14 ms·

Tech CEO Says Workers Get Too Much Pay and Benefits

150 points by pinewurst 5y ago

throwaway81523 5y ago
Interesting. Does he also say that tech CEO's don't get enough? Lol.
mikestew 5y ago
I noticed Avi didn't mention how much "pay and benefits" he's receiving. It's not often one gets to observe outstandingly tone-deaf execs prattle on, so read it as the gem it is. "We just received $230MM in funding, which I'm going to shovel as much as I can into my personal accounts, but the rest of y'all need to take a pay cut. BTW, we're hiring!"
- Finnucane 5y ago
  Really? It seems like tone-deaf executives are a pretty routine occurrence.
  - mikestew 5y ago
    This one stands out among the rest in my mind, hence the modifier.
  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    At a recent all-hands about hiring, and wages for existing/future employees, my CEO blatantly said “we look around at the market and set wages based on the going rate”. Something totally innocuous to someone with his background. Weirdly revealing to many employees at a rapidly advancing startup without much background in finance: the company as a whole doesn’t even consider output when setting wages.
    - polskibus 5y ago
      Everyone does it to a degree when they're buying a service or a product. It's the market that dictates the price, unless the company's lifeline depends to a high degree on a particular employee and his non transferrable knowledge and skills that are specific to the company.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - malandrew 5y ago
        child comment I was replying to was deleted so adding this to this parent comment: Likewise I've met plenty of engineers that are not profitably replaceable. Almost every SWE is replaceable, but many it makes no sense to replace and that usually correlates with their tenure working on a particular system. I myself have several years of knowledge I've accumulated working in a specific problem space at the company. It would take a new hire minimum 2-3 years if not more to accumulate the specialized knowledge I have. So if I were to leave tomorrow over pay, they would have to hire a replacement at the market rate (salary and a 4 year equity grant). That replacement would be far less productive than me for minimum 2 years, so they pay out 4 years of equity now to see equal productivity 2 years from now and if they continue the same pay strategy, that new hire will leave after 4 years of equity has vested. They basically get 2 years of productivity 2 years from now for the price of 4 years of equity today. It's just stupid to play chicken with salary when there are considerable opportunities costs for doing so and you're essentially paying double for half. It's not just me either. I see it with folks across the board at the company. The only ones I consider relatively fungible are those that team hop every 1 to 1.5 years.
    - closeparen 5y ago
      There seems to be a contingent of people floating around the internet with the idea that wages are "output minus," or more commonly that prices are "cost plus," and then getting all righteously indignant when they aren't. That is now how a market economy works! I mean, you can't usually sell for less than cost or pay more than productivity over the long term, but sometimes you do (loss leaders, R&D investments), and you can definitely do the reverse.
      - wallacoloo 5y ago
        > That is not how a market economy works! Well, you're right. I'm not in disagreement with the way in which dispassionate markets are understood to behave. I'm in disagreement that such a dispassionate job market is any sort of ideal that ought to be embraced by the average joe -- and that we've largely accepted it as if it were (or at least as if it were "good enough"). Let's say I go to a potluck and bring store-bought cookies as my contribution. My friends say "come on, wallacoloo, we all worked our butts off preparing good food for you: we deserve better from you." I reply, "well then, find a new friend who's willing to make better food for you and show them to me. Once you show me that such a man exists, I'll contribute to you as much as he would." It's an absurd scenario. It's insulting. That's not any type of relationship we should aim for. But suddenly, once you introduce enough indirection (money, specialization, larger-sized groups), I'm supposed to think that making every such interaction into an adversarial one is somehow proper.
        HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        I disagree. The difference is friendship vs commerce. Your employer-employee relationship is commercial, so it's reasonable of the CEO to think of your salary as market-driven, just as it is reasonable of you to leave when the market rate rises above what you're paid. It's business, you shouldn't take it personally. OTOH, the potluck is among friends. You're expected to have your friends' best interests in mind and to enjoy being around them, so it's not surprising that they'd be offended if they spent hours cooking and you just ran to the store and bought a cheap salad or some cookies.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- staticassertion 5y ago
  Yeah, as a CEO I find it gross. I don't make the most at my company by a long shot - I own stock, which carries more risk, but I chose to take this path. If the company is over budget I'm the first to take a pay cut, I would never try to extract that from my employees before I did so with my own funds. The reason developers are paid a lot is because they're worth a lot. That's it. IMO If you're a CEO that's what you sign up for. If you can't handle that, find another job.
  - bb88 5y ago
    I suspect that the market is finally catching up. A good dev might might generate $4M of revenue (or savings) over the course of his tenure. I know I saved companies millions of dollars but only got $100k/yr doing it.
    - walshemj 5y ago
      I fixed a single bug that recovered amount (in todays terms ) in my mid 20's. Neither I or the company secretary I worked with to ever got a word of thanks.
      - ASalazarMX 5y ago
        At least you can be sure that the deed was not forgotten, someone higher likely took credit for it.
      - brianwawok 5y ago
        To be fair, someone else made a bug that cost that much. I don't think you want to be in the business of getting a say 20% of revenue from big fixes, but also get 20% of revenue from bug creation? Or hey maybe you do, you could try to get that in your next contract.
        walshemj 5y ago
        Yeh a previous FD who brought that POS accounts receivable.
- walshemj 5y ago
  That's some grade A "Gerald Ratner" career/ company sabotage right there.
  - mzs 5y ago
    What's the back story on this? I only recognize the name as UofC donor and google failed me.
    - walshemj 5y ago
      He was at the time the CEO of a very big UK Jewelry group made a speech where he said. "We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap." Basically destroyed the company.
      - mzs 5y ago
        oh a different Gerald Ratner, thanks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner_(lawyer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner_(lawyer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner
    - nereye 5y ago
      see, e.g.: https://thehustle.co/gerald-ratners-billion-dollar-speech https://thehustle.co/gerald-ratners-billion-dollar-speech
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  For another example, here's the president of the Seattle Mariners bragging to a rotary club meeting about how their team's payroll was as low as it gets, how they get more than they deserve out of their TV deal, how they brazenly manipulate young players' in their minor-league teams to avoid starting the clock on their service contracts (basically the baseball equivalent of "my startup is offering stock options to justify low salaries, but we're going to dilute/fundraise at higher liquidation preference/prevent them from reaching the exercise price/terminate the employees before they vest so they don't cost us anything!"). He says that a particular veteran player and team leader is expensive, so they're going to fire him at the end of the season, another player from Japan doesn't speak English well and he wants to get rid of his interpreter. He brags that there's not enough parking, so he can get away with charging $30, $40, $50 to park in his tiny little parking garage, and he makes his employees park on the other side of town in a bad neighborhood. https://youtu.be/zBg8_44uDZ0 https://youtu.be/zBg8_44uDZ0 It's one thing to observe that people may rationalize the decisions that benefit themselves personally. Sure, it would be unexpected for the CEO to decide "We don't pay our employees enough", but you'd like to have a veneer of justification for the cut. You can imagine their subconscious pushing them towards the conclusion that they're incentivized to reach. It's another to hear them literally say the quiet part out loud.
  - bookofsand 5y ago
    Interesting. Just saw this headline in the local newspaper the other day: "New president of business operations Catie Griggs wants Mariners to be ‘most progressive team’ in MLB". https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/mariners/new-president-of-baseball-operations-catie-griggs-wants-mariners-to-be-most-progressive-team-in-mlb https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/mariners/new-president-o...
  - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
    Nintendo ruined the Mariners. They took over a decent team and drove it into the ground. By the time they sold the team in 2016 the team was one of the worst. But hey, they sell a lot of those virtual ads!
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
nhance 5y ago
