My guidance counselor's sense of negotiation was generally stunted, but when it came to discussing money, she had all the agility of sludge. In this, she was a product of her time. Money always has been important to employees and business. Yet in the traditional economy, there was a stupefying level of pretense about money. The Internet economy, happily, is dismantling this pretense.
Critics call the new generation of workers greedy and selfish, only interested in what they can get.
That's absolutely true, just as it always has been. Only now we have the decency to acknowledge it. The irony is, the more we acknowledge it, the less it is true. All these can and do become more important than money. So in the Internet economy, the conversation about money comes first.