Does your job give you enough satisfaction?

Joel Spolsky writes a column for Inc. Magazine in which he discusses how to structure salaries in such a way that things can be equitable and transparent.

A couple paragraphs resonated with me, as I've been that miserable employee:

At the same time, if you hear a lot of griping about salaries, you shouldn't look just at your system for paying people. One thing I've learned from experience is that happy, motivated employees who are doing work they love and feel they are being treated as adults don't gripe about money unless their pay is egregiously unfair. If you hear a lot of complaints about salaries, I suspect that's probably a manifestation of a much bigger disease: Your employees aren't deriving enough personal satisfaction from their work, or they are miserable for other reasons.

It takes a lot of salary to make up for a cruel boss or a prisonlike workplace. And rather than adjusting pay, you might choose to focus on some nonmonetary ways to make employees happy. Happy employees make better products and provide better customer service and will make your company successful and profitable. And success allows you to pay workers better. It's a virtuous circle, and it has worked for Fog Creek.

I've always said that people will work for much less, provided they're happy and they feel like they're a productive, contributing member of the team.