And getting into a tech company and having high compensation doesn’t require “top talent”. Just the ability to memorize DS&A (junior to mid) and memorize system design and being able to regurgitate answers to behavioral questions showing “scope” and “impact”.
It takes knowing two or three well known algorithms to implement the scheduling problem they are trying to solve and system design chops to know how to scale it.
But, as far as having to be on hold for hours, that’s a staffing issue.
Most of their issues are symptoms of poor management - not software engineers.
Like I said earlier in the thread - there are many bad engineers that are overpaid and many good engineers that are underpaid. On average though, compensation and quality are correlated. In the absence of additional information, compensation is the best metric we have to asses the quality of the underlying engineering talent. It also passes the sniff test - try using the Southwest Airlines app!
And it doesn’t take a $400K senior developer that can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls while riding a unicycle on a tightrope to make a mobile app.
How much do you think Delta developers make in Atlanta (hint: they aren’t making over 200K). Their app is excellent.
It never ceases to amaze me how little most people on HN know about compensation throughout the industry.
2) COLA matters. $174k in, say, Southwest HQ in Dallas is roughly equated to $422k in SV.
I don’t think COLA matters all that much. The reason SV pays such high salaries reflects the underlying higher productivity of those engineers. The fact that much of that income goes to landlords in the Bay Area is orthogonal to the underlying quality of the engineers.
Like so many strong claims made online, it's an overly simplified mental model for something that is much more complex in reality. Like you said, we need more information before making strong claims.