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For the HN crowd, it's probably worthwhile to split "STEM" into "high-end engineering" and "normal engineering". The former is suffering from a labor shortage w

by sxp 5y ago

For the HN crowd, it's probably worthwhile to split "STEM" into "high-end engineering" and "normal engineering". The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience. But for normal SWEs and other engineering fields, there is a glut of talent (https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/) so it can be harder to find an engineering job that pays enough to justify the college tuition. This article is about the latter group. However, there is still a significant shortage of talented engineers in non-SWE roles. We've outsourced engineering jobs such as semiconductor manufacturing and other tech production to other countries which makes it hard for junior engineers to find jobs and learn enough to become highly talented engineers. And that requires heavy investment by the government in our engineering ecosystem so that junior engineers can find good jobs and learn more. Tim Cook explained this well in the context of iPhone screws: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-china-made.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-... > “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” he said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”

MattGaiser 5y ago
Another problem is that just because a person graduates with a degree in X, doesn't mean they are any use at X. I know a bunch of CS degreed people who got out of virtually every coding course in university. Unsurprisingly, they don't work as software engineers at the moment. They are technically part of the group of potential employees for technical work, but they are arguably worse than someone who skimmed Python for Dummies.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Another problem is that just because a person graduates with a degree in X, doesn’t mean they are any use at X Perhaps true, but this: > I know a bunch of CS degreed people who got out of virtually every coding course in university. is arguably a different problem, because CS isn’t Software Engineering, though the right focus within CS study can be a good preparation for work in software engineering. > They are technically part of the group of potential employees for technical work, If they aren’t working as software engineers and aren’t seeking jobs as software engineers, are they really?
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    > If they aren’t working as software engineers and aren’t seeking jobs as software engineers, are they really? Practically, no, but for the purposes of surveys and government reports, yes.
- nradov 5y ago
  A CS degree was never intended to produce skilled coders. It's not a vocational training course.
  - unishark 5y ago
    ABET accreditation (not as important in CS as engineering, but still very common) requires a CS program to teach software development and strong programming skills. Training for professional roles (like engineering) is essentially vocational training. There is an industry need that drives the curriculum requirements.
  - bluedino 5y ago
    Someone should tell that to companies hiring programmers.
    - GeorgeTirebiter 5y ago
      If one succeeds in a CS program, then "programming" should be straightforward. I have a CS degree. We never learned any computer languages in college; you were expected to 'pick up' them well-enough to succeed in the course. (These languages were APL, Maclisp, and PL/I). A CS degree can be a proxy for 'this person proved they can learn computer-related stuff'.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> For the HN crowd, it’s probably worthwhile to split “STEM” into “high-end engineering” and “normal engineering”. Isn’t that just splitting the “E” in STEM? STEM ⊃ Engineering (EDIT: since you are really talking about SWE and not “classical” engineering, maybe its more splitting the “T” than the “E”; still, leaving out a lot of STEM.)
rootusrootus 5y ago
> normal SWEs Could you clarify what qualifies someone as a high-end SWE, and what would relegate someone to being a normal SWE? Is it just dependent on employer?
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  Not the OP but I agree with their comment. I think the distinction is mostly around experience. Specifically, experience designing large systems (understanding tradeoffs, resource requirements, etc.) based on product/business requirements. If I can come to you and say "I need a system to manage documents" and you can take it from their (eliciting more details from non/semi-technical collaborators along the way) then you are probably a high-end SWE.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Shit I’m fairly confident I could do that, where do I apply?
    - jmchuster 5y ago
