One thing a lot of people forget about this 20-40% number is: It's only true early in your career. It might be hard for younger folks to believe, but you will all hit a ceiling and plateau. My first job hop was for +50%! The next one was about 40%, the next one 15%, and so on. Now, with 20+ years of experience, my last job hop was for maybe 0.25%.
If I could get +40% every time I switched jobs, I'd only have to have switched jobs 9 times in my life in order to be making $1M/yr.
You're right that there's a ceiling somewhere, but the ceiling is (or at least has been) ludicrously high for the past decade or so in big tech in the US.
But when discussing the entire job market, it's a minuscule fraction of tech workers who could even get there if they tried (sometimes due to no fault of their own e.g. location), and it's a much smaller number that even get there at all.
Hitting L7 in mid 30s and catching a massive bull market to pump up compensation is mythical unicorn levels of lucky. It does happen to some people, but it's not useful at all when discussing realistic expectations even 95th percentile developers in the general population.
Getting into a bubble with top FAANG engineers can really distort perceptions of what the market looks like for the median developer.
Maybe I should just grind leetcode for a few months (my dynamic-programming algo skills are a bit rusty) and switch jobs. I would miss the 30 days of PTO though.
From another point of view - design and behavioral questions original goal is to confirm that candidate have related experience from day to day work, so if you have enough practice on your current job - it is not so much time to prepare for design and behavioral part of interviews.
In a more civilized world they'd have higher bases across the board and the commission/incentive structures would be less "winner-take-all" but they operate those divisions like running greyhounds around a track.
Orders take about 6 weeks to be fulfilled barring catastrophe, so when it's all calculated out every 3 months she makes $29 * 62.5 (40 hours plus 15 * 1.5 = 40 + 22.5 paid hours at base rate) * 12 (weeks) + $10,000 bonus every 3 months = roughly $31,750 or $10,567 a month before taxes.
That's almost as much as I make with a BS degree in the tech field. It's crazy, but then again she does work more hours than I do.
I have some friends making ~600, although a lot of that was getting lucky with RSUs, so I'm not sure they can keep it up in the long run
Either way, the ceiling is a lot higher than 150
You could extend the curve and plateau higher, but then, that money is probably going to cause problems elsewhere for the younger generations. Meanwhile, the younger generations are seeking income increases so they can get the basics out of the way and start working towards their goals. They are already at the point where, despite studying for a long time and taking longer to enter the market, they are starting lower and have to delay their goals way more than the generations before them.
I don't really see a solution here. You can make young people work earlier, but that'll flood the job market even more. Boosting young people will make the curve flatter, which exacerbates the problem. You could extend the curve otherwise, but that means your yearly growth at the start will be smaller (which hurts everyone along the curve). The only solution I see here is to take a larger portion of the profits, and stakeholders are fighting tooth and nail to prevent that.
Where have there have the layoffs started? What evidence do you have that we are "heading back into 'lucky to have a job' territory"?
If you can get the income as long term capital gains, you get to keep a lot more.
At the same time, money is money, and stock isn’t money.
Obviously market, location, expertise will vary, etc.
YMMV.
The thing about pay that the job hoppers apparently don't take into account is that levels aren't static. Looking at my own network over the years, virtually everyone I know has been promoted or otherwise landed more senior roles, to varying degrees on both sides. You may also have noticed a significant increase of "staff engineers" in the past few years, whereas the role was basically unknown some 10 years ago. Many companies also have been quietly giving out retainer bonuses/raises to slow down attrition.
Since I started my career, I've had multiple significant compensation increases, some from raises, some from promos, one from a team move, and some from changing jobs. Increasing your experience/expertise over time can have a huge impact. Going from no-name companies to household names can have a huge impact. Relocating can have a huge impact. Negotiations (even internal ones) can have a huge impact. There isn't a one-glove-fits-all when it comes to an individual's opportunities for comp growth.
On the other hand, stagnation is very much real. There are plenty of people that do nothing in terms of career progressions, negotiations, etc and just wait for year-end bonuses to fall into their laps. It'd naive to be surprised these folks aren't keeping up pay-wise.
Not only FAANGABCDEF, but "Staff+, with specialized skills, at FAANGABCDEF, in a small number of specific metro areas". If 1 software engineer can be found who makes $700K for every 29 software engineers at other companies/metros/levels who make $100K, Hacker News Commenters will tell you that "Software engineers make $700K". Important to point out there are a lot of other things in play that make it more complex.
Get a single +39% increase is one thing.
Getting a +39% increase every single time you change jobs isn't going to happen. If that was possible, you could change jobs every year for a decade and be earning 27X what you started with. If you started at $100K, that would put you at $2.7 million year after 10 iterations.
That's why whenever someone insists that job hopping is an easy way to get huge pay increases, it's probably more a sign that they're early in their career and/or that they haven't been keeping up with compensation negotiations. For people at the sharp end of the compensation scale, job-hopping stops becoming an easy option for compensation increases.
A lot of people a lot of people are making less money than they could be due to being complacent about reaffirming their own value. America, and most of the modern world, runs a labour market and to properly value a good in a market you need real sales data - I think it's a solidly good idea to interview regularly, be prepared to job hop... but make a sane evaluation about the decision before committing to leaving or joining a particular job. Most employers over-advertise their business because... well... advertising works - so the grass might not be greener on the other side. But if you have an offer for 120k and are currently making 80k from an employer that values you you can discuss that with your employer to seek a salary equalization.
This decreases over your mid-career. You can still get good job bumps of 15% - 25% in your mid years by job hopping.
But later in your career you will get rewarded by loyalty and sticking around. Those massive salaries that everyone brags about generally (not always, but usually) come from internal promotion or from poaching. Those careers require you to be part of specialized teams with high-value business-specific knowledge. Those job roles are not given to engineers who job-hop. Simply put, in your late career, if you are only staying at companies for 12-18 months, then you are not getting deep enough into your specialty to be worth the insane salaries. So long term loyalty becomes much greater rewarded.
This is another reason why I recommend people stay away from FAANG early in your career and move to those jobs later. Early on, you should job hop through smaller companies where you aren't as enticed to stick around and you can more easily get promotions. Then settle down later in your career at the large companies who want and reward loyalty with insane compensation packages.
11 years in the (relatively young) tech industry is quite the tenure at this point, _imo_.
My point was that the market is hot. Hot enough for an 11 year "veteran" to still get a 39% increase. Also want to point out I've "hopped" as many jobs in about as many years. Some people coming into the industry get taken advantage of compensation wise for a multitude of reasons just to get their foot in the door. I also strongly believe in skill stagnation at certain companies and hopping is the only way out.
Again, none of these arguments really matter as it comes down to individual experiences.
YMMV is right. There's a lot of factors here. It's almost meaningless to take averages without qualifying those against a fairly large number of conditions.
Total comp North of 300K for an IC sounds like science fiction to many folks which aren't in Silicon Valley, in certain fields, and in certain companies.
“compensation” is something I can trade for cash once I have earned it and then exchange for good and services.
Besides that, it takes the average startup 7-10 years to exit. As opposed to a public company where you can diversify your risk every three to six months depending on your vesting schedule.
Looking at a few non-SV cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Nashville, Orlando, Sacramento, Austin, and Fresno it costs $14-18k/year more to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area than to rent in those other places.
The average monthly spending on food in SF is about $150/month more than the US average. That's under $2K/year.
California does have a high income tax. For someone moving from somewhere else to California you might have to pay them maybe 10% more to compensate for that.
Putting it all together, a job that pays around $100k/year in non-SV non-NY decent sized cities should need to pay if we are generous maybe around $140k/year due to higher COL in the Bay Area.
That Bay Area tech pay is way more than that suggests that something other than SV COL is the main factor.
People are saying $350k remote jobs don't exist. Which obviously is untrue (go work at Airbnb). But they're exceedingly rare.
You do have to interview & negotiate well, and keep your skills sharp, and I'd bet that I'm about at the ceiling of what's possible as an IC. But now I've transitioned into management and all those startup exec positions are theoretically open. :-) There is always somebody making buttloads of money in the economy; if you want it, figure out who it is and how to make yourself useful to them.
So, I believe it is still possible but it is a very different skill set and does become difficult. Transitioning to management train sometimes is more efficient and then it’s a whole new skill set to progress there.
I will admit though - it does taper off and opportunities do become fewer. But, still, you’re making $500k+ by the time you’re on the really difficult track and that’s a pretty healthy amount. (Still might need a partner to comfortably afford a house in SV but that’s another discussion)
Source: My current nearly-concluded job search.
I'd rather us not use Stanford as a baseline even if the crowd is numerous and abundant on HN and SV.
Like, not being born with a US citizenship?
I don't think, if asked to interview for it today, that I could land my current job. I'm also fairly certain I'm one of the top engineers on my team, and I do think we have a really good team of developers overall.
It makes me feel better that I'm not alone, in this regard, but it often just makes me question the interview process even further.
If you set the bar 2 std. div. above what you need, you are hiring qualified people with a p value of 5%. You're rejecting /most/ qualified people too.
Most people underestimate how random the process is. There are a few ways in:
- Be 2 std. div above the qualifications
- Apply to many places and pick the one where you're lucky
- Give another, less noisy source of signal than resume + interview (e.g. networking into a company, consulting, references, major open source contributions, etc.)
I wouldn't get my current job if I randomly applied right now. I happened to do well on an interview process which wasn't well-aligned to my background. That was a fluke. I was probably the most-qualified candidate, but if I didn't have a lucky day, I don't think an interview would have shown that.
Last hiring cycle, I was also rejected several places where I am pretty sure I was better than the candidate who was hired too. If you make this about you, you'll feel horrible. If you understand the huge random factor, you'll do much better.
(Disclaimer: I have specialized skills, so my interview process isn't a typical SWE interview process).
My last three jobs, at least, I landed because I clicked well with my immediate hiring manager in this particular interview. That was it. I did no worse, and no better, than I did elsewhere on anything maybe a bit more objective (system design is weird, but coding, at least, you can say "does it work/is it efficient or not").
Which sounds bad, but it means my expectation of management aligned with theirs. It was a complete crapshoot in every case, with a lotta rejection along the way, before I found that, but each time it led to good outcomes.
