It may not have been your intent, but your comment has (at least on my read) an accusatory tone. You ask a number of rhetorical questions which indicate that you have low-regard for the work of the engineers in question.
You appear to be doubling down on this with your recent comment.
Why so defensive
Calling someone defensive because they disagree with you is uncivil and a great way to start an argument. In the most literal sense of the word, my comment offers some justification for these salaries because yours appears to discredit them.
I do have low regard for the engineers in question (low regard in terms of their ability and worthiness of salary, obviously not low regard in terms of their person). The majority of engineers in SV are working on products that primarily exist to serve advertisements to customers. They don't deserve $200k+ for that, and it makes me sad that society has decided these are the people that are paid this much while teachers and nurses are actually starving.
You say that self-driving car engineers deserve it? Really? Show me the 22 year olds that have contributed meaningfully to self-driving technology. But you can't. Because the people making the meaningful contributions (read: worthy of being paid $200k+) are much more experienced, have been working in the field much longer, and are much older. They are not 22 year old new grads.
>Calling someone defensive because they disagree with you is uncivil and a great way to start an argument. In the most literal sense of the word, my comment offers some justification for these salaries because yours appears to discredit them.
And claiming that someone is accusing blame (when they haven't) is also uncivil and a great way to start an argument.
Yes. The difference (aside from the fact that this particular post is specifically about SV, not about law and finance) is that I have never seen lawyers, doctors, or even investment bankers (although yes I have seen Wolf of Wall Street) be so casual about the fact that their salaries are so high. In another comment in this thread, someone suggested that having an extra $5,000 disposable per month was not a lot of money. That is absurd to me, and I have never experienced any of my doctor or lawyer friends have that same attitude.
What "lot of money" means is entirely relative to how much money you have because for most people it means "would it translate to large difference in lifestyle".
Also, if we are talking about the comment by refurb, it said "rolling in cash" which does not carry the same connotations as "lot of money".
Yes, and my entire point (or at least, the one started by the original top level comment) is that SV has strayed really far from the typical level of "relative" that most of the rest of the country operates on.
I saw somewhere else in the thread that you yourself are a new grad, so I'll chalk this up to lack of experience but on sufficiently large products it is trivial to make incremental changes that will produce more value then your salary. In my own career I saved a big tech company 250k in reoccurring costs with a 9 month project I completed as a junior. Yes, that number is a rounding error for a large company but the value is clear.
Additionally, perhaps you have never built a team before, but the value of a potential employee extends beyond their year-to-year output. If, for example, I have great confidence that a currently junior hire will output ~$1M of value over a four year period than I am willing to overpay that first year as they grow and develop.
This isn't going anywhere interesting and I am uninterested in continuing the conversation further. Have a nice day :)
(There is a certain irony to me about this back and forth. A large portion of my personal time is spent volunteering in an organization that agitates for unions and other forms of direct action aimed at tackling the gross inequity of this society head-on. You're clearly keyed in to a real and present problem, but rather than suggest any solutions you've decided to whinge ineffectively about... developer salaries?)
I'm sorry, how was I supposed to read that? If someone tells you that they lack experience, it is entirely within the pale to comment on or draw conclusions from their lack of experience.
And no, I do not want to measure your genitalia. That doesn't have any place on Hacker News.
Regardless, even if I was a new grad, it would not have been justification for your reductive and dismissiveness. That is not good faith discussion.
>And no, I do not want to measure your genitalia. That doesn't have any place on Hacker News.
Then why did you bring it up? Genuinely asking.
Citation needed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/...
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/repor...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/02/21/why-oakl...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/...
Did you miss the entire #ClearTheList campaign last month for when teachers started up school again? If so, the tl;dr is that teachers were having to ask their friends and family to buy school supplies for their classrooms because the teachers could not afford to do so themselves.
Amazon, ironically, created an entire section of their site for such lists. Does it not seem even a little bit of a problem to you that Amazon, one of the richest companies in the world, with some of the richest employees in the world, rather than using some of that wealth to help the teachers, actually created a service where Amazon actually profited off of the fact that these teachers needed assistance buying school supplies?
>Taking a second job does not mean the alternative is peril. I could take a second job to afford a better Ferrari but that does not mean I can't afford a car. Try again.
We aren't talking about teachers taking a second job so that they can afford niceties or a new car. We're talking about teachers taking a second job just so they can afford rent. Many of them are on federal subsidy programs just so they can afford food.
I showed you multiple links that show evidence of teachers being deprived of resources, aka starving. If you can't accept that, then you are not arguing in good faith and I'm through trying to have a discussion with you. Please try to abide by HN guidelines in further discussions.
Of course they deserve it - the money belongs to their employer and they decided to part with it in exchange for the services of those grads.
Whatever it is that you're trying to say hinges entirely on what you think the concept of "to deserve something" means. And you really haven't elaborated much on that (if at all, as far as I can see).
Sure, Facebook is probably willing to pay a mediocre engineer much more than they are willing to pay the best teacher in the world. That makes sense, because Facebook doesn't hire teachers and has no reason to pay a teacher a lot of money. In this sense, the teacher doesn't "deserve" a lot of money from Facebook, while the engineer might.