      If you want to "apply", then have a friend who works at a FAANG, and they'll connect you. Otherwise, you don't apply, you just have a resume online that looks like that of someone who would have that experience, and FAANG recruiters will already be reaching out and shepherd you through the process till you get to an interview. But while the recruiter sets a relatively low bar for what you should look like, the interview will then set a relatively high bar for what you should look like (and probably overly specific bar). So you need to make sure you have the ability to pass such interviews with flying colors, which itself requires a different skillset/training (maybe 50% overlap with your day-to-day skills). Again, remember during this whole process, what is most important is "do i look like someone who has these skills", which is slightly different from "i am someone who has these skills" or "i am someone who could develop these skills if needed". The latter only matters once you start at your new job.
  - btilly 5y ago
    No, you're describing the system architect anti-pattern. People who see their job as designing large systems will, over time, lose contact with coding. After that they will lose a critical feedback loop that informs their architectures, and you'll get architectures that work on paper but not in reality. Back when I was at Google they made it clear that it is important that interviewers identify such people in the interview process, and not hire them if their willingness and ability to code were not up to snuff. It was OK if they had a string of architect jobs. What is actually needed is the ability to be down in the weeds, working at a low-level, while keeping an eye on high level concerns and an awareness of how what you're working on will evolve over time. So yes, you design the large system, but have to be a major part of building the prototype. Then make sure that, as more developers are brought in, they learn the tribal knowledge needed to both maintain coding standards and the high level design.
nell 5y ago
I tend to agree here. There must be top performers in pool B willing to invest time and effort to move to pool A given how lucrative it is. Anyone working on high-end engineering, could you please give some color here? Is it very hard or impossible to make a move from let's say a web developer to a high end engineering role? What are the some examples of those roles? If the jump is doable, there should be some training available for anyone wanting to make that investment. Are there any?
- Bishop_ 5y ago
  From the (admittedly small) pool of folks i've talked to. It seems like you leetcode until your eyes bleed and hope you nail the interview.
- brutus1213 5y ago
  I posted something similar to you. I think the jump is not doable because it requires massive investment in a lottery ticket. Not only are FANG interviews leetcode level hard, I have heard friends at such orgs talk about the anti-loop. Even if you got to the point of solving most leetcode problems, the anti-loop can reject you. I know plenty of brilliant engineers not getting paid the value they create, because they have kids or work a tough job or volunteer or whatever, that makes it so they will never get a FANG offer.
  - civilized 5y ago
    The... anti-loop...?
    - dmoy 5y ago
      It's a yegge-coined term for getting a set of ~five interviewers who won't pass anyone. That is for any candidate who passes interviewer X's idea of a good candidate, you won't pass Y. I don't think you see it much anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does still happen from time to time.
    - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
brutus1213 5y ago
You raise an interesting point. I think most non-FANG engineers would say that that the leetcode culture is getting out of hand, and the FANG's quest for the 10x engineer leads to both (a) rocket high salaries+competition from the people who can pass leetcode, and (b) passing on lots of smart engineers who could not or did not want to run the interviewing gauntlet. What is the economic sense to not lowering the bar rather than constantly attempting to raise it?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  There’s coordination costs that scale super-linearly with people and many of the FAANGs have such high leverage from a slightly higher output of a software engineer that the costs aren’t a barrier for them. In other words, if they don’t have to lower their standards for financial reasons, they just don’t.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  I made the point in another comment that one of the reasons other industries kind of suck is because of the heavy gate-keeping. You want to be an investment banker? There is no path but to have gone to an Ivy League school. Stuff like this is a tragedy. Industries that are cordoned off in this way are extremely selfish. I understand the need for the elite to be brain surgeons, but for a vast majority of professions, the filtering for elite is not conducive to a healthy village. Leetcode is fine, but the trend I’m hearing is that it is getting more and more absurd and somewhat becoming our version of the same gate-keeping that makes finance, law, politics, etc bad. I’m hopeful overall since you can’t bullshit good software. Over time, the less elite can make better products and make the gatekeeping look stupid when it’s all said and done.
  - dasyatidprime 5y ago
    That's very dependent on whether the definition of “good” can be yanked around by what the rest of the industry does, for example by ease of compatibility with other software APIs or by UI and behavior models that are familiar to lower friction for people who have already used something popular.