Interestingly, there was also one company where I know I was a strong contender, did decently with the HM, but was beaten out by another candidate. I know because the recruiter reached out to tell me how close it was, and that was further validated when I later applied to a role, spoke with a different recruiter, who said "yeah, I saw the feedback and was like 'why the heck didn't we hire this person?!'". But that second application went nowhere; the HM gave the initial phone interview and didn't want to continue.
It's all random (or at least, so many variables that can't be measured or controlled for as to be indistinguishable)
Now, just for the avoidance of confusion, the standard deviation in this context is the standard deviation of the measurement error, not the standard deviation of the skill level of the applicants.
For example, if you simplistically assume people can be graded on a 1d scale from 0 to 10, and you think a certain job needs someone with a skill level of 7.5, and your interviewing process has an uncertainty of 1, then you need to set the bar at 9.5. From the outside, people would wonder why you are trying to hire Einsteins for a job to write dashboards.
You are not trying to hire Einsteins, it's just that your interviewing process sucks.
If you manage to reduce that estimation uncertainty from 1 to 0.25, then you need to set the bar at 8. All of a sudden your pool of reasonable applicants increases tremendously.
My conclusion (I'm making it up as I go, so feel more than free to discard it - I may discard it tomorrow, who knows?) is that there's tremendous value for companies to improve their interviewing process.
But there's a second conclusion: as an interviewee, you want to assist the interviewer in reducing their estimate uncertainty. Because that uncertainty is not a fixed number, it's candidate-dependent. A company will prefer to hire a candidate that is an 7 plus or minus 0.5 than an 8 plus or minus 2. All of a sudden you will beat much stronger candidates.
How can you do that? I'm not sure, if I knew I'd probably be 10 times richer.
But I can offer some guesses. If you have publications, a GitHub account with nice projects, maybe some youtube videos where you explain some concepts quite well. Also, anytime someone can vouch for you, someone that the potential employer trusts, that reduces their uncertainty a lot.
Thanks, this is helpful as I go through various interview processes right now.
Once I sat on the other side of the table, and saw how a /majority/ of qualified candidates were turned down, I didn't feel so bad when I was rejected. The key thing you *really, really, really* want to avoid is a bad hire. I've seen candidates rejected for the oddest reasons. It was definitely the right choice to do so.
In the kinds of companies I've worked for, if you're at all not sure about a candidate, the decision should be a no-hire.
I don't feel rejected any more. A good mental model is:
If you're qualified, you role a die. If the die comes up a 6, you're hired. If you role 1-5, you're not hired.
(The number of sides on the day varies by industry; I think 6-sided is about right for my industry in the current job market)
Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual impact.
(edit- NOT knocking internal tooling, it's just that it is traditionally considered a cost center)
Why the knock on internal tooling? If internal tooling helps a value-add position go 10% faster, that's worth a lot. And most likely it isn't just one position, it's many.
If this is your impression of internal tooling, then your internal tooling team is terrible.
The places I've worked with good internal tooling teams provided a dramatic decrease in time to delivery. Automated failovers? Don't have to write it, it's in internal tooling. Automatically rebalancing traffic across datacenters? Already in the framework. Service discovery? You already know.
I could go down the list, but with a good internal tooling team, the only thing I've ever had to worry about was my app's business purpose. I don't have to muck with configuring monitoring, or load balancers, or getting authentication to talk to another app, or how to get a database, or etc.
The difference in time to delivery is dramatic.
Places I've worked without internal tooling take like 2 weeks just to get infra for a static HTML site.
The places I've worked with bad internal tooling take 3 weeks to do the same thing, because you'll spend a week arguing about whether the tooling works.
The places I've worked with good internal tooling take like 15 minutes to do it. I spend longer reviewing an MR than I do deploying infra.
Tooling is a huge part of the reason companies throw fistfuls of money at clouds. They could get compute on-demand cheaper from Leaseweb or OVH or hundreds of other companies, but they don't. They pay the premium for AWS or Azure or GCP, and it's because of the tooling.
This historically was the some for technology in general. When grandpa was the chief of data processing in the 1980s for some insurance company, he wasn't making FANG salaries. But the IBM dudes were.
No one's making a value judgement. The direct numbers just aren't comparable.
That's unfortunately not how markets work. If you create 10M of value every year, and are only paid 250K for doing it, it's because there is someone else out there who is willing to do it for the same. (Yes, there are asymmetries in information and power, but broadly, tech salaries are market-driven)
Are we arguing against the attempt when a quick glance at the financials for FAANG and Co shows ample profit margins available for worker compensation?
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
Also it’s not like tech today is mostly people whose first language is English - no judgements
There is a wide gap between capital sucking up all of the productivity with workers being slave labor and Marxists seizing the means of production and burning it all down; neither is being argued for, but somewhere solidly in the middle of those extremes. Capital makes some sort of return, value is created, workers are treated fairly, receive reasonable compensation for the value they're creating, and have a seat at the table of the org, and everyone goes home happy. If someone is more of an Ayn Rand/Libertarian/individual exceptionalism sort of a person, this view is likely unpalatable, and there is no common ground to meet at.
Never mind just the quality of workers available for the price you have set as the threshold.
I’m referring to major tech companies that already have foreign headquarters just expanding overseas.
Like others point out, it's incredible the US hasn't mass outsourced their work to Europe yet.
It turns out someone identifying a market opportunity, getting funding, renting office space, hiring HR, infrastructure, service and support personnel, product designers, QA, sales, etc, etc all costs a surprising amount of money and effort that for some reason all those people feel they deserve to be paid for..
Otherwise, someone would've collected some VC money, hired the best of the best code monkeys for $1M+ each, and taken over some tech niche by now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Lucy finds out and orders Steve and Larry to stop doing that.
Now Steve shares salary data with Teddy and Teddy tells Steve what the market average is. Larry also shares salary data with Teddy and also learns what the market average is.
No collusion! But the effect is the same. That's why they earn the big bucks.
You mixed up the analogy though. Rather it should be that tomato seller 1 talks to tomato seller 2 down the road and they agree to never charge less than x$ for 1 pound of tomatoes thus removing market forces and creating an artificial floor for tomato prices
Arguably one of the best at doing this is Apple. A similar product exists and has cheaper options (various Android flavors) but people prefer their green text bubbles and status symbol brand effect.
We are the practitioners realizing that dream for our masters.
This is true of every industry going on decades of increasing productivity and stagnating pay. What's new here besides greater awareness and labor churn? Will there be an actual change going forward? Of course the demographics favor workers now, but the laws and politics often don't. Immigration and outsourcing and automation can change that power dynamic very quickly. What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere? Interesting times we live in.
> Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual impact.
All of my friends and aquaintinces in nursing, tax, retail, and trucking have a few people who are trying to break into programming because of the benefits and pay. Outsourcing, scope creep, and automation exist and are expanding in my industry as well. How long until this drags down programmers as well?
Quit and work for myself. Personally I'm sick of the capped upside with working in tech (among myriad other issues) and the kinda shit you have to pull to raise it.
Not to discount other departments like marketing or operations -- they are important too. But they don't make the product, they are more numerous, and more interchangeable.
Not sure how important that is, though. Often the product gets sold despite of the product, thanks to marketing, operations, logistics, sales, support, legal and management (product/project).
Genuinely curious but do you consider product/project management to also 'be making the product'?
That’s a tautology though. They wouldn’t hire someone to break even and they wouldn’t hire someone to make a little more money since there’s work and risk in hiring.
I mean, I’ve seen people working in retail make this same point. And I’m not saying either of you are invalid in your claim, thats just how work is, it seems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus...
It can be difficult to remember that the system wasn't always like this.
However, that revenue goes to support accountants, lawyers, marketing, internal tools, HR, healthcare, employer side taxes travel that’s not related to a customer, infrastructure costs, etc.
I am not saying in a perfect world I shouldn’t be making more and honestly, I probably could. But, I like having a large corporation to take care of all of the stuff I mentioned above.
Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now. But you can bet that I will be out the door the minute the clock ticks to the appropriate date.
Do the monetary value of these cover for the missing 4x on your base?
I'm very confident that I could buy a nice house in a low cost of living area, throw together a SaaS that pulls in a few grand a month, and then work on a more ambitious business while living comfortably. BUT if that ticking time bomb in my chest goes off while I'm doing that, my family will be relatively fucked. (~$250k life insurance payout plus our ~$500k net worth, so the wife will suddenly have to become a working mother with out of date skills in a relatively crappy locale..)
So in my case, it's worth sticking around at BigCo for another year or two and getting in shape while I'm still under the benevolent gaze of Master Faang
EDIT: Dang, I've been a fool.. looks like it's only about $100 a month for $1M in life insurance actually, haha. Maybe I should sneak out of here sooner rather than later
I didn’t become a Marxist until I hit six figures, but dang it I want the wealth produced by my labor!
The floor has risen big time. Entry level jobs are paying up to 60k these days, whereas they were closer to 30k a few years back. Good for them, seriously. But watching the floor rise closer to you is never a great feeling.
[1] Filter by "Location independent pay" https://himalayas.app/companies
This is what I will never understand about most established tech people, they see all the widespread misery and poverty in SV and they still have the capacity to feel sorry for themselves for not making X times more than 'that other guy.'
It's always about what they don't have rather than see that they live in an insulated bubble existence that they could never really navigate if it weren't for that wealth disparity because they have such a narrow limited set of skills. aWant an experiment turn off the wifi, see how quickly these people lose their minds.
I'm not mad at you for it, for all I know you are self-taught guy that beat out a bunch Stanford grads by grinding since HS and making it on your own, but it's this never-ending need to beat that guy.
Its like that scene in American Psycho with those business cards, where for some odd reason people seem to have a need to over-embellish their existence's value with triviality that re-enforces the 'yeah, but I have more than that guy' narrative which is completely lost on me.
I hate to tell you but you will never have more than a Bezos or a Musk, either. Not to mention the Nation-state level despots of the World who don't have their net-worth listed on the Forbes 500.
Just enjoy what you have, while you have it, because I can assure those very same tech companies are pouring tons of money to render you obsolete as soon as possible.
Just because someone is more well off doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. It’s not enough to fix affordable housing and say job done if the housing market is completely broken solving the problem requires fixing housing for everyone including the well off.
Interesting to see the word "grind" word making a comeback. It's first manifestation was "greasy grind", used as a pejorative for academically hard working immigrant kids - usually Jewish - before WW2.
