With my last job doing SWE for a bank, I know for a fact that my code saved the company hundreds of thousands dollars just from one project, and I know for a fact that some of my other code oversaw over a billion dollars in loan volume annually.

And what do I get come review time? No salary change and a variable bonus. It's fucking bullshit. These motherfuckers are getting rich off my back and they don't even share. Even 5% of revenue split across my entire team would be a million-plus or everyone, but nooooooooo we cant have that now can we? Whatever will the pathetic shareholders ever do then???

Sales, Marketing, and GTM are absolutely generating 100x - 1000x their salary if they take sole ownership of a project like you are doing.

SWEs are good are solving problems, but other people determine which problems to pay attention to, and how much investment to make in them.

In many organizations, marketing is just asking customers what they want. E.g. ask a farmer from the turn of the century, they'd have said "I want a horse that pulls harder and eats less oats!"

They'd never have said "I want a tractor!"

It's Engineers that conceive of tractors.

They are the ones by talking to the customers and knowing what they need. They are the ones that know that one engineer has been working on a high power engine, and other on rugged, high traction trailers.

Purely engineering firms fail in the long run as they drift away from what buyers want and chase interesting things because they think they know better.

Marketers coming up with ideas and dictating those ideas to engineers is just wrong

Eh, it's not about purely engineering. Many businesses who are not related to engineering fails exact same reason. They only care about short time growth and loses. Happens all the time.

That being said: you are absolutely right. How quickly the externalities are forgotten.

I haven't run the numbers but I have the impression that "idea people" tend to flounder without a strong technical co-founder. In contrast, technical co-founders can make it on their own, though there may certainly be challenges in doing so. Those roles are also very different in terms of what you can hire in as early employees vs what absolutely has to be a part of the founding team.

Almost everything in a big organization is a team effort, but that doesn't mean you can't tease out the relative contributions of the different parts. And I think you're undervaluing the engineering contribution substantially.

Lots of successful businesses have been founded and run by founders with no formal engineering training. They all need some level of business knowledge, but that can to some degree be learnt on the job.

Then they throw it to engineering and either take the credit or shift the blame.

SWEs at FAANG and other top tier tech companies are at a completely different level of compensation. I don’t think they’re underpaid.

And this was ten years ago when this stuff was the hot thing. This myth that big banks pay anyone in tech well needs to be dispelled. I worked at a few as well and they were all the same.

Also different banks pay better or worse. Goldman is the top of the hierarchy and pays competitively with a mid tier tech company depending on your team and role. JP Morgan is second place.

The rest of the pack (BoA, Citi, UBS, WF, others) probably can't compete with most tech companies.

Start a company then.

Pay is not determined by value, it's determined by leverage. The CEO pays himself the most money because he controls the company, he's not going to pay anyone lower than him more than he makes.

Start a company then.

Or go back in time 40 years.

It used to be very common for companies to give a portion of the yearly profits to the employees. It was called "profit sharing."

Somehow that perk evaporated in the tech industry.

High frequency trading / propriety trading firms (buy-side) make FANG TC look like public teacher TC.

400-600K USD for 22-year old new grads. With 5 YOE, TC of $1M+ is not uncommon . If you do really well, $10M+ annual TC is possible with 5-10 YOE.

Even mid-career employees get fixed % cut of company profits. I’m not even talking about the company partners either.

So yes, FANG SWEs are underpaid.

Along those lines, the number of SWEs in FAANG are tiny compared to the legions upon legions of SWEs working at nontech companies where a 60yo staff engineer retires with compensation similar to a FAANG 25yo junior engineer.

The comparison is even more dire if you bring non-US jobs into play. I’ve heard a typical Venetian gondolier is paid more than an Italian SWE.

So I disagree a FAANG engineer is underpaid compared to the vast majority of their peers at other companies.

FAANG is an anthill, and HFT firms are a wart on an ant’s thorax compared to the Mt. Everest that comprises the legions of companies that pay far, far less.

Similar to other professions - engineering and medicine for example - we have a career which requires a dedication to constant learning.

We build systems which allow companies to generate billions in revenue and deserve a slice of the pie.

So do adjunct professors, and they're paid peanuts.

> We build systems which allow companies to generate billions in revenue and deserve a slice of the pie.

Capitalists don't care what you think you deserve. Their morality says if the labor market situation means they can get away with paying you peanuts, it's righteous for them to do so, regardless if you do things that "allow companies to generate billions in revenue."

The people who care about getting people paid what they deserve will play a tiny violin for you, since most workers have it way, way worse than software engineers have it now.

Unfortunately (in my opinion), that's not how it is. Given our reality, I think I agree with you that SWEs do deserve that slice of that pie. But I very much wish that more people placed greater priority on benefiting others/society instead.