  - 5y ago
bcrosby95 5y ago
> We've outsourced engineering jobs > And that requires heavy investment by the government in our engineering ecosystem so that junior engineers can find good jobs and learn more. We'll just outsource them again next quarter. It's a losing game. You need a willing participant to play.
kktkti9 5y ago
It was stupid to put all our manufacturing eggs in one basket, not just for nation state politics but species security against regional war, acts of god… In the end our decisions were guided by elder concepts of correctness, that coincidentally enriched them at our expense. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson - “the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead.” We’re due for a rethink of our social obligations, not just this attacking fiscal margins, and coddling the business elite of yesterday. Who were enriched in an era of higher taxation and much lower costs. But they are obviously owed big returns on their decades old effort. Our reverence for them is of course etched into the physics of the universe. Hmmm…
teclordphrack2 5y ago
The only thing that is missing is training. If FAANGs would train then they would have no problems and would have much, much lower payroll cost.
dotcommand 5y ago
> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience. The reason FAANGs/etc are willing to pay $300k-600k for "high-end" mid-level engineers is because they stand to recoup many times than per employee. Nothing to do with shortage of high end mid-level talent. Facebook, Google, etc are some of the most profitable companies in the world ( outside of finance of course ). https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tech-companies-highest-profit-per-employee https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tech-companies-highes... > there is a glut of talent If there is a glut of "low-level" engineers it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers. Besides, the tech industry historically prefers to hire young people and push out older ones. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/tech-companies-admit-to-actively-targeting-younger-workers-for-jobs/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/tech-companies-admit-to... So if there is a lack of "high-end" mid level employees, they aren't doing a good job of developing their younger "low-end" employees. Or it's all just bullshit used by the tech industry to offshore more jobs, import more employees and create downward wage pressure on "high-end" mid level salaries. Just like with every supposed "shortage" of "talent" we've ever had.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > $300k-600k for "high-end" mid-level engineers is because they stand to recoup many times than per employee. Why would a company pay more than they need to? I would pay 4x the price for grapes if required. I don't as I would prefer to spend less on grapes. > it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers. Unless there is something that prevents from from becoming mid-level engineers. Like companies that don't hire junior level engineers at all and have mid-level be the entry level.
  - teebs 5y ago
    > Why would a company pay more than they need to? I would pay 4x the price for grapes if required. I don't as I would prefer to spend less on grapes. I think it's because they could still use more engineers to do what they want to do, and they believe that great talent is way, way better than good talent. They want pretty much everyone to think "working at FAANG is the best financial option for me" and to apply, so they get their pick of the talent pool.
mahogany 5y ago
> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience. I thought it was because they generate >$1 million per employee.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  It only matters how much revenue they generate per employee when that revenue dips below salary. If the supply for epic superstar 10x devs greatly exceeded demand, they could make $100M per employee and they still wouldn't pay as much as $300-600k. (Unless they were forced to by, say, unionization.)
tssva 5y ago
How nice of Tim Cook to describe the issue the Tim Cook's of the world created.
amelius 5y ago
Should we call FAANG high end engineering? Shouldn't that term be reserved for things like quantum computing, particle physics and fusion reactors and stuff?
- ampdepolymerase 5y ago
  Create value, capture value. Hardware is hard.
- madengr 5y ago
  Nah, advertising and click-bait far outclass those.
- akomtu 5y ago
  That stuff is research/science, not engineering.
  - amelius 5y ago
    There is plenty of engineering involved.
TuringNYC 5y ago
>> However, there is still a significant shortage of talented engineers in non-SWE roles. Not sure I agree. Seems more there is a shortage of housing in SWE-heavy metro regions. I have so many friends from college who graduated with computer science degrees and ended up in non-engineering roles -- because of a total mis-match between SWE pay and housing costs, especially in the Bay Area where the jobs used to be. Now, before anyone cites FAANG L6+ salaries, note you dont get into those after graduation, and not everyone gets into those roles. Also note, for the majority of non-public SWE roles with "high" total comp, you cant pay rent with total comp stock/equity, you pay rent with cash comp. Also, before anyone cites the cost of a studio apartment in California, note not everyone is single and not everyone wants to stuff a family into a studio apartment. All this may well change with WFH and remote-work, which will open up talent pools across the US and the world.
