Stairway to Heaven

So I am at the gym today running up a sweat on the treadmill( thank you thank you , you at the back kindly stop choking on your laughter )with my personal trainer at my side, wisely nodding and saying “good job” regularly ( so regularly in fact that I am getting a little suspicious about how good I really am doing ). Anywhoo we start talking about she gets compensated, and it turns out, she gets paid per client and here’s the kicker while the club will send the odd client her way , she’s pretty much responsible for getting new clients. Rev share is roughly 50-50.

If a trainer is not generating enough revenue well then …..Quite so. Its not really that diff than any sales\commission based job , BUT it struck me that this job this per hour commission job is really on the fast track to nowhere in terms of making more money. ( please note this is not a post about money cant buy you happiness, and how job satisfaction is about .77 times as important as orgasms etc etc ). This is just a non profound realization that you can end up in a job thinking things are really really great but for whatever reason , THIS IS IT, you will never ever make any real wage increases from now on. My trainer is in a really tough spot, lets say she get super fantastic at her job like twice as good, well I sure as hell am not paying her double. Also while I have no proof of this, rumour is she sleeps bathes eats and works out on her own to make sure her trainer look is maintained. For the vapid and  irresponsible reader, this means there is an absolute upper limit on the number of clients she can scale to.

So bigger picture , are you in such a spot? Do you care. Until recently I used to basically dev and yup like it or not I was like her. Say I wrote code twice as good ( whatever that means ) well no one was going to pay me even 10% more for that . And in fact the amount of money I was making well that was it , anymore and the employer starts thinking fondly of outsourcing and hiring fresh grads from college.

I thought I had gotten around that by picking up jobs on the side contracts , outsourcing them myself , etc etc but the reality is I am again rapidly coming up against a wall in terms of revenue that I can make. Scaling will now have to involve hiring more developers and worse either finding business or hiring someone to do that , which is really like saying I am completely changing my job and again this is not a call to arms or some such crap never forget laziness is the second most powerful force in the world ( stupidity is first in case you were wondering )

I think it really helps from time to time , to do a gut check ; Can I convince someone to pay me a lot more money to roughly do what I do now albeit a lot better( I stress money here because in our current system I  really believe it is the purest estimation of perceived worth) . If the answer is no well either figure out how to do something else OR if the money does not matter then great but at least you know.