> If someone else can come around and "claw back" my money, I want to make my contributions as impossible to build on, to change, and to understand as I can make them.
In theory, the "claw back" is decreasing your percentage while increasing the total pie such that your slice remains the same, or otherwise grows or shrinks exactly as much as it would all have without the "claw back". The theory makes sense if the measurements over a 2-4 week period are completely accurate and hold true over the entire lifespan of the product.
(Edit: Reading again, it seems likely that you are paid a fixed sum each week, not a percentage. Therefore the "claw back" is only referring to the psychological feeling of ownership)
> There is also zero accountability. The company wants to make profit and pay you as little as possible. You have no way of knowing if any improvements came from you or from someone else.
The article author calls out that as an issue, and gets over it by assuming everyone trusts his published metrics. Explicitly calls it out as an assumption that the metrics are trusted to make the system work.
Thank you. Look, all this is voluntary. We live in a capitalist system where businesses amass capital and take risks with that capital. The owners of the business “centrally plan” what will happen.
The goal of this to try a free-market approach to get closer to employee-owned companies. Ideas can be suggested by anyone. They can be even given a budget to go do it. If they succeed, they get a share of the revenues.
Many of us are so “whipped” by full-time employment that we commute long hours to work, neglect our kids and do what the boss says or get fired. QCM is closer to Adam Smith’s ideal of everyone being a free agent. Read this and tell me why no one should ever voluntarily agree to it:
Imagine, as a developer or designer, coming across a SaaS company whose product you are very familiar with, that openly publishes its metrics. They honestly reveal that some metrics could use improvement, and you have a great idea for how to do it. You get in touch and – instead of hiring you to for some full-time position doing mostly drudge work inside the company – they agree to pay you for your contribution, if it works out. $1,000,000 / year x (C–1) for every factor C that you improve a certain KPI metric.
Since I have written this, I have found that paying people in cryptocurrencies for their time may be a better way when it comes to time-based compensation. But for results-based compensation, I have found that this works quite well, and is closer to the ideal of “to each according to their contribution”. Just because I started a for-profit company doesn’t mean I have to take all the risk and reap all the reward and compensate employees at my whim. That’s how salaries stagnate.
Certainly, this isn’t for everyone. It attracts a certain type of person: independent, results-driven, and turned off by the bullshit in full time employment. There are plenty of people who contribute to open source and wikipedia and science FOR FREE. This is for compensating those kinds of people.
PS: in a society I wish we’d move towards, everyone gets enough UBI and health insurance indeendent of working for any corporation that they would voluntarily choose to learn guitar or contribute to a company’s bottom line. Then software and digital projects would have far more contributions from free people around the planet. Until then, many people have to keep their head down and conform to get that steady paycheck, and risktaking like this is apparently … derided! … even on a site which is hosted by an accelerator for entrepreneurs. I truly feel we are living in Plato’s cave here. (But then again, I remember HN’s traditional snarky character towards anything unorthodox and realize people may not actually be so against free humans choosing to have their contributions measured by a consistent system that attempts to be fair.)
In theory, the "claw back" is decreasing your percentage while increasing the total pie such that your slice remains the same, or otherwise grows or shrinks exactly as much as it would all have without the "claw back". The theory makes sense if the measurements over a 2-4 week period are completely accurate and hold true over the entire lifespan of the product.
(Edit: Reading again, it seems likely that you are paid a fixed sum each week, not a percentage. Therefore the "claw back" is only referring to the psychological feeling of ownership)
> There is also zero accountability. The company wants to make profit and pay you as little as possible. You have no way of knowing if any improvements came from you or from someone else.
The article author calls out that as an issue, and gets over it by assuming everyone trusts his published metrics. Explicitly calls it out as an assumption that the metrics are trusted to make the system work.