- treis 5y ago
  > have so many friends from college who graduated with computer science degrees and ended up in non-engineering roles -- because of a total mis-match between SWE pay and housing costs, especially in the Bay Area where the jobs used to be. What did they do instead?
  - TuringNYC 5y ago
    Wall Street. Management Consulting. Commercial Real Estate. The job doesnt have to pay a lot, but the pay needs to cover housing for the region where the job is located.
- ptmcc 5y ago
  > you cant pay rent with total comp stock/equity Sure you can, you just sell it as it vests. Which is the commonly-recommended thing to do. At a public company RSUs are so liquid they are damn near as good as cash. Once you're on the vesting treadmill they're hitting every quarter, or even every month. That's not much different from a paycheck. Yeah there's market risk that dictates the actual value, but when you're getting your salary again as RSUs it's still a boatload of cash regardless of market performance. Cash that you can pay for things with. Like rent.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience They want the golden childs. They want 5-10 years experience but still balk at anyone aged over 40. You have to have an "upper level degree" but then again they don't want someone who spent too long in school. You need a breath of multi-disciplinary experience but also know absolutely everything needed to "hit the ground running" in their very narrow field. And of course they must be a good "culture fit". At anyone one moment there are perhaps ten such people on the planet. I have met some of these people. They do exist. They are essentially walking professional resumes. They look great on the corporate website but rarely accomplish much practical work before they are off to live on a different website at an even higher salary.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  Maybe at the 600k mark, but the 300k mark is a very wide net. Source: levels.fyi
  - res0nat0r 5y ago
    Anyone have realistic or actual job postings that pay 300-600k vs. something off of levels.fi? I've been in this field for 15 years and have had some good gigs on my resume, not currently looking around but this pay rate is way outside what seems to be the norm. Unless you're some kind of expert in "big data" / Tensorflow / PyTorch / statistical wizard that is the current hotness, it seems a bit crazy to be making this kind of money for high end cloud / IT work. Or maybe I'm just really underpaid.
    - bun_at_work 5y ago
      It seems like a lot of these pay sources use total compensation as their metric, although I'm not 100% certain of that. If that's the case, though, things start to get real fuzzy talking about salary. If you're at a startup with X stock options, you can start talking about total compensation when the company IPOs. Also, if you work for FAANG, you get RSUs which don't vest until some time, but do count towards total compensation before then. Take a lot of those numbers in that context and they make more sense.
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
Well, high-end engineers are only in demand in specific fields. Anecdotally, one of my relatives is about to complete his PhD in Chemical Engineering, and since there isn't a labor shortage in that field, he's looking for software jobs to use the skills he picked up in his lab work.
tarsinge 5y ago
Tangential but it make me think, given the network effects and associated monopoly position of some FAANGs like Google or Facebook, it seems they could hire engineer to do nothing and still be vastly profitable. In fact, it would have the benefit or preventing top talents joining or creating a competitor. Therefore, how much is a "real" labor shortage vs a perverse side-effect of monopolies or a capital intensive hack of preventing competition? It's just an intuition from their monetized output from their profit centers compared to their workforce, maybe a dumb idea but I'm curious of what people than know more than me think of it.
bsder 5y ago
> “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” he said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Then perhaps Apple needs to start training some tooling engineers? Companies like Apple outsourced everything and killed domestic manufacturing in the pursuit of a couple pennies are now complaining that domestic manufacturing is dead? I'm currently listening to the world's tiniest violin. "Tech" companies like IBM used to own such prosaic things as low radioactivity lead mines in order maintain access to the resources required. Vertical integration got sacrificed to the financial gods in favor of Always Late Inventory(tm). And, now, everybody is finding that it's really hard to reverse. Suck it up and do it yourself, or bend over for China, Tim.

