Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era

Re:Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since... by starky on Monday August 02, 2021 @11:16AM (#28037678)

Evaluating value is usually not straightforward, unless the person was working alone it is always a subjective thing. If a junior is given a project alone, then they may provide zero value to the company if they can't complete it, but if they were paired with a senior, then together they should provide more value than the senior alone. Similarly, a manager's value is more indirect by providing a direction for the team but it adds up since they may be enabling the work of 5-10 people.

For support roles, their value comes from the costs that they help prevent. A security expert is like insurance, where they provide value by ensuring the company's product has the minimum chance of being exploited as that could damage the business in multiple ways.

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Re:Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since... by giantg2 on Monday August 02, 2021 @11:32AM (#28037959)

Yeah, but that's kind of my point - it's not easily calculated, so how can we say a senior easily provides an extra $40k. If we are saying the manager can make a lot because they're basically directing 10 people. If you have a security expert on a team of 10 people, should they be worth similar? After all, the tool is likely worthless if it's insecure, making all those efforts by others fruitless.

I guess I'm just skeptical and jaded based on my past experiences.

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Re:Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since... by starky on Monday August 02, 2021 @09:13PM (#28044675)

Just because it isn't easily calculated on an individual basis doesn't mean that it is impossible to figure out. If you know how much revenue your group provides to the company and then look at who contributes what relatively as a good enough estimate.

Since you bring up a security team, it absolutely can be estimated there as well, what other companies have had hacks and what did it cost them? How does that compare to the risk on your product and the damage to the business if you were compromised?

Not to mention a $40k salary difference means you should be providing multiple times that difference in value to the company. Just providing $40k of additional value is a rounding error for most reasonably sized companies, I've worked on projects where two people provided >$1M of ongoing cost savings per year.

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Re:Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since... by datavirtue on Monday August 02, 2021 @02:39PM (#28040871)

You are being pedantic developer fixated on numbers as a measure of value across the group. The world does not work this way. The business makes a decision based on what it takes to get what they need and salary can easily vary based on social aspects afterward. The number tells you something, but not everything.

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Re:Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since... by giantg2 on Monday August 02, 2021 @04:35PM (#28042274)

"You are being pedantic developer fixated on numbers as a measure of value across the group. The world does not work this way."

Then how does it work? It seems that senior devs should make the same as junior devs if the numbers aren't tied to value.

"The business makes a decision based on what it takes to get what they need and salary can easily vary based on social aspects afterward. The number tells you something, but not everything."

On an individual level that might be true, but that doesn't address it at the aggregate level.

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