August 2005
Thirty years ago, you had to work your way up the corporate ladder. Now this is no longer the rule. Our generation wants to get money at the forefront. Instead of developing a product for some big company and waiting for a job guarantee, we develop the product ourselves, in a startup, and sell it to a big company. At the very least, we want to have a choice.
Among other things, this shift has given rise to a rapid rise in economic inequality. But in fact, these two examples are not as different as it is presented in economic statistics.
Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the importance of safe jobs. An easy job that you can't get fired from costs money; exchange for a second job is one of the most common forms of corruption. (A well-paid position that does not require much work) is the effect (or financial annuity is a general term that describes the schedule for repaying a financial instrument, paying interest, or paying a portion of the principal and interest on it). Only sinecures do not appear in economic statistics. If they did, it would be clear that, in practice, socialist countries have non-trivial wealth disparities because they tend to have a powerful class of bureaucrats who are paid mostly on a seniority basis and who can never be fired.
Meanwhile, not a sinecure, but a position on the corporate ladder was really valuable, because big companies tried not to fire people and promote them, based mainly on seniority. Position on the corporate ladder had a similar meaning to "goodwill", which is indeed quite often used as a real element in the valuation of companies. This meant that high-paying jobs could be expected in the future.
One of the main reasons for the collapse of the career ladder is the trend of acquisitions that began in the 1980s. Why waste your time on stairs that might disappear before you reach the top?
And it's no coincidence that the corporate ladder was one of the reasons early corporate raids were so successful. It's not just economic statistics that ignore the implications of safe jobs. Corporate balance sheets do this too. The reason it was profitable to break up companies and sell them piecemeal in the 1980s is that they barely formally acknowledged their implied debt to employees who did a good job and expected to be rewarded with high-paying jobs when their time came. . In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko makes fun of companies overburdened with VPs. But the company may not be as corrupt as it seems; these comfortable vice-presidential jobs were probably payment for previous work.
I like the new model better. On the one hand, treating jobs like awards seems like a bad idea. Many good engineers have become bad managers this way. And the old system meant that people had to face a lot more corporate politics in order to protect the effort they put into their position on the corporate ladder.
The big disadvantage of the new system is that it involves more risk. If you're developing ideas in a startup rather than a big company, any number of random factors can sink you in before you can finish. But perhaps the older generation will laugh at me when I say that the way we all perform is more risky. After all, projects within large companies were constantly canceled as a result of strong-willed decisions from above. My father's entire industry (breeding reactors) disappeared in this way.
One way or another, the very idea of ββa career ladder has probably sunk into oblivion forever. The new model seems to be more liquid and more efficient. But it's not as much of a change, financially, as one might think. Our fathers were not so stupid.
Source: habr.com