by sxp 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

Another problem is that just because a person graduates with a degree in X, doesn't mean they are any use at X. I know a bunch of CS degreed people who got out of virtually every coding course in university. Unsurprisingly, they don't work as software engineers at the moment. They are technically part of the group of potential employees for technical work, but they are arguably worse than someone who skimmed Python for Dummies.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Another problem is that just because a person graduates with a degree in X, doesn’t mean they are any use at X Perhaps true, but this: > I know a bunch of CS degreed people who got out of virtually every coding course in university. is arguably a different problem, because CS isn’t Software Engineering, though the right focus within CS study can be a good preparation for work in software engineering. > They are technically part of the group of potential employees for technical work, If they aren’t working as software engineers and aren’t seeking jobs as software engineers, are they really?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > If they aren’t working as software engineers and aren’t seeking jobs as software engineers, are they really? Practically, no, but for the purposes of surveys and government reports, yes.
nradov 5y ago
A CS degree was never intended to produce skilled coders. It's not a vocational training course.
- unishark 5y ago
  ABET accreditation (not as important in CS as engineering, but still very common) requires a CS program to teach software development and strong programming skills. Training for professional roles (like engineering) is essentially vocational training. There is an industry need that drives the curriculum requirements.
- bluedino 5y ago
  Someone should tell that to companies hiring programmers.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 5y ago
    If one succeeds in a CS program, then "programming" should be straightforward. I have a CS degree. We never learned any computer languages in college; you were expected to 'pick up' them well-enough to succeed in the course. (These languages were APL, Maclisp, and PL/I). A CS degree can be a proxy for 'this person proved they can learn computer-related stuff'.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> For the HN crowd, it’s probably worthwhile to split “STEM” into “high-end engineering” and “normal engineering”. Isn’t that just splitting the “E” in STEM? STEM ⊃ Engineering (EDIT: since you are really talking about SWE and not “classical” engineering, maybe its more splitting the “T” than the “E”; still, leaving out a lot of STEM.)

rootusrootus 5y ago

> normal SWEs Could you clarify what qualifies someone as a high-end SWE, and what would relegate someone to being a normal SWE? Is it just dependent on employer?

thinkharderdev 5y ago
Not the OP but I agree with their comment. I think the distinction is mostly around experience. Specifically, experience designing large systems (understanding tradeoffs, resource requirements, etc.) based on product/business requirements. If I can come to you and say "I need a system to manage documents" and you can take it from their (eliciting more details from non/semi-technical collaborators along the way) then you are probably a high-end SWE.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Shit I’m fairly confident I could do that, where do I apply?
  - jmchuster 5y ago
    If you want to "apply", then have a friend who works at a FAANG, and they'll connect you. Otherwise, you don't apply, you just have a resume online that looks like that of someone who would have that experience, and FAANG recruiters will already be reaching out and shepherd you through the process till you get to an interview. But while the recruiter sets a relatively low bar for what you should look like, the interview will then set a relatively high bar for what you should look like (and probably overly specific bar). So you need to make sure you have the ability to pass such interviews with flying colors, which itself requires a different skillset/training (maybe 50% overlap with your day-to-day skills). Again, remember during this whole process, what is most important is "do i look like someone who has these skills", which is slightly different from "i am someone who has these skills" or "i am someone who could develop these skills if needed". The latter only matters once you start at your new job.
- btilly 5y ago
  No, you're describing the system architect anti-pattern. People who see their job as designing large systems will, over time, lose contact with coding. After that they will lose a critical feedback loop that informs their architectures, and you'll get architectures that work on paper but not in reality. Back when I was at Google they made it clear that it is important that interviewers identify such people in the interview process, and not hire them if their willingness and ability to code were not up to snuff. It was OK if they had a string of architect jobs. What is actually needed is the ability to be down in the weeds, working at a low-level, while keeping an eye on high level concerns and an awareness of how what you're working on will evolve over time. So yes, you design the large system, but have to be a major part of building the prototype. Then make sure that, as more developers are brought in, they learn the tribal knowledge needed to both maintain coding standards and the high level design.

