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I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very larg

• duaneb 10y ago
  Developers are just another means—we're not wizards. We are a commodity, and if you don't recognize that you're in for a hard midlife crisis. Do you really expect to make any money without taking the risk of deciding what to build? How it's constructed is a (admittedly time-consuming and distracting) detail—only a small aspect of the company's value. Risk and comfort are tradeoffs. If you want to live without risk, you'll have to be satisfied with whatever salary you can negotiate as a commodity.
  • dudul 10y ago
    But a good engineer will have a say in what to build, not only how to build it. Otherwise all dev work could just be outsourced. IMO, the role of a good engineer is to deeply understand the business/domain to provide good insight in regards to what to build.
    • duaneb 10y ago
      > Otherwise all dev work could just be outsourced. The value of American engineers is their ability to a) speak english well, b) show up at the office, and c) swallow large amounts of debt for college to ease hiring. So I'm not sure how outsourcing plays into this at all. I have never before heard of someone expressing a desire to hire a product manager/marketer/sales/brand strategist/designer because they're a good engineer. It actually shocked me you would consider skills involved related at all. I would not expect this from an engineer, and it would make hiring one immensely difficult. That's more the type of skill that leads to starting your own company.
      • cloverich 10y ago
        > I have never before heard of someone expressing a desire to hire a product manager/marketer/sales/brand strategist/designer because they're a good engineer. Hmm, I'd heard that hiring product managers that were excellent engineers is very common in the Valley. Not as an exception, but as a "preferred" qualification.
        • duaneb 10y ago
          Hopefully they have some ability to manage a product, too. :) That's a skill that engineering helps inform, but a good engineer does not imply anything like time management, market knowledge, people skills, translating between designers and engineers, etc etc.
      • dudul 10y ago
        "I have never before heard of someone expressing a desire to hire a product manager/marketer/sales/brand strategist/designer because they're a good engineer." I have. They don't have to be amazing engineers, but a background with some engineer knowledge is always a big plus.
        • duaneb 10y ago
          Well, sure. But it's not their engineering talent alone that got them the job—hopefully that is not sufficient. The main reason it helps is to understand obstacles, time management, and communication, not because their job is engineering. Regardless, coding is certainly not a directly useful skill.
  • NotSammyHagar 10y ago
    A startup might make lots of money, but most never succeed. As a regular dev in an established company, I expect to make a lot, my goal is $400k a year in total comp, but I might only break 300k this year. I'm not the VP, I'm not a director. I'm an experienced dev in Seattle, I hope for $200k in stock, 200k in salary + bonus. I have 20 years of experience. As many people have said, you don't have to do your own startup to make a lot of money at the big companies. In Seattle, your average 10 year experience google employee is making $200k salary + bonus, and then at least $100k in stock. Amazon, Msft, Facebook pay comparably.
• gjkood 10y ago
  There's a common saying "Nobody ever gets rich working for someone else". I am not sure how much that is backed up by any statistics but the Bay Area and employees of unicorns or Google/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft/... may be outliers to this adage. Anyway the point I am trying to make is that as an engineer you either have the choice of working for an employer and living an albeit comfortable life (without any risk) or going it alone or starting your own venture with all its associated risk/reward profile. You have already indicated that you believe in this adage and took the necessary steps to increasing your worth and would continue to take the same approach in future. What somebody is worth is what the market is willing to pay for them either in salary or by investing in their venture.
  • blahi 10y ago
    This adage is used mostly by snake oil salesmen slinging get-rich-quick schemes. Working for somebody else is probably the best way to get rich. Putting a qualification here, rich is not filthy rich, but affluent to comfortably rich.
    • ktRolster 10y ago
      >but affluent to comfortably rich. What does that even mean? It's kind of rare that someone will pay you enough money that you can live off your investments.
    • dvt 10y ago
      Uh, no. This adage is very very true. Sure, you can get a comfortable six figure salary, but that is by no stretch of the imagination "affluent". I'm defining rich as making 7 figures a year. I think that's a pretty fair assessment. You'll never get that working for someone else (especially as an engineer), barring extenuating circumstances. High equity employee #1 or co-founder is the way to go. High risk, high reward.
