At one point, WhatsApp had 40 engineers and 400 million users.

That’s 10,000,000 users per engineer.

And more users than the US population.

If WhatsApp generates $1 per user per year in revenue, each engineer would be responsible for $10,000,000 in revenue. From my view, no issue paying them $250,000 each and spiffing them with stock options to compensate them for taking full advantage of that insane leverage that modern Internet platforms provide.

Yeah, but it wouldn't really matter if it were a billion users per engineer if engineers with the needed skills/qualities etc. were a dime a dozen. Market scarcity determines price.

I mean, a computer allows me to do analysis that would take years in seconds, and to share it with millions of people trivially, but it's still dirt cheap because, well, there are lots of computers and not particular barriers to building more.

And a bad engineer can destroy as much.

One fun thing about humans is that almost all think they're underpaid. This says a lot about people and nothing about wages.

We may have different experiences, but in a long career the worst I've seen are useless engineers. Are you seriously claiming that the population of engineers destroying multiples of their salary (sabotage/gross negligence) is comparable to the population who create multiples (and are exploited)? Silicon Valley lore is filled with stories of fortunes earned on the backs of engineers being paid market rates. You don't have to look hard to find them, start with Apple, or look at any modern "unicorn."

I've seen several engineers who make more work for other people to fix than they contribute in progress themselves. Sometimes it is by bikeshedding on code reviews, other times by choosing some pet architecture/technology for a project which everyone else has to waste time learning about and/or migrating to, or by putting something in that bottlenecks all development of a critical codebase through only them, leading to people getting constantly blocked. Then again, these have been great lessons for me in what not to do, and what to recognize as red flags.

yes, they make more work for other people to fix than they contribute, but they don't make more work to fix than the people who are making work that fixes are doing. There is no -10x engineer, hardly even any -1x engineer - probably the worst you find are -.5 engineers.

In fact I knew a guy whose effect on a project was to wipe out several years of progress but to be fair he was not a -.5 engineer, in some ways it was just the bad chance that led to him having such a detrimental effect, in another scenario he might very well have been a +2 or more engineer.

I saw -10x: they chose some crazy architecture for something then dug their heels in. The two people who historically got all the work done, both about 5x, decided to quit because of this. So now the work still needed to be done, in the crazy architecture, without the two best engineers, and on top of that time needed to be spent on hiring. Go forward a year and the progress the company made was probably less than it would have in a month before the fancy new architecture was introduced, and the loss of talent.

Additionally I've seen managers/HR demotivate a team of 5 so thoroughly that nobody got work done for 2 weeks. That is -5x from a single meeting.

Any bad engineer in a position of architect or similar can easily destroy the efficiency of a full team. Hell, of the whole company.

It's also filled with many more startups that lost $20M, mostly in engineer wages, and died unsung deaths.

Bad engineers do bring negative productivity to a team. Hard to say how common they are.

Implying that those startups failed due to engineer negligence and not due to strategic business blunders.

My main point was completely different:

You can't claim engineers are exploited because some cherry picked tech companies make huge profits. You have to look at the tech sector as a whole, including the parts that lost untold billions while the famous ones raked them in.

I didn't mean to imply that at all.

Though of course that is sometimes a factor.

> And a bad engineer can destroy as much.

Often claimed, rarely proven. Usually in those cases it's actually management doing the value-destroying, by either misallocating people or refusing to act on removing bad engineers.

If you have a good engineer who is constantly tutoring the bad instead of building things, then you are losing a good portion of value (the $10m that would've otherwise been created) by the good engineer. This is not as big a problem for Google with thousands of engineers but is a huge problem in smaller startups.

It would have to be an extraordinarily bad engineer to actively remove revenue consistently. You can also hedge against this with disaster recovery.

There are a number of people I see consistently in the commit logs at work and I am quite confident that they have created more than a handful of new jobs each. So while they didn’t directly remove revenue, these people have an astonishingly bad ROI.

This is true. The performing engineers are underpaid; the underperforming ones should be trained or fired.

How about the good engineer, employed to design the wrong thing?

I feel like I've put good quality engineering work, in to projects that were completely wrong-headed in the bigger picture, and thereby lost the company money.

This seems more of an issue with where the company invests resources than to the engineer themselves.

I agree; my point was just that the "goodness" of an engineer doesn't necessarily relate to their impact on revenue.

In the particular situation I was thinking about above, it actually could've been better from a business perspective had I not been as "good" of an engineer. I took over a project that was simply not working at a technical level - it was a DSP-based thing, and the chosen DSP appeared not to have enough oomph. I managed to optimise the electronics and firmware enough to make it go, so it went on to production and AFAIK (I'm no longer at that company) has been a money pit ever since. The other possibility was a redesign with a burlier DSP, but I'd bet that the project would've been cancelled instead.

The average engineer is average, and isn’t producing massive multiples of revenue.

The reality is that lots of waste and bullshit is obscured by growth. Once that train stops, reality bites.

A limiting factor on salaries is competitiveness. It doesn't matter how much value you produce if somebody else is able and willing to do the same work, of comparable quality, for less pay. And as there has been a huge push to get more people into computer science, over time I expect we'll see compensation for such work begin to decrease, not increase. The only way this would end up being not true is if proportionately more desirable jobs emerge than the push to bring more people into computer science manages to achieve.

And if you pay each person for their marginal impact on revenue, many business models wouldn't work. E.g. the engineer can only drive another $1m+ because marketing and product management and support staff and everyone else are also doing their jobs. If you pay for marginal impact, you'd have to give the same dollar to multiple employees.

absolutely. the problem is there are cheaper engineers abroad and tech CEO's only care about their personal wealth, not those of their employees.