the whining continues

Sometimes you just can't please people. Well, I suppose you could. You just give them money and ask nothing in return. Wait, we had that. It was called welfare, and the people taking advantage of it whined too.

We have a woman in our office who constantly complains about her wages. She doesn't posess the same skill set as the rest of the people here. Most are programmers, or were at some point, and now do other things related to programming (system analysis and design for the most part). Most also have college degrees backing up what they do. She does not. She does presentation (screen design mostly) and the skill set necessary is HTML/XML/XSL, and she's learning Cold Fusion. She's supposed to be learning SQL as well.

Her constant complaint up till now is that she doesn't get paid as much as the programmers. Well, her skill set doesn't justify it, but her manager (not me, tho I wouldn't mind the credit) is trying to do something about that. He is trying to broaden her skill set, making her more useful and therefore justifying a pay increase. He has been sending her to classes to learn Cold Fusion, and giving her time to research SQL and figure out how to use it. It is fairly intuitive and with time, she could pick it up. Now the complaint is....I'm not as programmer! I don't get paid to do this stuff! How do you expect me to just learn this?

Well, no you don't get paid to do it, but if you'd like to change that, the opportunity is sitting at your feet. Jump in and give it a shot instead of whining about people expecting more of you. If you pull this off, you will get paid accordingly. You have nothing to lose and yet...it's nothing to you but a reason to whine. That's why you won't get paid as much as the programmers.