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There are many people on HN who agree with you on this. It has a certain appeal to it; I know folks whose sense of justice is offended that some programmers ma

by patio11 11y ago

There are many people on HN who agree with you on this. It has a certain appeal to it; I know folks whose sense of justice is offended that some programmers make $30k while other programmers make $300k, even programmers living in the same city. There exist tens of thousands of engineers at AppAmaGooBookSoft who have pay packages which top $300k. There exist thousands whose pay package approaches $1 million. These are facts about the world you live in. I urge HNers to incorporate these facts about the world you live in into your career plans, including e.g. a pre-commitment to negotiate all job offers consistent with the knowledge that this is what the market is paying. You need to get out of the salary game and work for yourself or do consultantcy if you want big bucks It is possible to beat AppAmaGooBookSoft while working for oneself or running a consultancy. It takes a bit of doing, and isn't quite as straightforward as "get job; execute well at core job function; try to get assigned to really good projects."

pyb 11y ago
If AppAmaGooBookSoft are happy to spend that much on talent, why don't they let it be known, rather than complain about a talent shortage ?
- patio11 11y ago
  AppAmaGooBookSoft want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation. They want to avoid further repricing of their entire engineering workforces at once, as that costs (literally) billions of dollars. They take substantial measures to avoid this, including (in recent memory) at least two of those companies illegally colluding against their employees to avoid those employees learning accurate facts about market clearing prices for their labor. This also helps develop cultural norms like e.g. "We're here to organize the world's information. It is Ungoogley to collect a spreadsheet about Googler salaries. That information should never be organized... by you, that is."
  - pyb 11y ago
    Mmmm... it's not clear how salary inversion would build up, when I assume every single Mountain View Googler gets multiple job opportunities a week in their inbox, presumably with salary ranges. Having said this, I'm looking at this from a distance, so who knows.
    - prodigal_erik 11y ago
      I get a ton of recruiter spam about positions which may or may not exist, but they pretty much never specify compensation.
  - sedev 11y ago
    That "[employers] want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation" is one of the most valuable career-enhancing lessons a developer could possibly learn. I want to etch it into CS101 classes. Learning it late is better than learning it never, though. Well put, Patrick.
- hamburglar 11y ago
  It's not actually all that hard to find out. You apply and if you pass, you get a silly offer. It actually does happen. A year ago, I could have written the dismissive, "individual contributor engineers making that kind of money is a pipe dream" comment myself, but in the meantime I happen to have interviewed at one of the bigs and more than doubled my take-home overnight. And I was reasonably well compensated before.
  - pyb 11y ago
    Maybe not for you ;) The rest of us usually need a few weeks to prepare for these algorithms-heavy interviews. I'd rather know in advance if it's worth the trouble!
    - hamburglar 11y ago
      It's worth it. Don't worry, it took me weeks too. It really helps if you are the kind of person who actually likes doing the dumb algorithm exercises. I accidentally did something clever by interviewing at a handful of small companies I wasn't very interested in first, so I got to warm up the interview-question region of my brain.
      - pyb 11y ago
        I regularly hear these rumours, but the only actual datapoint I ever found is not that encouraging ... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aXboiWpvoOwJ:careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/103773/ios-android-software-engineer-google-deepmind%3F%26offset%3D9+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aXboiWp...
        krschultz 11y ago
        Check Glassdoor, Payscale, etc for better data than that.
        pyb 11y ago
jordanb 11y ago
patio11, I love your articles on salary negotiation and totally jive with what you're trying to do, but seven figure compensation for salaried software engineers is completely inconsistent with any evidence I've ever been able to gather. If you have actual evidence of this I'd love to see it.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  While people with outrageous pay packages exist, I seriously doubt they're your everyday resume submitters. The company has to want you to bid you up like that. Google has hired many industry luminaries that they want on payroll at least as much for their own PR as for the work those people actually perform; it's almost like an athletic sponsorship that way. I'm sure some of those guys make 500K-1000K from their "employers". In that sense, even if you're an employee, you still have to go out there and do something special and noteworthy to raise yourself to the level of a "programmer" that makes 500k+. I don't think you can demand more than 170K-200K in a moderate COL area (plus or minus as appropriate for COL adjustments) for being a normal salaried programmer, and you'd have to be quite good to get that.
- jrs235 11y ago
  I think we keep having the same misunderstanding in these HN comments. patio11 says "pay packages", not salaries. From my understanding there are loads of folks making $150,000 / yr salary with $150,000+ stock/options which means there are in fact people getting $300,000+ pay (read compensation) packages.
wallflower 11y ago
> You need to get out of the salary game and work for yourself or do consultantcy if you want big bucks This. Trading time for money does not scale. To belabor the analogy, vertical scaling (e.g. getting higher and higher positions in a company, climbing the ladder, high-end office politics) as opposed to horizontal scaling (multiple income streams, multiple revenue-generating disciplines, building your network) gives you no ownership.