Before we start applying labels like that to people again, perhaps it would be better to look at the incentive structures that cause people to be so driven academically, even if to a fault.
For example, many of those people might not have a place like the Midwest to move back to, or even if they did, it would be even more hyper competitive (like much of Asia).
> they just want to move back to the midwest and live near the rest of their families in a place where land is cheap and people don't try to compete so hard in high school.
I sympathize with this as I think the SV style academic rat race damages kids' curiosity in the name of status, but the Midwest didn't sit still this whole time.
You will find such hyper competitive academic systems these days in many parts of the Midwest too, especially in the "nice" suburbs that people want to move to with cheaper land, big houses, "good" schools, and probably a short driving distance from a Whole Foods (or similarly posh supermarket).
People who think techies are well paid probably haven’t tried raising a family yet.
I started my own fintech startup by bootstrapping and working 90+ hours a week and I managed to survive in Boulder where/when the average house price was over 1 million USD, you will get no sympathy from me.
My investments are the only thing that saved me, and I didn't have health benefits that entire time. I treaded water and almost drowned many times most of it's existence while disrupting an entire Industry in the process and eventually got head hunted by a mega corp.
When will you realize that are not one of the tech oligarchs? What part of that don't you get yet? You're an expendable part of the equation.
You guys have been coddled so much by these corps that insulate you from reality I almost wonder if you can see the trees from the forest and what your role is in all of this?
I've always tried to stay at 2x the prevailing local wage, so that my wife can stay home and take care of the house and kid with no worry. That's really my only motivation. When you're doing more than 2x, you feel ahead of the curve. When 2x comes at you fast, you start to sweat a little.
But it's not lost on me that I'm lucky to be able to have such an existence.
I don't understand this opinion. Why are the two feelings in conflict? I can be concerned for the people around me AND be concerned that I'm making less than X times more than the average.
I really don't think there's anything good about equality if it means a programmer is making the same as the unqualified people - to me that signals a completely broken world that can't function. This kind of equality has been tried and failed spectacularly, and I live in a place that still feels the catastrophe today, 30 years post-facto, and it will be felt for the next 30 years at least, too.
Overall, equality seems to me to be a misguided goal. We want people to have comfortable, healthy lives - I don't see how that relates to financial equality at all. Life needs to get cheaper so even the poor people can afford it - making everyone an equal millionaire will never work, that would just cause the prices to rise so much nobody could afford it and the meme of "equal misery" would become a reality once again. Let's talk about financial equality again once machines can do all the work.
Because as a tech worker your salary is likely already well above the level that it would need to fall in order for us to achieve meaningful level of wealth equality (not complete equality, but equal-ish)
> making everyone an equal millionaire will never work
Yes, exactly. But could work is having a scale of something like lower middle class to upper middle class incomes and getting rid of millionaires entirely (or making them as rare as billionaires are today). If we want to bring people out of poverty that money has to come from somewhere, and if you're making 6 figures some of it probably needs to come from you.
Why would you want that??? I think it's awesome the common Joe can learn programming on the internet and earn huge bucks. Why cancel that of all things?
And then, I don't think your suggestion for equality would work. If my work was significantly taxed above $100K, I'd stop earning more at that point because work is very stressful to me and I'm not going to do it if I don't get the benefit of it; and I'd most definitely not go into any sort of risk (like starting a startup) in that world.
If I can't even bang on a keyboard without someone feeling entitled to get the majority of my product, well then I'm not doing it, sorry. Everybody would lose - I'd pay much less taxes overall, and innovation from my side would grind to halt.
(now I earn slightly less than $100k, but also live and work in Europe).
Perfect. You get a less stressful life. And you working less creates job opportunities for others.
Other people win just by you (and other high earners) earning less. They don't have to earn more. Their money is worth more if there is less total money in circulation.
And it's a life where I am forbidden to do useful things that others want me to do and I am willing and able (which is not always, or often) - just because someone said "you did enough in this arbitrary period of time, give us your money or don't do it at all".
Don't even start about me owing the society, because in my view the society owes me a lot for the pain it caused me, gave me nothing of value, and tries very hard to keep me from obtaining the little I have. And the bill keeps growing. The idea that this should not only prevail but continue to worsen gives me chills.
Sorry - nothing personal, but I really, truly hate every bit of your idea of the world. From the beginning where people "should earn less so we are equal" to the end where it's "perfect that engineers work less" and the bit where you just assume I'd lead a less stressful life, even though you know nothing about me - typical of people of your opinions.
No you're not. You're free to do whatever you like. You just won't receive as much money in return as you would otherwise have done.
> From the beginning where people "should earn less so we are equal" to the end where it's "perfect that engineers work less"
To be clear, to the extent that there is a difference, I think that people with high earnings should be taxed more not that their nominal income should be lowered or restricted. And I think that it would be good if people had the freedom to choose to work less while still earning enough to comfortably live on. If you want to continue working as much as you currently do then all power to you. It was you who said further up the thread that would choose to work less.
You say no and then you say the same thing I said, lol.
> It was you who said further up the thread that would choose to work less.
No, I said your idea would force me to work less and I also said that it'd have a serious negative impact on me and my health.
The problem here is being forced to work less at a time when I'm able to work more. It's not fair to make me earn less just because I wasn't able to spread out my work across the calendar because of my mental health issues.
I would also point out that those with lower salaries also suffer from mental health issues. I see no reason why yours specifically should take precedence.
I shouldn't take any precedence whatsoever, but others shouldn't have any precedence over me. It's bad enough that I'm unable to get any assistance because "I'm rich enough" - actually I'm in serious debt.
The most draconian collector I had was the tax agency, which assigned me interest larger than the worst loan shark you could find anywhere in the world; they don't care that a court locked me up in a hospital and disabled my bank accounts, I got 0.3%/day (yes, per day) "to motivate payment ASAP". I guess I should've just unstrapped myself from the bed, get a gun, rob the bank of my own money, and pay? Other creditors like banks were just OK to chill a little until I'm back, even the gangster drug dealer guy I had to borrow from when banks wouldn't see me treated me with much more respect than the state.
That's what you want more of? GTFO with that, you will just fuck up poor people's lives even more - the stories in the hospital were very similar to mine, and those other people don't have the big annual wage I can get as a programmer. If you think the state will try to help poor people, tell me why is it not helping at least a little now? I'm from a poor family, where was the state when I wasn't a programmer yet? Let me tell you, it was working hard to fuck us up even more. And now after my hard work overcoming my own problems, in spite of everything the state has thrown at me, you're saying it should get even more of my work?
That would include things like free health care, housing, and relief from tax burdens. Why doesn't the state help you? I'd argue that that's a lot because of lack of funding due to people taking your attitude that the state shouldn't take "your" money. I feel like you are someone who would benefit greatly from income redistribution that was well-implemented.
In theory, but I also can't afford illusions, if it doesn't work out it will be way too destructive to me - and I can't see any reason whatsoever why it should work.
I disagree the problems are because of a lack of funding. Any western state has loads of money they could be using to help people. I'd be happy to add more if it just wasn't enough, but we're very far away from states making a good use of what they get now.
As it stands, I don't think any increased income from taxation would translate into more support for poor people or people like me. Not a single cent. I expect the opposite - the states would pour the money into enforcement, and people would get hurt more.
Just so it's clear, I don't agree with what he said. I stand by my comments, but I don't agree that we should coax any of what the poster has said either.
I don't believe doing that would require making millionaires as rare as billionaires are today. The nordic countries have plenty of millionaires and billionaires, yet everyone has most of their basic needs taken care of and most everyone has the opportunity to make something of themselves.
Where I suspect we differ is that I don’t believe that market value of services is an especially accurate measure of true value provided. And in particular I think it would be pretty much impossible for someone to provide enough value to society (relative to the average person with a normal job - many of which IMO provide huge value to society for little compensation) to warrant billionaire level wealth. I therefore think we ought to correct this discrepancy.
As opposed to who exactly? The system is based on greed and maximizing profits/salaries/status/whatever. Are doctors/lawyers/financial people not behaving this way? Some doctors earn around one million USD a year in the U.S, that's money that makes insurance more expensive and unaffordable for everyone.
You're seriously not comparing yourself to physicians in level of importance in Society, are you?!
As I said, after COVID we got a real wake up call of who mattered, and Nurses and Physicians deserve every penny that they get, its the system that is broken: see Stanford nurse strike.
Moreover, it's actually not the physician salaries that keep things unaffordable, but the over-pricing of every bloated expense, procedure, medication, drug etc... that keeps it at those levels and simply because they can.
Believe me, I just did 2 MRIs that I put off for several years because of COVID, physicians who I met before COVID who were doing well, and are probably better of financially now then before have been run-down significantly and they all had the same tells of using amphetamines/cocaine that I saw in my undergrad as pre-med students and bio students did the same courses.
The real blame is at the administrative level, and accounting not the physician or nurse level. My MRI required that 2 specialists sign off on it before the Insurance approved it and everyone took a cut, such that by the time I got my MRI it was actually less (in the 1000s) than the 2 specialist visits to get that one MRI. I did this once again for my 2nd one and the same thing.
I also got an EMG in 2019 and had to go for another one, it didn't matter that I had significant atrophy and weakness, not that I was approved for one before when it wasn't as bad as it is now. I had to go through the same process and everyone got their cut.
So, again... no you're embellishing YOUR value if you think you are comparing apples to apples, its simply not the same thing at all.
And none of you were working double shifts in an ER or Urgent care when COVID was at it's peak, or the large amount of attempted or successful suicides as lockdown, so really, get some perspective. You work on computeres, and many of you boast about really only doing 4 hours of work a day, the fact that you're posts counts are as high and still complaining about salary is testament of this very facade.
And no, I don't agree, the 'system' was not based on greed, you chose to make it about greed because so many other have as well and is another matter entirely, because most physicians and some nurses are drowning in debt by the time they get to earning a decent salary. I agree they should optimize for that given those circumstances and many have after COVID and those who haven't are jumping ship or leaving the Industry all together, which is why we should pay them whatever they deserve/ask for (within reason, of course) to retain them.
People aren't even aware of how many nurses are simply over the job entirely and will be quitting in masse.
I'm not saying they don't deserve to get paid well but some doctors earn 10-15 times as much as the nurses they work with, so its not all about "value to society", it's simple market forces. I used the word greed which is very negative but we can simply call it market forces.
