3 ms·

I hire the guy that read the papers and know who to hire :) In an orchestra, the conductor is not replaceable but the instrument players are. Similarly, someon

I hire the guy that read the papers and know who to hire :) In an orchestra, the conductor is not replaceable but the instrument players are. Similarly, someone who allocates his or other's capital cannot be easily replaced very much like the worker's. Your engineer leaves there are 100 others ready to take the place. Business owner leaves you'd have to find a buyer to keep everyone going. This is different from a CEO funded by VC's where you are still replaceable but nevertheless a lot harder to replace than the cost intensive worker. Being on the profit generating part of the business and cost intensive part of the business helped me understand why such discrepancy exists-those who are able to read and perform in chaotic and uncertain environments will always be valued than those who directly affect the margin's as a result of the monetary figure attached to their time which is always far more costlier because cost centres do not generate new revenues. Your top sales guy makes $9 for every $1 spent on him (+$8) where as your top engineer costs $3 for every $0 he generates (-$3). tl;dr: revenue generators are king while cost generators are easily swappable due to the high supply of it as a result of it being a far safer and financially stable perception.

deepnotderp 10y ago
Hint hint: you're the most replaceable one in this setup
xapata 10y ago
Funny, I know more people who are asking about machine learning than people who are experts. So who is in high supply?
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  Machine learning experts are in higher supply, your anecdotal experience offers little weight. High demand creates a high supply which drives wages to zero.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    For the foreseeable future, machine learning experts will be in sufficient supply for them (i) to have wages which are considerably above zero and (ii) have the ability to raise capital from people that don't think they're commodity labour (it cuts the other way too: if an oversupply of labour in a field as difficult-to-learn as ML does arise, the demand shortage causing wages to fall is almost certainly because ML techniques aren't giving companies and traders as much of a financial edge as they hoped for...) Added bonus for the ML experts: in a lot of the possible areas they can choose to work in, their individual marginal contribution to the company's profitability is at least as quantifiable as that of a salesperson. In many areas of finance you can quantify the impact of an individual line of code!
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      It's not enough to hire a machine learning expert if you are planning on building out your own capable ML operation confident in competing against the best and the brightest at Azure, Google & AWS. You'd need a team of ML experts. On the other hand, it's easier to piggy back off the hard work of highly paid experts in this space now commoditized into 1/10th of a cent per application of an ML algorithm from Microsoft or Google or IBM. Commoditization is going to be in full force as businesses realize they can just have a junior developer to plugin IBM Watson or Azure than hire an expensive PhD student who may know everything under the sun but cannot compete against an army of highly paid experts completely under the control of a highly collusive labor market.
      - xapata 10y ago
        I think that idea is largely responsible for the decline of HP, IBM, etc.
  - deepnotderp 10y ago
    Karpathy was offered in excess of a million out of school, I'm going to assume that you don't know what you're talking about. Silly google, they must've skipped Econ 101 since they hire tons of engineers and are doing TERRIBLY!
deepnotderp 10y ago
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/requirementsengineering-140224082604-phpapp01/95/requirements-engineering-2-638.jpg?cb=1393238168 https://image.slidesharecdn.com/requirementsengineering-1402... Guess who's getting replaced once the VC figures out who's doing the work...
jzwinck 10y ago
> Your top sales guy makes $9 for every $1 spent on him (+$8) where as your top engineer costs $3 for every $0 he generates (-$3) In this case you should immediately fire all your engineers, your CFO, and your COO. Because why would you want to employ a team of engineers who are costing you money but bringing you no value? You should also fire your cleaning staff, who have never closed a deal in their lives, plus the plumber who most days dosen't even come in.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I'm glad you posted it because it shows how little people understand their engineer's financial importance. Granted, engineers are required to create products and maintain it. You need product to sell. But at the marginal level for every dollar your sales person makes your engineer is not. You might argue but the product is generating revenues but that's not what drives a sale. A sale is a function of value derived from the product and the price paid for it. Engineers aren't driving the sale unless the product itself is a developer tool. But even in that case the top level business controllers will always have the final say. In the end, buying such developer centric tool is about minimizing cost expenditure. There is critical proprietary knowledge and experience that is formed from a sales person that is driving revenues. Businesses do not want to lose the hen that lays the golden egg as they are hard and expensive to replace. Engineers on the other hand are easily replaceable and are expensive because they cannot generate revenues. They are not efficient when pulled away to a sales meeting from the work they are doing. Their knowledge and skill costs businesses time and money with no way to get it back directly. It must be sold, money collected and redistributed to all the payrolls. That's the main risk a business owner or a CEO is dealing with where as the engineer collects a cheque at the end of the month with little to no concern or exposure to that risk. Society rewards risk takers disproportionately at the corporate level. Even if it's tough to measure to the Board and investors losing a C-level executive is always going to be more impactful than a senior engineer who has far more workers to replace him as a result of being cost intensive. Find me an engineer that can code and sell, now that is a truly rare hybrid, a mewtwo, but it will still be more expensive than a guy who just sells (and does well). A poor salesman understands this better than anyone, his weight is worth the revenues he generates. For engineers it's the efficiency / dollar or output / dollar that they are competing against which is always headed towards commoditization and any business would replace them with an AI that can code if they could if it cost less.