nell 5y ago

I tend to agree here. There must be top performers in pool B willing to invest time and effort to move to pool A given how lucrative it is. Anyone working on high-end engineering, could you please give some color here? Is it very hard or impossible to make a move from let's say a web developer to a high end engineering role? What are the some examples of those roles? If the jump is doable, there should be some training available for anyone wanting to make that investment. Are there any?

Bishop_ 5y ago
From the (admittedly small) pool of folks i've talked to. It seems like you leetcode until your eyes bleed and hope you nail the interview.
brutus1213 5y ago
I posted something similar to you. I think the jump is not doable because it requires massive investment in a lottery ticket. Not only are FANG interviews leetcode level hard, I have heard friends at such orgs talk about the anti-loop. Even if you got to the point of solving most leetcode problems, the anti-loop can reject you. I know plenty of brilliant engineers not getting paid the value they create, because they have kids or work a tough job or volunteer or whatever, that makes it so they will never get a FANG offer.
- civilized 5y ago
  The... anti-loop...?
  - dmoy 5y ago
    It's a yegge-coined term for getting a set of ~five interviewers who won't pass anyone. That is for any candidate who passes interviewer X's idea of a good candidate, you won't pass Y. I don't think you see it much anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does still happen from time to time.
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago

brutus1213 5y ago

You raise an interesting point. I think most non-FANG engineers would say that that the leetcode culture is getting out of hand, and the FANG's quest for the 10x engineer leads to both (a) rocket high salaries+competition from the people who can pass leetcode, and (b) passing on lots of smart engineers who could not or did not want to run the interviewing gauntlet. What is the economic sense to not lowering the bar rather than constantly attempting to raise it?

sokoloff 5y ago
There’s coordination costs that scale super-linearly with people and many of the FAANGs have such high leverage from a slightly higher output of a software engineer that the costs aren’t a barrier for them. In other words, if they don’t have to lower their standards for financial reasons, they just don’t.
runawaybottle 5y ago
I made the point in another comment that one of the reasons other industries kind of suck is because of the heavy gate-keeping. You want to be an investment banker? There is no path but to have gone to an Ivy League school. Stuff like this is a tragedy. Industries that are cordoned off in this way are extremely selfish. I understand the need for the elite to be brain surgeons, but for a vast majority of professions, the filtering for elite is not conducive to a healthy village. Leetcode is fine, but the trend I’m hearing is that it is getting more and more absurd and somewhat becoming our version of the same gate-keeping that makes finance, law, politics, etc bad. I’m hopeful overall since you can’t bullshit good software. Over time, the less elite can make better products and make the gatekeeping look stupid when it’s all said and done.
- dasyatidprime 5y ago
  That's very dependent on whether the definition of “good” can be yanked around by what the rest of the industry does, for example by ease of compatibility with other software APIs or by UI and behavior models that are familiar to lower friction for people who have already used something popular.
- 5y ago

bcrosby95 5y ago

> We've outsourced engineering jobs > And that requires heavy investment by the government in our engineering ecosystem so that junior engineers can find good jobs and learn more. We'll just outsource them again next quarter. It's a losing game. You need a willing participant to play.

