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> Not sure why you think FAANG is getting the cream of the crop. The best coders can demand the highest salary. If you can afford to pay the highest salary you

> Not sure why you think FAANG is getting the cream of the crop. The best coders can demand the highest salary. If you can afford to pay the highest salary you are in an advanced position position to get the best coders. FAANG can afford to pay the highest salary. Anecdotal evidence to the contrary does not cancel this mechanism.

johbjo 6y ago
> The best coders can demand the highest salary. How would you confirm this with data?
- tnel77 6y ago
  I’m not sure how you confirm this, but I don’t see how it’s not true. Do you (or other people on this thread) genuinely believe that the best software engineers aren’t demanding the best salaries? Who doesn’t want to make more money given the opportunity?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >Who doesn’t want to make more money given the opportunity? Tons of people remain at jobs they enjoy/companies they like even if they suspect they could probably get a better offer elsewhere. There are plenty of people elsewhere in the country who aren't interested in moving to Silicon Valley and working for one of the large firms. More generally there's probably some relation between quality (which is an elusive variable to measure and can be dependent on managers/teams/etc.) and salary--but it's far from a perfect correlation.
    - brandall10 6y ago
      The FAANGs, and I figure about a couple dozen other major tech companies paying similar comp levels, now have offices spread out across the country. You won’t make as much in say Austin or Denver, but it will still be dramatically better than other local options.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        >The FAANGs, and I figure about a couple dozen other major tech companies paying similar comp levels I'm skeptical about the couple dozen. There are a bunch of reasons someone may choose not to work for Facebook or Google. But all the anecdotal information I see--including the migration of people from and to jobs--suggests to me that it's hard for most companies to outbid FAANG (and probably a few other smaller companies) in general.
        brandall10 6y ago
        Just go to levels.fyi and see what people are reporting per company and region, and of course what is discussed on blind if you're familiar with that. Maybe not outbid but coming within 10-15%, which is going to be dramatically better than other regional options. By these other companies, I mean more established ones like Linked In or pre-IPO like Slack/Stripe. There are quite a few of them and they are indeed competing with FAANGs for talent. But the FAANGs are going to have larger national spread. My point is, if someone lives in a 2nd tier tech hub they should have a handful options to make dramatically more than average from one of these companies; but the interviews are tough and whether or not they want to have a conversation in the first place are gating factors.
      - anaerobicover 6y ago
        When we're discussing high salaries there should probably only be one 'A' in the initialism. Apple famously does not have particularly high salaries for engineers. Even if they're above industry average, they're nowhere near the Facebook/Google level.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    If the industry demands weird or suboptimal practices or has strange evaluation criteria then the people making the most will be the people who are best at the game. I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.
aahortwwy 6y ago
> The best coders can demand the highest salary. Not really. This is one of those things that sounds correct but when you actually sit down and examine the claim not only is there sparse evidence to support it but it's not entirely clear what the claim even means. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vudnMLzZjTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vudnMLzZjTg
ema 6y ago
Sure a big salary is nice but especially Google hasn't done much in the last decade to make it look there is exciting, or even just satisfying, engineering happening there.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  Not to mention, people like to work on things with meaning or value. Google cancels so many things, so much work and code tossed, and with entire projects, the point of entire projects axed, how can anyone there feel there's a point to their work?
- decafninja 6y ago
  Because it's all relative. Most other companies (both tech and non-tech) probably have more negatives and less positives than Google has.
bananaface 6y ago
That assumes the selection process is effective, but FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes. I'd argue the people at FAANGs are the people who are best at hitting the requirements of a FAANG. That's still a competition and they'll brain drain from smaller companies, but it creates arbitrage on unrecognised ability and other opportunities may exploit that (e.g. starting your own venture relies much more on genuine ability than where you stand on a FAANG progression matrix). I was contributing to an open-source FAANG project recently and the oversights they'd made in the codebase were surprising to me. There were very basic errors and mistakes and the people managing the codebase didn't understand what some of the functions were even supposed to do. The API wasn't consistent. Tests were testing behaviour that was outright wrong (and, somehow, passing). Feature prioritization was way off. There were half-hearted implementations of some features that were bad enough that they weren't useful. They weren't talking to other departments working on the same basic area (who are also open-source, and hold the state of the art), so there were important features that weren't ported. The project was small, too (but not unimportant). I don't have high market value, but I was fixing some of these bugs in minutes. The guys managing that project are obviously a lot better than me overall, but I think it betrays a flaw in the institutional structure. Those weaknesses in the codebase would be cheap to fix, the problem is the FAANG standards are such that they are able to go unrecognised.
- jstummbillig 6y ago
  > [...] FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes. But they do. You see that happening every time a big company fails. It just takes a while longer because of the inertia the company has built (for example by having made more good than bad hiring decisions in the past). I understand that good people fly under the radar all the time. Also I understand that there are startups that certainly have a higher skill level than Google does (anything else would be shocking, considering Googles immense work force). Not all hiring decisions are good. Maybe most aren't. There's just no reason to believe that Google would be any worse at it than Random Small Company, considering that more money and expertise certainly helps when trying to hire the best talent.
12xdev 6y ago
> this mechanism. Lmao we're not particles in a simulation. Not everybody optimizes for earnings. I optimize for not giving a fuck, so I'll never work at a FAANG. Not everybody wants to trade ten years of their life span for... a modest home in the tri valley and a horrible commute.
Dudeman112 6y ago
Ah, the myth of tech meritocracy. As a community are we still stuck pretending that being the real deal will be better for your career than being able to convince other people you are the real deal?