I've long thought that developers don't realize how much value they really have. If they're in the right place, they're wickedly underpaid for the value they create.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  i think (the US ones) are extremely overpaid for the quality of software that goes around. It's just a result of captive markets
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    Again, they're paid for value they create. Don't equate quality of software with the value of that software. A simple example: a crappy $500 beater may have immense value because it gets me to work every day, even if the door is held closed by a coat hanger and I have plastic sheet taped over the missing back window.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      most of the value they create is raising the company's stock by simply existing. Whether they are valueable to other people is another thing, for one, if the value they created to other companies was comparable, there wouldn't be such extreme inequality in valuations of tech vs rest of the economy
    - adam_arthur 5y ago
      Employees tend to get paid on the basis of supply and demand in the labor market. The value you create just puts a ceiling on the equilibrium pay. Simple thought experiment. I have a button that creates a million dollars anytime it's pressed. How much should/do I need to pay for somebody to sit there and press it all day? In fact you can probably pay minimum wage because low skill work and easy to find people. That being said, as an employee you can leverage the unique value you provide into higher pay, assuming you're able to persuade your employer. E.g. imagine you could press the button twice as fast as anybody else... Suddenly you're in a strong position to negotiate for a million dollars per press. But the value you provide has to be unique relative to the labor market. Looking at unique value, and ability to convince others of that unique value, is more relevant than the absolute value you create.
oneepic 5y ago
In Israel.
pokstad 5y ago
There’s just a lack of supply for the work at hand. Someday it might slow down and salaries will lower, but for now that is just a priority mechanism that ensures the highest rewarding businesses can acquire workers first.
muzaffarpur 5y ago
A former product manger thinks software engineers are getting paid more. What an irony.
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  To be fair (based on his LinkedIn profile) he was also a software engineer during the first 5 years of his career.
  - muzaffarpur 5y ago
    People mostly forget where they came from. It is so convenient.
warmfuzzykitten 5y ago
If he were actually "calling" executives in other companies to get them to agree to lower wages and benefits, that would be illegal activity in the US. Companies are not allowed to conspire to fix wages.
- dheera 5y ago
  How can you regulate conspiring? It would seem to me that people have the right to private channels of communication, and free speech over said communication. They could do it over Signal and nobody would know nor have records.
  - cl42 5y ago
    You can regulate conspiring. There are tons of laws for this already, either within antitrust, criminal law, etc. The challenge is proving the conspiring happened. If a CEO specifically admits to calling companies and conspiring, then, well, there's the evidence. EDIT: Case in point from 2014 -- "Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed to pay a total of $324 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to hold down salaries in Silicon Valley..."[1] [1]: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-google-pay-324-million-settle-conspiracy-014934782--sector.html https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-google-pay...
    - to11mtm 5y ago
      What's interesting to me is I thought at first that maybe the only reason this won was because California is one of the few states where non-competes are illegal (this being a form of de-facto non-compete.) Then I read the link and saw that even the Feds (US DOJ) found their practices worth investigating and acting on. Still, it's weird to think about it. I live in a state where my First Senior role in 2015 paid less than the Cali mandated wage for a basic 'Software Engineer' at the time.
  - roland35 5y ago
    It has happened! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545
davidf18 5y ago
This CEO apparently hasn't been programming computers and doesn't understand as Steve Jobs said, which is in software you have some people who are much better at it than others. They should be paid their value. Apparently his firm has no board members that have programmed computers for any length of time because someone on his board would have pointed this fact out to him.
sethammons 5y ago
> The employees are bad! bad employees! how dare you ask for good middle class wages! how dare you! Shame on you! I'm all for solid wages and better benefits, but let's be honest, a college grad who makes $100k to start is not a middle class wage. Edit: I should clarify, I'm not saying a new grad _shouldn't_ make that. I'm saying it is not a middle class wage for a someone just entering the market.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  What is it then? It seems at best upper middle class in the US [not California], but that's pushing it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jen20 5y ago
  > [someone] who makes $100k [] is not a middle class wage. Where?
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    Why did you cut out the starting salary part? I know averages aren't the same as class, but, middle-class would be about half that, if middle-class=average salary, in the USA. https://www.google.com/search?q=average+starting+salary+in+us https://www.google.com/search?q=average+starting+salary+in+u... > While there are a few outliers, the general average salary for college graduates comes to about $50,000
    - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
      So then if it isn't middle class then which class do you think it is?
    - Arainach 5y ago
      Class is defined based on lifestyle, not statistics. The average income in the US is nowhere near enough to sustain a middle class lifestyle.
sentinel 5y ago
He has a point – which is that with remote work proving feasible and high salary expectations on the coasts, a lot of companies will be looking for talent elsewhere – either in the middle of the country, or on the same timezones outside of the country. He's not saying much though, because salary / benefits expectations and what a company is willing to offer are all part of the free market dance, which takes some time before it reaches a "final" state. A company that will reduce salaries tomorrow will find itself in a difficult position – difficult to find new people, maybe bad publicity etc. But over time (years, a decade?), salaries will likely normalize due to companies hiring cheaper developers piecemeal. Not all tech jobs are equal, and while some engineers will always be able to charge a premium, others won't. Similarly with good managers, PMs etc.
- commiefornian 5y ago
  There's a couple layers of economics involved here. There's supply/demand for employees/jobs. Fewer employees and more jobs mean higher wages. But there's also ROI. If you can sell a year of an engineer's work for $1M, the difference between $50k in comp and $100k in comp looks pretty minor compared to having them to produce that value and not.
  - sentinel 5y ago
    Why do you think that’s not happening already?
- pixl97 5y ago
  A company that will reduce CEO salaries tomorrow will find itself in a difficult position – difficult to find new CEOs, maybe bad publicity etc. But over time (years, a decade?), salaries will likely normalize due to companies hiring cheaper CEOs piecemeal. Notice how that's never the conversation.
  - sentinel 5y ago
    You think CEOs get formed as easily as engineers coming out of a bootcamp?
himinlomax 5y ago
It's the market. Not everyone can be an engineer, the demand for engineers / tech specialists is growing, ergo it's a seller's market. If you can't afford it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
mattficke 5y ago
He’s saying the quiet part out loud, but this is almost certainly not a rare opinion. It was long enough ago now that people new to the industry may not know, but Google, Apple, and others were illegally colluding for years to reduce employee compensation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  I'm normally not super pro-union, but when I see stuff like this I think the employees need to get together and squeeze the fuck out of their employers.
  - bookofsand 5y ago
    It just so happens that employees are more divided than ever on "social justice" / identity issues. We are on a wild wild ride.
    - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
      I guess that explains the pro-diversity corporate agenda.
      - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
        There have actually been leaked Amazon documents that explicitly state this: https://www.newswars.com/leaked-amazon-whole-foods-docs-workforce-diversity-helps-prevent-unions/ https://www.newswars.com/leaked-amazon-whole-foods-docs-work...
jamra 5y ago
Salaries in Israel aren’t that high. His employees will easily find work in another company. What a dumb move by him.
abxytg 5y ago
What a disingenuous PoS. Honestly, fuck this clown and the horse he rode in on. Anyone telling you that giving you a smaller slice of the pie is for your own benefit is getting one over on you. The best hot take I have heard on this subject is that engineers are not paid too much. Everyone, including eng, is underpaid WRT rising revenues and exec comp. Of course the pushback comes from CEOs because they are hoarding revenue. I hire. I know it sucks and is hard and you have to pay an arm and a leg to do it. But do you know how much a fucking house goes for these days? Do you know how long it takes to save for a downpayment on $150k? Get the fuck out of here "helping the younger generation" by stagnating salaries.