      • blahi 10y ago
        You will get affluent in 10-20 years. That's my point. You get rich slowly, not quickly. And wealth is not defined by how much money you make, but by how much money you have.
• llamataboot 10y ago
  I hardly think underpaid engineers are the main problem with our economy. We could start by looking at, oh I dunno, teachers?
  • deskamess 10y ago
    Why not raise all deserving boats?
    • markonthewall 10y ago
      Sorry but the above poster does not handle parallel operations yet, come back for v2.
  • merpnderp 10y ago
    Underpaid relative to what? Oklahoma pays teachers crap, yet for every open position there are fully credentialed applicants willing to accept that salary. I wish everyone could make a million dollars a year, but as of yet the only fair way to set value for labor is a free market.
    • llamataboot 10y ago
      You're trained in something because you love it. You really want to do it, and you went to school for it, have experience in it. Someone gives you a choice -- you can do this for $XX/year or you can starve. The labor market is not as "free" as free-marketers make it out to be. I made a mid-career switch from social work to coding in part because of compensation, but it wasn't a friction-free switch. Also, my point was in response to the above poster who claimed that engineers were getting a fraction of what they deserved. By your metric, programmers are also getting what the market values them at. But by OPs metrics, I maintain that teachers create a lot more value than someone building another ad-tracker.
      • aianus 10y ago
        If you're doing it because you love it, then you should consider that joy/satisfaction as part of the comp package. A lot (most?) high-paying jobs are high-paying because people don't love doing them and they involve a lot of sacrifice. That's why they call it 'compensation'.
• zenlikethat 10y ago
  In order for this to happen programmers have to: (1) Stop shaming each other for being "greedy" when they actually ask for what they merit. I can't tell you how many times on HN and elsewhere I've run into extremely defeatist attitude about this implying that we should be happy just to have jobs in the field. As long as these folks are around shaming fellow engineers for asking for more money they will drag everyone else down and other folks will laugh their way to the bank at engineers' expense. It needs to end. Edit: See other replies to this post for great examples of this. Just because you get paid more than a lot of other folks, does that mean you're getting paid commensurate to the value you actually create? (2) To justify these asks programmers must shift from doing things like chasing the latest JavaScript trend to focusing on delivering business value first and foremost. Every programmer hire is a gamble that might pay off big time or might end your business with crushing technical debt and poor decisions. Until programmers as a whole demand that each other focus on delivering business value first and foremost the shiny new tech chasers will, just like the shamers above, drag the salaries available for everyone down due to their own poor decision making.
  • rozap 10y ago
    These things aren't mutually exclusive. If it takes 10 devs 3 months to ship a Java EE app that requires 2 full time SREs to keep running, vs. 2 devs, 3 months and a part time SRE to ship something built with ShinyNewTech, then you better believe that's delivering business value. ShinyNewTech bites people when they aren't intentional about introducing it and haven't done an accurate cost/benefit analysis. If you've done that analysis, and it really is a big difference in cost to market & cost of operation, then you're leaving money on the table by not taking that route. This happens all the time. The cost of rejecting new stuff because the status quo seems to be working well enough is massive, especially because the status quo at most software shops is room-on-fire-this-is-fine.jpg
    • zenlikethat 10y ago
      A good engineer certainly should know when to bite on new technology if it will deliver legitimate value but a FAR more common story in this industry is that whole stacks get rewritten for the new hotness with very little actual tangible gain to show for it. Opportunity cost of jumping at new tech when you shouldn't is much higher than the opportunity cost of the opposite.
• blahi 10y ago
  Sorry, but this is straight up proletariat bull. You get hired, you get paid. If it doesn't pan out, you go somewhere else. You have 0 risk and a guaranteed career. And sorry, but 100k for a javascript "engineer" is more than the "fair share" in my opinion, but it's a market, so it is what it is.
  • samsonradu 10y ago
    True, but it doesn't work like that in many parts of the world. I personally know Javascript engineers working for 20k just for geographical reasons and, like GP said, they should all smarten up imo.
  • DicksenZuider 10y ago
    Prices for goods and services are determined by supply and demand, not by what, "in your opinion", is "fair".
    • blahi 10y ago
      Exactly my point.
