9 ms·

The Programmer's Price (2014)

50 points by pieterr 6y ago

pjmorris 6y ago
How long before we get 'Jerry Maguire' for developer agents?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  They used to have them. I was a hiring manager for many years, and dealt with them. I hired a number of consultants. Nowadays, recruiters are...different. I quickly learned not to have anything to do with them, after leaving my last job, and dipping my toe into getting back into the field. My experience with today’s recruiters is a big reason that I quickly gave up on looking for work. I think that the enormous flood of substandard developers has warped the technical hiring process. There’s so much chaff, that wheat has no chance. Weird place to be.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    I'm in a poor situation and looking for work. I'd like to consider myself as wheat(ish) and I'm good at what I do. But there are a lot of of poor devs, and recruiters/companies are looking for... I'm not sure. Glossy CVs with major tech stacks, usually with Big Data or ML or somesuch. Trouble is, most of those companies don't have any need for this. It's plain line of business and basic data management they need but they're after more, more, more. Unicorn guys/gals. It's unreal. So I've got to stand out. And I don't really know how. Any suggestions? I'm working on a project that should show my creds, and I know they like that (and that makes sense) but any other suggestions?
    - xupybd 6y ago
      Solve real business problems. Got a friend that runs a small business? Got a favourite shop you frequent? Maybe you can help them by automating something small. Keep doing that. Get known as someone that solves problems.
      - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
        Last year I literally went round ~200 businesses in my area offering my services for free and sometimes more than once, stuck up posters in local business centres, did not get one bite.
        ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        I feel your pain. I really do. I'm not sure my advice is relevant, but I'll tell you what I have. I have a gigantic open-source portfolio. I incorporated it into what Stack Overflow calls a "story"[0]. This is sort of a "super-CV." I have an almost solid green GH Activity Graph[1]. The value of this is reduced by people that "game" theirs. I spruced up my GH profile[2], using their "hidden Profile README"[3]. I have had over twenty apps in the iOS App Store, over the years. I'm down to just a few, now[4]. I spent my entire career (over 30 years), shipping product; even my open-source work is done as "ship." I have written a tool that has become a worldwide standard[5] (but is now under the care of a new team -I hardly have anything to do with it anymore). I write a lot of stuff[6]. Basically, my motto is "Don't just take my word for it; see for yourself. I can prove what I say." I would have been happy work for half of what people with far less skill than I demand, as I do what I do for the love of the craft, and my retirement is set. That all means nothing. Recruiters drop me like a live snake, as soon as they figure out that I'm older than 40 (50, actually). I now make sure that my age is known up front, so that prevents a big waste of time. They don't need to give me a binary tree test to weed me out. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall (Story Format) https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall ("CV" Format) [1] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff [2] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY [3] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/managing-your-profile-readme https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/setti... [4] https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/ https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/ [5] https://bmlt.app https://bmlt.app [6] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany
        6y ago
    - nullspace 6y ago
      My 2c, with all humility. But, I'm not sure you really understand why recruiters and companies are not taking you. For any serious business where it's senior managers or founders doing the recruiting, they are not after the "unicorn guys/gals". My suggestion is to ask for feedback when you get rejected, most people will be happy to give it to you.
      - sequoia 6y ago
        Sadly your last point is incorrect. Most interviewers will not give any feedback because there’s no upside for the company and a strong chance of pissing the candidate off, making them feel they were treated unfairly or engendering resentment toward the company, or causing them to want to start negotiating or arguing, which is essentially wasted time. If you don’t believe me, start giving rejected candidates feedback and I think you’ll quickly see what I mean. It’s not fair but that’s been my experience.
o_class_star 6y ago
