> do I get $10M bonus?

Seems like you might want to consider the finance industry.

If you make something important 5% faster, you bet you are getting a few years worth of salary as bonus.

The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.

That seems so easy to game. Do some small change that brings short term gain, bag the profit and let the rebound be the failure of another team.

Doesn't that pretty much describe the 2007-2008 financial crisis?

And every such crisis before it, and the next one too.

The crisis was 07/08, but the buildup was almost a decade in the making, does that count as short term?

the law in the UK is that material risk takers bonus pay over a certain amount (couple of hundred thousand) is deferred over 3-5 years and can be clawed back

Maybe the profit share is earned out over time? Otherwise I would agree with you..

If you think it's easy to game 30M in short term revenue, please try to do that in a large firm.

The risk/compliance teams would be interested in your strategy.

I'm a socialist/anarchist, they would never give me that opportunity :)

You could try this overall strategy in the stock market and see how it works out ;)

how do swe get into finance?

I see quite a few SWE jobs here in Singapore in finance, mostly realtime C++ order management. If the advertised salaries are real, they're very well-paid (300-700k USD, plus bonus).

First step, understand what Finance means in the scope of technology work.

i dont have a clue

The path of least resistance is to become a well known C++ or systems guru.

This can be done by contributing substantially to the language standard, a compiler, etc etc.

Or you could learn COBOL!

I think you would have to target the scope even smalller to particular areas of finance probably quant or trading within a hedge fund. The majority of jobs at a large bank are mostly fixed salary with limited bonus. There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate. For example processing transactions is essential for a bank but typically doesn't pay large bonuses in that area.

>There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate.

Isn't that strange?

Unfortunately not. Nurses, doctors, bin men, car mechanics, plumbers can all be essential at times but rarely pay large bonuses.

It's the scale.

One important blue collar worker can help a limited number of people at a time, usually one.

One line of code can affect what billions of people are doing.

Large banks can pay very well for the right software role, but there's so much more nepotism than big tech that it's pretty much impossible to land these unless you have a godfather in the industry AND you are a recognized prodigy.

>>but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.

System was designed by the people, more specifically people with ability to make decisions a.k.a management

There might not have been one person making all the wrong decisions. But more like lots of small wrong decisions, but it doesn't reduce the fact that it is management that is always responsible for the state of affairs.

> Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.

I agree that many want the stable and low hours career but how many people at these big companies are getting that? I mostly see it as a FOB farm and trying to overwork the overwhelming majority of workers at these companies. For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.

> If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

I don’t really see startups rewarding that much either. Maybe it’s more rewarding if you’re a founder. I’m speaking as someone who has been an early engineer at startups and gone public with them. I still don’t see them as that rewarding unless you’re a founder.

Also, incentives aren’t the same. You might make a great thing but unless you’re near the top - you’re probably not going to get properly rewarded regardless of how good your ideas and whatnot are. People at the top will steal credit because that’s what they do. (“Look at how good I am at hiring/managing/inspiring/etc.”)

> For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.

This is absolutely right. For every senior person in a glamorous role at a FAANG making $400k/yr, there are probably five less senior, less glamorous people making $150k/yr, grinding away trying to justify a promotion to the next level. The people posting to HN that their brother's girlfriend's nephew's roommate makes $400k think that's every FAANG developer.

To be more balanced on this, I don't think that many are making <=$150k/yr if they're in NYC/Seattle/SF and are in engineering. I think many are making $300-400k/yr but have a high workload.

Levels gives a clear direction that if you work at big tech as an engineer, you'll usually make decent to good income. Whether it's worth the WLB/PIPing/misery is what you have to figure out.

There's a reason a ton of the people at FAANG are all on H1B. It's not a lack of domestic talent - it's a lack of Americans willing to be worked that hard and go through insane hoops to get said jobs. (justifiably so btw) I think a large reason why most of the crowd at FAANG is way more autistic than average is because autists can put up with such insane working conditions/hoops. Either cause they enjoy it or because they just have something about them that allows them to ignore it. I'm not even going to get in on how so many people in SV are also on various stimulants.

Insane working conditions? At least at Google I'd say you have better working conditions than the sales staff at Anthropologie. They are not mining coal over there. Laptop class is indeed spoiled.

My hard-charging peers are coming out of the FAANG world with hypertension and/or type II diabetes.

So is the rest of America. Any evidence the rate is higher? Free soda and food may contribute I give you that.

This is oversimplifying too much IMO. Obviously the potential reward working at startups is much higher than megacorps, and you can very safely say that people working at startups have a higher risk appetite. However, plenty of people work 9h-12h a day (say, at Meta) in wish to get promoted at rocket-speed and play to "win" the higher TC at megacorps, and it happens often enough that very-driven people do join megacorps.

They are two sides of the same coin, aka culture.

System incentives,management,and staff hiring all form a feedback loop which sets culture and performance.

If you're lumping together all the big corporations you're missing my point. Sure size is a parameter but not precisely what I meant to communicate, which is more true about Google than Tesla for example.

A lot of people at a megacorp play to win, they've just realized that the company's value is so much higher than the value they could add to it, that for them, winning means capturing part of the company's value for themselves. In a sense the company becomes the market and their friends become the company.