There was an article on Living Revolution about a week ago by IM David Pruess, a very popular writer from Chess.com. Living Revolution believes that "the proper mode of human interaction is cooperation rather than competition" and, as such, members joined together as a commune sharing with each other as needed. Sounds OK, I guess, if that’s how you want to live and few will argue that the idea of being nice, charitable and helping others is a bad thing, but the idea of trying to force employers to adopt your philosophy probably won’t work in the corporate world. That’s what Pruess did at Chessdotcom.
Apparently he didn’t like the fact that the site owner was making a lot more money than the staff, so he suggested that things should be different; the owner should share the wealth. When the owner refused Pruess quit what he described as “a job with so many good aspects– educating people, entertaining people, being creative, working in a field that I love and am an expert in, fun co-workers with similar interests, flexible hours, the ability to work from anywhere, good compensation, constant flattering feedback– that almost anyone would call it a dream job.”
Pruess must live in a different world than I do. I simply can’t imagine anybody walking into a corporate executive’s office and saying, “Hey, your salary is 40 times mine. And besides that, everybody in the company is underpaid. That’s just plain wrong! You should pay all of us a lot more money even if it means you have to take a whopping pay cut.” That’s essentially that’s what Pruess did. The site owner wasn’t interested so Pruess did what he deemed the reasonable thing…he quit. A man of principle, or was it a foolish decision?
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