>In all, it takes about eight to ten years to become a professional engineer, depending on whether you decide to get a master's degree.

>Doctors must complete a four-year undergraduate program, along with four years in medical school and three to seven years in a residency program to learn the specialty they chose to pursue. In other words, it takes between 10 to 14 years to become a fully licensed doctor.

I can't see any reasonable argument that engineers are intrinsically worth more, (and I say that as a person that dropped out of Engineering to pursue other opportunities). There might be fewer (good ones) than what the market needs, and this obviously pushes salaries up.

Most of the job training for this field comes from within. Hours, weeks, years alone with a computer. Nobody sees that, and you don't pay someone to administer it to you. But it's absolutely required.

1) Premed - 4 year degree + easily 1-2k+ hours spent volunteering, doing research, gaining medical work experience, obtaining LOR, shadowing, MCAT prep etc. This isn't optional if you actually want any chance of being accepted. Fail to get in and you're working with a (typically) biochem bachelors as a lab tech for $12 an hour and no upward mobility outside of grad school.

2) Medical School - another 4 years of pretty much nonstop studying outside mandated classwork and clinicals. Multiple large exams that basically dictate your entire future and whether you'll be able to match (ie. actually work as a doctor ever) along the way. A few thousand fail to match each year and invested 8 years + 250k med school + 50-100k undergrad to go back to that lab tech career I mentioned at $12/hr. Keep in mind those student loans are non-dischargable through bankruptcy.

3) Residency - 3-7 years. Family Medicine is one of the least rigorous and shortest at 3 years and averages about 10k hours of on the job during that time making less than minimum wage. Surgery is more like 80+ hours/week for much longer with 28 hour shifts standard at the start (minimum, better hope you don't have to finish any work at the end). Oh and don't fuck up because you literally have lives in your hands and face multi-million dollar lawsuits if you mess up after being awake for 20 hours straight on the job.

At the end of all of this and if you matched the most competitive specialties and busted your ass you might be able to make as much as a senior level SV software dev. Or you might be a pediatrician making 150k/yr if that appeals to you more than being wrist deep in someones bowels all day every day, or getting a 3 AM call to come do neurosurgery, or an urgent heart cath. Not feeling it tonight? Well someone is going to literally die if you aren't there within the next 30m- sleep well.

Despite the HN bubble, most developers go to work, do their jobs and go home and don’t think about “side projects”

Then that led to an internship in 1995 at another company and I got a job there in 1996.

I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since then. The only reason I have any type of open source presence now is because my current job has a very straightforward open source process that allows us to get approved to put reusable artifacts from customer engagements on the corporate open source Github organization (https://github.com/aws-samples) under an MIT license.

That means I am free to fork it once it gets approved so it shows up on my own profile.

> Or what about me who's a soon to be nuclear engineer, do you think I will be stagnant? Of course I need a dedication to constant learning too.

> I don't really understand what you mean to imply with your message above

Maybe you should read it again, because he means the exact opposite of what you understood

95% of that is chasing dumb fads, pop cultures, pointless shiny objects, technology fetishes

...and deserve a fair slice of the pie.

You're the operator of a machine that exploits on a planetary scale. You might be awesome at operating this machine, but you don't supply the actual value that leads to those billions.

Those other professions don't get paid nearly as much though

It is very easy to find someone else to be a "rater". Certainly easier than it is to find another software engineer

You can argue SWE wages are inflated but comparing them to someone testing whether YouTube search returns the right results is inaccurate and feels disingenuous

"Fairness" is a vague concept which nobody can agree on. It's definitely not as easily observable as, say, the marginal cost of replacing a worker

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1. This also happens to be a helpful framework for establishing "value", beyond the context of labor. For instance: how much is a company worth? The amount it would cost to replace them if they were taken out of the picture

A race to the bottom for engineers at the same time there’s ever-increasing CEO pay is gross. That’s the point.

I think finding a great CEO for the particular strategy and company is harder than we all think. (Yes I know the fault of the previous sentence -- it was on purpose.)

The situation is crazy right now. Engineers are not overpaid. The other jobs should have a better pay, while the CEOs should be paid a lot less.

If engineers are to be paid less, then where should the profit go?

IMHO the reason is because American tech companies are located in cities with insane costs of living.

If Silicon Valley wants to save some serious money on salary, bribe and cajole state and local governments to change housing policy.

You know who is really overpaid? Landlords. They are the reason everything in Silicon Valley is so damn expensive. I'd gladly take a pay cut if the "landlord association of america" would collectively take a pay cut of their own. That will make this place slightly more affordable.

You know who else is really overpaid? A good chunk of the healthcare industry. My healthcare expenses are by far my highest money drain other than rent.