This is all nonsense, but I love how employers try to find professionals with 25 years of experience, who are somehow still under 30... who are willing to work 90 hours per week for barely enough money to make rent... and then whine about how hard it is to find talent. There is no "talent shortage". There are a lot of whiny, cheapskate employers trying to scam the government, or to convince programmers that they have it "so good right now" so they aren't able to see the exploitative nature of capitalism. Programmer salaries were amazing in the 1980s and '90s, if you were any good. The numbers were the same as now, but adjusted for inflation, $300-500k (in today's dollars) wasn't unusual... not for middle management or PM bullshitters but actual, honest-to-God, knew-what-they-were-doing programmers. You could actually get rich by working. Today, your only shot at reaching that comp level is playing politics and climbing a management ladder, or a "technical ladder" that is calibrated to be approximately 50 times as hard as the management one to create the impression that all these MBA-toting Directors and VPs are actually good at something. Also, recruiters have existed forever and most of them are optimizing for churn, but if you think that you can hire "an agent" as a programmer and not be laughed out of the interview... sorry. They'll say "It was great to meet you" and then hire an "unagented" H1-B.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I beg to differ with the agent part, given that that is the way most consulting works in Europe. Either you get employed by a big consulting firm, or get your consulting agent to find gigs for you. Naturally one can try on their own, but alone getting through the first round of RFPs is going to be a challenge regarding company assurances for delivery.
  - o_class_star 6y ago
    That could be. I know nothing about the consulting market in Europe. That's not a bad system, given that people who are good at doing work are usually terrible at going out looking for it.
BerislavLopac 6y ago
I might have missed the link in the article, but this is the company it is about: https://www.10xmanagement.com/ https://www.10xmanagement.com/
- titanomachy 6y ago
  They don't seem to accept applications, their site says they only take referrals from existing consultants and clients.
  - BerislavLopac 6y ago
    There is this form, FWIW: https://info.10xmanagement.com/contact-us-become-10xer https://info.10xmanagement.com/contact-us-become-10xer
nathias 6y ago
"The rate was significantly higher than what Bradley had paid the workers in Pakistan. (Offshore developers charge as little as twenty-five dollars an hour." This is incredible.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  what part? the $25? or $250? Even for 6 years ago, that didn't seem all that incredible. Big pain points with 'offshore' include timezone work, language and cultural differences, missing of body language, etc. My experience has been most offshore folks are afraid to ask clarifying questions, which introduces a lot of delays over the long haul, but makes it feel at the the start of a project like things will go great.
  - nathias 6y ago
    25$ I thought it was much less, I'm not even making half that.
    - square_usual 6y ago
      The $25/h is probably overall consulting fee per billable hour. The programmer won't be seeing the full amount.
      - nathias 6y ago
        yes, its still a lot more than I thought they are getting
        mgkimsal 6y ago
        Interesting. When I was younger (just starting out) I didn't have much idea of how much markup others had when I was working for them (as employee or contractor). I typically thought it might be 20-25% markup. And... in some cases I know it's that, but that has tended to be the low end. It's usually more like minimum 50% markup; if you're getting $50/hr from an agency, they're charging at least $75/hr, probably more. If you're getting $60/hr, they're probably charging at least $90/hr, and so on.
lordnacho 6y ago
Wow what a golden, glittering, graceful submarine. A lot of firms would pay 10x to have this kind of article written about them. The problem is that while I think some devs are better than others, I'm not a big fan of the superstar idea. The only area where you can even have indentifiably top performers is in sports, where you have a contest that someone is going to win, and you want to pay up for the guy who is marginally better than the next guy. I don't doubt that the Django guy would be useful for writing a Django app. The question is how big is the gap between him and someone who's been using Django for a few years, even without contributing PRs to the project. Do the thought experiment in your head of whether you could tell the difference between code written by one guy or another. For instance you are given a load of repos, how big is the set of people who aren't the original guy? My guess is you can find quite a few people who can use it properly without being the main guy. That's kinda the point of a framework. You couldn't do that with sports. If MJ or LeBron had had bags over their heads, you would figure out who they were, the group of maybe-MJs would shrink very rapidly down to a small set, and you would be justified in paying them millions. The other difference with sports is you don't have a fixed team size. You found a 10x guy, good for you. Now with the 999 other people you have 1009 people's worth of productivity. In a sports team, you absolutely want CR7 or Messi, you aren't splitting the pie 1000 ways. Music is similar. There's only so much appetite for music in the world, and a band is only a handful of people, so you can pay up for the top people.
- bananaface 6y ago
  Completely disagree with the superstar thing. Some developers are hundreds of times more effective than others even if you ignore raw output, because they know where to apply their effort. There are games written by one person that are more fun and sell better than games written by teams of 1000. Some one-man open-source libraries are used by ten people, some are used by millions. The degree to which you can control that is your multiplier.
  - cesaref 6y ago