johbjo 6y ago

> The best coders can demand the highest salary. How would you confirm this with data?

tnel77 6y ago
I’m not sure how you confirm this, but I don’t see how it’s not true. Do you (or other people on this thread) genuinely believe that the best software engineers aren’t demanding the best salaries? Who doesn’t want to make more money given the opportunity?
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Who doesn’t want to make more money given the opportunity? Tons of people remain at jobs they enjoy/companies they like even if they suspect they could probably get a better offer elsewhere. There are plenty of people elsewhere in the country who aren't interested in moving to Silicon Valley and working for one of the large firms. More generally there's probably some relation between quality (which is an elusive variable to measure and can be dependent on managers/teams/etc.) and salary--but it's far from a perfect correlation.
  - brandall10 6y ago
    The FAANGs, and I figure about a couple dozen other major tech companies paying similar comp levels, now have offices spread out across the country. You won’t make as much in say Austin or Denver, but it will still be dramatically better than other local options.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >The FAANGs, and I figure about a couple dozen other major tech companies paying similar comp levels I'm skeptical about the couple dozen. There are a bunch of reasons someone may choose not to work for Facebook or Google. But all the anecdotal information I see--including the migration of people from and to jobs--suggests to me that it's hard for most companies to outbid FAANG (and probably a few other smaller companies) in general.
      - brandall10 6y ago
        Just go to levels.fyi and see what people are reporting per company and region, and of course what is discussed on blind if you're familiar with that. Maybe not outbid but coming within 10-15%, which is going to be dramatically better than other regional options. By these other companies, I mean more established ones like Linked In or pre-IPO like Slack/Stripe. There are quite a few of them and they are indeed competing with FAANGs for talent. But the FAANGs are going to have larger national spread. My point is, if someone lives in a 2nd tier tech hub they should have a handful options to make dramatically more than average from one of these companies; but the interviews are tough and whether or not they want to have a conversation in the first place are gating factors.
    - anaerobicover 6y ago
      When we're discussing high salaries there should probably only be one 'A' in the initialism. Apple famously does not have particularly high salaries for engineers. Even if they're above industry average, they're nowhere near the Facebook/Google level.
- bananaface 6y ago
  If the industry demands weird or suboptimal practices or has strange evaluation criteria then the people making the most will be the people who are best at the game. I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.

aahortwwy 6y ago

> The best coders can demand the highest salary. Not really. This is one of those things that sounds correct but when you actually sit down and examine the claim not only is there sparse evidence to support it but it's not entirely clear what the claim even means. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vudnMLzZjTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vudnMLzZjTg

ema 6y ago

Sure a big salary is nice but especially Google hasn't done much in the last decade to make it look there is exciting, or even just satisfying, engineering happening there.

bbarnett 6y ago
Not to mention, people like to work on things with meaning or value. Google cancels so many things, so much work and code tossed, and with entire projects, the point of entire projects axed, how can anyone there feel there's a point to their work?
decafninja 6y ago
Because it's all relative. Most other companies (both tech and non-tech) probably have more negatives and less positives than Google has.

bananaface 6y ago

That assumes the selection process is effective, but FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes. I'd argue the people at FAANGs are the people who are best at hitting the requirements of a FAANG. That's still a competition and they'll brain drain from smaller companies, but it creates arbitrage on unrecognised ability and other opportunities may exploit that (e.g. starting your own venture relies much more on genuine ability than where you stand on a FAANG progression matrix). I was contributing to an open-source FAANG project recently and the oversights they'd made in the codebase were surprising to me. There were very basic errors and mistakes and the people managing the codebase didn't understand what some of the functions were even supposed to do. The API wasn't consistent. Tests were testing behaviour that was outright wrong (and, somehow, passing). Feature prioritization was way off. There were half-hearted implementations of some features that were bad enough that they weren't useful. They weren't talking to other departments working on the same basic area (who are also open-source, and hold the state of the art), so there were important features that weren't ported. The project was small, too (but not unimportant). I don't have high market value, but I was fixing some of these bugs in minutes. The guys managing that project are obviously a lot better than me overall, but I think it betrays a flaw in the institutional structure. Those weaknesses in the codebase would be cheap to fix, the problem is the FAANG standards are such that they are able to go unrecognised.

jstummbillig 6y ago
> [...] FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes. But they do. You see that happening every time a big company fails. It just takes a while longer because of the inertia the company has built (for example by having made more good than bad hiring decisions in the past). I understand that good people fly under the radar all the time. Also I understand that there are startups that certainly have a higher skill level than Google does (anything else would be shocking, considering Googles immense work force). Not all hiring decisions are good. Maybe most aren't. There's just no reason to believe that Google would be any worse at it than Random Small Company, considering that more money and expertise certainly helps when trying to hire the best talent.

12xdev 6y ago

> this mechanism. Lmao we're not particles in a simulation. Not everybody optimizes for earnings. I optimize for not giving a fuck, so I'll never work at a FAANG. Not everybody wants to trade ten years of their life span for... a modest home in the tri valley and a horrible commute.

Dudeman112 6y ago

Ah, the myth of tech meritocracy. As a community are we still stuck pretending that being the real deal will be better for your career than being able to convince other people you are the real deal?