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As a software engineer your leverage should be higher than near any other profession. This is why SV engineers are paid handsomely. Your productive output eclip
by offby37years 6y ago
As a software engineer your leverage should be higher than near any other profession. This is why SV engineers are paid handsomely. Your productive output eclipses that of any profession without force multipliers. Your income should not be based on input (risk, comfort), but rather your output (scale, value).
- anoncake 6y ago> Your income should not be based on input (risk, comfort), but rather your output (scale, value). Why?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- samtho 6y agoCompensation, in a perfect world, should be based on how much value you bring to the company.
- anoncake 6y agoYou did not answer the question, you just repeated the initial claim.
- oneplane 6y agoYou seem to be dodging the obvious: the "why" is because a company has no value when you are risk-free and comfortable because it gets nothing from the inputs towards you, only from your outputs. That doesn't mean it is exactly that black-and-white; your input and output are related. Then there is the availability thing; people with skills and experience are not easy to find so you often want to retain them at the company, and compensation is a great motivator.
- batiudrami 6y agoIt is clear that your perfect world and my perfect world are quite different.
- Der_Einzige 6y agoNot again! The labor theory of value is rearing its head out of the grave again! Oh no! /s
- MAGZine 6y agoBecause people pay for output, not input. They don't care if you bought a pencil from someone else or grew the tree, made the paint, etc all yourself. They buy a pencil.
- anoncake 6y agoThat does not answer the question. Why should someone's income depend on their output? Why is that the ethically correct outcome?
- concreteblock 6y agoWhy did you automatically bring "ethics" into this discussion? The person you replied to was probably using the word 'should' in reference to some other objective.
- anoncake 6y agoI automatically bring ethics into this discussion because I try to be a decent human being and actually care about the society I live in.
- concreteblock 6y agoSomeone said, roughly, that X should be like Y. You immediately asked them why this was ethically optimal. To me that seems like a non-sequiter. There is no reason to suspect that the optimization (with respect to whatever objective you desire, e.g. total happiness) of a large, complex, chaotic, system (such as a society) can be best achieved by using 'ethical correctness' as the only criterion for decision making. At least, that's my opinion. I hope that doesn't make me an indecent human being.
- xyzelement 6y ago>> That does not answer the question. Why should someone's income depend on their output? Why is that the ethically correct outcome? Because anything else is wishful thinking at best and destroys society at worst.
- offby37years 6y agoIf you need a hole dug by tomorrow and you have $1k to spend, you can either: - Pay one person ($1k) with an excavator - Pay ten people ($100/each) with shovels
- alkonaut 6y agoIt’s based on value but if my value is X and there are many developers who can do my job for my salary Y then it’s not X but Y that’s the pay. There is a scarcity of talent here too but in order to take advantage of it you typically have to actively seek higher pay. I just don’t want to switch jobs, it’s not that I don’t want higher pay.
- burntoutfire 6y agoI think it's just a story that software engineers like to tell themselves to feel better about earning more than almost everybody else. Meanwhile, there are plenty other "force multipliers", who are paid a pittance. Even a cleaner is a "force multiplier" - they enable people not dying from diseases coming from dirt - that's much more in terms of multiplying output than we do (without cleaners, everybody dies and there's zero profit).
- njanirudh 6y agoNo. Can the cleaners job be automated ? Yes Can a good/creative developer be automated ? No The skill you bring to the table is worth a lot more than their skill. Although everyone in the world is important, some are more important than the other. Its the Google that changes the direction of the world not the general guys.
- hbt 6y agobased on your output and how many people can also create the same output. that's what drives down the price. as long as other people are willing to create the same output for less money, you will be paid less
- benhurmarcel 6y agoSalaries are never based on any of those concepts. They are simply determined by how much it would cost to replace you. It doesn't matter that you generate billions if somebody else would accept to do it for less.
- yulaow 6y agoBased on this premise any teacher should be payed an incredible amount of money considering they are literally creating the bases to allow professionals like us to generate our "force multipliers".
- wreath 6y agoI absolutely agree that they should be payed the same way as SW.