Also why do you think family doctors earn half as much as plastic surgeons for instance? Are plastic surgeons bringing 2X the value? If anything family doctors are first in line and responsible for hundreds of lives each year.
For the record I think both nurses and doctors oughta be paid very well, possibly much more than me, as do construction workers and kindergarten teachers. And no, I don't think a doctor should earn one million yearly but that's just my opinion. But anyway the system simply doesn't work like that. The market doesn't care much about who works the hardest or who contributes the most to society.
Few American dr's make $1M. Most of those that make many multiples more than nurses are specialists, and they are still much less than $1M. I do know ones that do better... Because they are involved in effectively second jobs around biotech startups, maybe clinical trials, vs the actual patient care. I've been curious on celebrity patients (who seem to be more about donations/endowments.) You can get $700k by being the only specialist in the middle of nowhere and working nonstop, but most prefer not to.
Instead, someone doing regular family medicine is more like $150-250k... Less than a US programmer with significantly less training & responsibilities. You don't get big RSU refreshers for saving lives.
But the interesting thing is comparing over time. Specialists not only likely took loans and no salary for the stressful years of college, med school, and then residency, but then did another 2-4 years of fellowship, and really good ones, another 4-7 years of underpaid phd. They are making up for 1-2 decades of being underpaid and even debt, beyond the daily stress. More fun? As all the pay comes deferred in big batches, it is also taxed at ~double the rate of everyone else. Triple hit for savings: they don't get the compounding investment bump of people who started to get paid 1-2 decades sooner. Insurance is high too - disability, liability, etc. that regular people don't pay.
After another decade or two it balances out and starts being more than others, and then they retire.
Grass is always greener :)
Oh please.
One of the fun things about MDs and dentists is that it's one of the only professions where the supply of those people is strictly controlled by the people who are in danger of being replaced. There are VASTLY more people qualified of being excellent cardiologists and neurologists than there are spots to be trained in those specialties. The exclusivity of the practicing physicians on the field is what limits supply and increases demand.
False equivalence, and this is akin to one asking if you would be where you are if electricity ever got invented. It's all built on someone's else's shoulders, and the fact that you can say this underscores exactly what I mean.
They save lives, you are one of many who push code that could potentially be of use to use to someone who does is not the same thing.
It's only weird because it conflicts with your copium, you two are not the same thing and society doesn't rely on you as heavily as you think you do.
> One of the fun things about MDs and dentists is that it's one of the only professions where the supply of those people is strictly controlled by the people who are in danger of being replaced.
I'm aware of the AMA's practices, I did my undergrad with pre-meds; I know how the system works, That still doesn't change what I said, you weren't working doubles in an ER during COVID. You were likely at home working normal hours and on Zoom calls, you really can't compare the two professions at all.
Just because the medical system itself is broken doesn't detract from what I said either, it's entirely broken and I explained my situation that I feel best reflects that with an anecdote, too.
> No one deserves anything beyond basic human rights. I have great respect for the work done by doctors, but other countries pay doctors far less and still achieve better health outcomes. As a society, are we getting a good value for our money?
See above.
And just so it's clear the same goes for software developers; I think we can all agree that most coding interviews are a waste of time, and as most get more experience under their belt they are less tolerant of the absurdity of it all. That doesn't diminish the talent that exists in this Industry.
Personally speaking it's something that I'm dreading about coming back into the tech Industry; I come from startup land as a founder, and my only interview at a tech firm was just the telling me about what project I'd be working on if I decided to join, they didn't even probe me for anything as I got head-hunted and they already did their research on me before they ever reached out.
I'm pretty sure that will be the case this time around and sitting around white-boarding sounds like a total waste without more than 7 years in the Industry to me, too.
Ok, let me spell it out: you're not special. Nothing about your profession makes you special, you are not somehow better than anyone because you can sit at a computer and write code.
It's a skill, a very highly compensated one for now but an incredibly narrow one that happens to be useful a select few corps, sure, but so was were many other things.
And if one thing that COVID has taught us is how incredibly unnecessary you are to maintaining civilization--unless you are some supply chain developer in which case you were doomed either way. No one was calling for the return for programmers like they were for even barbers or cooks, in fact people lauded the fact that FB went down.
In short, you like being told you're special, it makes you feel good. But you are not. Wide spread misery isn't about equality, I can assure this isn't what I'm advocating here, it's about a self-awareness issue.
You're right, any human being with a pulse can produce effective software with no training or education or experience or effort whatsoever, and nobody's better at it than anybody else, unlike every other single human endeavor.
I don't think you understand how the world dealt with COVID. Governments needed software fast to deal with things like tracking the spread of the virus, ensuring people observe protocols (like in my country Greece where you had to go online or send a text to make sure that you're allowed to be outside during the peak of the pandemic). You do mention supply chain, like it's one simple job, but in fact software is now an integral part of selling anything to anyone. People went online to do things like work, socialize, buy things they don't need, buy the things they need to survive, go to school or learn skills they now need to survive like how to cook, exercise, perform, have sex.
I don't think being a programmer makes me special either, I'm not attacking that argument of yours, but in trying to make that argument you make some very myopic remarks...
And then, even if I thought I was special (I don't), I would still be fully capable of feeling concerned for other less fortunate people while feeling concerned about making less than X times the average.
Anyways, the demand for software engineers increased extremely significantly (multiples of open positions, rates doubled) when Covid started and all remaining companies hopped on the digital transformation trend; and that continues to today.
Every contract I interviewed for since it began, they literally begged me to work for them (previously it felt like we're equals, they were able to say no without fear of not finding anyone else). They don't even ask programming questions anymore, they just try to make their company look like the best place while apologizing profusely for their limited budget. Your characterization of the programmers market seems totally out of loop.
Haha, I appreciate the candor, and earnest response!
> Anyways, the demand for software engineers increased extremely significantly (multiples of open positions, rates doubled) when Covid started and all remaining companies hopped on the digital transformation trend; and that continues to today.
I agree, it's why I came back to tech actually; I wasn't satisfied with where the fintech Industry was heading in the 'blockchain' craze and decided that while the pay was good, the most I had ever been offered actually in any job, I'd be dedicating my life to something I knew was a farce and we couldn't deliver because of abject greed to cash-in on the flavor of the month.
> Your characterization of the programmers market seems totally out of loop.
I never said the demand didn't exist, I said that their is a deluded sense of self-worth that is so out of touch with reality from the comments I quoted that it's astonishing to hear people make so much and still be like 'well that guys has more, so I should too.'
That level of greed is what puts me off so much from this Industry because it resembles banking, its also a red signal that we have entered what is likely a bubble in programmer salaries which for me as a person just getting back in to tech after a 5 year absence to study AI and ML (arguably the most frothy of all programming roles) makes me step and re-evaluate things.
Why should a corporation make more money from your work when others like you are not giving them as much?
>"you're not special"
and you replied with
>"they literally begged me to work for them"
>"they just try to make their company look like the best place while apologizing profusely for their limited budget"
Do you not see how your 2 comments here give off the impression that you feel special? Maybe you don't feel special (like you explicitly say), but those two comments especially give a strong impression that you do feel special.
EDIT: I continued reading down this thread and I found a comment chain that perfectly encapsulates the "feeling special" observation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31336614
>"Well said. Working in tech is like writing a book with 50 people instead of 1."
And I don't think that a job makes a person special, why would it? It's just a job. I work on a hot market, someone else does not - that doesn't make any of us special people. To me, a special person is distinguished by much more than just working on a hot market.
I don't even know how much money the people who I think are special have or make, and don't care about it at all. Few of the best programmers I know make nearly zero money (of course, by choice). They're special by themselves, not because of their money.
Should I lie about the market so you don't think I feel special even if I repeat like 10 times it doesn't make me special, or what?
Well, a job takes up roughly 1/3 of our working lives (minus 2/3 for sleep (8hrs) and "leisure" (8hrs)), so I would say that it defines us very much, and it's a lot more than "just a job". A "job" is stacking shelves at Tesco or driving lorries for Amazon. Tech is a career (and a lifestyle, given how much it seeps into one's personal life e.g. watching Defcon before bed, I doubt lorry drives watch Lorrycon talks before bed...)
As for your other point, fair enough, point taken.
Wait what? So you somehow realize that if you're a software engineer supporting some necessary field, you're necessary by extension, but apparently the only thing we needed during covid was a function supply chain. Impressive mental gymnastics.
No one was calling for the "return" of programmers because (almost) no one interacts with them directly like they do their barber. Do you think their barbers decided during covid that they no longer needed to support credit card payments, an electronic scheduling system, etc?
If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
The fact that you cannot see that is what I mean, you take what I said as a personal insult while simultaneously having the collective view that if 'poor people want to stop being poor they should learn to code like me' around here.
It's cognitive dissonance and the part that I don't get is how you think people with other skills would want to do this even if given the choice were it not for the money.
I'm a self-taught coder and don't regard myself highly. I will be honest, I never thought it was easy but it's also not difficult in the same way that biochemistry, nuclear chemistry or organic chemistry is difficult either: it's more tedious than it is anything else. It's all relative to what you've done before, I suppose.
It's a lot of grinding, searching and revising and a war of attrition. All while putting up with people who quite frankly have the social skills of a lamppost and not giving into the urge of wanting to just quit and leave it all behind and start a hobby farm--as is so common in the tech circles towards the end.
I agree to a large extent about the social skills, and even the hobby farm seeing as I've considered it more than once... but being good in IT requires a wide range of skills.
It feels like most people that enter the field now are here because of the money, which is OK, but that doesn't mean they are any good, many are not, they are just taking advantage of a good opportunity. Again, that is OK.
This is a gig that won't last forever, like having a popular YouTube channel, so there is no reason to read into it any more than "people are jumping on the bandwagon during a gold-rush", and no reason to get so upset about it. There is no more or less social inequality because of IT workers than there was during the "house flipping" trend from a few years back, Crypto, social media influencer channels, etc.
There are a lot of good paying jobs, and no job will ever make you wealthy or powerful, so no reason to get worked up over ordinary working-class people (even if they make 6 figures, it's the 8+ figures that oppress).
edit: spelling
Out of sight, out of mind? What does it matter whether the misery and poverty is in your neighbourhood, or in the third world?
Or a level self-abosrbedness that can only be defined as peak narcissism, really.
