Well, that bit about management is true but sucks.
I saved my previous employer 60k years in running cost on my first three month on the job, and couldn't get a 10% raise out of it. Just promises and nice words. Well guess what? If you pay programmers as blue collars and get them to work as blue collar in a "software factory" paying them blue collar wages, you are in a self fulfilling profecy about their value.
My point of view is that I should cost my company somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of the value that I create for them.
Less than 1/5th and there's room to pay me more. More than 1/3rd and I'm at risk of getting into the unstable realm where if I or my team hit a temporary rough patch, that the company would be economically ahead to fire us, especially after you consider the amount of "double counting" that goes on.
(Engineering builds something that saves $100K/yr. Manufacturing deploys that thing to save $100K/yr. What do you want to bet that the total savings claimed is closer to $200K/yr than $100K/yr?)
I see what you mean, but putting your work value at the company behest is a losing proposition. My work has value even if the company that commissioned it to me is unable to monetize it.
My time has a value which is independent to what the company pays me to actually do. My time would carry the same value even if the company got me to clean bathrooms.
If I had the willingness to start a company and spent my time there, how much money would I make? That's the value of my time, but it carries quite some risk. I am not the best at monetizing software, so I outsource the monetization of my time and associated risks to a third party. They do get a substantial cut of the money, which is fine since I get reduced risk.
If you tie the value of your time to the capability of the company to direct you doing high value tasks you're starting with the losing foot in any negotiation. What if you gave your time to a charity? What if the company needed you to debug some worthless software in the chain as an emergency? Your time has a value even if what you are told to build in your time from your employer has no value - it's the employer loss, not yours.
Your second paragraph talks about the value of your time to you and in that sense, it's true. From the company's point of view of your time, your second paragraph is somewhere between irrelevant and false.
You hit the nail on the head that we're giving up a lot of the value "pie" in exchange for much lower risk. My mindset takes that one step farther: ensure that everyone's economic goals are aligned and stably pointed to continued employment of me and my team. That requires an exchange of my time for the company's money at a rate low enough that it's obvious to the company they're getting an economic gain from buying it and high enough that it's obvious to me that I'm getting an economic gain from selling it.
If those ranges don't overlap, you have a very unstable situation. When those ranges have large overlap, many different valuations of time are stable and mutually beneficial.
>What if the company needed you to debug some worthless software in the chain as an emergency?
If the software I'm debugging is worthless, it's hard to imagine there's a genuine emergency involving it. The mere fact that there's an emergency involving it means it has some value to someone.
I saved my previous employer 60k years in running cost on my first three month on the job, and couldn't get a 10% raise out of it. Just promises and nice words. Well guess what? If you pay programmers as blue collars and get them to work as blue collar in a "software factory" paying them blue collar wages, you are in a self fulfilling profecy about their value.