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  I couldn't have said it better myself.
- djanogo 5y ago
  You know he is full of it because tech jobs salary is wide spectrum, if he wants to pay low price and his work is simple enough he can pick a outsourcing company which will give him the lowest price for that work. What this clown is complaining is he wants complex work done at low price while wanting his company to get to PE 15-30x so they can get out of it as millionaires/billionaires.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  The company is the cliche of the evil mega Corp. “When NBC News first approached AnyVision for an interview, CEO Eylon Etshtein denied any knowledge of "Google Ayosh," threatened to sue NBC News and said that AnyVision was the “most ethical company known to man.” He disputed that the West Bank was “occupied” and questioned the motivation of the NBC News inquiry, suggesting the reporter must have been funded by a Palestinian activist group.” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/why-did-microsoft-fund-israeli-firm-surveils-west-bank-palestinians-n1072116 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/why-did-microsoft-fund-isra...
- s5300 5y ago
  I'm personally pissed I went Mechanical Engineering at this point. Original plan was to go Mechanical Engineering bachelor's and Electrical Engineering masters. In the end, the pay for both of those careers is kinda complete shit for what you do to get the degree, unless you manage to happily completely bullshit yourself through everything and don't let it weigh on your conscience. SWE is... arguably easier than both Mech E and Elec E in my mind, and the option for remote work has always been much, much higher. And the starting pay is... about 2.5x more, at a minimum, to begin with - and if you want to be a dick, and know how to interview FAANG and the like, you can hop company to company, do basically nothing and make that pay for 4-6 months before you're found out. And not to mention the benefits... I can't understand why there's not more of an outrage. It's insane. I simply can't tell any high schooler that an engineering degree outside of SWE, and maybe a highly focused aerospace degree, is worth it for the foreseeable future.
jppope 5y ago
I've been thinking about this for a while... and I am really starting to believe that management is the subsection of the workforce being most overpaid these days. Also, I wrote an article on developer pay that might be relevant to this discussion: (Why Aren't Developers Paid More?) https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/why-aren-t-developers-paid-more/ https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/why-aren-t-developers-pai...
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  To be fair most middle management isn’t as well compensated as software developers are. A director at a Fortune 500 is pulling down $200-250k, which is equivalent to about an E6 at big Internet natives. That said, to those who create the value go the spoils, so it’s not at all wrong. The middle managers just get a little frustrated and wish they were still software devs.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    > A director at a Fortune 500 is pulling down $200-250k, which is equivalent to about an E6 at big Internet natives. Who are the big Internet natives?
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
      Google, FB, Netflix, Spotify, Twilio, et al. Make their money selling software and / or digital products.
      - pedrosorio 5y ago
        I don't think there are any staff software engineers at those companies in the US earning in that range. At the first 2 companies, that is slightly above the total comp for a new grad. For Spotify and Twilio, some Senior Engineers may earn in that range, but unlikely that any staff do. Netflix only hires senior(+) SWE, and is well known for making offers at the top of the market, which is well above $250k. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Spotify,Twilio,Netflix,Google,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Spotify,Twilio,Netflix,Googl...
fallingfrog 5y ago
Maybe he should eat less avocado toast. For real though, CEOs have thought this way for decades. See the famous Powell memo: https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/ https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
abeppu 5y ago
I think aside from the hypocrisy and poor taste of the specific sentiment expressed, the other thing that I find telling is that Golan's instinct was that management at competing companies should collectively agree to drive down wages. His perspective is centered not around competition between his company and others, but about management at all companies against a group of workers. And for those in the US, perhaps this idea of companies colluding to keep down wages recalls the non-poaching deal among many US tech giants from several years ago. I suspect the exception here was voicing this in a relatively public way, where at least normally executives would have the sense to do this quietly.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  There are also those of us who bill out engineering talent hourly who are more than happy to help drive up salaries across the board as it increases the hourly rates my clients will pay. I can absorb the salary increase simply by raising the price, and my clients will pay it because their HR couldn’t hire engineering talent even when it was available.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  If he ends up in court for doing that I hope he realize his LinkedIn posts might be used by the prosecution.
jeromenerf 5y ago
Well. Pay and price fixing is an exercice of vision and elegance. Most go at it with brute force and ignorance.
dougSF70 5y ago
I guess high salaries paid by funded startups offset the risk that the company will flame out in 3-5 years combined with scarcity of developer talent - which in itself is driven by lots of VC money sloshing around. When the money dries up, salaries will deflate. However, money will remain cheap while govts are printing it so liberally. Software isn't so much eating the world, it is eating mountains and mountains of cash.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Basically what I wanted to say. There is definitely a bubble in tech salaries, people are getting paid salaries that in comparison to other fields have no relation to the aptitude, education, and personal sacrifice needed to do the work. Will the bubble pop? I don't know. I thought it would pop long ago, but the flow of VC money into tech firms doesn't seem to be abating, and the consumer appetite for the dreck created by the FAANG companies is likewise.
  - dougSF70 5y ago
    Basically, ride the wave while it lasts. And that CEO should suck it up and pay market rates, why else did he raise all that VC money?? To spend it on swanky offices and aws compute?
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > people are getting paid salaries that in comparison to other fields have no relation to the aptitude, education, and personal sacrifice needed to do the work. None of these things matter. It's supply and demand, simple as that. And value created. Instagram had millions of users and 14 employees.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    These people still create more value than they get paid. Seems fine.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  There's two choices right now: wait for salaries to go down and look at an other startup gain market share for the same idea you had or bite the bullet. Especially with SaaS, there's no reason why a single startup can't completely own a niche. Scaling is a matter of architecting code correctly (higher quality engineers will do that) and adding extra resources in AWS.
cvhashim 5y ago
Clown
Apocryphon 5y ago
More about the company- > Israel-based Anyvision’s previous largest stint in the public eye came when Microsoft pulled its investments from the company last year after reports (which AnyVision denied) that the company’s AI was used to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank.
bhewes 5y ago
Classic. Maybe his idea is bad if he cannot pay salaries in the same order of magnitude.
underseacables 5y ago
Here’s an anecdote from a job I had in Atlanta at an inside sales for Microsoft job: It was an awful, horrible place to work, with major churn and deception, but management never understood why we complained, after-all, we got free snacks, soda, and Chik Fil A on Wednesday’s…
- djanogo 5y ago
  I have always associated free food at work with dog biscuits, they gave them to calm you down or make you do tricks, like a pet.
  - andreskytt 5y ago
    Depends on the circumstance. Skype office in Tallinn had free food because it was an efficient way to feed the mass of geeks in that part of town at the time (10+ years ago).
aeturnum 5y ago