by patio11 11y ago

pyb 11y ago

If AppAmaGooBookSoft are happy to spend that much on talent, why don't they let it be known, rather than complain about a talent shortage ?

patio11 11y ago
AppAmaGooBookSoft want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation. They want to avoid further repricing of their entire engineering workforces at once, as that costs (literally) billions of dollars. They take substantial measures to avoid this, including (in recent memory) at least two of those companies illegally colluding against their employees to avoid those employees learning accurate facts about market clearing prices for their labor. This also helps develop cultural norms like e.g. "We're here to organize the world's information. It is Ungoogley to collect a spreadsheet about Googler salaries. That information should never be organized... by you, that is."
- pyb 11y ago
  Mmmm... it's not clear how salary inversion would build up, when I assume every single Mountain View Googler gets multiple job opportunities a week in their inbox, presumably with salary ranges. Having said this, I'm looking at this from a distance, so who knows.
  - prodigal_erik 11y ago
    I get a ton of recruiter spam about positions which may or may not exist, but they pretty much never specify compensation.
- sedev 11y ago
  That "[employers] want few things more in life than for their engineers to remain really, really smart at developing distributed databases and really, really stupid at salary negotiation" is one of the most valuable career-enhancing lessons a developer could possibly learn. I want to etch it into CS101 classes. Learning it late is better than learning it never, though. Well put, Patrick.
hamburglar 11y ago
It's not actually all that hard to find out. You apply and if you pass, you get a silly offer. It actually does happen. A year ago, I could have written the dismissive, "individual contributor engineers making that kind of money is a pipe dream" comment myself, but in the meantime I happen to have interviewed at one of the bigs and more than doubled my take-home overnight. And I was reasonably well compensated before.
- pyb 11y ago
  Maybe not for you ;) The rest of us usually need a few weeks to prepare for these algorithms-heavy interviews. I'd rather know in advance if it's worth the trouble!
  - hamburglar 11y ago
    It's worth it. Don't worry, it took me weeks too. It really helps if you are the kind of person who actually likes doing the dumb algorithm exercises. I accidentally did something clever by interviewing at a handful of small companies I wasn't very interested in first, so I got to warm up the interview-question region of my brain.
    - pyb 11y ago
      I regularly hear these rumours, but the only actual datapoint I ever found is not that encouraging ... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aXboiWpvoOwJ:careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/103773/ios-android-software-engineer-google-deepmind%3F%26offset%3D9+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aXboiWp...
      - krschultz 11y ago
        Check Glassdoor, Payscale, etc for better data than that.
        pyb 11y ago

jordanb 11y ago

patio11, I love your articles on salary negotiation and totally jive with what you're trying to do, but seven figure compensation for salaried software engineers is completely inconsistent with any evidence I've ever been able to gather. If you have actual evidence of this I'd love to see it.

cookiecaper 11y ago
While people with outrageous pay packages exist, I seriously doubt they're your everyday resume submitters. The company has to want you to bid you up like that. Google has hired many industry luminaries that they want on payroll at least as much for their own PR as for the work those people actually perform; it's almost like an athletic sponsorship that way. I'm sure some of those guys make 500K-1000K from their "employers". In that sense, even if you're an employee, you still have to go out there and do something special and noteworthy to raise yourself to the level of a "programmer" that makes 500k+. I don't think you can demand more than 170K-200K in a moderate COL area (plus or minus as appropriate for COL adjustments) for being a normal salaried programmer, and you'd have to be quite good to get that.
jrs235 11y ago
I think we keep having the same misunderstanding in these HN comments. patio11 says "pay packages", not salaries. From my understanding there are loads of folks making $150,000 / yr salary with $150,000+ stock/options which means there are in fact people getting $300,000+ pay (read compensation) packages.

wallflower 11y ago

> You need to get out of the salary game and work for yourself or do consultantcy if you want big bucks This. Trading time for money does not scale. To belabor the analogy, vertical scaling (e.g. getting higher and higher positions in a company, climbing the ladder, high-end office politics) as opposed to horizontal scaling (multiple income streams, multiple revenue-generating disciplines, building your network) gives you no ownership.