> I'm a startup founder, and we can't compete head-on for talent. We have to hire people who don't want a FAANG
Then you don't deserve to get those people. If you are paying below market rates, well honestly it sucks to be you, and I don't particularly care if you lose employees.
Instead, the only thing that I care about is getting higher salaries for engineers.
> How many new technology companies did not get created because people's depressed salaries reduced how much they could save to bootstrap something new?
I agree with everything else you're saying except this. Higher wages could also cause less people to consider founding a startup.
True, higher pay would allow people to save more and thus making it financially easier - but it also would mean a higher opportunity cost [for the same risk], making it psychologically more difficult.
>Tech is basically the most overpaid career there is.
I think we get paid what a middle class wage should be. There was a huge downward spiral in wages due to rapid economic changes that cause a large fraction of the workforce to make very substandard wages.
> Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
It's great to enjoy programming, and to enjoy your job. But we live under capitalism. We can't fault people for just working a job.
> I’ve started noticing the inverse of this situation: Some of the juniors I’ve mentored end up working at ultra-cushy jobs at overfunded and undermanaged startups where they’re paid a lot to do very little. After those experiences, it’s hard for them to go back to a regular job where they’re paid normal comp to do normal amounts of work.
The "normal comp" is now bellow their market rate.
> More startups competing for fewer talent resources will mean that the cost of doing business is going to go up, which in this era of on-demand infrastructure from the likes of Amazon Web Services means SALARIES, which are essentially the single biggest component of any startups’s spending.
Reading that sentence alone, and then thinking about how much big corporate CEO's are paid, and banksters and Wall Street types, hedge fund managers, etc. and as a software engineer I tell ya my heart just bleeds for them. What a horrible tragedy, having salaries for talent go up. So irrational! :) Heck, at least the engineers and designers are actually building something, and adding to society, which is more than many of those other types can say.
It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams.
Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
> new stuff that does not exist or has it infancy.
If it was new stuff, then the people doing it must not be very low at the bottom (by virtue of the org being quite shallow - such as a startup).
Even new stuff in a big company with lots of layers of management cannot make new stuff with excellence. Eventually, probably sooner rather than later, it gets polluted.
Not to mention that in a big org, the people at the bottom do not get rewarded for making excellence in engineering, if the top doesn't appreciate it. SO why go that extra mile, when a mediocre job will earn you the same salary? You'd be more incentivized to move jobs to grow your pay instead, and use this as a stepping stone.
>but I don't think I could work in e.g. finance because I like technology and developing new stuff.
Right, most people don't want to work in finance. They do so because of the money. And generally financial CEOs/CFOs are smart enough to only pay workers what they have to. So the incentives are probably priced appropriately.
"Innovation" always takes a ton of muck work that has very little glory. I work at a chip company. For every engineer doing cutting edge work, you have 10 people doing very unsexy support tasks that are 100% necessary. These are roles people do because they pay well, not because they are interesting.
> Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives.
Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level.
Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.
> It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing.
That argument could apply to anyone who pays anyone well.
Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers.
(And by 'treat well', I mean the whole package. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.)
> Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
Huh, how is that 'dilution' supposed to work?
Well, and at least those 'evil' money grubbers are out of someone else's hair. They don't just get created from thin air. So if those rimarly-compensation-motivated people are now writing software, then at least investment banking and management consulting are free again for the primarily-craft-motivated people to enjoy!
>my salary history led me to be significantly underpaid for most of my career.
I feel like this misses the point of the article. The author claims its important to enjoy what you're working on. They make no claims that doing so is a way to maximize your salary.
I know tech gets paid well now but that wasn't always the case. Decades ago people went into medicine or law or finance if they wanted to optimize for pay and prestige. Only relatively recently has tech joined that list.
> This is making finding people for our (large but non tech) company (not in a high tech area) very difficult; we never paid those kind of salaries (cost of living here is much lower) but now you no longer need to be local to work for us, so we have to compete with these high paying companies which our company cannot afford to
> Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the average worker does in the country but ridiculously to what they would look like if engineers were allowed to capture a greater (that is a >0.01%) percentage of the added value they CREATE.*
As an engineer, I'd certainly like to make more, and I plan to negotiate more aggressively at my next position; but I'm honestly more concerned about how little most of the rest of the nation gets paid compared to the value they create. I don't like seeing my friends who work harder than I do--and contribute at least as much to society--getting paid 1/3 of what I make, just because they don't happen to have natural aptitudes for a currently fashionable skillset.
If I could fix just one of those two problems, it would be the second one. I make enough to live comfortably. Too many people don't.
>working for Disney or Pixar pales in comparison to how much $ Facebook,apple, netflix and amazon,
I dont think you know too many creative people. Artists i.e. people with an imagination, are much more capable of finding routes out of corporate energy draining traps, than the rest of the chimp troupe. The rest have no hope really other than to claim their salaries justify whatever meaningless shit they are made to do.
> ” If someone is very money-driven, there’s nothing we can do.”
I am very far from “very money-driven”. I worked for a long time in the non-profit sector that would pay much less than mostly any of my other careers options. Then I changed to software development.
I work for an American company from Brazil. I earn 5 times more (after taxes) that what I would likely earn in a local well-paying company for my level of experience. 3 times if I was lucky and good at negotiation.
And think that is 3 times multiplication of already high-paying job. So it is a LOT of money. There is just not much a company can do around here until the demand for tech talent in the US decrease a little.
>I am embarrassed that as a computer scientist I make more than her working from home in a comfy chair in front of a screen
Compensation isn't correlated with how rigorous a job is, or we might pay laborers more. It's simply what the market is willing to pay for that skillset. Why is that? There are a lot of reasons but I'll agree they aren't great. But I'm not sure how one could change that
Right, and having known a lot of the "Wall Street" type engineers in college, I'm not sure if I really want them in my field.
Yeah, they're smart and bright (you kind of have to be in those environments), but I know more than a few who went into engineering position at major investment banks - soul-crushing, mind-numbing work that it is solely because of the compensation.
Maybe this is me being too startupy-self-important, but that speaks to a complete lack of passion, that you're willing to take on the IT equivalent of coal mining, where the only real upside to your job is the gigantic paycheck. On this side of the divide I'd rather have people who place an utmost importance in the, well, work of their work - someone who will take a high-paying, rewarding position over a ludicrous-paying soul-crushing job.
This isn't some justification to pay people less - if we can sweeten the pot for new grads I'm all for it, but I'm not sure I really want to attract Wall Streeters to our side of the industry.
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