which it isn't).

If you fire all your marginal workers or people who get old and crufty then it causes labor problems, makes people wonder if this is a good long term place. If you give great compensation to the best employees you get a lot of resentment in other employees at the same level.

And how do you tell who that great worker is? how do you trace all the way through from the low level to the end result of sales and a good product? It's very difficult, and ultimately requires relying on some lower level management to make those decisions.

But if someone is good at telling who is a good worker from an interview, how valueable is that? It can be incredibly valuable, of greater value than any one worker.

It's true you need to go into management or have some sort of leverage to get money but there's more to it than buerocracy. You then become responsible for some small segment of the business, and then the upper management can take it off their plate and get back to higher level decision making they are (hopefully) better equipped for.

In every business lots of seemingly questionable decisions get made. Much of that is because managers recognize it's a social construct not a machine. Just making your product well possible is secondary to keeping the organization stable and healthy.

Anyway that's a speech I got a long time ago from the CEO of a company I worked at as he explained why the maximum I (or anyone) would ever make without running his own office or being at corporate would never be more than X no matter how much money they made the company, and a frank assessment that I was too inexperienced to take on that burden. That might make you dismiss it but it was one of those surprisingly frank moments that you sometimes come across in life.

I have a family member in the military who's had about 20 million dollars in training. By the logic you're using it makes sense to pay him a very large salary indeed, but if they spend a lot to retain one person or even a small group it is hard to justify to others a much smaller salary, even if they are in a less critical position. You also can get a problem where many people are then competing for this job they only want for the money, which doesn't work out well for either programming or for combat.

You're concentrating on the product but production is only a small part of a business. The computer science corporation has many products they bought out for the old customer bas just to milk out tech support fees.

Employees in production are invariably a commodity. You don't really make any profit for the company, by business logic, you're just an expense. Your product itself has a certain level where it's "good enough". There's many ways they can achieve that including contractors who can be hired and fired with no consequence, even if at greater expense. The expense can be offset by the lack of need to manage them, too.

For management the goal is generally to keep costs down for production jobs while maintaining that "good enough" state. If they let salaries creep up too much for even one person then it just gives fuel to others to get higher salaries. They don't want to fire people or have them quit too often but if a highly talented programmer leaves occasionally it's a small price to pay so long as they can keep things in decent shape. Especially with programmers who like you said tend to have just a few good things they'd want to do at a particular company then may well be largely dead weight once they are done.

For sales and marketing jobs there's a direct and easy to measure profit. You get a check and the sales guy gets a percentage and marketing gets points, and if the numbers are bad they are out the door. To really manage techies would require being a techie and managing isn't about subject knowledge it's more high level than that. So you can't expect them to go overboard too much for one person, but on the other hand if you are continually shut down whenever you bring up a pay increase you don't have any real choice but to move on to greener pastures.

All of those 4? Interesting. Just in case – if you'll be looking for something – keep us in mind :)

Great post, couldn't agree more with the sentiments.

I am, IMO, a good firmware developer, tech writer, hardware designer, and not so bad manager. I'm also plenty bad at many, many things.

Anyway, I could get a job doing any of the 4 things that I'm good at, and each of them would pay pretty well.

But for me to be paid very very well, for me to be personally & professionally fulfilled, and for me to be used to my maximum potential, I need a position that requires and uses *all* of these talents. Those positions don't just grow on trees, and in my case it's usually a smaller company that needs such a person. But when you find the fit, it's very comfortable for both sides.

I wouldn't go as far; if business has little to do with reality, then what does have much to do with reality? I mean, most real work gets done through some business arrangements, and people have all the reasons to look for real ways to get more for less.

You may as well quit and do something you love a while or in your spare time while you work somewhere that appreciates you.