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From experience working with folks in Aerospace Companies, yes it is possible. The key part, and this is where it gets tricky is your cost vs value you directl
by aerophilic 6y ago
From experience working with folks in Aerospace Companies, yes it is possible.
The key part, and this is where it gets tricky is your cost vs value you directly provide. This is why most of those that I saw this happen for never got “high” ranking positions.
When you are an individual contributor, your value is directly a result of the work you do, you don’t get “multiplication” factors by making other folks more productive.
The effective consequence of this is that you are “capped” on how much you can “charge” for what you can individually provide as value to them.
To make this concrete, for a particular task, the value to them may be X. Yes you can do an amazing job and do the job as 5X, but they only needed X. So the most they will want to give you is Z, where Z = X/Y, where Y is some factor >= 1 + a factor. Note the Z will have to account for your “total” cost, which is salary + benefits + the overhead of having you in the company (managers, IT costs, etc).
So as long as you can have X >>> Z, you will always have a job. The trick is either making sure your knowledge gives a large X for your specific niche, or your Z is relatively low.
Hopefully this helps...
- travisjungroth 6y ago> When you are an individual contributor, your value is directly a result of the work you do, you don’t get “multiplication” factors by making other folks more productive. Software seems pretty good at multiplying the productivity of other people. It’s just less socially acceptable to take credit for that increase than it is in management.
- aerophilic 6y agoAbsolutely! Software is a huge multiplication factor. No argument there! However the point, which maybe I didn’t make clearly, is this: they expect a specific multiplication factor from a specific bit of code. This is the value X they hope to achieve by employing you. If you can do X in less time/lower overall cost then someone else, then that is worth paying more for. However, that X benefit they are seeking is relatively fixed. As a consequence your value is fixed. With management, there is much more variation. A bad manager will make a team of 5 produce the value of a team of 3. A great manager can take that same team and get a value of 8. This scales with how many people you manage/lead. Assume management makes a 10% difference to output capability. If you are leading/managing 100 people, the delta value is 10 whole people paychecks. To bring this home: think how productive you were under a “bad” manager vs a “good” manager. Whatever delta was there, you can multiple it by your normal team size. That is the “value” a good manager unlocks.
- travisjungroth 6y agoI still don’t get why you think that the budget for sharing productivity gains is strictly more bounded for software engineers than managers. I could flip your example around. McDonald’s hopes to achieve value X from each of their managers and that’s what their willing to pay. But a software engineer who can increase retention rates can noticeably increase the value of the whole company. And that’s part of why one gets paid more than the other.
- burntoutfire 6y agoModern software engineer is in most cases just a bricklayer - he just realises a vision of the business (product owner and his boss etc.). So, in your example, it's not the software engineer who increased retention rates, but rather the manager who thought of writing such improvement, and hired an engineer who then implemented it. In other words, the implementation is seen as a trivial part of the process, while figuring out what exactly to implement is seen as the core of the value creation.