kktkti9 5y ago

It was stupid to put all our manufacturing eggs in one basket, not just for nation state politics but species security against regional war, acts of god… In the end our decisions were guided by elder concepts of correctness, that coincidentally enriched them at our expense. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson - “the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead.” We’re due for a rethink of our social obligations, not just this attacking fiscal margins, and coddling the business elite of yesterday. Who were enriched in an era of higher taxation and much lower costs. But they are obviously owed big returns on their decades old effort. Our reverence for them is of course etched into the physics of the universe. Hmmm…

teclordphrack2 5y ago

The only thing that is missing is training. If FAANGs would train then they would have no problems and would have much, much lower payroll cost.

dotcommand 5y ago

> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience. The reason FAANGs/etc are willing to pay $300k-600k for "high-end" mid-level engineers is because they stand to recoup many times than per employee. Nothing to do with shortage of high end mid-level talent. Facebook, Google, etc are some of the most profitable companies in the world ( outside of finance of course ). https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tech-companies-highest-profit-per-employee https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tech-companies-highes... > there is a glut of talent If there is a glut of "low-level" engineers it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers. Besides, the tech industry historically prefers to hire young people and push out older ones. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/tech-companies-admit-to-actively-targeting-younger-workers-for-jobs/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/tech-companies-admit-to... So if there is a lack of "high-end" mid level employees, they aren't doing a good job of developing their younger "low-end" employees. Or it's all just bullshit used by the tech industry to offshore more jobs, import more employees and create downward wage pressure on "high-end" mid level salaries. Just like with every supposed "shortage" of "talent" we've ever had.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MattGaiser 5y ago
> $300k-600k for "high-end" mid-level engineers is because they stand to recoup many times than per employee. Why would a company pay more than they need to? I would pay 4x the price for grapes if required. I don't as I would prefer to spend less on grapes. > it's impossible for there to be a shortage of high-end mid-level engineers as those mid-level come from the low-end engineers. Unless there is something that prevents from from becoming mid-level engineers. Like companies that don't hire junior level engineers at all and have mid-level be the entry level.
- teebs 5y ago
  > Why would a company pay more than they need to? I would pay 4x the price for grapes if required. I don't as I would prefer to spend less on grapes. I think it's because they could still use more engineers to do what they want to do, and they believe that great talent is way, way better than good talent. They want pretty much everyone to think "working at FAANG is the best financial option for me" and to apply, so they get their pick of the talent pool.

mahogany 5y ago

> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience. I thought it was because they generate >$1 million per employee.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
It only matters how much revenue they generate per employee when that revenue dips below salary. If the supply for epic superstar 10x devs greatly exceeded demand, they could make $100M per employee and they still wouldn't pay as much as $300-600k. (Unless they were forced to by, say, unionization.)

tssva 5y ago

How nice of Tim Cook to describe the issue the Tim Cook's of the world created.

amelius 5y ago

Should we call FAANG high end engineering? Shouldn't that term be reserved for things like quantum computing, particle physics and fusion reactors and stuff?

ampdepolymerase 5y ago
Create value, capture value. Hardware is hard.
madengr 5y ago
Nah, advertising and click-bait far outclass those.
akomtu 5y ago
That stuff is research/science, not engineering.
- amelius 5y ago
  There is plenty of engineering involved.

TuringNYC 5y ago

>> However, there is still a significant shortage of talented engineers in non-SWE roles. Not sure I agree. Seems more there is a shortage of housing in SWE-heavy metro regions. I have so many friends from college who graduated with computer science degrees and ended up in non-engineering roles -- because of a total mis-match between SWE pay and housing costs, especially in the Bay Area where the jobs used to be. Now, before anyone cites FAANG L6+ salaries, note you dont get into those after graduation, and not everyone gets into those roles. Also note, for the majority of non-public SWE roles with "high" total comp, you cant pay rent with total comp stock/equity, you pay rent with cash comp. Also, before anyone cites the cost of a studio apartment in California, note not everyone is single and not everyone wants to stuff a family into a studio apartment. All this may well change with WFH and remote-work, which will open up talent pools across the US and the world.