    • pc86 10y ago
      His point is that supply and demand has dictated that engineers who create $1.5M in value are worth approximately $100k. It works both ways.
    • damptowel 10y ago
      Yes... but only on paper!
  • usaphp 10y ago
    Can you tell me the reason behind you thinking that "100k for a JavaScript engeneer is more than the "fair share"? And why you highlight the word "engeneer"?
    • blahi 10y ago
      Because you can achieve high proficiency rather quickly. Contrast this with engineers who optimize compliers who need much deeper and broader knowledge to make decisions in their day to day work, yet have the same comp. How is this fair? Again, it's a market and it is what it is.
• samsonradu 10y ago
  > engineers need their fair share. They are the one creating things, they are the one on the front line and we should not get satiated by the crumbles we are left with. This, 10x and especially for programmers coming for 2nd/3rd world countries, whom are even more unaware of the value they're creating and settle with way less. Obviously, it's easy to say this and it often doesn't help you get your foot in the door when you ask for 3x the average dev salary around you at an interview. Key is to keep re-negotiating after you've proven your value, then iterate until you get the slice you deserve. For a company it's really painful to lose an employee who is already performing well, they'll likely give up on the margin to keep you on.
  • hurricaneSlider 10y ago
    We used to joke that people with naïve pictures of Africa in their heads, expected to see wild life immediately after stepping off the plane. I believe the image you have is somewhat more nuanced, but still could do with some work. We are very aware we are generating value which we are not capturing. I've heard AWS CT devs complaining about receiving less than half the total comp as their US peers. We just don't have much leverage.
    • samsonradu 10y ago
      I am kind of in the same boat, I also tend to settle with less. My point is to push that leverage to its limits, many don t do that.
• slg 10y ago
  I am a developer, so I am all for higher developer salaries, but your posts shows a common misunderstanding about economics. The value someone creates has nothing to do with their salary. Their salary is dictated by how many people need to hire developers and how many developers exist to fill those jobs or in simple terms, supply and demand. I might create millions of dollars in value with my code, but there might be another developer that will accept $5k less that can still create millions of dollars with their code. Similarly, the job that 95% of us do really isn't that unique. Sure, each development job has its own challenges and there certainly are a handful of 10Xers out there, but the truth is that once you get to the point of "competent developer" and the meaty part of the bell curve, we are all pretty much interchangeable. It then becomes a question of who will do the same work for less.
  • ISL 10y ago
    Agreed. In my field, physics, salaries are low precisely because supply is high. The work is hard, and demands a lot of training/skill, but there are a lot of people who will do almost anything to stay in the field. One of the things they can do is accept a lower-than-tech-market salary.
    • kenjackson 10y ago
      Yes... see game programming too.
  • zenlikethat 10y ago
    Have you ever worked on a project where management considered developers as pretty much interchangeable and added folks to the team that did more damage than good? If so, do you want to repeat that experience?
    • ktRolster 10y ago
      I'll say this: if you aren't writing code in a way that someone else can pick up the project when you leave, then you are being an irresponsible coder.
• JonFish85 10y ago
  This is really difficult to quantify, I imagine. Sure, engineers can create very valuable things. They can also create totally useless things (I am one, and I've made my own share of 'useless' features). I don't really see why singling out engineers is really terribly helpful in saying how much they're worth. An engineer can create great value, but if no one is selling it, is it worth much? A company without a direction can have great engineers but crater without good leaders. Without accountants, the money would be in shambles. Without IT, nothing would get done in a larger company. Without designers, user experience would likely suck so bad as to get in the way of the product. It's hard to say that engineers necessarily deserve a larger slice of the pie. As it stands, we/they're paid quite handsomely. But I think to try to make it out to be something almost mythical seems unfair to everyone else. Look at Apple, for instance. Without Steve Jobs, it almost certainly wouldn't be what it is today. Steve Wozniak is by all accounts an excellent engineer, but without Jobs' vision and drive, Apple wouldn't ever have taken off. Of the two of them, Jobs was the much more "valuable" by that measure.
  • cloverich 10y ago
    Though I'm not sufficiently familiar w/ Jobs / Woz careers -- I like what you're getting at. I would say that just like there are 10x engineers, there's 10x Product managers / CEOs (really, just 10x people in general). They are few and far between (or, I've never met one) -- but if you got one, I can't imagine its possible to overpay them.