But speaking in a broader sense, do you think that a mediocre 22 year old engineer "deserves" more money and a better lifestyle than the best teacher in the world?
Well, first of all, it is very unlikely that the "best teacher in the world" simply works in school. And if they do - then it is by choice.
Second, it would of course not matter if said mediocre engineer is 22 or 66 years old - maybe you just included it for the sake of illustration but it does give some ageism vibes.
Anyway, since you have still not elaborated on what "to deserve" means to you, I will tell you how I think about it. When I think "someone doesn't deserve something" it implies "this should not be so". Now we have a question - can we and should we do something about it? Either on a personal level, or on collective governmental level.
In this particular case - it would depend on having a way to objectively determine teacher's skill level and whether disproportionately high skill level would translate to similarly disproportional effects in their teaching (both in the individual pupil results and the number of pupils they are able to reach). All of that is required because they are paid by public money - private tutors can get paid whatever their clients are willing to pay.
If we are able to do that, I might say such a great teacher deserves to be paid lot of money, comparable to what Facebook pays it's engineers. Otherwise, I would not presume to say that any particular teacher should (which is the same as "deserves" for me) command a salary based on what few big tech companies are willing to pay fresh grads.
This might be putting the cart before the horse. You may not find very "high skill level" teachers, but that's not a justifiable reason to not pay them. The way to get high skill level teachers is likely to attract people with high skill with a higher pay.
How do we make pay for teachers higher? I don't know exactly, and I don't want to start a political debate, but one idea might be to collect taxes from the giant FAANG companies and use those taxes to pay teachers more, rather than just letting the FAANGs frivolously throw the money around. I think that would be a better use of the money rather than letting billions (or in the case of a commenter here, $11k/month) sit in a bank account doing nothing.
>When I think "someone doesn't deserve something" it implies "this should not be so"
This is what I'm saying, too, but I think I'm applying it differently. I'm not looking narrowly at a CS grad's salary and saying "this should not be so". I'm looking at CS grad salaries in relation to salaries of other crucial-to-society professions like teachers, and saying that the disparity "should not be so".
But I just want to notice that you seem very willing to command other people's money based on the most casual of observations and lot of emotion. That will not lead to a good place, policy wise.
This reminds me of a HN post a few weeks ago about how SFers have the tendency to take a discussion about anything and see it as political.
>But I just want to notice that you seem very willing to command other people's money
At no point other than the comment that was written in response to your question asking how I would allocate money have I suggested "commanding" anyone else's money. It's very disingenuous of you to ask me a question, and then use the fact that I responded to that question as means to bash me.
That is political. It's not an insult, it's just that it's literally about the policies of how we pay teachers, nurses and researchers and how we constrain (or not) large tech salaries.
And I'm not from SF, not even from US.
> At no point other than the comment that was written in response to your question asking how I would allocate money have I suggested "commanding" anyone else's money. It's very disingenuous of you to ask me a question, and then use the fact that I responded to that question as means to bash me.
I never asked you how you would allocate money, I just asked what you mean by "deserve". And BTW, this: "collect taxes from the giant FAANG companies and use those taxes to pay teachers more, rather than just letting the FAANGs frivolously throw the money around" is commanding other peoples money.
Also, I don't believe I bashed you, but there would be nothing disingenuous in asking you a question and then bashing you based on the answer. It would just not be nice or appropriate for HN.
It isn't political. Nothing in my comment at all talks about the policies of how we pay anyone. If you read my words and then your mind took the leap to thinking about those policies, then you apparently have a tendency to politicize things, but that doesn't make my comment political.
Regardless, your original statement was that it "started a political debate", and I'll concede that it did apparently do that.
>I never asked you how you would allocate money, I just asked what you mean by "deserve".
You asked what we could "do about it", referencing teacher pay and allocation of funds for that pay.
>Also, I don't believe I bashed you, but there would be nothing disingenuous in asking you a question and then bashing you based on the answer. It would just not be nice or appropriate for HN.
You didn't bash me based on the answer, you bashed me for even accepting the premise of the question, a question that you asked.
No, let's not. If we're going to have a discussion, we're at least going to agree on the actual meaning of words, otherwise attempting to discuss them is going to be fruitless.
To blame means to assign responsibility for a fault or wrong. At no point in my comment above did I assign responsibility to anyone for any fault or wrong. In this case, the "fault or wrong" would be being paid too high. Again, nowhere in my comment did I say, or even imply that the new grads are responsible for their high pay. That fault would (obviously) lie with the people willing to give them such high pay.
Based on this, you can now see why the rest of your comment doesn't make sense. The new grads aren't responsible for doing anything (they don't have to not accept the money or whatever) because it isn't their fault in the first place.
Envy followed by anger is a common human emotion and every person has to find their own path to come to terms with it.
If you aren't willing to abide by the actual meaning of words when you attempt to use them, you're the bad faith actor, and a discussion is going to get us nowhere.
Use that money to fund education, healthcare, public parks, infrastructure, basic research, etc, including by paying the people doing that work a bit more.