> Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling.

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.

They didn't say internal doesn't add any value at all. They said it's more obviously justifiable with the product people, and it is. Given that total salaries paid per year is almost always small in proportion to revenue at a successful company, tooling cannot add anywhere near as much to the bottom line, even at the extreme where it reduced time to market to 5 seconds.

> even at the extreme where it reduced time to market to 5 seconds.

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.

It's not a knock - if you're not aligned with revenue, you're valued less.

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.

Infosec is generally in the same boat.

Yeah, but if you tweak an ad-placement algorithm or a UI that results in Google selling 0.1% more ads, you've instantly produced more revenue than you will make in salary your entire life.

No one's making a value judgement. The direct numbers just aren't comparable.

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company.

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)

That's why people unionize. Hasn't happened to tech yet, don't know if it will, but it isn't a forgone conclusion this is how markets have to work.

And when costs get to high, what’s stopping tech companies from just expanding their overseas presence?

The same thing that is causing reshoring: rising developing world wages, culture, language barriers, etc. If you have the necessary support in government, labor law. The defeatists will always argue against improvement of the status quo; they are not to be indulged, as their goal is not improvement. Only 30% of an org's workers need to vote for the NLRB to hold an election [1], and then you only need a simple majority to unionize.

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...

Yet every major tech company has large presence overseas already. There is no language barrier when your entire team that’s working on a product speaks the same language.

Also it’s not like tech today is mostly people whose first language is English - no judgements

It appears to be a frequent occurrence for proclamations based on strongly held beliefs to be made that something is impossible, until it isn't. The balance of labor and capital is inevitably in tension perpetually, and I am simply arguing for more balance. Success is not assured, by any means, but that is no reason to accept the status quo in silence. There is always nuance, and I think it's unhelpful in the discussion to say "it won't work because of x." But that's not a conversation. The conversation is, "here are challenges with the current economic configuration, and here are some levers that could be pulled to make changes where there is a more equitable outcome for those who are getting the short end of the stick."

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.

Going overseas also carries risk. It could be something as irritating as just cultural or language friction or as bad as a civil disturbance or war breaking out.

Never mind just the quality of workers available for the price you have set as the threshold.

I’m not talking about your everyday enterprise companies hiring one or two developers.

I’m referring to major tech companies that already have foreign headquarters just expanding overseas.

Problem is more that the contributions of an engineere are hard to quantify, so that 10M never gets compared to the 250k

Hah, no. The problem is whenever someone talks about pushing back, you can find at least one guy saying "ok then I'll do the job" and 3 people saying "I don't care, my 250k is super comfy".

Like others point out, it's incredible the US hasn't mass outsourced their work to Europe yet.

If you're able individually as a sole contributor to create 10M of value, sure, off you go, quit you job to go solo and generate all that sweet revenue for yourself.

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..

This is a deflection: the original comment didn't say that there was no value in other parts of the business. It said that the price/value ratio was wrong.

The other comment didn't give for why a 10m:250k ratio is wrong either though. The argument that the 10m is only enabled by the rest of the company is a reason why it isn't i 1:1. What should the ratio be? Why would it necessarily approach 1:1?

But you can't unlock your value without those other parts of the business. Again, as an employee you aren't paid the value of your work, you're paid your replacement cost.

…or form a union with only those capable of generating 10M/year and dictate that market together. Easier than starting a company.

I might join a union of all software engineers in order to help junior engineers keep from getting completely burned out or horribly exploited, but I wouldn't join a union of elite FAANG engineers. I'm pretty sure the $250-$500k we can command is the most we can reasonably expect companies to be able to pay, since there's a ton of competition among them to hire us already

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

Except Apple and others have already been caught colluding to stop engineers from making higher salaries.

And the courts put a stop to it. There were several cases against various companies over the years, but there don’t seem to be any since 2014. Did engineers salaries suddenly jump as a result 6 years ago? Is there any evidence of significant collusion since?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Steve and Larry share their employees salaries with each other to avoid a bidding war over top talent.

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.

Knowing the price of a thing is how markets work. If I want to buy tomatoes and a friend tells me a shop down the road has them on special offer, that's not collusion.We're not artificially suppressing the price of tomatoes. Anyway companies already know this by just offering a given salary and seeing if they get decent applicants. If they're not getting enough good applicant, they just raise the offer if they think it's appropriate. Having said that the habit of companies suppressing info about salaries between employees should be fought.

