As employees many of us seem to forget a few key aspects when it comes to compensation, many are guilty of that, my self included.
When a self-employed contractor is bidding on a project, he will take into account every bit that goes into completing his contract, and then set the price, even small things such as transportation costs, electricity bills, equipment wear and tear etc.. everything must be taken into account to make sure profitability otherwise the business loses money over time and might bankrupt.
On the contrary, employees many times forget to treat their employment in a similar manner, many times we just round up a few corners and say “ahh it's only a few dollars, I will not make a big deal out of it” – wrong! not on everything, but for certain aspects, we should treat our employment as if we were self-employed.
an example:
You are being interviewed for an office job, compensation is fine, nothing crazy, slightly better than what you have now.. but then they demand you commute 4 times a week to their headquarters which is an hour and half away from where you live, using your own means of transportation, here we should calculate our costs, car maintenance (faster wear out of parts, more oil changes), gas prices (very high at the moment), the time we lose for the commute (in this example about 3 hours just driving) etc etc.. then encapsulate it into our monthly compensation in such a way that we don't need to take the burden. why should I take a salary that is $10K/yeah higher than what I make now, but on the flip site yearly will cost me about $7K extra because of commute costs? I should calculate how much will be my yearly costs and add it on top of what I would like to add.
that is just one simple example, but can applied to lots of things, another example: you are a software developer working fully from remote, but you still have to pay extra electricity, internet costs, property taxes, wear and tear of various equipment etc.. in order to make that work, so unless the employer is shipping to your house everything down to the light bulb in your fixture and your office furniture… why should you take the burden while the company saves it self a ton of money by avoiding having offices to begin with?
We were indoctrinated to “just accept and shut up or look for another job”, while C-level executives many times are able to get a large chunk of their living expenses covered by the company they work for.
e.g. why should I work 8 hours a day with a crappy, 21 inch 7 years old monitor, when my CEO just replaced his 27 inch “old” monitor, with a brand new 37 inch curved monitor which costs more than my car, for the 40 minutes a day he even look at his monitor… well you get the idea
what do you think about this subject?