I get wanting to be paid what you're worth, but when it comes to pretending you're some how any better than any other wage-slave is where I have trouble crossing over that level of hubris.
Also keep in mind that the linked FRED graph doesn't adjust for population size nor number of households in the country.
"Boston saw a historic building boom during the seven years (2014-2021) that former mayor Marty Walsh, a former construction union leader, occupied City Hall. The city’s skyline transformed, and continues to do so. Tens of thousands of new units of housing were created. An entire neighborhood rose from the ground." - https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2021/07/19/boston-mayor...
> Most major metros are experiencing a serious housing crisis right now.
Completely agree. But your reasons are off. Most high prices have literally nothing to do with supply or demand in any traditional (person-based) sense. Boston certainly fits that model -- it's price problems have nothing to do with any shortage in construction (construction is booming) or 'housing ban' (obviously there's no meaningful ban, because construction has already happened in large numbers for over a decade)
This is poor reasoning. The fact that some housing got built does not mean that there weren't significant impediments to building it, many of which still remain. Or that even during the boom that enough housing was built to sustain increased demand. There has been a historic housing boom alongside an enormous population surge over the past ten years (nearly 10% in the city proper alone). The boom is still not keeping pace with demand, and restrictions on multi-family housing remain. Here's a good article that gives an overview of the policy issues locally: https://commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/on-housing-wu-shoul...
In particular:
> In Boston, on account of its antiquated zoning laws, it’s easier to build a leather tannery than it is to site an apartment building. The zoning code is written in such a way that it is nearly impossible to build multi-family housing, without going through the time consuming and costly process to obtain a zoning variance. Even then, projects are at the mercy of abutters and neighborhood associations that are often diametrically opposed to any form of development in their backyards, particularly projects with a higher unit count.
Also,
> Most high prices have literally nothing to do with supply or demand in any traditional (person-based) sense.
Citation needed. Population is growing faster than housing supply. High prices are exactly what you would expect in this situation. Building more housing is the only long-term solution.
Well, that are migration away from supply constrained cities.
Problem is that America's most productive cities are the most supply constrained.
People contribute less to GDP, earn less for themselves, pay fewer income taxes etc, in those other areas where they can still afford to live.
America is huge. There's land everywhere. Start dreaming. China has 160 cities with 1+ million people. We have 10. Granted, there is a massive population difference, but we should most definitely have more than 10.
There are major issues when you only have a few cities with the bulk of the opportunity and high salaries for given fields. It stymies growth for the rest of the country, and for all the people we claim to care about: the poor and uneducated.
Greece has this issue with Athens being the only realistic metropolitan location. All the resources are there, and those left in the villages and small towns are finding it harder and harder to advance. If you aren't going to Athens (or immigrating to another country), you aren't succeeding. This is a big problem.
You also have to face the fact that as you spread people out, most costs go up. Cities subsidize suburbia and rural areas in the sense that cities generate more tax revenues of all types relative to costs. Suburban and rural areas mostly fail to raise enough tax revenue to pay for their own infrastructure and generally rely on various handouts from state and federal governments to build things like sewers and roads, which they then do not adequately maintain due to budget shortfalls.
For example, I could live in Wise County in Texas, and be technically counted towards the population of the Dallas/FW/Arlington Metro, but I would never dream of driving into Dallas from there daily for services, schooling, or work, and if I did, I would be severely disadvantaged, especially if I was poor or lacked resources.
Let me put it this way. If you go by city population size, Columbus where I live is larger than San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Las Vegas, or Atlanta [1]. In fact, Columbus is almost the same size as Atlanta and and Miami combined. Does that seem right to you?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
But you can’t bucket a million people living in thousands of square miles as the same as a million locked together in a suburban sprawl connected with rail and roads. Look at London. Take away the boroughs and what is really left?
There are other educated assumptions we can make based on the rapid response to the Wuhan outbreak and the surrounding cities, but in my opinion, based on inference from what we can observe from the outside, the answer is firmly yes.
Ok yeah ok Australia might as well be a hollow disk (no one lives in the middle) but still!
From an environmental point of view, it seems nearly ideal if most humans would live in a few big cities, than more of the rest of the earth could be given back to nature.
And those who think remote will be long term to their advantage are wrong. All that will happen is that these companies will find a way to pay you less. The solution is to organize.
for those who will reply that people are making less in CA and also need to survive… i was in a black uber recently and the driver told me he was averaging 20K per month. not bad for driving a car with zero education or leetcode requirements.
Would be glad to be proven wrong, but I’ve looked pretty deeply into it.
I'm torn tbh - there are various ways that a salary can be set, including the value people are delivering, market forces and in reference to others in the career ladder. There's a balancing act to be had, but I can see where the GP is coming from.
Not arguing one way or another. But an alternate hypothesis would be this skill gap has closed.
Education might be better. Or tooling may have improved such that the tangible benefit of experience has, for most current applications, depreciated. Assuming the reduced innovativeness of the average tech worker today versus ten years ago, the equation balances.
Test might be measuring this skill gap in new industries (e.g. crypto) versus established ones (like adtech).
You can have the socialist argument of "hey senior engineer, take a salary cut / no raise for the common good, to avoid layoffs of junior engineers - which btw would be the first to go as they're not as productive as you are" and I've seen plenty of senior engineers accept that. Their livelihood are not as stake so they'll take one for the team, forgetting that it's a for profit company which can't find the money.
In the above scenario, I refused and I wasn't fired - but I also started looking for a job and switched 2 weeks after the above episode happened.
If you are, you’re not getting paltry 2-10% raises yoy.
Maybe in an alternative world, it would... but in my experience, salaries are almost entirely based on market demand and supply, local regulation, and how much money the particular industry you can find jobs on can make, divided by how many people they need to make it happen (which changes how much they pay when they get desperate for experienced workers).
How much value you actually deliver depends not only on your skills, but on the company you're working on actually creating value (which depends on not only the product, but the marketing, sales, local conditions, competition etc.)... and even though that will affect your salary, as I mentioned before, the real driver of salaries is supply (more specifically, how many capable people could do the job besides you, and how much other companies would be willing to pay them)...
For example, we know lots of companies that made billions of dollars while only employing a few dozen engineers... I'm pretty sure those engineers were only getting the minimum possible salary to keep them from leaving for another job... despite them each arguably producing several million dollars of company value every year.
On the other hand, lots of companies make losses for year while still paying good salaries to thousands of people... would you rather see those people getting no salaries until the company turned a profit??
Now that we've established that there's no real correlation between the value an individual salaried employee produces and how much money a company is actually willing to pay them, let's look at the social aspect of the problem as well.
When everyone gets a decent pay (by us increasing the bottom relative to the top), society is fairer in a greater sense, as more people will have the means to have a good life regardless of their education or skills... those with greater skills will always be more highly appreciated and better compensated in a free economy (specially those willling to start their own business - which allows them to extract nearly ALL value they produce at the cost of high risk to themselves... by the way, that's why those who do it are not willing to give their salaried employees ALL the value they deliver). That has great benefits to society as a whole as there is going to be fewer people that resent the "smart asses" making 10x more than themselves, the economy becomes more vibrant as there's more people who can afford to spend money on fun things, and so much more... imagine your son turns out to be a bit dumb (it happens, unfortunately)... should he be doomed to a life of misery?
Finally, you assume you deliver 10x more than someone else but I bet you have zero evidence to back that up. Developers specially are extremely hostile to actually having objective measurements of anything, so we can't really know for sure.
So, that's why I think that no, it's not very fair for anyone to make 10x more than anyone else.
I wasn't referring to programmers, but unskilled labor such as specifically, package sorting. Even some fast food jobs are approaching that number.
> That will not actually affect you negatively in any way
Absolutely untrue. When everyone has more money, money is worth less. See also, our current (underreported) inflation rate.
I'd be all for everyone making more money, unless it means money is worth less, which is what's happening now.
Do you see any concern with other people making more money that would not be reflected in an (accurately reported) inflation rate?
I hope I don't come across as a conspiracy theorist here... but based on my own experience and also how CPI is calculated. CPI constantly shifts out items to 'mimic consumer behavior' which coincidentally also makes inflation look lower. As someone who hasn't really changed much, our grocery bills went way, way over any reported number. It is probably close to 30-40% in total(2019 to today), but I can't find any old receipts proving as much...yet.
Rent for us is up from 1700 to 2750 for like sized houses (due to not getting renewed, it's admittedly not on the exact same property).
And gas well, that tells its own story.
> Do you see any concern with other people making more money that would not be reflected in an (accurately reported) inflation rate?
No way! If everyone could make 100k a year and we could have 2018 prices back...that would damn near be a utopia.
OK, it's good we agree on that.
About inflation: CPI has some aspects that underreport inflation and some that overreport inflation.
This is actually a serious topic for economists, not just for in conspiracy theory nuts. Though you can imagine that the former focus on different aspects than the latter.
I can write a bit more about this from an economics perspective. Some interesting keywords to look into:
- hedonic adjustment
- gdp deflator
- Big Mac index
Partially because inflation is such a 'subjective' topic, and requires judgement about how much better or worse the new iPhone is compared to last year's model, my preferred model for central bank policy is nominal gdp (level) targeting instead of inflation targeting.
Nominal GDP is the same as total nominal income, and basically just counts up every dollar everyone in the economy spends/earns. No judgement about the quality of iPhones necessary.
(Alternatively, you could target total gross nominal wages. It's almost the same in practice, because the ratio of total wages / gdp is fairly steady over time in the short run.)
Another favorite of mine, for a web development position, was "what happens at the network level when you load a webpage" where I got marked as getting it wrong for skipping explicit description of SYN/ACK step of the TCP connection. Again, fair, but probably not relevant.
that's pretty crazy because if you're going to talk about that then you're going to have to talk about congestion control, windowing, every other protocol besides IP that TCP can run on top of and how they work, and all the other things that come into play based on the current state of the various networks between you and the server hosting the website. Answering that one question could take an hour itself. It reminds me of that saying that goes like "How to make an Apple Pie. Step 1, create the universe..."
I'm very fortunate because my last three interviews have been basically calling up an old colleague and asking what they've been up to and if they want some help.
If you want to spend 20 minutes talking about DNS, I'm going to ask a lot of follow-up questions throughout the process, not fail you for not meeting a rubric or magic list of buzzwords. My goal will be to see how deep your knowledge on a particular piece of technology is, especially for a security role.
