r/todayilearned • u/EtOHMartini • 27d ago

TIL that philanthropist and engineer Avery Fisher was motivated to start his own company after, identifying a way to save his employer $10,000 a year, was immediately denied a $5/week raise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avery_Fisher
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u/mandy009 27d ago

multiply the raise he was denied by 50 weeks in a year. About $5,500 a year equivalent today out of that $215,000 a year savings in today's dollars.

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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka 26d ago

This story is similar to the blue LED story where that Japanese engineer worked on solving the blue LED invention for years, while his boss kept cutting his budget and treating him like shit. Then when he finally did it, his boss was like "nice" and gave him a $180 bonus, when the invention itself was easily worth billions.

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u/PresumedSapient 26d ago

the blue LED story

Relevant Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M

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u/Few-Pen4183 26d ago

Really interesting. Thanks for posting it. 🤜🤛

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u/MadeByTango 26d ago

There is a story from the early days of "User Experience" as a career, when a dude talked about the "million dollar button." He meant to be positive, explaining about how he noticed that a certain button was poorly labeled and they were losing tons of customers to confusion, so he fixed the label. Later his client came back and told him that he had earned an extra million dollars through the fixing of the button. It was a story about how valuable UX was and why companies should spend on it.

In practice it became an expectation that UX was about maximizing the value as a job, so any ability to argue for raises based on output became a matter of the expected status quo for UX designers. Meanwhile if you can't make a UI earn a million by changing a single label you're seen as worthless.

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u/0OKM9IJN8UHB7 26d ago

Is that why nobody leave any UI alone more than 6 months anymore?

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u/french_snail 26d ago

So, basically chump change

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u/Pacificus_ 26d ago

Your math is wrong buddy

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u/ThePixelsRock 26d ago

How so? It doesn't seem wrong at all