treis 5y ago
> have so many friends from college who graduated with computer science degrees and ended up in non-engineering roles -- because of a total mis-match between SWE pay and housing costs, especially in the Bay Area where the jobs used to be. What did they do instead?
- TuringNYC 5y ago
  Wall Street. Management Consulting. Commercial Real Estate. The job doesnt have to pay a lot, but the pay needs to cover housing for the region where the job is located.
ptmcc 5y ago
> you cant pay rent with total comp stock/equity Sure you can, you just sell it as it vests. Which is the commonly-recommended thing to do. At a public company RSUs are so liquid they are damn near as good as cash. Once you're on the vesting treadmill they're hitting every quarter, or even every month. That's not much different from a paycheck. Yeah there's market risk that dictates the actual value, but when you're getting your salary again as RSUs it's still a boatload of cash regardless of market performance. Cash that you can pay for things with. Like rent.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> The former is suffering from a labor shortage which is why FAANGs and similar companies are willing to pay $300k-600k for engineers with 5-10 years of experience They want the golden childs. They want 5-10 years experience but still balk at anyone aged over 40. You have to have an "upper level degree" but then again they don't want someone who spent too long in school. You need a breath of multi-disciplinary experience but also know absolutely everything needed to "hit the ground running" in their very narrow field. And of course they must be a good "culture fit". At anyone one moment there are perhaps ten such people on the planet. I have met some of these people. They do exist. They are essentially walking professional resumes. They look great on the corporate website but rarely accomplish much practical work before they are off to live on a different website at an even higher salary.

helen___keller 5y ago
Maybe at the 600k mark, but the 300k mark is a very wide net. Source: levels.fyi
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  Anyone have realistic or actual job postings that pay 300-600k vs. something off of levels.fi? I've been in this field for 15 years and have had some good gigs on my resume, not currently looking around but this pay rate is way outside what seems to be the norm. Unless you're some kind of expert in "big data" / Tensorflow / PyTorch / statistical wizard that is the current hotness, it seems a bit crazy to be making this kind of money for high end cloud / IT work. Or maybe I'm just really underpaid.
  - bun_at_work 5y ago
    It seems like a lot of these pay sources use total compensation as their metric, although I'm not 100% certain of that. If that's the case, though, things start to get real fuzzy talking about salary. If you're at a startup with X stock options, you can start talking about total compensation when the company IPOs. Also, if you work for FAANG, you get RSUs which don't vest until some time, but do count towards total compensation before then. Take a lot of those numbers in that context and they make more sense.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

Well, high-end engineers are only in demand in specific fields. Anecdotally, one of my relatives is about to complete his PhD in Chemical Engineering, and since there isn't a labor shortage in that field, he's looking for software jobs to use the skills he picked up in his lab work.

tarsinge 5y ago

Tangential but it make me think, given the network effects and associated monopoly position of some FAANGs like Google or Facebook, it seems they could hire engineer to do nothing and still be vastly profitable. In fact, it would have the benefit or preventing top talents joining or creating a competitor. Therefore, how much is a "real" labor shortage vs a perverse side-effect of monopolies or a capital intensive hack of preventing competition? It's just an intuition from their monetized output from their profit centers compared to their workforce, maybe a dumb idea but I'm curious of what people than know more than me think of it.

bsder 5y ago

> “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” he said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Then perhaps Apple needs to start training some tooling engineers? Companies like Apple outsourced everything and killed domestic manufacturing in the pursuit of a couple pennies are now complaining that domestic manufacturing is dead? I'm currently listening to the world's tiniest violin. "Tech" companies like IBM used to own such prosaic things as low radioactivity lead mines in order maintain access to the resources required. Vertical integration got sacrificed to the financial gods in favor of Always Late Inventory(tm). And, now, everybody is finding that it's really hard to reverse. Suck it up and do it yourself, or bend over for China, Tim.