    There are all sorts of superstars, and quite often they do things that don't fit this category. Ever been in a design review meeting where some junior guy who has just joined the team asks a stupid question, and an attempt to answer this inadvertently finds what would have been a very expensive to fix design issue? Now that might be the only really significant contribution that junior guy makes to the project, but it might have just saved millions, or saved the product, but I bet if you've been in that situation you don't find them heralded as some sort of uber programming hero. If however the exact same stupid question leading to the exact same problem was found by your super-expensive rockstar programmer, chances are that management would get to hear about how they had saved the project, and their lavish compensation is totally justified.
x0xMaximus 6y ago
Hi – I'm Max from the article (long haired guy). Happy to answer any questions about what's changed since 2014... Michael Solomon [1] still my agent, and 10x has stood by me throughout my career. While I've stopped doing consulting work for others through 10x, they still support my contracts related to art and speaking arrangements. I can't speak highly enough of how much they've done for me. I stopped doing contract work not because of 10x, but simply grew tired of working on, and fixing other people's problems. They were completely accepting and supportive of me to head out and build my own company (since 2017). I know their rooster of talent has grown significantly since then, and I would still highly recommend companies use them to get amazing talent onboarded without any hassle. [1] While you're looking into 10x, don't forget to check out the nonprofit he started https://www.musiciansoncall.org https://www.musiciansoncall.org which brings live music into hospitals!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- marsrover 6y ago
  You've got some good hair.
krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
> The rate was significantly higher than what Bradley had paid the workers in Pakistan. (Offshore developers charge as little as twenty-five dollars an hour). There are plenty of people this side of the Atlantic who would love to make twenty-five bucks an hour. Westoid programmers are hella entitled.
- flurben 6y ago
  Expecting to be fairly compensated for your labor is not "entitlement."
  - krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
    Why are American programmers so much more "fairly compensated" than Europeans?
    - etripe 6y ago
      Market valuation is based on perceived need over actual need. In my experience, European companies tend to think they need management types - middle managers, project leaders, etc - more than they need IT (of any flavour).
    - flurben 6y ago
      There are numerous reasons, but the most important one is that American tech firms are better-capitalized than European tech firms. Europe has the individual talent, but their capital markets tend to be sclerotic and risk-averse, and in the case of certain countries, protectionist as well.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Because we accept working for less :). Ultimately, if there are no other constraints interfering, the pay will gravitate towards being as low as workers are willing to accept (which ultimately is a function of costs of living). In a way, every developer that feels "entitled to" high salary is contributing towards keeping the programmer salaries high, so it's in our all our interests to keep asking for more, not less :).
gregsadetsky 6y ago
Hey, I see that Max commented here, but just in case it can be helpful, I was briefly quoted in the article and have also been represented by 10x since 2013. AMA..? 10x does stellar work - as Max said, standing by me, enabling my career, and helping many people along the way. 10x also runs https://10xascend.com/ https://10xascend.com/ , a salary negotiation service, which has been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494677 The “10x” topic usually brings up a number of arguments (do they exist / does anyone need them / etc.) :) but I do want to highlight at least one small thing: having a professional business negotiator working for you is life & career changing. It’s very easy for my technical enthusiasm to get ahead of my interests (“I just want to build the thing!”), and that’s not usually a problem when working for myself on an art or side project or helping friends. But some businesses will 100% take advantage — if given the chance — of this maker spirit that’s not uncommonly seen among some developers. 10x has always been there to remind me that it’s ok to both love doing the work and setting clear boundaries (and they will then help enforce them). Others here might have an easier time setting boundaries than me, and that’s great! But considering it’s been something I’ve consistently struggled with, I’m deeply grateful for Michael, Rishon and all of their colleagues’ work.
- vsareto 6y ago
  >having a professional business negotiator working for you is life & career changing. What are the things you did or the things you had that made that opportunity available to you?
  - gregsadetsky 6y ago
    At the time, I had co-founded a startup that had had an exit. The people represented by 10x are typically quite varied in the way that they get to do this kind of work. I've recommended freelancers that I've worked with to 10x based on their technical abilities and empathy/"EQ" i.e., people who are pleasant to work with & get stuff done.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Is there an equivalent in the UK? I was pitched a senior job pre covid by a hapless main stream recruiter and would like to see if a more specialist agency might pay dividends. This was a grade 6 or 7 Civil Service Role, Colonel and up to just below the Senior Civil Service BTW
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616952
minerjoe 6y ago
I've decided that the price of my time is just too valuable (to me) to trade it away for any amount of time. You only get one life. Yes, $$ could further some things, but the cut out of my strong years would never come back for any reason.