I genuinely don't understand concern about workers being paid too much. I get that a particular company may not be possible with the current compensation standards and that's frustrating, but if you are in the position of having raised hundreds of millions on a particular business plan then you're in a position to possibly make money in the current compensation environment. Like, you can always start a fast food franchise if you want reliable profit off low-wage workers? If your business can make money, it seems like it would be great to pay everyone as much as possible while still making money. Like, the best way to keep a good thing going to to keep everyone happy (including investors so ofc save some of the pie for them). It just seems like, if you want to keep doing the thing you built the business to do, you wanna minimize risk on the important parts and working hard to pay your knowledge workers less seems like it would undermine that? I guess it's also a classic observation that capitalists are all about "everyone wins under capitalism" until they see a way for someone else to win less.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I don't begrudge anyone for earning as much as he can or paying employees well. I am just surprised the bubble hasn't popped again, like it did in 2000. The time is coming. Inflation is reducing the spending power of the average consumer and tech gadgets and gizmos will be one of the first things on the cutting block of the middle-class family budget.
zwieback 5y ago
Tonedeaf and will surely backfire. However, churn is a real problem for overfunded companies participating in an overheated market segment. It'll work itself out eventually.
iddan 5y ago
All the people I talk to in the Tel Aviv scene are glad they are able to pay these salaries. They choose to hire people from Israel because they believe they have strategic value for their companies and that on-site communication is vital for their success. Many companies in Israel hire remote workers as well. There is room for everybody. Worth mentioning all the major news outlets in Israel regularly broadcast items about huge exists and IPOs of Israeli companies and ads for hiring tech workers are aired in prime time and plastered all around town
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
josefritz 5y ago
I would argue it's the C-suite execs that are overpaid. Their decisions are meant to be at a high-level, impesonal and focused on the finaincial well-being of the corporation. ironically that would make their work very easy to automate with AI. In other words... a robot could do his job.
josefritz 5y ago
I would argue it's the C-suite execs that are overpaid. Their decisions are high-level, impesonal and focused on the finaincial well-being of the corporation. Ironically that would make their work very easy to automate with AI. In other words... a robot could do his job.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> We just received $230MM in funding Money is falling from the sky on even the most trivial idea in someone's head, so by definition nobody can be getting too much pay. SV and american tech is crazy overvalued compared to the whole rest of the world, i don't know if this will end up good or bad. This guy is talking about Israeli tech companies, and he s right, israel can't print unlimited money the way the US can and can't afford to sustain a bubble
k4ch0w 5y ago
Maybe CEOs get paid too much for the value they bring? If my company’s head said this, it would be an indication to leave because clearly they don’t value what you bring to the table.
gotoeleven 5y ago
Just to play devil's advocate, the argument here is that programming is largely commoditized nowadays. A given programmer might build a thing that makes the company $10M, but if there are 1000 other people who could also build that thing then really the value isn't so much in the building of that thing, but in the company structure providing the opportunity to build that thing that has a value of $10M. I think this might be a more interesting argument to engage with than the one people seem to be responding to in this thread.
bartread 5y ago
> The problem, Golan explained, was that tech companies are offering wages and benefits that were too generous and, he claimed, would hurt employees in the long run. Spoken like a multi-millionaire. Eff right off. I had a former boss who latched onto some article about how £X was the optimal amount of money to earn for happiness and you shouldn't want more, and started loudly declaiming this amongst staff one lunchtime. Needless to say I wasn't too impressed with him either. I don't know whether these people are tone deaf to begin with or whether something about the money makes them so but, if I ever "make it", remind me not to behave like this.
Animats 5y ago
This is going to be amusing, because of Israel's internal politics. It's embarrassing for Israel. Israel has a Government department[1] which tries to stop, spin, or de-emphasize embarrassments like this. The last big embarrassment they faced was the binary options scam, which had grown at peak to be 40% of Israel's financial sector. On this one, the meme is starting to roll. Globes, Israel's main business newspaper, picked this up.[2] They interviewed the guy, and have more info than the Vice article. He's in San Francisco, and lives in Silicon Valley, not Israel. Which means this may attract the attention of US antitrust regulators, who are much more active now than under previous administrations. Remember the Apple-Google-Intel-Adobe-Pixar-Lucasfilm conspiracy.[3] Complaint to Israel competition authority [4](Hebrew) [5] (translated). Anti-Semitic rant about this.[6] That's the sort of thing that gets the ADL and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy going, because it started with something someone in Israel really did, and worse, talked about in public. [1] https://www.gov.il/en/departments/Units/ministry_of_strategic_affairs_and_public_diplomacy https://www.gov.il/en/departments/Units/ministry_of_strategi... [2] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-ceo-slams-millennials-tech-job-ethic-1001378286 https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-ceo-slams... [3] https://www.inc.com/associated-press/apple-google-other-tech-firms-to-pay-415-million-wage-case.html https://www.inc.com/associated-press/apple-google-other-tech... [4] https://www.geektime.co.il/competition-authority-receives-complaint-against-anyvision-ceo-avi-golan/ https://www.geektime.co.il/competition-authority-receives-co... [5] https://www.translatetheweb.com/?ref=TAns&from=&to=en&a=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geektime.co.il%2Fcompetition-authority-receives-complaint-against-anyvision-ceo-avi-golan%2F https://www.translatetheweb.com/?ref=TAns&from=&to=en&a=http... [6] https://f1bbs.com/viewtopic.php?id=8039 https://f1bbs.com/viewtopic.php?id=8039
- sofixa 5y ago
  Regarding [6], what?! I'm glad i don't understand half their slang, I'd be even more disgusted.
908B64B197 5y ago
> "I'm calling all Israeli CEOs specifically in hi-tech to stop the hiring madness before the bubble explodes," Golan wrote. I can't help to think that a rich Jewish man whining that employees are paid too much and suggesting wage-fixing as a solution won't help fighting stereotypes... > "This new generation of young engineers needs proper guidance, and we need to be responsible to teach them career fundamentals. Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad. We are hurting our young generation as well as our own market and country by the fact we keep raising salaries and offering crazy illogical benefits." My experience with outsourcing is that projects ends up getting in-sourced eventually (and often it's a complete re-write). But hey, if they want to burn their investor's money like that, good for them. It's a winner's take all market out here and those who will outbid for 10x devs will get to market better and faster.
- shadilay 5y ago
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/201809/stereotype-accuracy-displeasing-truth https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2018...
polotics 5y ago
This looks like a desperate plea for attention and relevance, most likely a smoke cloud from someone having serious issues at the helm of his company.
morpheos137 5y ago
Absolutely. Tech workers are just about the most entitled profession out there for actual value creation. The problem is feature and framework churn introducing unecessary complexity into the development process. Once software development managers get a handle on churn and the work process is standardised work can be increasingly completed by lower skill workers for less pay with no loss of functionality. But so far, for the last 20 years or so the industry has been more interested in the latest bullshitly.js framework every couple months. Tl. dr. over investment leads to wage inflation without substaintial functional improvements turning raw materials into in demand products.
taylodl 5y ago
Tech workers say CEO gets too much pay and benefits. All asinine comments like this do is foster disrespect.
nunez 5y ago
How insulting. > "I'm calling all Israeli CEOs specifically in hi-tech to stop the hiring madness before the bubble explodes," Golan wrote. "This new generation of young engineers needs proper guidance, and we need to be responsible to teach them career fundamentals. Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad. We are hurting our young generation as well as our own market and country by the fact we keep raising salaries and offering crazy illogical benefits." Translation: > "Engineers are bodies. We must reinforce that only those that command many bodies through a strictly hierarchical organization are deserving of being highly compensated. These are fundamentals. We must not erode them." Also: > Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad lol, good luck with that.
bitL 5y ago
CEO: I can't have a software sweatshop, the employees must come to their senses! I need that new Lambo every month!
wanderer2323 5y ago
There is a bank in Russia that had almost the same message -- it's a bubble, we don't want to support it, in 5 years nobody will be able to afford an SWE, we should do whatever we can to avert the tragedy. Of course when the inside stories came out -- the bank's software department turned out to be a horrible sweatshop drowning in technical debt.

