You can't change the reasons for which you need a new person, and you've materially benefited from the person working for low pay. But it's not guilt, it's your morality and ethics identifying a gain you made that you feel you shouldn't be comfortable with.

One suggestion, perhaps the most obvious: identify the likely pay/compensation of the person who will replace them, and then pay them the difference (or as much of it as you can) in severance over and above what you're required to offer.

Second suggestion: help find this person a new job at the kind of pay they should actually have been earning for the quality of work they were doing.

But don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation. It's a good thing, not a negative emotion. It means you're thinking like a complete person in a world where it is common to pretend that isn't necessary.

>it's your morality and ethics identifying a gain you made that you feel you shouldn't be comfortable with.

What's your definition of guilt then? Just curious. Thanks.

My internal definition of guilt is screwed up because I have OCD. This is why I am so keen on defining guilt carefully.

What I am describing above is just discomfort. Unless the parent poster deliberately sought to underpay the person, they should have no guilt merely from that scenario. Discomfort is real enough.

Guilt might attach if they do not or choose not to act on that discomfort, or if the person is materially disadvantaged by not doing the ongoing work, or if a promise of better pay/longer employment was attached to asking for that work to be done at a low pay.

Thank you.

> But don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation. It's a good thing, not a negative emotion. It means you're thinking like a complete person in a world where it is common to pretend that isn't necessary.

If you have a moral obligation you can’t fulfill because of the rules of the human system you operate in, how exactly do you propose avoiding a negative emotion?

Not sure I should answer a post with a "how exactly" in it, to be honest, because it's rude. But:

I don't, but that negative emotion shouldn't necessarily be guilt.

First off, we don't know the obligation can't be fulfilled in this case. No reason to feel guilty if it can be. Things change.

Second, if there is genuinely nothing you can do to fulfil a moral obligation because of systemic issues, there is no value in guilt; it's literally not your fault. There might be negative emotions but it's better to consider them sadness or helplessness, and push away guilt.

Negative emotions happen. But taking on guilt for things you did not do and cannot fix for reasons outside your control is significantly emotionally damaging.

Apologies for the rude tone. I was mis-reading your comment as saying it's possible to fully avoid negative emotions around this type of situation, but going back I see that wasn't what you said.

Yes, I agree with everything you've written here.

The only nuance I'd add is that feeling guilt (or sadness, or helplessness) is not necessarily bad—emotions are valuable signals that can be mined for insight. I think the problem comes when we start to dwell on negative emotions and then internalize them as somehow representative of the state of the universe. Don't try to suppress or change the emotion, feel it, acknowledge it, then take a breath and decide on a course of action that you think will lead to the best outcome.

Actually it is me who should apologise; I'm in an awful mood today and on other days would not have been so pompous, I hope :-)

And yes -- I think to some extent my determination to push myself not to accept guilt for things that aren't my fault comes from realising that guilt for imagined misdeeds is the most potent fuel for OCD, which has wrecked the pattern of my life; it is a thief of joy.

When I explained one of my OCD obsessions/compulsions to a friend, they said "I can understand why that affected you but you understand it is literally absurd to have guilt from that?", and it was one of the most empowering things I've ever heard.

Guilt is a burden that good people willingly shoulder and bad people willingly shirk (if they are capable of it at all).

Internalising that there are more productive negative emotions to feel than unearned, secondhand guilt is a life's work for me.

> I had a worker do some good work for low pay, because they believed in the idea.

Basically preying on someone's low self-esteem and impostor syndrome. It's a vile thing to do, but unfortunately businesses keep exploit workers this way.

Did they believe in the idea to make shareholders buy themselves another yacht?

This is a nasty accusation made without evidence.

> I had a worker do some good work for low pay, because they believed in the idea.

Yes, that's the line you quoted earlier. It's still not evidence of your accusation and it won't become that through repetition.

Ah okay. Looks like you don't know what words mean.

Imagine you built a big sandcastle and asked a friend to help. Your friend helped a lot but you only gave them a tiny cookie as a thank you because they liked your idea so much. This is very mean and unfair because you're taking advantage of your friend’s feelings and hard work without giving them what they really deserve. This kind of behaviour is called exploitation and it's not nice at all.

Unfortunately I don't have crayons to make it more visual.

I know what words mean, but you're imagining words that don't exist.

> This is very mean and unfair because you're taking advantage of your friend’s feelings and hard work without giving them what they really deserve.

The motivation for the friend's altruism is, in fact, not in evidence. Nor is there evidence that they didn't know they were being underpaid, or didn't know the situation was unclear.

There are many reasons why it might be rational for a developer with full knowledge of the situation to accept low pay to make sure something happens, when it otherwise might not happen for no pay.

And there are situations where something has a truly unexpected upside.

The nasty accusations are that:

1) this is, specifically, "preying on low self-esteem". Where is this in evidence?

2) the developer has "impostor syndrome". Again, where is that in evidence?

You can use your big words if you like. But you are making an accusation that is supported only by your projection (perhaps of your own bad experiences?) onto it.

(I've done this kind of work. Once or twice when younger I would suggest impostor syndrome may have played a part, for sure. But in recent years I have done great work for low pay simply because one specific outcome was a social good I wanted to see happen, and I couldn't have done the work without some compensation. Had that work produced an additional financial windfall or escaped the MVP stage, I would have been there to profit from it. It didn't, for reasons I have learned from. But the social good exists nonetheless.)

Sorry you don't have crayons; they are an underrated device for the development of your evidently-pre-adult brain, and they are just plain fun! Put them on your wish list for Father Christmas.

by your own admission you paid them low. What evidence is needed that you paid them low when that's what you're saying that yourself?

It's not myself I am defending.

That the developer has been paid low is a fact.

The accusation is that they were paid low because they were exploitable due to their low self-esteem.

This is projected onto this fact without evidence. Perhaps from bitter personal experience, but projected nevertheless.

My favorite kind