Global Finance (Economic) Crisis and Incomes

A little more than a year ago, a young doctor of mathematics who wanted to change from his university career into the world of free enterprise was warmly recommended to me. Naturally, I immediately invited him for an interview. This is how I met a young man who had just about all the talents you can think of. He was pleasant, self-assured, trustworthy, reliable, extremely intelligent, competent, goal-oriented, and obviously had very good general knowledge. He could listen carefully and give precise answers. He showed understanding of technical and business matters, his English was perfect, and he was even good-looking. If he had one weakness, it was that, at 29, he was no longer all that young and yet still relatively inexperienced. Studying, writing a doctorial thesis, and then spending another year at university does take time.

With the exception of LaTeX and a little Office, he had no IT experience (his minor subject had been physics, where he seemed to be very proficient). Since our enterprise had been recommended to him, he wanted to learn a little about InterFace, and he liked what he saw. Nevertheless, we soon discovered that his plans for the future did not really meet our needs. Regardless of his many qualities, it would have taken considerable time to turn him into a qualified IT advisor. On the other hand, he wanted to become a “real” economical advisor, rather than specialize in IT. We liked each other well enough, so we remained on friendly terms for some time.

This is how I know that (probably because of his age) his applications were not a success with companies like McKinsey or BCG. However, he landed with a small financial service with a very “innovative” product. And his pay-check was about 2½ times as much as a beginner can earn at an IT company. I then investigated the salary structure for graduate career beginners and found out that a young “high performer” gets two to three times as much as a good computer scientist or engineer if he starts with one of those enterprises that is now taking refugee under the German Multi-Billion-Euro-Shield. If you start with one of the famous companies, as far as I know, you get “only” 1½ or 2 times that money.

The bad news was that his working day with the new company was more like 14 hours than 12 hours, and that six days per week. As a sign of gratitude, they sometimes flew him to London on a Saturday at company expense, for dinner in a noble restaurant to celebrate particularly successful results.

For young people who are interested, let me give you a short description of the income policy at InterFace AG. In general, we have permanent employees. We have three wage components, one fixed, the other two variable:

  • The basic income (GG)Thomas Vallon, our managing director for the area “IT organisation” and personnel says: “The GG should certainly be high enough to provide a decent living”.
  • An individual achievement bonus (iLG)The iLG is a conservative component and basically takes into account what individual value the employee has for us.
  • An individual success bonus (iEB)The iEB is an innovative component. It is defined by a basic sum, depending on the company profit. The speciality is that the basic sum will even be paid when the result is zero, (which hopefully also in the future only happens in theory)

The individual salary components and the relation between fixed and variable parts are defined during income talks and are subject to yearly re-evaluation and adaptation. So far, this concept has worked well. We hope that it will help us to master the generally expected coming recession.

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