The problem here isn't the question; the question is a tool. The problem is that the interviewer isn't using the tool appropriately.
(Note: I don't choose these questions, the team I work for did. I follow a script, and it includes questions like this. But the script also contains a reminder for how to use the damn question.)
Opening with DNS, HTTPS, TCP, etc. could end up being a complete waste of time depending on what signals your looking for, what you're really asking, and your background. I'm curious how my responses would be interpreted by you as someone who's asked questions like this before?
Like, my goal isn't to see how much of a spiel you've rehearsed for a finite set of possible interview questions.
That sort of exercise constitutes a useless hazing ritual that selects for people with low anxiety at the moment, not aptitude with the relevant technologies for the job.
I'm going to keep pushing the conversation along until you've either hit the depth of your knowledge and say "I'm not sure", or we need to move onto other questions. If we hit your depth early but we're headed into an interesting direction, I might ask, "How would you build [protocol or feature you're not sure about]?" This potentially gives useful data in how you, as a candidate, approach abstract problems.
But I should also note: I'm an introvert. I'm shy. I get nervous easily in social situations. I'm not the best interviewer, and I don't believe the processes I learned from my employers are necessarily the right way to hire technical expertise. I would rather replace the interview with timeboxed work-sample tests. But I don't call those shots.
With the first type of response, when you follow up with how do we know where the webserver is, there is usually uncertainty. The whole point of open ended questions is to understand where your technical understanding is, not to hit a bunch of keywords on the way. This type of question though is way outside the norm though, I think it is a misunderstanding on the interviewee's part if they think this is an exercise in saying specific terms. I can see how its potentially more frustrating- there is no pass/fail, just how well did you do on a scale that is a bit subjective.
Hazing is a feature of almost every organization that is regularly recruiting new members.
Never heard that there were crazy interview rounds for experienced lawyers, marketers, project managers, even other non-tech engineers. After a certain amount of experience, people assume from your resume that you are not an impostor and interviews are mostly about motivations / behavourial fit.
I worked in a law firm for a while, and didn't see the 'daily scrum/standup' thing done, even when multiple lawyers were working on the same case. They would certainly have regular meetings, and direct support staff to do certain things.
I was only a delivery/courier person, so certainly wasn't privileged to hear every case detail, but I was friends with someone whose mom was effectively the office manager. She knew most practical details about the cases - court dates, filing dates, parties, procedures, etc, but would never dream of telling any of the lawyers how to lawyer. She might remind them of due dates, but she didn't set the dates either - the courts did that.
One issue is that while costs of products, housing, etc is adjusted pretty much instantly with supply, demand and inflation, wages aren't. When inflation numbers are introduced, companies jump to announce they're raising prices, citing cost of resources or... whatever. But they don't increase wages.
How often have wages gone up at a rate higher than inflation? I can't remember it. So basically people are expected to continue living on a currency that is decreasing in value constantly. Or they're expected to switch jobs or grow in their career, not to have a better life, but just to be able to maintain their current lifestyle.
Remember these tropes from the 80's and 90's and before where people bought a sizeable house, one or two cars, and put money away to put their kids (they could afford kids too) through college, all on a single income? Yyyyeeeaahhh. actually I don't know if that was the case for most people, it's what sitcoms depicted.
It wasn't. Bill, from the Cosby Show, was a physician, Tony, from Who's the Boss was a former baseball player, the dad from Full House was a TV broadcaster, etc.
It's probably the reason "blue collar" sitcoms were popular in the 90s (Rosanne, Grace Under Fire).
I really don't like this self loathing mentality on HN. I work really hard to keep up to date in IT, even after I'm off work.
Sorry to burst your bubble but most people just go home from work and get high or drunk then watch 5hrs of TV. Thats the reason they can't work tech jobs. I didn't go to school for CS but I still make lots of money in tech because I want to and I keep myself up to date.
Its not all poor single moms without any time or some other tragic story.
And it never will go up when conservatives have a majority in the Senate, but regardless wages have been growing (1)
> How often have wages gone up at a rate higher than inflation? I can't remember it
According to the same source, there were multiple periods since 2007 where wages rose faster than inflation
That's not to say that wages shouldn't grow higher or make up for the periods where wage increase is below inflation... but at the same time, it's dishonest to point to the floor set by the government as evidence, when in periods of high labor demand and economic growth we see wages go up in (since you can't hire anyone at the minimum wage!)
The average worker, especially those with families, have seen their costs inflate much, much higher than 11% per year for quite some time.
[1] https://www.fostercity.org/faqs?keys=&field_microsite_tid=Al...
[2] https://deniseliew.realscout.com/homesearch/listings/p-812-m...
[3] https://deniseliew.realscout.com/homesearch/listings/p-893-e...
[4] https://deniseliew.realscout.com/homesearch/listings/p-1112-...
I'll throw in a different angle. If I'm truly happy at a job, pay isn't a big concern as long as I can pay the bills. The more miserable the job becomes, the more the money becomes the only way to tolerate it so it better keep getting higher.
Pay in software roles might be at an all-time high today, but respect and independence is at an all-time low.
In the 90s I had a private office with a door and a window. Today we're packed like sardines into an open office (although thanks to the pandemic this part improved).
In the 90s I worked on deep hardcode tech, today nearly every company just wants to glue libraries to frameworks and connect AWS bits together. Work is no longer intellectually satisfying.
In the 90s tech companies produced tech, that was the product, so it was exciting and hip. Today so-called "tech companies" produce advertising, shopping, social spyware, movies. It's not tech anymore. Boring.
In the 90s, senior engineers drove engineering decisions. Today we have non-technical product managers forcing their way into technical decisions.
In the 90s we were trusted to get things done and allowed the time to get deep in the zone. Today it's forced daily status reports, "agile".
In the 90s we could plan ahead and go deep, research and build well-architected solutions. Today the task better take no more than 1-2 days so the story gets closed, "agile".
I could go on and on but will stop. If software engineering today had the working conditions and respect it had in the 90s, I'd happily do it for 25% of my current salary and be so happy.
I have heard this point made a couple of times recently. Is there any reason why these two values should be the same? It is a point of concern for those on very low incomes who spent all their income and are not able to save anythiny, but if you are on a six figure income and only a portion of that income is spent on groceries and housing then I assume you can still end up wealthier than the previous year.
I'm not sure that's a reasonable conclusion for most cases. Inflation is not uniform across the board, depending on who your employer is they may not have raised their prices by whatever the average inflation rate was, meaning the company as a whole is taking in less value (based on their prices hikes vs. the inflation rate). So the new value from the inflation rate is not "going" anywhere, it's just not there.
That's not to say you shouldn't argue for raises anyway, but just that it's not like every company is suddenly taking in X% more dollars because the average inflation rate is X%.
(A quick search seems to say that managers can't join most unions, but there might be some they can join. There seems to be no legal barrier, but rather that existing unions don't want them, and that managers seldom ask to join.)
Are you producing the same value for the company as you did last year? If inflation is higher, then you are receiving less value via your pay from producing the same or more value for the company.
People like to think of X% inflation meaning that every dollar is worth less and every product as costing X% more, but this isn't actually how it works in practice.
Most things are interconnected. Yes, gas might not directly affect a specific company, but it will eventually due to things like inputs, shipping, etc going up. And yes, even the people on the supplier side getting raises will affect it.
"People like to think of X% inflation meaning that every dollar is worth less"
At an aggregate level that is how it works. The basket of goods costs more. The person's purchasing power has been reduced. The the number of dollars needed to purchase the same basket of goods is higher. So yes, the dollar is worth less. As you point out, not every product costs more, but most do eventually as the effects ripple (some go down, but usually though changes in technology/production/etc).
I understand that the company needs to stay competitive and they would need to increase revenue to increase salary. Usually that isn't a large enough increase to affect competitive prices for the actual workers (executives and management are different). Of course that assumes being competitive with other onshore companies. If competing with offshore companies in LCOL areas, then it's going to be nearly impossible to compete (see things like steel production in the US).
So many entitled people arguing for an economic caste system…
Arguing that your wage should always match or beat inflation is arguing for defacto permanent income inequality. You’re literally saying your work is always the same amount more valuable than the average labor cost increase incorporated into inflation numbers.
I don't see that anywhere in my argument.
"Arguing that your wage should always match or beat inflation is arguing for defacto permanent income inequality."
Do you have an alternative approach? I have not heard any mainstream argument for setting all salaries/wages to be equal.
You have to define income inequality and then determine what level of inequality is acceptable. Should a CEO make more than a worker? In my opinion, probably. Should they make 100x more? I don't think so. If I could make the same money flipping burgers as I can working as a dev (let's say around the median salary of $40k), I'd quit today and most other devs would too. Why should I go to college? Why should I endure the longer hours/on-call? Why deal with the frustration and office BS?
Different jobs make different money because the work carries different value. We should protect those at the bottom and try to make it fair. But fair doesn't mean literal income equality with everyone making $20/hr regardless of job, performance, etc (ie equal and equitable are different).
The fact that workers are seeing real wages decline since the 70s is the problem. If you adjusted them for inflation, then income inequality is not as much of an issue. (You'd still have to adjust capital gains taxes and the real increase in things like executive pay, but at least indexing wages to inflation would have benefited things on the worker side.)
"You’re literally saying your work is always the same amount more valuable than the average labor cost increase incorporated into inflation numbers"
Not if everyone gets the inflation adjustment as they do in that other country - Denmark maybe? The discrepancy can be adjusted by increasing the floor, as that impact will raise the lower end more than the rest of the market (eg the people that need the raise most get the biggest impact while those not at the bottom see minimal effect upto a certain level).
You're literally arguing against yourself. You're saying that workers should not get inflation adjustments. Where do you think that money goes? It goes into the pockets of the executives and the investors (capital instead of labor).
On top of all this, you wrongly assume I'm some high earning person. I make less than $100k and live in a moderately high cost of living area.
And trust me, most devs I know couldn't handle flipping burgers. Dealing with customers, dealing with managers, dealing with cleaning restrooms, dealing with late nights/early mornings.
So don't shit on burger flippers...
I'm not. I'm saying if everything paid the same (true income "equality", really equity), then why wouldn't I want to do a job, that is stereotyped as easy and typically low paid? There are tons of burnt out devs who want to quit and do something else.