>If I want to buy tomatoes and a friend tells me a shop down the road has them on special offer, that's not collusion.We're not artificially suppressing the price of tomatoes.

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

You aren't really naive enough to think that just because a court ordered a corporation to stop doing something that they always stop doing that thing? Not only that but the order was only against some companies in SV which these days aren't even the highest paying or most desirable to work for.

But then some competitor should come and sell the same thing for much less money, which means that you do not really create 10M value.

That's why companies try and sell you their brand and/or their ecosystem as well as their product.

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.

It often works like that for people in sales or other positions that puts them in the flow of money. The get paid some percentage and the more deals they are involved in, the more they are paid.

What? Internal developer productivity tooling is one of the most important investments a company can make, especially at the scale phase. B tier companies give that work to juniors. A tier companies give that work to the most senior people they can find to do it.

Here here. I’m not a 10x developer but I run in those circles, and the best of the best are working to reduce friction for the rest of the team.

This strongly depends on the company. In high growth industries this is absolutely true, in low-growth industries/companies its somewhat debatable. I suspect that this is why software salaries were tightly correlated with tech growth for the last 3 decades. The 90s, and 2010s were great times to be a software engineer - but average salaries were more than cut in half during the oughts.

If you're doing tech stuff to replace some kind of human, manual labor then I think this applies regardless of your sector or growth rating. Tech enables companies to do more with less -- at lesat, that's the dream -- and I suspect that if the economics aren't favorable for tech they'd rather have cheap expendable labor.

We are the practitioners realizing that dream for our masters.

> Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them.

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?

> What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere?

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.

Good on you. I hope you do well.

well we all like to think we're the sole reason "the company" makes any money but there's a lot more to the equation than just the person typing out the code. Without the code there would be no value but the code is meaningless without all the other expertise required to turn it into bank deposits. The technical part is maybe 10% (if not lower) of the overall effort to get a paycheck in your hands.

Nowhere does my post indicate that I think I'm the "sole reason" the company makes any money. We are all just cogs in the machine. But, as with anyone who makes the product, we are a huge part of the reason the company is in business and it would be nice if management would stop looking down at us. Maybe they should be looking up to us instead. (And if you disagree, read into the tone of the article.... "techies"??? Ideas for paying us less?)

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.

> But they don't make the product

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'?

If their project is said product, then yes; because they are, in a way, architecting the final deliverable. And that recognition goes up the chain, in an increasingly diluted form, until it reaches the top.

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company.

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.

It's really not. Start-ups routinely fail to generate value and engineers get hired by such companies all the time. All that is needed is the belief it's possible the value will be higher. The reality doesn't need to match the belief.

But then the engineers at the successful company can't capture a significant amount of the value that company makes, because the rest of it has to go back to investors to make up for all the other companies they funded that 'overpaid' engineers and failed.

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling. Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them

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

That's how capitalism works, specifically delivering to capitalists the difference between the product's value and the worker's wage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus...

It can be difficult to remember that the system wasn't always like this.

I didn’t say it wasn’t how it works? Nor was I complaining, just pointing out that the sentiment is universal.

I work as a billable consultant. Therefore I know to the dollar the revenue I bring in in a given year.

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.

I have a colleague who left and is essentially doing the same work as I do, but is making about 5x more due to getting a cut of the revenue, but has a low base compensation.

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.

> Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now.

Do the monetary value of these cover for the missing 4x on your base?

I can't speak for the parent commenter, but I can say that in my case, I just found out that my blood pressure is through the roof because of bad exercise/snacking habits during the lockdown. If I die while I'm working for BigCo, my wife and kid will get something like $2.5M from life insurance and immediately-vested RSUs

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

My tip on life insurance: don't buy it from your existing auto/home insurance company. In my recent experience it's far cheaper from a dedicated life insurance company. I also got a discount going through Costco.

How far down the stack does this mentality go? My brother does fiber construction and repair for a major telco. I bet there's been a trillion dollars of economic activity conducted over glass he's put into place, but he just gets paid an hourly wage plus overtime.

Depending on the industry, this can be so true that at a certain point you start to wonder why VCs are even tolerant of companies with zero technical founders in 2022 given the obvious risks of this situation.

Do you think internal tooling is just a cost center?

This is what makes me feel underpaid. I see how much value I’m adding. I get a tiny, tiny fraction.

I didn’t become a Marxist until I hit six figures, but dang it I want the wealth produced by my labor!