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I mean what is a huge salary? There’s so much money flowing around at the top of society where it’s in the interest of tech investors to get the best founders a

I mean what is a huge salary? There’s so much money flowing around at the top of society where it’s in the interest of tech investors to get the best founders and companies working for them I think investment is going to be larger which will inevitably trickle down to salaries. Weirdly it’s actually much better to not take a large salary and have the lowest possible burn rate to reduce the need for investment diluting your steak.

wpietri 5y ago
The theory that maximum money gets you "the best" is... under-evidenced. It's just as likely to get you the greediest, the most manipulative, or the most opportunistic. A good place to start is with Kohn's "Punished by Rewards", which covers a fair bit of research on how intrinsic motivation is undermined by extrinsic motivation. The people I know who are great at something do it because they truly love it. Whereas the most money-motivated people I meet focus a lot of their attention not on the actual topic, but the getting of money.
- cjblomqvist 5y ago
  But all that research is not done on founders (haven't checked, but I've read research on this topic before) - so I'd argue it's basically difficult to know.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    If you want to claim founders are different, you have to make the claim and justify it. For example, you could claim that modern startups don't actually require people who are the best at anything except greed. Look at Uber or WeWork. Neither of those companies has ever turned a profit and maybe never will. But both of their founders walked away rich, rich, rich.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  I’m not convinced, essentially I’m saying businesses that have higher growth rates will get more investment and consequently pay higher salaries. For example the best developers already know their worth and I would suspect paying well to on average be correlated with better software. If you’re paying your developers $300k+ you’re likely to also remunerate yourself similarly well. I’d really be surprised if paying top rate for devs isn’t associated with more successful companies but sure, some will waste their investment in the wrong places and some will be trying to artificially enrich themselves, maybe even faking growth numbers which I’d be surprised if it doesn’t happen a lot. As for me if I’m doing a startup I’d prefer to be more mission driven and keep all of the equity for myself and the founding team or as much as possible.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Paying top rates is associated with more successful companies because the more successful companies have the money to pay top rates. That doesn't mean they get the "best" people, though. I know good developers who have joined Google, ended up on things where they weren't learning much, and left Google for things that were more challenging. And I've known people who hopped between the various high-profile companies regularly to maximize salary. They were all smart enough, but they aren't people I'd want on my team because what they focused on wasn't the work or the colleagues, but getting the next promotion so they'd look more appealing next time they changed jobs. Or you could look at the people in finance. I used to write software for financial traders. It was lucrative but soulless and frequently unpleasant. Some of the people I was building for were awful human beings. I left, and few of my former colleagues stayed in the industry. So in my view, finance pays more because to compensate for its flaws. So I'd agree that on average a better software developer can command more pay than a worse one. But so can people who are more self-confident, more self-promoting, more exploitative, or less interested in things like net value to society, learning things, or working with good people. There are just too many factors to make sweeping statements, especially at the extremes.

wpietri 5y ago

The theory that maximum money gets you "the best" is... under-evidenced. It's just as likely to get you the greediest, the most manipulative, or the most opportunistic. A good place to start is with Kohn's "Punished by Rewards", which covers a fair bit of research on how intrinsic motivation is undermined by extrinsic motivation. The people I know who are great at something do it because they truly love it. Whereas the most money-motivated people I meet focus a lot of their attention not on the actual topic, but the getting of money.

cjblomqvist 5y ago
But all that research is not done on founders (haven't checked, but I've read research on this topic before) - so I'd argue it's basically difficult to know.
- wpietri 5y ago
  If you want to claim founders are different, you have to make the claim and justify it. For example, you could claim that modern startups don't actually require people who are the best at anything except greed. Look at Uber or WeWork. Neither of those companies has ever turned a profit and maybe never will. But both of their founders walked away rich, rich, rich.
andy_ppp 5y ago
I’m not convinced, essentially I’m saying businesses that have higher growth rates will get more investment and consequently pay higher salaries. For example the best developers already know their worth and I would suspect paying well to on average be correlated with better software. If you’re paying your developers $300k+ you’re likely to also remunerate yourself similarly well. I’d really be surprised if paying top rate for devs isn’t associated with more successful companies but sure, some will waste their investment in the wrong places and some will be trying to artificially enrich themselves, maybe even faking growth numbers which I’d be surprised if it doesn’t happen a lot. As for me if I’m doing a startup I’d prefer to be more mission driven and keep all of the equity for myself and the founding team or as much as possible.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Paying top rates is associated with more successful companies because the more successful companies have the money to pay top rates. That doesn't mean they get the "best" people, though. I know good developers who have joined Google, ended up on things where they weren't learning much, and left Google for things that were more challenging. And I've known people who hopped between the various high-profile companies regularly to maximize salary. They were all smart enough, but they aren't people I'd want on my team because what they focused on wasn't the work or the colleagues, but getting the next promotion so they'd look more appealing next time they changed jobs. Or you could look at the people in finance. I used to write software for financial traders. It was lucrative but soulless and frequently unpleasant. Some of the people I was building for were awful human beings. I left, and few of my former colleagues stayed in the industry. So in my view, finance pays more because to compensate for its flaws. So I'd agree that on average a better software developer can command more pay than a worse one. But so can people who are more self-confident, more self-promoting, more exploitative, or less interested in things like net value to society, learning things, or working with good people. There are just too many factors to make sweeping statements, especially at the extremes.