There aren't any In-N-Out in my state. If I could get a manager position, then I'd consider it (although the range starts below $100k, especially outside of CA).
"And trust me, most devs I know couldn't handle flipping burgers."
Maybe. Many of the devs I know seem like the could (or have). But there are some that seem like they would struggle. I've worked in a warehouse, I've worked in billing, I've worked as a janitor, I've worked retail sales, and I've worked as a house painter. I've even done a weekend gig as a good worker at a BBQ stand. Food service is not my main choice (I'd take that over painting though), but your example pays much better than any of these did. Every job has tough stuff and everyone likes to assume others couldn't do it because they don't have as much grit or whatever, including devs. I think this is mostly just bias.
I brought up In-N-Out because while the job is hot, and probably tedious, the employees seem to genuinely enjoy their jobs. Either that or the management has done an incredible job of brainwashing them.
But for other places, it's not that the employees are any worse than in IT. When I worked fast food in high school, one of my coworkers was the valedictorian in my class who became a doctor on the Navy's dime. Another scored a perfect SAT (in 1982) and got a full ride to Caltech. One guy was so smart, he reverse engineered the displays on some of the kitchen computers to mock the management. We had a real mix of people, both economically and socially diverse. Times have changed, and the US doesn't have as much social or economic mobility, but it was an interesting time.
The only difference I see between the people I work with now, and the people I worked with in my previous life is how much we're paid, and the working conditions. There are assholes in my current company, and assholes in fast food.
My software engineering salary buying less of car/house/food than it did last year is a reflection (in an abstract sense) that my total share of "value" is relatively smaller by comparison to the factory worker, farmer, etc.
In other words: the economy is putting more of a premium on people who make things that everyone buys than it did the year prior. My take is that this is totally ok. The value of goods, services, and labor relative to one another change over time. Raising my salary in precise lockstep with the increase in cost of goods will only lead (indirectly) to more inflation.
Put another way: The company isn't compensating you in Abstract Adjusted-for-Buying-Power Compensation Units. They aren't guaranteeing your work entitles you to the same lifestyle every year, year after year.
They're compensating you in dollars. If your best argument for an 11% raise is that "stuff is more expensive", it's a lot less convincing than "I'm 11% more productive".
It sucks that things are more expensive, but if the alternative is freezing everyone's relative buying power where it's at right now, I'd prefer not to do so. Because I think that people growing my food and making things in factories deserve to get ahead, but in order for that to happen, (all things being equal, even if you drove profits and executive pay down to some "acceptable" level) costs of things might have to increase.
All that is a super abstract and hand-wavy argument ignoring really important factors over the past several decades. Now of course, the reality of the situation is that a lot of productivity increase went straight to the top instead of improving compensation. But wage-inflation for all doesn't solve that.
But in my abstract hypothetical scenario: - where the only relevant factors to CPI are labor cost - and we've effectively max'd out productivity per worker - so wage increases aren't offset by output
then I'll take increase costs relative to my personal lifestyle if it means less people with essential jobs living paycheck to paycheck. I don't want everyone on the same salary, but in a scenario where vampire squids aren't sucking all excess wealth out of the system, I'm ok with my tech salary being relatively closer to farmers and factory workers. (or really arriving at whatever unmolested market price makes sense)
That's true if that factory worker or farmer is also getting a raise. It can still be true if those workers are getting raises higher than inflation even if you as a dev gets an inflation adjustment. The thing I was saying is that I should get inflation adjusted and those other people should be getting more than inflation adjusted by moving up the floor.
"it's a lot less convincing than "I'm 11% more productive"."
It can still be convincing if the company is able to charge 11% more for the same output you are producing.
"Now of course, the reality of the situation is that a lot of productivity increase went straight to the top instead of improving compensation. But wage-inflation for all doesn't solve that."
Not entirely, but maybe a little. The fact that the top are absorbing the increases while the workers absorb inflation is the problem. If wages are inflating as they are now, the at least puts pressure on the top to stop sucking up the extra to stay competitive. Maybe. I can't imagine how good life could have been if real wages hadn't decreased for the past 50 years.
"I'll take increase costs relative to my personal lifestyle if it means less people with essential jobs living paycheck to paycheck."
I'd rather make the top pay. I don't make all that much.
Let's invent our own unit: the "grocery-year" -- one grocery-year represents the amount of money needed to buy one year of groceries.
Now let's say I am making $100k this year, and spending $10k on groceries. My annual salary is ten grocery-years (though I'm saving nine of those).
Let's assume that inflation is 10%, but I get a 5% raise. You're absolutely right that my net income will increase in dollar-terms (i.e. I'll spend $11k on groceries now, but make $105k; a $4k net increase). The issue here is that in actual purchasing power, my salary has gone down: my annual salary is now only 9.54 grocery-years.
Obviously not everything experiences the same rates of inflation, but the idea here is that inflation affects all of your income, not just the income you're spending. Likewise, my actual purchasing power will decrease if my raise doesn't match inflation, regardless of how much actual purchasing I do in a given year.
I've been working remote since long before the pandemic, but I did enjoy some benefits of living in a HCOL (fun events, social life, networking) - benefits that I wasn't using as much after having kids.
If you're in the States you may also consider the benefits of lowering your tax rates + health insurance bill by moving to LCOL country overseas.
There are a few (mostly) english speaking countries with low taxes, cheap properties, low crime with decent public healthcare or cheap good private healthcare.
In 2010 I was working in the UK and we had about 5% inflation that year (or so). I got a 2% raise, and found that more insulting than if they had given no raise; even though objectively any positive raise is better than no raise.
Just got an extra side gig for 20-25% hours per weeks so it's like getting a 50% raise and feels great.
Although seeing how many $500k jobs exist in Silicon Valley makes me think I should spend more time grinding leetcode.
A lot of LC tends to hit on "specialist in LC". We overweight this type of candidate in our interview processes, mainly as "specialist in LC" no longer translates to "highly interested in Comp Sci fundamentals" or "Algorithm expert" - many grind LC just to get a job and promptly forget the fundamentals.
A few interviews that I've seen gaining prominence.
- Code Review interviews. Give a sample code review, and have the candidate provide feedback. I'd love to see this extended with just having the candidate write code review comments in whatever code review tool the company uses - you could then discuss the code review afterwards. Clarify ahead of time the tool that will be used for code review.
- Debugging broken code. Let the candidate show off how they approach dealing with broken/buggy code, clarify ahead of time the language/environment for debugging.
- Build a service/program to a spec via take home. Does the candidate build the system properly? do they exceed expectations? skip requirements? test the code? work double time?
- Given a problem, build a working solution in your IDE of choice.
I'm not even convinced that 5 45 minute to 1 hour interview block is the right size. Why not do a 3 hour time block where the candidate has to build something, then review with them at the end? This is common in interviews with for MBA-type positions.
This isn't my experience, I've found that the number one reason for not doing well on leetcode problems is simply because the candidate hasn't practiced doing leetcode problems. I've known plenty good engineers who, when interviewing with LC style interviews for the first time, fail utterly. Then they realize they just need to practice and did better.
I've been in the industry for around 15 years now, my anecdotal observation is that the average quality of engineers is negatively correlated with the rise of leetcode. 10 years ago the strongest signal was a solid github profile with lots of relevant projects.
That's not to say leetcode is the cause of this decline. The cause is the flood of SWE being rushed into the career as fast as possible (this is why github is no longer a good signal, bootcamps started training their students to create meaningless GH projects just to attempt to create signal).
However I've also seen no indication that leetcode type challenges have any relationship to being a good engineer. I've worked at plenty of places that required pretty tricky leetcode style problems filled with very, very mediocre engineers. Leetcode has become a game that has little to nothing to do with real world programming, in the same way that speed-cubing (solving Rubik's cubes in record time) has absolutely nothing to do with the player's underlying understanding of group theory and combinatorics.
The old fashioned walk through and reason about non-trivial code someone has written is still an excellent method to see how a programmer thinks and if they can code.
Take homes can get a bit out of hand because candidates can choose to spend too much time (12 hours on something that "should" take 2 hours) out of desperation (or perhaps simply not having a life) if the primary criterion is the completeness of the solution. I think it works best if the solution or partial solution is used as something to have a conversation about in the next interview. For instance, the applicant can explain their lack of unit tests by providing their reasoning for relying more heavily or entirely on integration tests as the system relies too heavily on an external service.
For take-homes, I don't think the candidate spending 12 hours on something that should take 2 is necessarily a negative signal - but it's also something that should be considered. If the candidate spent 12 hours ensuring the solution was perfect, then it's probable that they are just thorough - which is a good thing more often than not. You do end up in a quirky situation of judging candidates by how much time they are willing to dedicate to your take-home interview though.
Anecdotally, for the few take-homes that I've done - I've always gone a bit overboard out of pride. Granted, this is also how I approach a lot of coding tasks.. so I guess you get what you test for?
The 12 hour vs 2 hour thing is to allow for a degree of normalization, similarly to how it's unclear about what's being considered when 1 applicant spends 3 hours on a LC medium and another spends 30 minutes. Spending an extreme amount of time on take-homes confounds simple pride with someone who's otherwise a bad fit skills-wise but can eventually make up for it with an input of time, something that might not be appreciated after an offer is accepted. Too often companies will refuse to speak further with candidates if even 1 out of 20 test scenarios are not covered just because someone else chose to spend their entire weekend on the problem -- they'll be the same ones complaining about a dev shortage, no doubt.
This goes back to the days where job ads would request N years of X experience. The big takeaway from the last ~10 years is that this type of requirement is unnecessary. As an engineer who knows the fundamentals, it's relatively straightforward to pick up a new tech stack.
I wouldn't want to pass on someone who spent the last 5 years working in C because we have a java stack.
The problem with this is that the company has no skin in the game. Sadly flakey companies and recruiters are prevalent enough that it's not at all uncommon for a company to ask you to complete their "take home" assignment and then never get back to you. I've had it happen enough that I would simply refuse this now. I think if a company wants you to spend 3-4 hours on their take home project they should pay you for that time.
Are you buying the average number of used cars and housing? I'm not. My expenses haven't gone up 10% in nominal dollars.
(Related anecdote: people tend to say the economy is bad if they heard it was bad on TV, even if they just got a new job and a raise.)