50 points by pieterr 6y ago

pjmorris 6y ago

How long before we get 'Jerry Maguire' for developer agents?

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
They used to have them. I was a hiring manager for many years, and dealt with them. I hired a number of consultants. Nowadays, recruiters are...different. I quickly learned not to have anything to do with them, after leaving my last job, and dipping my toe into getting back into the field. My experience with today’s recruiters is a big reason that I quickly gave up on looking for work. I think that the enormous flood of substandard developers has warped the technical hiring process. There’s so much chaff, that wheat has no chance. Weird place to be.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  I'm in a poor situation and looking for work. I'd like to consider myself as wheat(ish) and I'm good at what I do. But there are a lot of of poor devs, and recruiters/companies are looking for... I'm not sure. Glossy CVs with major tech stacks, usually with Big Data or ML or somesuch. Trouble is, most of those companies don't have any need for this. It's plain line of business and basic data management they need but they're after more, more, more. Unicorn guys/gals. It's unreal. So I've got to stand out. And I don't really know how. Any suggestions? I'm working on a project that should show my creds, and I know they like that (and that makes sense) but any other suggestions?
  - xupybd 6y ago
    Solve real business problems. Got a friend that runs a small business? Got a favourite shop you frequent? Maybe you can help them by automating something small. Keep doing that. Get known as someone that solves problems.
    - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
      Last year I literally went round ~200 businesses in my area offering my services for free and sometimes more than once, stuck up posters in local business centres, did not get one bite.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        I feel your pain. I really do. I'm not sure my advice is relevant, but I'll tell you what I have. I have a gigantic open-source portfolio. I incorporated it into what Stack Overflow calls a "story"[0]. This is sort of a "super-CV." I have an almost solid green GH Activity Graph[1]. The value of this is reduced by people that "game" theirs. I spruced up my GH profile[2], using their "hidden Profile README"[3]. I have had over twenty apps in the iOS App Store, over the years. I'm down to just a few, now[4]. I spent my entire career (over 30 years), shipping product; even my open-source work is done as "ship." I have written a tool that has become a worldwide standard[5] (but is now under the care of a new team -I hardly have anything to do with it anymore). I write a lot of stuff[6]. Basically, my motto is "Don't just take my word for it; see for yourself. I can prove what I say." I would have been happy work for half of what people with far less skill than I demand, as I do what I do for the love of the craft, and my retirement is set. That all means nothing. Recruiters drop me like a live snake, as soon as they figure out that I'm older than 40 (50, actually). I now make sure that my age is known up front, so that prevents a big waste of time. They don't need to give me a binary tree test to weed me out. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall (Story Format) https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/cv/chrismarshall ("CV" Format) [1] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff [2] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY [3] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/managing-your-profile-readme https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/setti... [4] https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/ https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/ [5] https://bmlt.app https://bmlt.app [6] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany
        6y ago
  - nullspace 6y ago
    My 2c, with all humility. But, I'm not sure you really understand why recruiters and companies are not taking you. For any serious business where it's senior managers or founders doing the recruiting, they are not after the "unicorn guys/gals". My suggestion is to ask for feedback when you get rejected, most people will be happy to give it to you.
    - sequoia 6y ago
      Sadly your last point is incorrect. Most interviewers will not give any feedback because there’s no upside for the company and a strong chance of pissing the candidate off, making them feel they were treated unfairly or engendering resentment toward the company, or causing them to want to start negotiating or arguing, which is essentially wasted time. If you don’t believe me, start giving rejected candidates feedback and I think you’ll quickly see what I mean. It’s not fair but that’s been my experience.

o_class_star 6y ago

This is all nonsense, but I love how employers try to find professionals with 25 years of experience, who are somehow still under 30... who are willing to work 90 hours per week for barely enough money to make rent... and then whine about how hard it is to find talent. There is no "talent shortage". There are a lot of whiny, cheapskate employers trying to scam the government, or to convince programmers that they have it "so good right now" so they aren't able to see the exploitative nature of capitalism. Programmer salaries were amazing in the 1980s and '90s, if you were any good. The numbers were the same as now, but adjusted for inflation, $300-500k (in today's dollars) wasn't unusual... not for middle management or PM bullshitters but actual, honest-to-God, knew-what-they-were-doing programmers. You could actually get rich by working. Today, your only shot at reaching that comp level is playing politics and climbing a management ladder, or a "technical ladder" that is calibrated to be approximately 50 times as hard as the management one to create the impression that all these MBA-toting Directors and VPs are actually good at something. Also, recruiters have existed forever and most of them are optimizing for churn, but if you think that you can hire "an agent" as a programmer and not be laughed out of the interview... sorry. They'll say "It was great to meet you" and then hire an "unagented" H1-B.