    • chii 10y ago
      Except it's hard to identify the 10x'ers, unless you do it after the fact (i.e , too late).
• marcoperaza 10y ago
  I think you're unfairly discounting the essential work done by other people in any business. While we engineer-types are tempted to look down upon sales, marketing, legal, HR, and leadership as do-nothing fluff, those roles can be just as crucial to a business's success as an engineer's. Pay is determined by the supply and demand of labor in the market.
  • markonthewall 10y ago
    Most professions you are referring to are unionized and defend their interests as a group, if you wait for C-execs to increase salaries of its information workers you might wait a long... long time. They have a board of shareholders to respond to and that is just not in their interest. I am actually quite surprised at the devotion of some people here for their masters. It does provide a beautiful illustration of La Boetie's speech on "Voluntary servitude". I mean, c'mon, this isn't the McCarthy era anymore... people should not get thrown off because you pronounce the word unions. Ordoliberalism like applied in Germany where I worked a couple years provides a quite elegant framework to allow a local form of union so the workers' right can be defended while not impending innovation and regular market dynamics.
    • marcoperaza 10y ago
      >if you wait for C-execs to increase salaries of its information workers you might wait a long... long time. Actually, you wouldn't wait very long at all, since pay for software engineers is at all-time highs. If you're good (and even if you're not), you can come out of college into a six-figure job in the valley. I know people who work at Boeing and have to follow union rules. I want no part of that racket. Keeping track of every single minute worked is mandatory and working extra time beyond the allowed maximum can get you fired. It becomes a way for the mediocre and complacent to pull the excellent and ambitious down to their level. The union has repeatedly shot themselves in the foot by forcing outrageous demands on Boeing. Guess what the company is doing in response? Moving more and more operations to South Carolina and China. There's no place for unions in software, a field of highly-paid knowledge workers that have recruiters emailing them weekly. >Ordoliberalism like applied in Germany where I worked a couple years provides a quite elegant framework to allow a local form of union so the workers' right can be defended while not impending innovation and regular market dynamics. The United States is wealthier, more dynamic, and has a lower cost of living than Germany. Why exactly should we copy their model?
• refurb 10y ago
  A job's salary might be capped by the value created, but it's supply and demand that determine wages, not value created. If you're creating $1M in value, but there are only 100 jobs and 1000 people applying for them, you'll never capture the $1M.
  • ktRolster 10y ago
    If the supply/demand curve pushes the salary above the value created, then the job will disappear and that value will never be created. That is how resources get allocated to the most valuable projects. (Value of course is subjective, but here it refers to things that can be measured in dollar amounts).
• superuser2 10y ago
  If in 10 years, every high school graduate is trained to be what we now think of as a 10x programmer, do you think they would still make six figure salaries? Of course not! Value-creation may drive demand but it does not (itself) set prices - supply is in there too. There are enough programmers willing to work at current salaries, or they would rise.
• pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  since when are engineers on the front line? salesmen are on the front lines. corporate attorneys are on the front line. engineers hide in their fortified bunkers producing shit, so they can justify their existence next week by fixing all that shit... all while they create more shit. you want to talk percentages? how about the engineers take on 100% of the liability, as they are the ones creating liability. you're all idiots.
• PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  > Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the average worker does in the country but ridiculously to what they would look like if engineers were allowed to capture a greater (that is a >0.01%) percentage of the added value they CREATE.* As an engineer, I'd certainly like to make more, and I plan to negotiate more aggressively at my next position; but I'm honestly more concerned about how little most of the rest of the nation gets paid compared to the value they create. I don't like seeing my friends who work harder than I do--and contribute at least as much to society--getting paid 1/3 of what I make, just because they don't happen to have natural aptitudes for a currently fashionable skillset. If I could fix just one of those two problems, it would be the second one. I make enough to live comfortably. Too many people don't.
  • brianwawok 10y ago
    You could run a business and pay everyone above market rate. If you are good could help 10 or even 100 people.
• kwisatzh 10y ago
  +10000 I've always maintained that Wall Street is way fairer to its employees than the Valley. Most investment banks and hedge funds offer great bonuses to their traders/analysts as they should -- they are the ones bringing in money. Relative to the value engineers create for firms like Apple/FB/Google, its easy to see they see peanuts of that value.
