When a candidate hands over a salary slip, you might see a lack of self-respect. You aren't wrong; you're just negotiating with the wrong party.

You may think the problem is a lack of differentiation—that if they were truly "10/10" talent, they’d command a premium. But in a market with 50,000 applicants for 50 roles, merit is a commodity. Being a "10x engineer" is table stakes; it doesn't make you scarce. It makes you one of many scarce things.

The real question isn’t how to become more valuable, but how to become scarce. Scarcity is built by outside options, not skill alone.

Some call this "victimhood talk." It isn't. When thousands chase a handful of openings, individual defiance is collective suicide. If one person refuses to show their slip, ten others will. The nine who compromise get to eat; the one who stands firm gets to be "right" and unemployed. You cannot bluff when you have no chips.

You might think policy intervention is "coddling the weak." I see it as a market correction. A company that needs your salary history to price a role isn’t running a meritocracy; they are outsourcing their compensation strategy to competitors. They are making the candidate pay for the firm's inability to value talent. That isn’t a free market—it’s a free rider.

Principles don't pay rent; leverage does. Consider a parent who has been unemployed for months with bills piling up. Telling them to "hold their ground" is asking them to let their family suffer to prove a point.

The worst deals happen when one side has no alternative. When "no deal" equals catastrophe, you don't have a negotiation—you have a hostage situation. You don't blame the hostage for cooperating; you blame the structure that created the crisis.

You can’t out-talent a structural glut. Stop asking candidates to conjure leverage from thin air. Instead, ask:
- How do we build a credible Plan B (savings, side hustles, unions)?
- What are we doing to change the structure instead of judging the response?

We need structural scarcity, not more sermons on "knowing your worth."

$IHSG $MYOR $KLBF