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I’m talking about global dev salaries. Those London based devs can now easily get SV remote jobs and the matching salaries. It’s not that SV salaries are unusu

I’m talking about global dev salaries. Those London based devs can now easily get SV remote jobs and the matching salaries. It’s not that SV salaries are unusually high, it’s that most places artificially depress dev salaries. I think we’ll see the elimination of layers of over paid management with all that money being captured by developers.

benhurmarcel 6y ago
In my opinion the artificial bubble is more the SV-type salaries. Compare developers salaries with similarly educated/skilled engineers in other disciplines (mechanical, electrical, aerospace, civil…), you'll see that SV developers are the outlier. The reality is that on the global market you can get a good mid-level dev from a first-world country for half that price. And it's not artificial, it's just the market at play.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  I think you're underestimating the amount of investment flowing in to tech companies right now. There's massive VC overhang with billions of dollars more to invest than there are opportunities. Devs are going to capture a lot of that money. It's the tech industry that's the future, the rest have just yet to catch up.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  You are wrong. The revenue impact of more manufacturing heavy and device heavy industries is lower for those engineers - that’s just how the overhead of other engineering and biotech companies work. Software is fundamentally different and the revenue impact can be multiples or even orders of magnitude higher, in really any industry or company type. Software engineers, even in Silicon valley, are underpaid relative to revenue or profit contributions. Paternalistic and entitled employers in other areas have milked the opportunity for rent seeking by suppressing wages due to disingenuous cost of living policies for a long time. Finally workers have options that let them say, “no, I just won’t take your poor pay job. I don’t care that you think someone in Kansas City or Wyoming should earn X% less for doing the exact same job, and I won’t accept that anti-worker paternalism. Improve your offer or get lost.”
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    Employees aren't paid based off the value they provide, they're paid the least the company thinks they can pay to get an acceptable worker to fill he position.
    - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      That goes without saying and is already accounted for implicitly in anything I already wrote. You’re pointing this out like it’s a surprise or somehow contradicts what I wrote, but it doesn’t at all. The “least they can pay” floor is just being moved up closer to the fair level indicated by the actual contribution to revenue. Remote work just strips exploitative regional employers from their many decades of greedy free lunch setting the “least they can pay” floor much lower.
      - colinmhayes 6y ago
        I mean it also opens up the entire Indian subcontinent and anyone who doesn't want to move to the headquarters. Workers compete with each other for jobs, they can't really just demand their marginal value of labor unless they're truly unique. Remote work seems likely to lower the floor even more, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
        mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        The entire world has already been a recruiting source for FAANG for more than a decade, both remote & via paid relocation & visa sponsorship. People seem to think that opening up India as another source will drastically lower wages, but I don’t see any reason at all that this will be true - and if the reasoning is just “more supply generally means lower prices” then you’re totally wrong and supply & demand 101ism should just get straight ignored in this conversation. Hiring a competent and trustworthy software engineer, even at entry level, is extremely hard and expensive. For every 100 computer science applicants, maybe 15 are hirable, 4 are good, and 1 is sincerely worth it. You can increase the candidate pool but that rate doesn’t change. And if the sources of education and training are substandard in other markets (only a fraction of Indian students can get education or training on par with mid-grade or higher Western universities), the rate of acceptable candidates is even lower. Factoring in the overhead of visas, it is just super unlikely to result in widespread wage reduction. Besides that, there is still employer competition. Employees don’t typically bid on jobs by quoting lower prices to undercut peers, especially not in a collaboration-based industry like software. Rather, employers compete. A lot of companies would gladly double their engineering headcount even at San Francisco wages, if only they could actually find that many acceptable candidates. I admit these dynamics could change. For example if the fraction of computer science job seekers who are actually capable of doing the job at a minimally acceptable level grows much higher than ~20% then perhaps replacements will be cheap and common. But right now the industry is not at all like that. I welcome remote workers from all over the world. If they are good enough to get hired, then they deserve a wage close to their impact on revenue just like their SF or NY counterparts. I don’t fear this will cause wage depression for me one bit. It will give them access to better quality of life they have earned, and will make our teams more culturally diverse and globally minded. I think all around it’s only a good thing.
tiew9Vii 6y ago
> Those London based devs can now easily get SV remote jobs Is this really the case? I have seen an increase in remote jobs. Most of these remote jobs I've seen have a requirement you are in a similar timezone to the company's offices. Being in a similar timezone to your team is reasonable. Even though you are remote, sending a message then waiting until you start work the next day for the response, or not being able to schedule calls at convenient hours due to timezone massively impacts delivery. You can live with it, but it's not ideal. Being stuck on the other side of the world in Australia, this is currently my problem, timezones. There's an increasing number of remote jobs available which I'd love to do because the work no longer exists in Australia but booming in the Europe/US. However, the timezone means that companies are not interested, they want Europe/US based staff to match with there current team locations. On the plus side, as it looks like I will leave Australia because my career has stopped and going backwards even if getting paid more, I'll have much more freedom where I can move to if this trend continues, or I hope anyway.

