What money really mean to IT employees

The recent market recession has led firms to curtail costs wherever possible including cost on human capital. Most of the companies have curtailed benefits and put salary revision on hold, which makes this a good time to re-evaluate how we think about money. It seems our love affair with lucre has developed into a bit of a dysfunctional relationship.

Few issues elicit as much emotion from technical staffs as salary. For a bunch of folks who typically eschew emotion, we can get really worked up about money. We have seen more tears and screaming about it than about any other managerial issue.

The problem is that we've allowed money to become wrapped up with a number of other issues. We use it as a tangible symbol for other intangible values.

Status. We use money as an indicator of social status. As herd animals, we really like to know where we stand in relation to our peers, and money is one key measure.

Personal worth. We use money as a symbol of how much our organizations value us. The more they pay us, the more they must feel that we are good and valuable people.

Progress. We expect that income over a career should continually rise. As we progress, so should our value and commensurate compensation.

Fairness. Most important, we use money as a gauge of the organization's fairness. We compare the value we deliver and expect to be reasonably compensated. We estimate the value that we add compared with our peers and expect that each should be compensated according to his relative contribution.

So frequently, when technical people, uncomfortable with squishy emotional things, feel undervalued, unloved, abused or unfairly treated, they complain about money. It's the safe, concrete way to express what they don't like. It's easy to say, "Bob does a worse job than I do but is paid better. That's not fair."
It's hard to say, "Why don't you respect me and my contribution as much as you do Bob's?" But they are really the same thing.

And that's where the problem comes in. Money's not really about any of those things.

In aggregate, how much we get paid is not a function of our moral worth but of supply and demand. The ups and downs of salary numbers are based less on the value we deliver to the organization and more on the fluctuations of the market for people with our talents.

As the market for technical skills continues to globalize, we need to get clear about what money really means. And perhaps more important, we need to get better at expressing our feelings about worth and values and fairness separately from the symbol to which we've grown so accustomed.