  • dnh44 10y ago
    Sports is another industry where the employees are paid quite fairly relative to the owners. This is often missed when people complain about someone getting paid millions to throw a ball. The alternative is that the owners of the teams make even more. The other thing to note is that most athletes in America's sports industry are unionised.
• spbaar 10y ago
  Revolución. It can be pretty demoralizing when you look at it from that perspective. We really need to have a conversation that even though passion is important and great for quality of life, it can hide real systemic problems and inequities
• maerF0x0 10y ago
  We buy the line that value drives price from sales people selling their wares to us. Yet we do not hold that line when it comes to the price we sell ourselves for. @markonthewall, in the companies you start do _you_ pay your engineers based on their value or based on market rates?
• tptacek 10y ago
  If it was true that the output of engineering alone was creating that value, then it stands to reason that dissatisfied engineers could simply leave and capture something closer to 100% of that value. The reality, though, is that businesses themselves enable substantially all of the value they create through engineering. Google can't drive billions in revenue without engineers, that's true. But the Mets can't play in Shea Stadium without the janitors cleaning up after games, too.
• branchless 10y ago
  Your problem is you are labouring (if you pardon the pun) under the assumption that wages are set by a function of the value created. This is not how pricing works. Western economies largely operate by attempting to establish monopolies and by not passing on value created by employees. This is essentially the foundation of profits, otherwise they would be cooperatives. If you want to get into the true middle class (who should not have to work as they do not need the money, not the faux middle class we have now who have a reasonable car and a holiday for 2 weeks), you need to stop creating wealth and capture wealth creation by: 1. land monopoly to capture wages (like money moustache man who as 3 properties and write blogs about grain being cheap) 2. run a business that does not pass on as much as possible of the value your employees create, ideally by choosing an industry without organised labour This is not to dismiss all companies as terrible capitalists, of course!
• vacri 10y ago
  So the CxOs get no credit for vision? Basically you're saying that a developer's worth is tied to the worth of the company; that the same developer who works at a multimillion dollar company is worth millions, but if they then move to a startup that is struggling and then fails, they are only worth tens of thousands (or even zero). If developers were paid relative to what the company was earning, there wouldn't even be a 'startup scene'.
• Spooky23 10y ago
  Economic theory mumbo jumbo is a red herring. It's all about risk. You "pay" a premium for an FTE position where you get paid every two weeks, get someone to deal with your benefits and pay your taxes. If you create $1M of value, that's fine, but the check for that value may not arrive for a year -- or ever. But you still get paid. Engineers always talk about the money they save or value they create, but most of the savings are fixing mistakes and the value usually cannot be attributed to specific people. If you want to get paid what you're "worth", you need to be at risk. Either work for yourself or work a gig where you get paid directly for outcomes like a salesman.
• vadym909 10y ago
  Salaries seem lower today than the value add because some companies are being valued very highly. $20B for Whatsapp. $26B for LinkedIn. If you were risk taking and joined a no name startup early enough for a less than market salary- and it turns out successful, you do get that share of the pie. If you want a cushy secure job writing hr applications for a Fortune 100 company, or some code for facebook when it reached 1B users, then its crazy to expect a large share of 'the profits' as the company's profits are spoken for by the owners who bought its shares and they are happy to get rid of expensive engineers as the engineering prowess you are bringing is not required as much now.
• lifeisstillgood 10y ago
  If I have learnt one thing, it's that creation of wealth, no, rephrase that, the creation of a business that can extract profit from the creation of wealth, is the 80% of the total effort. I happily produce code that does a job. But doubling my skills with nested loops, debuggers etc will not produce double profits. This is because in most cases competent coding produces good enough code. Increasing my skills with architectural design, improving my processes mgmt (releases, testing) will likely increase profits because those are often left unfixed in many companies. Then improving my ability to understand what the ultimate paying user needs will have much much more impact because I will build the right thing And finally improving my ability to co-ordinate with others (a market?) will magnify my efforts again. I suspect that the creation of a business that allows and encourages all the above (call it marketing ?) is the key to extracting wealth. Not sure where that goes but it meant something as I types
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• tn13 10y ago
  Because Salary has nothing to do with value they create but what someone else is willing to accept to create the same value.