150 points by pinewurst 5y ago

Interesting. Does he also say that tech CEO's don't get enough? Lol.

I noticed Avi didn't mention how much "pay and benefits" he's receiving. It's not often one gets to observe outstandingly tone-deaf execs prattle on, so read it as the gem it is. "We just received $230MM in funding, which I'm going to shovel as much as I can into my personal accounts, but the rest of y'all need to take a pay cut. BTW, we're hiring!"

Finnucane 5y ago
Really? It seems like tone-deaf executives are a pretty routine occurrence.
- mikestew 5y ago
  This one stands out among the rest in my mind, hence the modifier.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  At a recent all-hands about hiring, and wages for existing/future employees, my CEO blatantly said “we look around at the market and set wages based on the going rate”. Something totally innocuous to someone with his background. Weirdly revealing to many employees at a rapidly advancing startup without much background in finance: the company as a whole doesn’t even consider output when setting wages.
  - polskibus 5y ago
    Everyone does it to a degree when they're buying a service or a product. It's the market that dictates the price, unless the company's lifeline depends to a high degree on a particular employee and his non transferrable knowledge and skills that are specific to the company.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - malandrew 5y ago
      child comment I was replying to was deleted so adding this to this parent comment: Likewise I've met plenty of engineers that are not profitably replaceable. Almost every SWE is replaceable, but many it makes no sense to replace and that usually correlates with their tenure working on a particular system. I myself have several years of knowledge I've accumulated working in a specific problem space at the company. It would take a new hire minimum 2-3 years if not more to accumulate the specialized knowledge I have. So if I were to leave tomorrow over pay, they would have to hire a replacement at the market rate (salary and a 4 year equity grant). That replacement would be far less productive than me for minimum 2 years, so they pay out 4 years of equity now to see equal productivity 2 years from now and if they continue the same pay strategy, that new hire will leave after 4 years of equity has vested. They basically get 2 years of productivity 2 years from now for the price of 4 years of equity today. It's just stupid to play chicken with salary when there are considerable opportunities costs for doing so and you're essentially paying double for half. It's not just me either. I see it with folks across the board at the company. The only ones I consider relatively fungible are those that team hop every 1 to 1.5 years.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    There seems to be a contingent of people floating around the internet with the idea that wages are "output minus," or more commonly that prices are "cost plus," and then getting all righteously indignant when they aren't. That is now how a market economy works! I mean, you can't usually sell for less than cost or pay more than productivity over the long term, but sometimes you do (loss leaders, R&D investments), and you can definitely do the reverse.
    - wallacoloo 5y ago
      > That is not how a market economy works! Well, you're right. I'm not in disagreement with the way in which dispassionate markets are understood to behave. I'm in disagreement that such a dispassionate job market is any sort of ideal that ought to be embraced by the average joe -- and that we've largely accepted it as if it were (or at least as if it were "good enough"). Let's say I go to a potluck and bring store-bought cookies as my contribution. My friends say "come on, wallacoloo, we all worked our butts off preparing good food for you: we deserve better from you." I reply, "well then, find a new friend who's willing to make better food for you and show them to me. Once you show me that such a man exists, I'll contribute to you as much as he would." It's an absurd scenario. It's insulting. That's not any type of relationship we should aim for. But suddenly, once you introduce enough indirection (money, specialization, larger-sized groups), I'm supposed to think that making every such interaction into an adversarial one is somehow proper.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        I disagree. The difference is friendship vs commerce. Your employer-employee relationship is commercial, so it's reasonable of the CEO to think of your salary as market-driven, just as it is reasonable of you to leave when the market rate rises above what you're paid. It's business, you shouldn't take it personally. OTOH, the potluck is among friends. You're expected to have your friends' best interests in mind and to enjoy being around them, so it's not surprising that they'd be offended if they spent hours cooking and you just ran to the store and bought a cheap salad or some cookies.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
staticassertion 5y ago
Yeah, as a CEO I find it gross. I don't make the most at my company by a long shot - I own stock, which carries more risk, but I chose to take this path. If the company is over budget I'm the first to take a pay cut, I would never try to extract that from my employees before I did so with my own funds. The reason developers are paid a lot is because they're worth a lot. That's it. IMO If you're a CEO that's what you sign up for. If you can't handle that, find another job.
- bb88 5y ago
  I suspect that the market is finally catching up. A good dev might might generate $4M of revenue (or savings) over the course of his tenure. I know I saved companies millions of dollars but only got $100k/yr doing it.
  - walshemj 5y ago
    I fixed a single bug that recovered amount (in todays terms ) in my mid 20's. Neither I or the company secretary I worked with to ever got a word of thanks.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      At least you can be sure that the deed was not forgotten, someone higher likely took credit for it.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      To be fair, someone else made a bug that cost that much. I don't think you want to be in the business of getting a say 20% of revenue from big fixes, but also get 20% of revenue from bug creation? Or hey maybe you do, you could try to get that in your next contract.
      - walshemj 5y ago
        Yeh a previous FD who brought that POS accounts receivable.
walshemj 5y ago
That's some grade A "Gerald Ratner" career/ company sabotage right there.
- mzs 5y ago
  What's the back story on this? I only recognize the name as UofC donor and google failed me.
  - walshemj 5y ago
    He was at the time the CEO of a very big UK Jewelry group made a speech where he said. "We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap." Basically destroyed the company.
    - mzs 5y ago
      oh a different Gerald Ratner, thanks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner_(lawyer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner_(lawyer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner
  - nereye 5y ago
    see, e.g.: https://thehustle.co/gerald-ratners-billion-dollar-speech https://thehustle.co/gerald-ratners-billion-dollar-speech
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
For another example, here's the president of the Seattle Mariners bragging to a rotary club meeting about how their team's payroll was as low as it gets, how they get more than they deserve out of their TV deal, how they brazenly manipulate young players' in their minor-league teams to avoid starting the clock on their service contracts (basically the baseball equivalent of "my startup is offering stock options to justify low salaries, but we're going to dilute/fundraise at higher liquidation preference/prevent them from reaching the exercise price/terminate the employees before they vest so they don't cost us anything!"). He says that a particular veteran player and team leader is expensive, so they're going to fire him at the end of the season, another player from Japan doesn't speak English well and he wants to get rid of his interpreter. He brags that there's not enough parking, so he can get away with charging $30, $40, $50 to park in his tiny little parking garage, and he makes his employees park on the other side of town in a bad neighborhood. https://youtu.be/zBg8_44uDZ0 https://youtu.be/zBg8_44uDZ0 It's one thing to observe that people may rationalize the decisions that benefit themselves personally. Sure, it would be unexpected for the CEO to decide "We don't pay our employees enough", but you'd like to have a veneer of justification for the cut. You can imagine their subconscious pushing them towards the conclusion that they're incentivized to reach. It's another to hear them literally say the quiet part out loud.
- bookofsand 5y ago
  Interesting. Just saw this headline in the local newspaper the other day: "New president of business operations Catie Griggs wants Mariners to be ‘most progressive team’ in MLB". https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/mariners/new-president-of-baseball-operations-catie-griggs-wants-mariners-to-be-most-progressive-team-in-mlb https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/mariners/new-president-o...
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  Nintendo ruined the Mariners. They took over a decent team and drove it into the ground. By the time they sold the team in 2016 the team was one of the worst. But hey, they sell a lot of those virtual ads!
- selimthegrim 5y ago

nhance 5y ago

I've long thought that developers don't realize how much value they really have. If they're in the right place, they're wickedly underpaid for the value they create.