deepnotderp 10y ago

Hint hint: you're the most replaceable one in this setup

xapata 10y ago

Funny, I know more people who are asking about machine learning than people who are experts. So who is in high supply?

brilliantcode 10y ago
Machine learning experts are in higher supply, your anecdotal experience offers little weight. High demand creates a high supply which drives wages to zero.
- notahacker 10y ago
  For the foreseeable future, machine learning experts will be in sufficient supply for them (i) to have wages which are considerably above zero and (ii) have the ability to raise capital from people that don't think they're commodity labour (it cuts the other way too: if an oversupply of labour in a field as difficult-to-learn as ML does arise, the demand shortage causing wages to fall is almost certainly because ML techniques aren't giving companies and traders as much of a financial edge as they hoped for...) Added bonus for the ML experts: in a lot of the possible areas they can choose to work in, their individual marginal contribution to the company's profitability is at least as quantifiable as that of a salesperson. In many areas of finance you can quantify the impact of an individual line of code!
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    It's not enough to hire a machine learning expert if you are planning on building out your own capable ML operation confident in competing against the best and the brightest at Azure, Google & AWS. You'd need a team of ML experts. On the other hand, it's easier to piggy back off the hard work of highly paid experts in this space now commoditized into 1/10th of a cent per application of an ML algorithm from Microsoft or Google or IBM. Commoditization is going to be in full force as businesses realize they can just have a junior developer to plugin IBM Watson or Azure than hire an expensive PhD student who may know everything under the sun but cannot compete against an army of highly paid experts completely under the control of a highly collusive labor market.
    - xapata 10y ago
      I think that idea is largely responsible for the decline of HP, IBM, etc.
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  Karpathy was offered in excess of a million out of school, I'm going to assume that you don't know what you're talking about. Silly google, they must've skipped Econ 101 since they hire tons of engineers and are doing TERRIBLY!

deepnotderp 10y ago

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/requirementsengineering-140224082604-phpapp01/95/requirements-engineering-2-638.jpg?cb=1393238168 https://image.slidesharecdn.com/requirementsengineering-1402... Guess who's getting replaced once the VC figures out who's doing the work...

jzwinck 10y ago

> Your top sales guy makes $9 for every $1 spent on him (+$8) where as your top engineer costs $3 for every $0 he generates (-$3) In this case you should immediately fire all your engineers, your CFO, and your COO. Because why would you want to employ a team of engineers who are costing you money but bringing you no value? You should also fire your cleaning staff, who have never closed a deal in their lives, plus the plumber who most days dosen't even come in.

brilliantcode 10y ago
I'm glad you posted it because it shows how little people understand their engineer's financial importance. Granted, engineers are required to create products and maintain it. You need product to sell. But at the marginal level for every dollar your sales person makes your engineer is not. You might argue but the product is generating revenues but that's not what drives a sale. A sale is a function of value derived from the product and the price paid for it. Engineers aren't driving the sale unless the product itself is a developer tool. But even in that case the top level business controllers will always have the final say. In the end, buying such developer centric tool is about minimizing cost expenditure. There is critical proprietary knowledge and experience that is formed from a sales person that is driving revenues. Businesses do not want to lose the hen that lays the golden egg as they are hard and expensive to replace. Engineers on the other hand are easily replaceable and are expensive because they cannot generate revenues. They are not efficient when pulled away to a sales meeting from the work they are doing. Their knowledge and skill costs businesses time and money with no way to get it back directly. It must be sold, money collected and redistributed to all the payrolls. That's the main risk a business owner or a CEO is dealing with where as the engineer collects a cheque at the end of the month with little to no concern or exposure to that risk. Society rewards risk takers disproportionately at the corporate level. Even if it's tough to measure to the Board and investors losing a C-level executive is always going to be more impactful than a senior engineer who has far more workers to replace him as a result of being cost intensive. Find me an engineer that can code and sell, now that is a truly rare hybrid, a mewtwo, but it will still be more expensive than a guy who just sells (and does well). A poor salesman understands this better than anyone, his weight is worth the revenues he generates. For engineers it's the efficiency / dollar or output / dollar that they are competing against which is always headed towards commoditization and any business would replace them with an AI that can code if they could if it cost less.