benhurmarcel 6y ago

In my opinion the artificial bubble is more the SV-type salaries. Compare developers salaries with similarly educated/skilled engineers in other disciplines (mechanical, electrical, aerospace, civil…), you'll see that SV developers are the outlier. The reality is that on the global market you can get a good mid-level dev from a first-world country for half that price. And it's not artificial, it's just the market at play.

solosoyokaze 6y ago
I think you're underestimating the amount of investment flowing in to tech companies right now. There's massive VC overhang with billions of dollars more to invest than there are opportunities. Devs are going to capture a lot of that money. It's the tech industry that's the future, the rest have just yet to catch up.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
You are wrong. The revenue impact of more manufacturing heavy and device heavy industries is lower for those engineers - that’s just how the overhead of other engineering and biotech companies work. Software is fundamentally different and the revenue impact can be multiples or even orders of magnitude higher, in really any industry or company type. Software engineers, even in Silicon valley, are underpaid relative to revenue or profit contributions. Paternalistic and entitled employers in other areas have milked the opportunity for rent seeking by suppressing wages due to disingenuous cost of living policies for a long time. Finally workers have options that let them say, “no, I just won’t take your poor pay job. I don’t care that you think someone in Kansas City or Wyoming should earn X% less for doing the exact same job, and I won’t accept that anti-worker paternalism. Improve your offer or get lost.”
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Employees aren't paid based off the value they provide, they're paid the least the company thinks they can pay to get an acceptable worker to fill he position.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    That goes without saying and is already accounted for implicitly in anything I already wrote. You’re pointing this out like it’s a surprise or somehow contradicts what I wrote, but it doesn’t at all. The “least they can pay” floor is just being moved up closer to the fair level indicated by the actual contribution to revenue. Remote work just strips exploitative regional employers from their many decades of greedy free lunch setting the “least they can pay” floor much lower.
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      I mean it also opens up the entire Indian subcontinent and anyone who doesn't want to move to the headquarters. Workers compete with each other for jobs, they can't really just demand their marginal value of labor unless they're truly unique. Remote work seems likely to lower the floor even more, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
      - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
        The entire world has already been a recruiting source for FAANG for more than a decade, both remote & via paid relocation & visa sponsorship. People seem to think that opening up India as another source will drastically lower wages, but I don’t see any reason at all that this will be true - and if the reasoning is just “more supply generally means lower prices” then you’re totally wrong and supply & demand 101ism should just get straight ignored in this conversation. Hiring a competent and trustworthy software engineer, even at entry level, is extremely hard and expensive. For every 100 computer science applicants, maybe 15 are hirable, 4 are good, and 1 is sincerely worth it. You can increase the candidate pool but that rate doesn’t change. And if the sources of education and training are substandard in other markets (only a fraction of Indian students can get education or training on par with mid-grade or higher Western universities), the rate of acceptable candidates is even lower. Factoring in the overhead of visas, it is just super unlikely to result in widespread wage reduction. Besides that, there is still employer competition. Employees don’t typically bid on jobs by quoting lower prices to undercut peers, especially not in a collaboration-based industry like software. Rather, employers compete. A lot of companies would gladly double their engineering headcount even at San Francisco wages, if only they could actually find that many acceptable candidates. I admit these dynamics could change. For example if the fraction of computer science job seekers who are actually capable of doing the job at a minimally acceptable level grows much higher than ~20% then perhaps replacements will be cheap and common. But right now the industry is not at all like that. I welcome remote workers from all over the world. If they are good enough to get hired, then they deserve a wage close to their impact on revenue just like their SF or NY counterparts. I don’t fear this will cause wage depression for me one bit. It will give them access to better quality of life they have earned, and will make our teams more culturally diverse and globally minded. I think all around it’s only a good thing.

tiew9Vii 6y ago

> Those London based devs can now easily get SV remote jobs Is this really the case? I have seen an increase in remote jobs. Most of these remote jobs I've seen have a requirement you are in a similar timezone to the company's offices. Being in a similar timezone to your team is reasonable. Even though you are remote, sending a message then waiting until you start work the next day for the response, or not being able to schedule calls at convenient hours due to timezone massively impacts delivery. You can live with it, but it's not ideal. Being stuck on the other side of the world in Australia, this is currently my problem, timezones. There's an increasing number of remote jobs available which I'd love to do because the work no longer exists in Australia but booming in the Europe/US. However, the timezone means that companies are not interested, they want Europe/US based staff to match with there current team locations. On the plus side, as it looks like I will leave Australia because my career has stopped and going backwards even if getting paid more, I'll have much more freedom where I can move to if this trend continues, or I hope anyway.