I don't believe this at all. Put another way: you're exactly right, but I'd combine two concepts you separate.
Everyone is working for passion/happiness. There's the net awesome that you get out of solving problems and building value at worth, and there's the net awesome that you buy with the money they pay you.
One way to look at it is that it all goes in the same pool and plusses-and-minuses until you have some score of how awesome your days tend to be.
I think that's the only reasonable way to look at it, and I don't buy the 'some of us are just working stiffs' bit that gets dropped into these threads on HN. I think more accurately, it's just generally speaking really hard to find an awesome job and eating and sleeping (under drywall) is expensive... So for lots of folks salary dwarfs work environment in priority.
The sad thing is that the comparison is generally done in a speculative vacuum. It's very easy to imagine what would happen if we made less (or more) money. That's pretty simple math. It's much harder to evaluate the benefits or drawbacks of a different work environment on our lives. Challenging math.
Oh, and that was a total tangent... to the point, in my example the employee is leaving for reasons other than money. So the premise kind of is the conclusion there. I was just being redundant. It's just a logical redundancy that lots of people in this situation seem to miss. Dollars do that.
No, everyone - either for the passion/happiness of the work, or the passion/happiness gained from the pay. Even having food to eat is a small happiness.
Everyone is working for passion/happiness. There's the net awesome that you get out of solving problems and building value at worth, and there's the net awesome that you buy with the money they pay you.
One way to look at it is that it all goes in the same pool and plusses-and-minuses until you have some score of how awesome your days tend to be.
I think that's the only reasonable way to look at it, and I don't buy the 'some of us are just working stiffs' bit that gets dropped into these threads on HN. I think more accurately, it's just generally speaking really hard to find an awesome job and eating and sleeping (under drywall) is expensive... So for lots of folks salary dwarfs work environment in priority.
The sad thing is that the comparison is generally done in a speculative vacuum. It's very easy to imagine what would happen if we made less (or more) money. That's pretty simple math. It's much harder to evaluate the benefits or drawbacks of a different work environment on our lives. Challenging math.
Oh, and that was a total tangent... to the point, in my example the employee is leaving for reasons other than money. So the premise kind of is the conclusion there. I was just being redundant. It's just a logical redundancy that lots of people in this situation seem to miss. Dollars do that.