The time-for-money model is broken

I have a friend who was a “job stacker.”

She had three full-time jobs at corporations you've definitely heard of, not competitors – working remotely, using AI to amplify her output. She is exceptionally good at what she does, and survived multiple rounds of layoffs at all three. None of them knew the truth.

She found an arbitrage opportunity. Three companies paid her for 40 hours a week, each got high-quality work, none got 40 hours.

Time-for-money was never a great model for knowledge work. But remote work and AI have now exposed just how broken it really is.

Two problems:

1. Time ≠ Value

The truth is, we pay for the wrong thing. We buy time, not value. It worked on assembly lines, but makes zero sense for knowledge workers who use AI.

I could pay someone $5,000 to write 10 landing pages. If any of them converts at 20%, it's worth way more than $5K to my business. If they all convert below 1%, they're worth nothing. Either way, I paid $5,000.

When we can measure value precisely, we throw money at it. Great salespeople earn huge commissions. We knowingly overpay for Meta ads because we can track exactly what we're getting. At this point, paying knowledge workers for their time just feels like a cop-out.

2. Money ≠ Engagement

Elite AI engineers earn millions from corporates, but they can't fake interest in boring work. Money buys attendance, not commitment.

What actually inspires top performers to do their best work? They long to solve interesting problems, build something that matters, and be surrounded by other talented people who are doing great things.

As an employer, that's exactly what you want too! Strip away the noise about time and money, and our incentives are perfectly aligned.

So, what do you do instead?

Knowledge work isn’t that hard to measure, the metrics exist:

• Product engagement and user satisfaction

• Customer acquisition cost and deal size

• Team velocity and output quality

• Problems solved that were previously stuck

• New insights that change how you operate

Use the data you have and hold people accountable to outcomes, not hours logged.

And once you can see their impact, acknowledge it. Takes five minutes. Costs nothing. Goes further than any bonus.

What happened to my friend who had three full-time jobs? She quit them all to join a startup. Took a 70% pay cut so she could work on a problem that obsesses her, for a founder who inspires her. She couldn't afford rent, she had to move back in with her parents. But she couldn't be happier.

I hope this helps!