• aetherson 10y ago
  Wait a minute, it is straight up crazy to suggest that most engineers get paid less than 0.01% of the value they create. If you make $100,000/year, in order for that to be 0.01% of the value you create, you'd need to create $1 billion in value. You're off by like dead minimum two orders of magnitude, and probably more than three.
  • chii 10y ago
    Turning that around, a CEO is paid 100mil/yr, is he creating more than that in value?
  • Bartweiss 10y ago
    It's an interesting question to look at job and calculate how much value it would need to create per day or per hour to "outperform" the salary. Certainly it's a good benchmark in cases like this, where lone engineers are obviously not producing large-multiples of the value of their entire company. At a guess most engineers are getting paid >10% of their value created, and some jobs (a crappy CEO, perhaps?) are getting paid >100% of that value. In fact, I'm not even sure that >100% of value means anything is wrong if someone is undertaking a high-risk job.
• stevenwiles 10y ago
  What is it like being so rich that starting a tech company is something you just do for fun? It is my greatest goal and wish in life to have as much money as you and to be able to give myself more money whenever I want it. Do you have any advice for someone who hopes to have the same kind of success as you?
• hockley 10y ago
  If you want to get maximum compensation for the value you create, become a founder.
• PostOnce 10y ago
  What about the linesmen who provide the power for your computers? What about the road workers who make it possible for you to get to work? What about the African miners who dig up the rare earths for your components to run your computer? What about the guys soldering all this crap together? I bet you'd say the road worker creates hardly any value, but in reality the economy just ceases to function without roads. Or sewage. Or power lines. Or gas stations powered by truck drivers. Or a million other things. Developers create a portion of a valuable system, they're not water-walking god-kings. I know, I'm one of them--and my code is probably faster and more reliable than a very large proportion of that created in the rest of the industry, but I don't kid myself thinking I'm doing it all by myself or creating something that has a stand-alone value and operates outside of a larger system; we're all cogs and together we make an amazing machine. I'm glad I can watch Silicon Valley on TV instead of having to live around those characters. Delusions are detrimental.
  • blazespin 10y ago
    Coding is definitely higher value for sure, just as driver who operates a berry picking machine can deliver more value than a migrant individually picking berries.
    • codeddesign 10y ago
      Why a migrate rather than say someone who picks berries by hand? Vice did a story comparison on this and actually migrate workers worked harder and picked more fruit than Americans pulled from temp agency. But in your comparison, the machine would be of higher value, the operator would be of little value since it does not take extensive skill to operate - much less skill than someone working on power lines for example. It's all based upon geographic demand.
      • iopq 10y ago
        Anybody can pick cherries by hand, but a bad machine operator could damage it and cause losses to your farm.
  • 10y ago
• mikekchar 10y ago
  I probably shouldn't post because reading this kind of stuff always annoys me. Let's back up from the "OMG I'm getting scammed" position and see what a "fair" share for a programmer is. Let's say there are 10 programmers on the team and the company makes $10m in sales that year. How much money should each programmer receive? You might naively think $1m a piece is fair. But there are other people in the company and other costs involved. It is quite common to run companies with a 5% profit. R&D expenditures are usually around 10% of total expenditures. So $10m sales is $500k profit and $9.5 million expenses. $950k of that is spent on R&D, or about $95k per developer. The rest goes to paying other employees, real estate, cost of sales, etc, etc. If you find a way to reduce these other costs in your company, you will almost certainly be able to negotiate a wonderful bonus, but otherwise you really can't complain. It's just hubris to think that your contribution should account for more than everybody else's. Go ahead and fire those sales people. What could possibly go wrong. But you may not be thinking about sales. Because, hey, we're in "dotcom version 2" these days. Who cares about sales? It's company valuation that really defines "the added value they CREATE", right? Well, please forgive the sarcasm from an old programmer. Moving money from your investor's pockets to your own is an age old and proven business plan. If you feel you deserve a slice of the action, then by all means go for it. My moral outrage does not quite extend to your plight, unfortunately. You might be thinking, "I'm not talking about those scammy startups that are just pumping their valuation to score a big exit. I'm talking about the true unicorns that are wildly successful. Where's our cut?" Well, if you look at a wide cross section of startups and look at return on investment over a 10-20 year period, it is true that there is some growth. Let me be really clear, though -- you don't deserve that money. Let's face it. Are you going to take responsibility for the failed projects? Are you going to refund the investors when it turns out that your awesome architecture suddenly implodes and causes the company to miss its window of opportunity? Are you going to pay for those days when you were arguing with your coworker about whether to indent 2 space or 4 spaces instead of getting the damn product out the door? Am I going to pay my employer for wasting their time writing this ridiculous reply instead of fixing their sales system? OF COURSE NOT! The attitude that "All the success is due to me and all the failure is due to someone else" really bothers me. If you really think you're worth millions, then go ahead and stick that giant price tag on your head. I wouldn't hold my breath about landing that "no downsides, all upsides and BTW make me rich" job, though.
