6 Comments

I'm pretty young and I've heard many variants of "what do women want?"

Expand full comment

I've definitely seen this kind of thing in my workplaces. Interestingly, I don't think anyone is consciously aware they're pursuing this sort of strategy as an employee, but it often shows up as vague demands for various supports of perks rather than direct asks for more money, which has always felt wildly inefficient to me, yet people can get really hung up on access to various perks they could easily buy for themselves more efficiently with a raise.

The common explanation given in the tech sector for this is that it's because people are bad at evaluating how much money they are willing to trade for choice between work environments and so must complete on perks sure to decreasing marginal value of additional salary, which I have always found hard to believe. This perhaps better explains the perks race among letaving tech firms, though.

Expand full comment

Curiously, this hasn't resulted in female employees being better at extracting surplus from their employers... Or maybe they're extracting it in the form of non-salary compensation and ancillary benefits?

Expand full comment

We know what employers want from workers: maximum productivity and an appearance of sustained effort and passion for as low a wage as they can get away with paying.

I think it stands to reason that a worker who doesn't buy into the notion that their job should fulfill them would want the opposite: the highest wage they can get for minimal effort.

Expand full comment

Flow is when you are so engaged with your work that it utterly consumes you. I remember as a student, once, when I was working on a difficult problem in the morning. I had a date at 7pm, but during the whole time I neither ate nor went to the bathroom but just kept working on the problem until 8pm, when I called my date to apologize (but I had solved the problem). That is flow.

Expand full comment

What does flow mean?

Expand full comment