cblconfederate 5y ago
i think (the US ones) are extremely overpaid for the quality of software that goes around. It's just a result of captive markets
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  Again, they're paid for value they create. Don't equate quality of software with the value of that software. A simple example: a crappy $500 beater may have immense value because it gets me to work every day, even if the door is held closed by a coat hanger and I have plastic sheet taped over the missing back window.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    most of the value they create is raising the company's stock by simply existing. Whether they are valueable to other people is another thing, for one, if the value they created to other companies was comparable, there wouldn't be such extreme inequality in valuations of tech vs rest of the economy
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Employees tend to get paid on the basis of supply and demand in the labor market. The value you create just puts a ceiling on the equilibrium pay. Simple thought experiment. I have a button that creates a million dollars anytime it's pressed. How much should/do I need to pay for somebody to sit there and press it all day? In fact you can probably pay minimum wage because low skill work and easy to find people. That being said, as an employee you can leverage the unique value you provide into higher pay, assuming you're able to persuade your employer. E.g. imagine you could press the button twice as fast as anybody else... Suddenly you're in a strong position to negotiate for a million dollars per press. But the value you provide has to be unique relative to the labor market. Looking at unique value, and ability to convince others of that unique value, is more relevant than the absolute value you create.

oneepic 5y ago

In Israel.

pokstad 5y ago

There’s just a lack of supply for the work at hand. Someday it might slow down and salaries will lower, but for now that is just a priority mechanism that ensures the highest rewarding businesses can acquire workers first.

muzaffarpur 5y ago

A former product manger thinks software engineers are getting paid more. What an irony.

pedrosorio 5y ago
To be fair (based on his LinkedIn profile) he was also a software engineer during the first 5 years of his career.
- muzaffarpur 5y ago
  People mostly forget where they came from. It is so convenient.

warmfuzzykitten 5y ago

If he were actually "calling" executives in other companies to get them to agree to lower wages and benefits, that would be illegal activity in the US. Companies are not allowed to conspire to fix wages.

dheera 5y ago
How can you regulate conspiring? It would seem to me that people have the right to private channels of communication, and free speech over said communication. They could do it over Signal and nobody would know nor have records.
- cl42 5y ago
  You can regulate conspiring. There are tons of laws for this already, either within antitrust, criminal law, etc. The challenge is proving the conspiring happened. If a CEO specifically admits to calling companies and conspiring, then, well, there's the evidence. EDIT: Case in point from 2014 -- "Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed to pay a total of $324 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to hold down salaries in Silicon Valley..."[1] [1]: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-google-pay-324-million-settle-conspiracy-014934782--sector.html https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-google-pay...
  - to11mtm 5y ago
    What's interesting to me is I thought at first that maybe the only reason this won was because California is one of the few states where non-competes are illegal (this being a form of de-facto non-compete.) Then I read the link and saw that even the Feds (US DOJ) found their practices worth investigating and acting on. Still, it's weird to think about it. I live in a state where my First Senior role in 2015 paid less than the Cali mandated wage for a basic 'Software Engineer' at the time.
- roland35 5y ago
  It has happened! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545

davidf18 5y ago

This CEO apparently hasn't been programming computers and doesn't understand as Steve Jobs said, which is in software you have some people who are much better at it than others. They should be paid their value. Apparently his firm has no board members that have programmed computers for any length of time because someone on his board would have pointed this fact out to him.

sethammons 5y ago

> The employees are bad! bad employees! how dare you ask for good middle class wages! how dare you! Shame on you! I'm all for solid wages and better benefits, but let's be honest, a college grad who makes $100k to start is not a middle class wage. Edit: I should clarify, I'm not saying a new grad _shouldn't_ make that. I'm saying it is not a middle class wage for a someone just entering the market.

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
What is it then? It seems at best upper middle class in the US [not California], but that's pushing it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jen20 5y ago
> [someone] who makes $100k [] is not a middle class wage. Where?
- cryptoz 5y ago
  Why did you cut out the starting salary part? I know averages aren't the same as class, but, middle-class would be about half that, if middle-class=average salary, in the USA. https://www.google.com/search?q=average+starting+salary+in+us https://www.google.com/search?q=average+starting+salary+in+u... > While there are a few outliers, the general average salary for college graduates comes to about $50,000
  - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
    So then if it isn't middle class then which class do you think it is?
  - Arainach 5y ago
    Class is defined based on lifestyle, not statistics. The average income in the US is nowhere near enough to sustain a middle class lifestyle.

sentinel 5y ago

He has a point – which is that with remote work proving feasible and high salary expectations on the coasts, a lot of companies will be looking for talent elsewhere – either in the middle of the country, or on the same timezones outside of the country. He's not saying much though, because salary / benefits expectations and what a company is willing to offer are all part of the free market dance, which takes some time before it reaches a "final" state. A company that will reduce salaries tomorrow will find itself in a difficult position – difficult to find new people, maybe bad publicity etc. But over time (years, a decade?), salaries will likely normalize due to companies hiring cheaper developers piecemeal. Not all tech jobs are equal, and while some engineers will always be able to charge a premium, others won't. Similarly with good managers, PMs etc.

commiefornian 5y ago
There's a couple layers of economics involved here. There's supply/demand for employees/jobs. Fewer employees and more jobs mean higher wages. But there's also ROI. If you can sell a year of an engineer's work for $1M, the difference between $50k in comp and $100k in comp looks pretty minor compared to having them to produce that value and not.
- sentinel 5y ago
  Why do you think that’s not happening already?
pixl97 5y ago
A company that will reduce CEO salaries tomorrow will find itself in a difficult position – difficult to find new CEOs, maybe bad publicity etc. But over time (years, a decade?), salaries will likely normalize due to companies hiring cheaper CEOs piecemeal. Notice how that's never the conversation.
- sentinel 5y ago
  You think CEOs get formed as easily as engineers coming out of a bootcamp?

himinlomax 5y ago

It's the market. Not everyone can be an engineer, the demand for engineers / tech specialists is growing, ergo it's a seller's market. If you can't afford it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

mattficke 5y ago

He’s saying the quiet part out loud, but this is almost certainly not a rare opinion. It was long enough ago now that people new to the industry may not know, but Google, Apple, and others were illegally colluding for years to reduce employee compensation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
I'm normally not super pro-union, but when I see stuff like this I think the employees need to get together and squeeze the fuck out of their employers.
- bookofsand 5y ago
  It just so happens that employees are more divided than ever on "social justice" / identity issues. We are on a wild wild ride.
  - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
    I guess that explains the pro-diversity corporate agenda.
    - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
      There have actually been leaked Amazon documents that explicitly state this: https://www.newswars.com/leaked-amazon-whole-foods-docs-workforce-diversity-helps-prevent-unions/ https://www.newswars.com/leaked-amazon-whole-foods-docs-work...

jamra 5y ago

Salaries in Israel aren’t that high. His employees will easily find work in another company. What a dumb move by him.

abxytg 5y ago

What a disingenuous PoS. Honestly, fuck this clown and the horse he rode in on. Anyone telling you that giving you a smaller slice of the pie is for your own benefit is getting one over on you. The best hot take I have heard on this subject is that engineers are not paid too much. Everyone, including eng, is underpaid WRT rising revenues and exec comp. Of course the pushback comes from CEOs because they are hoarding revenue. I hire. I know it sucks and is hard and you have to pay an arm and a leg to do it. But do you know how much a fucking house goes for these days? Do you know how long it takes to save for a downpayment on $150k? Get the fuck out of here "helping the younger generation" by stagnating salaries.