Same with land. If your goal is to purchase lands, then your budget needs account for increases in the prices of land (specifically the land you want). And healthcare. And education.
Also, my food purchases have definitely increased at least 10% nominally in the past couple years.
My rent hasn’t gone up either. Which is kind of weird since I don’t think we have rent control here.
Getting a 4% raise on 150k salary in an uneven 8% inflation environment is a genuine meaningful increase, and will have you "keep up" fine in the short/mid term.
So the 8.5% inflation rate in March is actually 1.085^(1/12) = 0.7% for March, and 8.5% assuming that same rate lasted for 12 consecutive months.
In 2021, the CPI-U was 4.7% for all of 2021.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
$1 in January 2020 is worth $1.11 today
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=202001...
I don't disagree that inflation is overtaking wage increases, just that the magnitude isn't that large....yet.
First I agree overall, however I think you overestimate how much any companies saved on the WFH shift.
1. They still own the buildings or leases/mortgages. I doubt many were able to get out of leases which in commercial are usually 3-5year min. Mortgage only goes away if they sold the building.
2. They still have to pay the cost of maintaining the building and facilities while unused in the above cases.
3. Pretty much all companies are using their commercial locations to bloat their balance sheets and secure debt. This is actually a HUGE factor as to why so many companies what WFH to end. They simply cannot get rid of their offices or they would be insolvent based on their finances. You can't throw out 2bil in real estate that is securing 20bil in debt or it would be called in.
4. Many companies were unprepared so they had to pay out the nose the get things setup rapidly for remote workers because they resisted it for so long. Why do you think Zoom blew up so fast?
The smaller startup I worked at also had to get a second office a couple blocks away from the original office.
In the current remote-forward world, while these companies have to keep their existing real estate, they get the benefit of not having grow their real estate portfolio relative to their employee size. I was also told it cost that large tech company 20-30k a year per physical seat in the office. So I'm pretty sure the savings have been decent, even if they didn't dump their office spaces.
To clearly illustrate my point here, if fortune 500 CEO pay is up less than 11% on avg since 2020, I don't think that's an argument they're underpaid.
Yeah well, in reality it's up considerably more. They didn't get to be the 0.1% by accepting sub-inflation pay raises for the last 100+ years. Here is what their actual raises were:
19% in 2021, 16% in 2020, ~14% in 2019 & 2018. Sources below.
Meanwhile that's what average hourly wages increased by:
4.7% in 2021, 1.8% in 2020
https://fortune.com/2022/04/01/ceo-pay-rose-record-19-percen...
https://fortune.com/2021/05/28/ceo-pay-increase-2020-pay-gap...
If you want to make your argument, show a profession which has ACTUALLY been getting sub-inflation raises for a decade or more, but you still consider to be overpaid. It's no coincidence that such combination doesn't exist.
Inflation (CPI): 25.2% (2.2% annual increase)
Pilots average wage increase: 67.8% (5.3% annual raise, $118,070 -> $198,190)
Lawyers average wage increase: 13.4% (1.2% annual raise, $130,490 -> $148,030)
A mere 4.1% points difference in their annual pay raises, but it really adds up over the years – pilots started the past decade with lower wages than lawyers, yet ended it much better off. Keeping pace with inflation is extremely important.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes532011.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20120526161129/https://www.bls.go...
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes231011.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20120526012248/https://www.bls.go...
Most good engineers(especially early in their career) will be an order of magnitude more productive after a couple years at the same company, as they build up both domain knowledge in their tech space, and institutional knowledge that can't be learned outside of the company. And companies know the value of this experience. That's why you can switch jobs after 2 years for a 20-40% increase. When the market rate for your labor is 1.2x your current salary, I think that's called underpaid.
My point is that dev pay being off a few percent since 2020 because of high inflation does not by itself decide the question of whether they're overpaid or not.
Patrick Mahomes doesn't get a pay raise adjustment every year for inflation. That doesn't mean his $500m football contract makes him underpaid.
The grandparent comment reads as if devs are underpaid because their pay isn't fully keeping up with some unusual inflation since 2020.
Some would say CEOs are paid to increase corporate profits, thus their value is their ability to raise corporate profits.
However, the Kalecki-Levy profit equation (an accounting identity which originated in 1908 and is still accepted as true) makes clear that in aggregate, corporate profits == government deficit.
Thus the single largest driver of corporate profits is not CEO activity, but government fiscal policy.
So CEOs are paid based on what the government does.
Are you pricing in value, or pricing in a specific amount of dollars? Because if you're actually pricing in value, then even though the value stays constant, the dollar amount of the value goes up with inflation.
I agree with your point that regular employees should be expected to get more raises than CEOs, because regular employees can improve more. This doesn't really relate to inflation though, except to the extent they are both factors that lead to raises.
Asking too much? “Waaah! It is really hard to find good developers” is a stuck record on loop since 2016 at least
It's up a /lot/ more than that! And what do you know, they're also not underpaid. The former will predict the latter pretty damn well, I think you'll find. So yes, strictly speaking, annual raises and having the market power to command meaningful ones do actually have everything to do with being over/under paid.
Apply this to dev pay as well. Just because you're a few % off since 2020 after inflation does not mean $300k salaries are overpaid or that they're appropriate. They're two unconnected data points.
If you don't have the market power to have garnered a good pay increase over the past 2 years of record profits you're almost certainly underpaid, like teachers, nurses etc. If you got massive pay increases you're almost certainly overpaid, like CEOs.
The connection is right there. Maybe these two things could somehow become disjointed but they really don't appear to be such in any meaningful way in the current economy.
Plenty of people want to become teachers and nurses and doctors (or veterinaries or musicians or artists etc), knowing full well how low the pay is.
there's two "meaning" to being underpaid; 1) the work being done is captured by another party, and thus underpaid to the worker doing the work. An extreme example is slavery - they are underpaid.
2) the second meaning of underpaid is the perception from other people that the profession is producing value for society, but the payer of that work (usually tax payers) is not compensating for the value dispersed throughout society. Examples might be teachers.
The second is a bit nebulous. I think it's mostly down to social desirability bias: people say stuff that sounds good, but doesn't make much sense.
Lots of companies had long term leases or obligations anyway. Eventually the 'cost savings' were probably there, but I don't know too many companies that were just able to jettison their initial lease payments in the first few months of the pandemic. I know I couldn't quickly get out of my office lease.
A few disconnected points:
As we're seeing, some of that growth was temporary. Between inflation and growth, record profits is expected from any company not in decline. Allocating profits from growth to more growth is a reasonable choice. There's no reason for wages to track profits. Wages are driven by the labor market; profits just act as a wage ceiling.
Remove the word tech, and you basically have it right. Why would companies whose goal is to maximize profit pay more than they have to? There is little incentive for companies to pay more than required to meet their needs.
Raises are often somewhat small, but job changes can be pretty hefty. And it's better than most positions by fair margin.
yeah trickle down economics was just a rebranding of horse and sparrow economics.
as in you feed the horse all the oats and then the sparrows get to pluck the undigested bits from the feces. Never was going to work.
Is this really all it takes?
Algorithms are only one part of an interview. I wouldn't hire someone who was rude or condescending, regardless of how fast they can write an O(n) solution.
Like Michael O'Church talked about a company hiring a software engineer and another hiring a manager, and he and the engineer A/B testing trying to get hired as an engineer or as a manager. And in the interview, they wanted him to come up with the golden algorithm that took them months and was their hot shit with which they would win big, they wanted that in an hour. Actually less, you couldn't solve it in minute 59 without coming up with incremental steps to "show progress" as if that weren't counterproductive. So like 4 minutes, Michael O'Church lied through his teeth in favor of these guy's patience. 4 minutes of silence and it's over. And because he couldn't do it that's when they started discounting points, like you start at 100 and then get knocked points for not having gone to Stanford (or Berkeley as he puts it, but you still get discounted for Berkeley in reality), then more demerits for every flaw, negging over and over. Always communicating it's the engineer's fault he's treated like shit.
Whereas for applying to manager (which in many ways was more honest, it was arguable, he just hadn't been formally promoted with actual employees with a wage, he just pretended he had and had the knowledge to back it up), with applying to manager, he started at like 80 points and everything he did well added points to his value, they saw him as an ally. Against the software engineer, against his own alternate self, whom they treated as the subordinate, like enemy slash slave.
So that story I don't know how to judge, I don't have enough visibility on Michael O'Church and I have very negative opinions about a lot of his thoughts. But that's not the question. The question is, if I do crack the golden algorithm that took them months right then and there, in the heat of the moment under time pressure, in the interview, under adversarial circumstances, all of that, in the four minutes they actually give you without acting impatient, if I DO not if I don't IF I DO will that get me human dignity and a wage? Or will they still reject me because I'm not submissive, which I can never again be after standing up to torture?
[1] So what this means is, suppose a chess player is at a crossroads, and thinks for a minute. And from that point on, plays perfectly until checkmate. Every move correct. Saying I don't do it perfectly would be like saying the chess player didn't play perfectly because he didn't lay the pieces in the exact geometric center of the square when he moved them. I get every algorithm interviewer to say "what the fuck", "did you hear it before?" "that was fast" But it's never enough. Best job I had was $20 an hour, dream job, as a handyman, construction. Dream job. I got promoted into software, and was quickly fired.
Managers are primates first, mathematicians a distant second. They talk about being mathematicians a lot, like a lot, they pretend it's all about the bottom line, but no. It's about dominance, being alpha, a guy who stood up to torture is an alpha challenger, no hire, no matter what he can bring to the company. Mathematics is a distant distant second.
It would have been if they had shut down the offices, but they've paying rent and heating/cooling costs on completely empty buildings for years now because they hold out hope they can drag people back.
But inflation is over 11% since 2020. This isn't an increase. The average tech worker is making less than they were 2 years ago according to the Dice salary report.
Why do tech workers feel underpaid? Many companies posted record growth and profits over the pandemic, but still give out paltry 3-5% raises every year. The cost savings of work from home must have been enormous for these companies, yet none of that savings or record profits trickled down to the people writing code.
Meanwhile for those that have the time and willpower to grind leetcode, they know they can command a 20-40% raise every few years. It's not a secret that tech companies underpay their employees and bank on them being too complacent to go through the interview gauntlet yet again. Most devs will admit that they couldn't readily pass the interview at even their own company without many hours of studying and practicing algorithms.