There’s a strain of thinking about jobs that I see in online leftish spaces, etc that’s very adversarial. That’s where it seems strongest but it also pops up in more mainstream boilerplate “negotiate your salary” type stuff.
And like, I’m really not a fan,
(Tbc this is a privileged perspective; all of that stuff might totally apply if you have a low-paid job and aren’t looking for upside from it and just want to put food on the table, etc. But I feel like part of the trend I see is people taking this framing and applying it to higher-status/more aspirational jobs in tech or media or whatever, and that’s more what I’m talking about.)
And like I very much do think that employment should be a mutually beneficial relationship and there should be some fair allocation of the surplus produced. But it’s less like a simple transaction, and more like an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and you only end up in the high upside cases if you’re both cooperating.
So I used to think a bit more that the motivations of employees didn’t matter; there are lots of mutually beneficial transactions we could make with lots of people, let’s try to make them. And now I think something a bit closer to: a lot of the synergies of employment can only be achieved in an environment of high trust and cooperation, and so a lot of the most successful people in an organization will simply be the most loyal ones.
So yeah my (completely unqualified, fully anecdotal) advice if you are going for high upside in your career: don’t negotiate your salary! Instead of arguing over scraps of the surplus you can make the surplus orders of magnitude bigger by finding or creating the sort of organization that makes you want to be loyal and doing that.