pjmlp 6y ago
I beg to differ with the agent part, given that that is the way most consulting works in Europe. Either you get employed by a big consulting firm, or get your consulting agent to find gigs for you. Naturally one can try on their own, but alone getting through the first round of RFPs is going to be a challenge regarding company assurances for delivery.
- o_class_star 6y ago
  That could be. I know nothing about the consulting market in Europe. That's not a bad system, given that people who are good at doing work are usually terrible at going out looking for it.

BerislavLopac 6y ago

I might have missed the link in the article, but this is the company it is about: https://www.10xmanagement.com/ https://www.10xmanagement.com/

titanomachy 6y ago
They don't seem to accept applications, their site says they only take referrals from existing consultants and clients.
- BerislavLopac 6y ago
  There is this form, FWIW: https://info.10xmanagement.com/contact-us-become-10xer https://info.10xmanagement.com/contact-us-become-10xer

nathias 6y ago

"The rate was significantly higher than what Bradley had paid the workers in Pakistan. (Offshore developers charge as little as twenty-five dollars an hour." This is incredible.

mgkimsal 6y ago
what part? the $25? or $250? Even for 6 years ago, that didn't seem all that incredible. Big pain points with 'offshore' include timezone work, language and cultural differences, missing of body language, etc. My experience has been most offshore folks are afraid to ask clarifying questions, which introduces a lot of delays over the long haul, but makes it feel at the the start of a project like things will go great.
- nathias 6y ago
  25$ I thought it was much less, I'm not even making half that.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    The $25/h is probably overall consulting fee per billable hour. The programmer won't be seeing the full amount.
    - nathias 6y ago
      yes, its still a lot more than I thought they are getting
      - mgkimsal 6y ago
        Interesting. When I was younger (just starting out) I didn't have much idea of how much markup others had when I was working for them (as employee or contractor). I typically thought it might be 20-25% markup. And... in some cases I know it's that, but that has tended to be the low end. It's usually more like minimum 50% markup; if you're getting $50/hr from an agency, they're charging at least $75/hr, probably more. If you're getting $60/hr, they're probably charging at least $90/hr, and so on.

lordnacho 6y ago

Wow what a golden, glittering, graceful submarine. A lot of firms would pay 10x to have this kind of article written about them. The problem is that while I think some devs are better than others, I'm not a big fan of the superstar idea. The only area where you can even have indentifiably top performers is in sports, where you have a contest that someone is going to win, and you want to pay up for the guy who is marginally better than the next guy. I don't doubt that the Django guy would be useful for writing a Django app. The question is how big is the gap between him and someone who's been using Django for a few years, even without contributing PRs to the project. Do the thought experiment in your head of whether you could tell the difference between code written by one guy or another. For instance you are given a load of repos, how big is the set of people who aren't the original guy? My guess is you can find quite a few people who can use it properly without being the main guy. That's kinda the point of a framework. You couldn't do that with sports. If MJ or LeBron had had bags over their heads, you would figure out who they were, the group of maybe-MJs would shrink very rapidly down to a small set, and you would be justified in paying them millions. The other difference with sports is you don't have a fixed team size. You found a 10x guy, good for you. Now with the 999 other people you have 1009 people's worth of productivity. In a sports team, you absolutely want CR7 or Messi, you aren't splitting the pie 1000 ways. Music is similar. There's only so much appetite for music in the world, and a band is only a handful of people, so you can pay up for the top people.

bananaface 6y ago
Completely disagree with the superstar thing. Some developers are hundreds of times more effective than others even if you ignore raw output, because they know where to apply their effort. There are games written by one person that are more fun and sell better than games written by teams of 1000. Some one-man open-source libraries are used by ten people, some are used by millions. The degree to which you can control that is your multiplier.
- cesaref 6y ago
  There are all sorts of superstars, and quite often they do things that don't fit this category. Ever been in a design review meeting where some junior guy who has just joined the team asks a stupid question, and an attempt to answer this inadvertently finds what would have been a very expensive to fix design issue? Now that might be the only really significant contribution that junior guy makes to the project, but it might have just saved millions, or saved the product, but I bet if you've been in that situation you don't find them heralded as some sort of uber programming hero. If however the exact same stupid question leading to the exact same problem was found by your super-expensive rockstar programmer, chances are that management would get to hear about how they had saved the project, and their lavish compensation is totally justified.