BrianOnHN 5y ago
I couldn't have said it better myself.
djanogo 5y ago
You know he is full of it because tech jobs salary is wide spectrum, if he wants to pay low price and his work is simple enough he can pick a outsourcing company which will give him the lowest price for that work. What this clown is complaining is he wants complex work done at low price while wanting his company to get to PE 15-30x so they can get out of it as millionaires/billionaires.
lostlogin 5y ago
The company is the cliche of the evil mega Corp. “When NBC News first approached AnyVision for an interview, CEO Eylon Etshtein denied any knowledge of "Google Ayosh," threatened to sue NBC News and said that AnyVision was the “most ethical company known to man.” He disputed that the West Bank was “occupied” and questioned the motivation of the NBC News inquiry, suggesting the reporter must have been funded by a Palestinian activist group.” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/why-did-microsoft-fund-israeli-firm-surveils-west-bank-palestinians-n1072116 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/why-did-microsoft-fund-isra...
s5300 5y ago
I'm personally pissed I went Mechanical Engineering at this point. Original plan was to go Mechanical Engineering bachelor's and Electrical Engineering masters. In the end, the pay for both of those careers is kinda complete shit for what you do to get the degree, unless you manage to happily completely bullshit yourself through everything and don't let it weigh on your conscience. SWE is... arguably easier than both Mech E and Elec E in my mind, and the option for remote work has always been much, much higher. And the starting pay is... about 2.5x more, at a minimum, to begin with - and if you want to be a dick, and know how to interview FAANG and the like, you can hop company to company, do basically nothing and make that pay for 4-6 months before you're found out. And not to mention the benefits... I can't understand why there's not more of an outrage. It's insane. I simply can't tell any high schooler that an engineering degree outside of SWE, and maybe a highly focused aerospace degree, is worth it for the foreseeable future.

jppope 5y ago

I've been thinking about this for a while... and I am really starting to believe that management is the subsection of the workforce being most overpaid these days. Also, I wrote an article on developer pay that might be relevant to this discussion: (Why Aren't Developers Paid More?) https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/why-aren-t-developers-paid-more/ https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/why-aren-t-developers-pai...

wayoutthere 5y ago
To be fair most middle management isn’t as well compensated as software developers are. A director at a Fortune 500 is pulling down $200-250k, which is equivalent to about an E6 at big Internet natives. That said, to those who create the value go the spoils, so it’s not at all wrong. The middle managers just get a little frustrated and wish they were still software devs.
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  > A director at a Fortune 500 is pulling down $200-250k, which is equivalent to about an E6 at big Internet natives. Who are the big Internet natives?
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Google, FB, Netflix, Spotify, Twilio, et al. Make their money selling software and / or digital products.
    - pedrosorio 5y ago
      I don't think there are any staff software engineers at those companies in the US earning in that range. At the first 2 companies, that is slightly above the total comp for a new grad. For Spotify and Twilio, some Senior Engineers may earn in that range, but unlikely that any staff do. Netflix only hires senior(+) SWE, and is well known for making offers at the top of the market, which is well above $250k. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Spotify,Twilio,Netflix,Google,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Spotify,Twilio,Netflix,Googl...

fallingfrog 5y ago

Maybe he should eat less avocado toast. For real though, CEOs have thought this way for decades. See the famous Powell memo: https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/ https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

abeppu 5y ago

I think aside from the hypocrisy and poor taste of the specific sentiment expressed, the other thing that I find telling is that Golan's instinct was that management at competing companies should collectively agree to drive down wages. His perspective is centered not around competition between his company and others, but about management at all companies against a group of workers. And for those in the US, perhaps this idea of companies colluding to keep down wages recalls the non-poaching deal among many US tech giants from several years ago. I suspect the exception here was voicing this in a relatively public way, where at least normally executives would have the sense to do this quietly.

wayoutthere 5y ago
There are also those of us who bill out engineering talent hourly who are more than happy to help drive up salaries across the board as it increases the hourly rates my clients will pay. I can absorb the salary increase simply by raising the price, and my clients will pay it because their HR couldn’t hire engineering talent even when it was available.
908B64B197 5y ago
If he ends up in court for doing that I hope he realize his LinkedIn posts might be used by the prosecution.

jeromenerf 5y ago

Well. Pay and price fixing is an exercice of vision and elegance. Most go at it with brute force and ignorance.

dougSF70 5y ago

I guess high salaries paid by funded startups offset the risk that the company will flame out in 3-5 years combined with scarcity of developer talent - which in itself is driven by lots of VC money sloshing around. When the money dries up, salaries will deflate. However, money will remain cheap while govts are printing it so liberally. Software isn't so much eating the world, it is eating mountains and mountains of cash.

throwawayboise 5y ago
Basically what I wanted to say. There is definitely a bubble in tech salaries, people are getting paid salaries that in comparison to other fields have no relation to the aptitude, education, and personal sacrifice needed to do the work. Will the bubble pop? I don't know. I thought it would pop long ago, but the flow of VC money into tech firms doesn't seem to be abating, and the consumer appetite for the dreck created by the FAANG companies is likewise.
- dougSF70 5y ago
  Basically, ride the wave while it lasts. And that CEO should suck it up and pay market rates, why else did he raise all that VC money?? To spend it on swanky offices and aws compute?
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > people are getting paid salaries that in comparison to other fields have no relation to the aptitude, education, and personal sacrifice needed to do the work. None of these things matter. It's supply and demand, simple as that. And value created. Instagram had millions of users and 14 employees.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  These people still create more value than they get paid. Seems fine.
908B64B197 5y ago
There's two choices right now: wait for salaries to go down and look at an other startup gain market share for the same idea you had or bite the bullet. Especially with SaaS, there's no reason why a single startup can't completely own a niche. Scaling is a matter of architecting code correctly (higher quality engineers will do that) and adding extra resources in AWS.

cvhashim 5y ago

Clown

Apocryphon 5y ago

More about the company- > Israel-based Anyvision’s previous largest stint in the public eye came when Microsoft pulled its investments from the company last year after reports (which AnyVision denied) that the company’s AI was used to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank.

bhewes 5y ago

Classic. Maybe his idea is bad if he cannot pay salaries in the same order of magnitude.

underseacables 5y ago

Here’s an anecdote from a job I had in Atlanta at an inside sales for Microsoft job: It was an awful, horrible place to work, with major churn and deception, but management never understood why we complained, after-all, we got free snacks, soda, and Chik Fil A on Wednesday’s…

djanogo 5y ago
I have always associated free food at work with dog biscuits, they gave them to calm you down or make you do tricks, like a pet.
- andreskytt 5y ago
  Depends on the circumstance. Skype office in Tallinn had free food because it was an efficient way to feed the mass of geeks in that part of town at the time (10+ years ago).

aeturnum 5y ago

I genuinely don't understand concern about workers being paid too much. I get that a particular company may not be possible with the current compensation standards and that's frustrating, but if you are in the position of having raised hundreds of millions on a particular business plan then you're in a position to possibly make money in the current compensation environment. Like, you can always start a fast food franchise if you want reliable profit off low-wage workers? If your business can make money, it seems like it would be great to pay everyone as much as possible while still making money. Like, the best way to keep a good thing going to to keep everyone happy (including investors so ofc save some of the pie for them). It just seems like, if you want to keep doing the thing you built the business to do, you wanna minimize risk on the important parts and working hard to pay your knowledge workers less seems like it would undermine that? I guess it's also a classic observation that capitalists are all about "everyone wins under capitalism" until they see a way for someone else to win less.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I don't begrudge anyone for earning as much as he can or paying employees well. I am just surprised the bubble hasn't popped again, like it did in 2000. The time is coming. Inflation is reducing the spending power of the average consumer and tech gadgets and gizmos will be one of the first things on the cutting block of the middle-class family budget.