• gauruvbose 10y ago
  Pay=marginal productivity. There's a field called economics.
• umanwizard 10y ago
  Not sure why you're calling out California when developers there get paid more than literally anywhere else in the world, often by several times.
  • thatfrenchguy 10y ago
    Cost of living ? If you make 30k in Budapest, you will live a better life than with 140k in California.
• rebootthesystem 10y ago
  I think you are creating false equivalencies. There is a huge difference between the risk and commitment that an entrepreneur brings to a venture when compared to any other employee. Now, if an employee (engineer or not) participates with similar exposure they definitely deserve more than a salary. Maybe you haven't had a solid failure yet. I have. I lost everything once. And by that I mean everything: home, cars, furniture, even the last penny in my bank account. Everything. My employees got laid off and found new jobs. Their lives continued (something I was happy to see, BTW). For me it was a nightmare that lasted a few years until I was able to get back on my feet (through entrepreneurship, again). Everything in business in business isn't rosy. Businesses like Facebook that go from dorm to rocketship with hardly any struggle are pink unicorns. Most ventures have to slog it out and struggle, sometimes for years, before they succeed (and most fail). In this context, paying market rates --which means "only as much as you have to"-- is the fiduciary responsibility of the entrepreneur/CEO. Over-paying because of some unconventional criteria of fairness (that happens to be false) is simply irresponsible. Because of this and other experiences I am very sensitive to this idea that everyone is equal (in terms of salaries, responsibility, exposure, risk, etc.). That's not the case at all.
• avindroth 10y ago
  This world rewards people for the value they bring (supply vs. demand). The world you propose seems to reward people for the value they think they are bringing. Let me clarify. The world does not reward those who work the hardest. More pain /= more value. The people working might feel like they are bringing more value; a construction worker probably does more "work" than a white-collar executive. The worker may even be more stressed, physically and mentally. But does that mean he is bringing more value? Unlikely. This is because how effective you are has no correlation with how hard you work. I could dig holes all day, and I would be "working hard," but at the end of the day, I haven't done shit. Saying "I am getting underpaid" is admitting "I made a wrong strategic choice." Don't complain about the state of the world, but instead compose the right strategy moving forward according to the state of the world. The Dough of Idealism must go through the Sieve of Reality to create a product that realizes the idealism for as many individuals as possible. Have just the former, you are a lone idealist. Have just the latter, you are a lame realist. Idealism and Reality are both necessary to bring the most value to the world.
• randomThoughts9 10y ago
  I'm replying here but I'm trying to reply to the entire thread. - So you are talking about how much value we create and that we should receive more of it. - Then someone else mentions a lot of other professions that do that too: create a lot of value. - Now the discussion does a 180, forgetting completely the first topic: value. Now it's about supply and demand. Pick your measuring stick people. You either trust that markets work best and then you are paid exactly what you deserve, because you are free to change jobs and ask for more. Or you don't and think that a better system should be in place, but then it should apply to everybody, not just software developers, right?
• Taek 10y ago
  As a businessman, I'm going to find the cheapest way to do something at the necessary quality that I can, regardless of how much value it adds. If a faster database is worth $50M to the company, and one person can do it for $500k and the other for $200k, I'm going to choose the guy who will do it for $200k (assuming he's up to the task). It's all about supply and demand.