x0xMaximus 6y ago

Hi – I'm Max from the article (long haired guy). Happy to answer any questions about what's changed since 2014... Michael Solomon [1] still my agent, and 10x has stood by me throughout my career. While I've stopped doing consulting work for others through 10x, they still support my contracts related to art and speaking arrangements. I can't speak highly enough of how much they've done for me. I stopped doing contract work not because of 10x, but simply grew tired of working on, and fixing other people's problems. They were completely accepting and supportive of me to head out and build my own company (since 2017). I know their rooster of talent has grown significantly since then, and I would still highly recommend companies use them to get amazing talent onboarded without any hassle. [1] While you're looking into 10x, don't forget to check out the nonprofit he started https://www.musiciansoncall.org https://www.musiciansoncall.org which brings live music into hospitals!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
marsrover 6y ago
You've got some good hair.

krebs_liebhaber 6y ago

> The rate was significantly higher than what Bradley had paid the workers in Pakistan. (Offshore developers charge as little as twenty-five dollars an hour). There are plenty of people this side of the Atlantic who would love to make twenty-five bucks an hour. Westoid programmers are hella entitled.

flurben 6y ago
Expecting to be fairly compensated for your labor is not "entitlement."
- krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
  Why are American programmers so much more "fairly compensated" than Europeans?
  - etripe 6y ago
    Market valuation is based on perceived need over actual need. In my experience, European companies tend to think they need management types - middle managers, project leaders, etc - more than they need IT (of any flavour).
  - flurben 6y ago
    There are numerous reasons, but the most important one is that American tech firms are better-capitalized than European tech firms. Europe has the individual talent, but their capital markets tend to be sclerotic and risk-averse, and in the case of certain countries, protectionist as well.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Because we accept working for less :). Ultimately, if there are no other constraints interfering, the pay will gravitate towards being as low as workers are willing to accept (which ultimately is a function of costs of living). In a way, every developer that feels "entitled to" high salary is contributing towards keeping the programmer salaries high, so it's in our all our interests to keep asking for more, not less :).

gregsadetsky 6y ago

Hey, I see that Max commented here, but just in case it can be helpful, I was briefly quoted in the article and have also been represented by 10x since 2013. AMA..? 10x does stellar work - as Max said, standing by me, enabling my career, and helping many people along the way. 10x also runs https://10xascend.com/ https://10xascend.com/ , a salary negotiation service, which has been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494677 The “10x” topic usually brings up a number of arguments (do they exist / does anyone need them / etc.) :) but I do want to highlight at least one small thing: having a professional business negotiator working for you is life & career changing. It’s very easy for my technical enthusiasm to get ahead of my interests (“I just want to build the thing!”), and that’s not usually a problem when working for myself on an art or side project or helping friends. But some businesses will 100% take advantage — if given the chance — of this maker spirit that’s not uncommonly seen among some developers. 10x has always been there to remind me that it’s ok to both love doing the work and setting clear boundaries (and they will then help enforce them). Others here might have an easier time setting boundaries than me, and that’s great! But considering it’s been something I’ve consistently struggled with, I’m deeply grateful for Michael, Rishon and all of their colleagues’ work.

vsareto 6y ago
>having a professional business negotiator working for you is life & career changing. What are the things you did or the things you had that made that opportunity available to you?
- gregsadetsky 6y ago
  At the time, I had co-founded a startup that had had an exit. The people represented by 10x are typically quite varied in the way that they get to do this kind of work. I've recommended freelancers that I've worked with to 10x based on their technical abilities and empathy/"EQ" i.e., people who are pleasant to work with & get stuff done.
C1sc0cat 6y ago
Is there an equivalent in the UK? I was pitched a senior job pre covid by a hapless main stream recruiter and would like to see if a more specialist agency might pay dividends. This was a grade 6 or 7 Civil Service Role, Colonel and up to just below the Senior Civil Service BTW

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8616952

minerjoe 6y ago

I've decided that the price of my time is just too valuable (to me) to trade it away for any amount of time. You only get one life. Yes, $$ could further some things, but the cut out of my strong years would never come back for any reason.