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> After you have spent enough time in the first tier of the intellectual strip mine, we will make you an SDE 2, where you can do slightly higher level refactori
by dasil003 11y ago
> After you have spent enough time in the first tier of the intellectual strip mine, we will make you an SDE 2, where you can do slightly higher level refactoring for $150k a year, which will make the giant company $5 million. This is what is called an arbitrage.
I've been a programmer my entire career, and so my interests align with this ideology, but quite frankly it is offensive to call junior software dev work an "intellectual strip mine", and to assume a priori that your salary will return 10-20x multiples in value to the company.
The reality is that it is highly non-trivial to derive economic value from programming. You have to be able to sell something in significant volumes. That is the value the company is bringing to the software engineer. How much value any particular employee brings to the organization is impossible to calculate. Certainly the engineers will bring efficiencies that are impossible to get any other way, and perhaps they enable the entire business. But you can say the same about the sales people, the biz people, the product people; even the much-maligned marketing people may be essential to keep the revenue flowing.
There's a huge bias in any industry to overvalue your own work over that of other disciplines, simply because by definition you know more about it than what those other departments do. There's something I find really off-putting about a lot of abstract whining about how underpaid developers are. Sure, some are underpaid, also some are overpaid NNPPs, but as a whole we are doing way better than the vast majority of careers in the world right now.
All this is not by way of saying you should be satisfied with what you're given, but rather that you should pull your head out of the sand and recognize how the world works: you don't get paid what you deserve, you get paid what you negotiate. And negotiation is a skill you have to learn. If you don't want to learn anything about business and you just want to write code, then you should expect to be taken advantage of. If you want to capture more value you create, the first step is defining that value, and you can't do that unless you understand the business. From there you can have honest conversations with your employer on more equal footing, and decide to either stay or leave. This business knowledge will also enable you to start your own company with a much greater chance of success than the majority of startups with purely technical founders who start with a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality.
- gizi 11y agoIt probably works like that in the corporate world. But then again, most corporations today are pretty much like taxi companies waiting for their own Uber to put them out of business. The company of the future is rather a platform running on the internet. Any company that looks more like a collection of politicking corporate offices instead of an internet platform, is just a dinosaur waiting to get wiped from the face of the earth. The logic and rationale in things like Uber is totally different than what you have described. Uber does not "overvalue" the work of its devs. The essence of what it does, is created by its devs. Furthermore, there are pretty much no other departments in the business. These other departments are all just automated or outsourced distractions. They are not supposed to disturb the core business.
- mantas 11y agoLaw, at least in Europe, seems to be one of the core bits of their business too.
- generic_user 11y agoAny sufficiently large 'internet platform' is going to be a corporation. Complete with politicking corporate offices, lawyers, human resources departments, accounting, support staff, etc, etc. While there are some differences in culture the basic model is not much different then any other industry that relies on skilled labour or engineers to produce a product. Small startups can do things differently but once you become a 'platform' with millions of dollars changing hands investors and public stock there is an entirely different set of logistical and legal components that have to be taken care of.
- dasil003 11y agoWhat an interesting dichotomy you have painted: internet platform versus politicking corporate office. This is exactly the kind of myopia I was referring to where a software engineer thinks everything that is not tech is bullshit. In fact there is a huge range of ways to succeed in business, and while all are helped by efficient technology to varying degrees, technology is not the primary driver of value most of the time. You can bet your career that Uber leadership is spending every waking minute figuring out how to gain structural advantages to solidify their position—the tech is easily replicable and becomes more so every day. In any case though, you seem to be putting some words in my mouth since I never said anything about Uber's valuation of its engineering. My point was much more universal than that and had absolutely nothing to do with the corporate world or anything else. Employers pay their employees what they feel they have to. Uber pays them more because they need the best and the market is very competitive, but there is absolutely no link to the bottom line.
- generic_user 11y agoI think the big problem with this is that 'Philosophies' or advice should be given out by people who have extensive experience and a long careerer that stands as some proof that there advice is good advice and not the ramblings of self absorbed disgruntled junior developer.