zwieback 5y ago

Tonedeaf and will surely backfire. However, churn is a real problem for overfunded companies participating in an overheated market segment. It'll work itself out eventually.

iddan 5y ago

All the people I talk to in the Tel Aviv scene are glad they are able to pay these salaries. They choose to hire people from Israel because they believe they have strategic value for their companies and that on-site communication is vital for their success. Many companies in Israel hire remote workers as well. There is room for everybody. Worth mentioning all the major news outlets in Israel regularly broadcast items about huge exists and IPOs of Israeli companies and ads for hiring tech workers are aired in prime time and plastered all around town

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

josefritz 5y ago

I would argue it's the C-suite execs that are overpaid. Their decisions are meant to be at a high-level, impesonal and focused on the finaincial well-being of the corporation. ironically that would make their work very easy to automate with AI. In other words... a robot could do his job.

josefritz 5y ago

I would argue it's the C-suite execs that are overpaid. Their decisions are high-level, impesonal and focused on the finaincial well-being of the corporation. Ironically that would make their work very easy to automate with AI. In other words... a robot could do his job.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> We just received $230MM in funding Money is falling from the sky on even the most trivial idea in someone's head, so by definition nobody can be getting too much pay. SV and american tech is crazy overvalued compared to the whole rest of the world, i don't know if this will end up good or bad. This guy is talking about Israeli tech companies, and he s right, israel can't print unlimited money the way the US can and can't afford to sustain a bubble

k4ch0w 5y ago

Maybe CEOs get paid too much for the value they bring? If my company’s head said this, it would be an indication to leave because clearly they don’t value what you bring to the table.

gotoeleven 5y ago

Just to play devil's advocate, the argument here is that programming is largely commoditized nowadays. A given programmer might build a thing that makes the company $10M, but if there are 1000 other people who could also build that thing then really the value isn't so much in the building of that thing, but in the company structure providing the opportunity to build that thing that has a value of $10M. I think this might be a more interesting argument to engage with than the one people seem to be responding to in this thread.

bartread 5y ago

> The problem, Golan explained, was that tech companies are offering wages and benefits that were too generous and, he claimed, would hurt employees in the long run. Spoken like a multi-millionaire. Eff right off. I had a former boss who latched onto some article about how £X was the optimal amount of money to earn for happiness and you shouldn't want more, and started loudly declaiming this amongst staff one lunchtime. Needless to say I wasn't too impressed with him either. I don't know whether these people are tone deaf to begin with or whether something about the money makes them so but, if I ever "make it", remind me not to behave like this.

Animats 5y ago

This is going to be amusing, because of Israel's internal politics. It's embarrassing for Israel. Israel has a Government department[1] which tries to stop, spin, or de-emphasize embarrassments like this. The last big embarrassment they faced was the binary options scam, which had grown at peak to be 40% of Israel's financial sector. On this one, the meme is starting to roll. Globes, Israel's main business newspaper, picked this up.[2] They interviewed the guy, and have more info than the Vice article. He's in San Francisco, and lives in Silicon Valley, not Israel. Which means this may attract the attention of US antitrust regulators, who are much more active now than under previous administrations. Remember the Apple-Google-Intel-Adobe-Pixar-Lucasfilm conspiracy.[3] Complaint to Israel competition authority [4](Hebrew) [5] (translated). Anti-Semitic rant about this.[6] That's the sort of thing that gets the ADL and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy going, because it started with something someone in Israel really did, and worse, talked about in public. [1] https://www.gov.il/en/departments/Units/ministry_of_strategic_affairs_and_public_diplomacy https://www.gov.il/en/departments/Units/ministry_of_strategi... [2] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-ceo-slams-millennials-tech-job-ethic-1001378286 https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-ceo-slams... [3] https://www.inc.com/associated-press/apple-google-other-tech-firms-to-pay-415-million-wage-case.html https://www.inc.com/associated-press/apple-google-other-tech... [4] https://www.geektime.co.il/competition-authority-receives-complaint-against-anyvision-ceo-avi-golan/ https://www.geektime.co.il/competition-authority-receives-co... [5] https://www.translatetheweb.com/?ref=TAns&from=&to=en&a=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geektime.co.il%2Fcompetition-authority-receives-complaint-against-anyvision-ceo-avi-golan%2F https://www.translatetheweb.com/?ref=TAns&from=&to=en&a=http... [6] https://f1bbs.com/viewtopic.php?id=8039 https://f1bbs.com/viewtopic.php?id=8039

sofixa 5y ago
Regarding [6], what?! I'm glad i don't understand half their slang, I'd be even more disgusted.

908B64B197 5y ago

> "I'm calling all Israeli CEOs specifically in hi-tech to stop the hiring madness before the bubble explodes," Golan wrote. I can't help to think that a rich Jewish man whining that employees are paid too much and suggesting wage-fixing as a solution won't help fighting stereotypes... > "This new generation of young engineers needs proper guidance, and we need to be responsible to teach them career fundamentals. Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad. We are hurting our young generation as well as our own market and country by the fact we keep raising salaries and offering crazy illogical benefits." My experience with outsourcing is that projects ends up getting in-sourced eventually (and often it's a complete re-write). But hey, if they want to burn their investor's money like that, good for them. It's a winner's take all market out here and those who will outbid for 10x devs will get to market better and faster.

shadilay 5y ago
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/201809/stereotype-accuracy-displeasing-truth https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2018...

polotics 5y ago

This looks like a desperate plea for attention and relevance, most likely a smoke cloud from someone having serious issues at the helm of his company.

morpheos137 5y ago

Absolutely. Tech workers are just about the most entitled profession out there for actual value creation. The problem is feature and framework churn introducing unecessary complexity into the development process. Once software development managers get a handle on churn and the work process is standardised work can be increasingly completed by lower skill workers for less pay with no loss of functionality. But so far, for the last 20 years or so the industry has been more interested in the latest bullshitly.js framework every couple months. Tl. dr. over investment leads to wage inflation without substaintial functional improvements turning raw materials into in demand products.

taylodl 5y ago

Tech workers say CEO gets too much pay and benefits. All asinine comments like this do is foster disrespect.

nunez 5y ago

How insulting. > "I'm calling all Israeli CEOs specifically in hi-tech to stop the hiring madness before the bubble explodes," Golan wrote. "This new generation of young engineers needs proper guidance, and we need to be responsible to teach them career fundamentals. Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad. We are hurting our young generation as well as our own market and country by the fact we keep raising salaries and offering crazy illogical benefits." Translation: > "Engineers are bodies. We must reinforce that only those that command many bodies through a strictly hierarchical organization are deserving of being highly compensated. These are fundamentals. We must not erode them." Also: > Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad lol, good luck with that.

bitL 5y ago

CEO: I can't have a software sweatshop, the employees must come to their senses! I need that new Lambo every month!

wanderer2323 5y ago

There is a bank in Russia that had almost the same message -- it's a bubble, we don't want to support it, in 5 years nobody will be able to afford an SWE, we should do whatever we can to avert the tragedy. Of course when the inside stories came out -- the bank's software department turned out to be a horrible sweatshop drowning in technical debt.