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Don't really think SWEs are being taken advantage of the same way other employees at successful tech companies are. (Coming from the perspective of an SWE)
by amanj41 4y ago
Don't really think SWEs are being taken advantage of the same way other employees at successful tech companies are. (Coming from the perspective of an SWE)
- adamsmith143 4y agoDidn't mean that in general but there is a strong undercurrent of bootlicking and overworking oneself for little or no reward on HN.
- amanj41 4y agofair enough
- FredPret 4y agoWouldn’t call the typical SW career “little or no reward”
- adamsmith143 4y agoSure 300K TC seems impressive relative to the Barista you buy your Latte from but it pales in comparison to the amount that people like Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, etc have increased their wealth in the past 2 years for example, which is on the order of 10s of Billions. You are far closer to the homeless you guy step over on the way to Twitter HQ than to Jack Dorsey and sure if you deliver a great result this quarter maybe you'll make 400k next year but it's all relative.
- Shugarl 4y agoAre you actually comparing regular SW engineers to the wealthiest people on the planet ?
- FredPret 4y agoIt’s not relative. 300k buys you a fantastic life. You’ll never be in the 0.1% with a job vs owning assets, but these jobs are amazing by any measure, and a world away from being poor. The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply. You may say it buys them outsized influence, but media companies will always have owners, whether they be hectomillionaires or billionaires or whatever.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agospeaking from experience 300K buys you a fantastic life most of the time, but there can be problems that would be solved with more money but are unsolvable at the 300K level.
- adamsmith143 4y ago>The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply. I think this almost completely false. Elon Musk just bought Twitter and could drastically change a major point of interaction for hundreds of millions of people. The Koch Brothers spend billions to influence, to great effect, the laws that are passed in the US. These examples are not rare. The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie. But anyway I think the general point is that is that even by working yourself to death you only increase your income or net worth by small numbers while someone like Elon Musk can 10x it over the same time period.
- FredPret 4y agoHow could you possibly think the economy hasn’t grown in real terms since the 70’s? Almost every consumer item is vastly better and cheaper. Middle class lives are luxurious in the extreme compared to then. Who cares if 100 people at the top are getting more rewards faster, does it actually make your life worse? No. Only if you are jealous and mean-spirited does Musk’s quarter trillion dollars bother you. In fact, these people tend to invest in things that lead to further improvement. Furthermore, if Twitter bothers you that much, go on Parler.
- adamsmith143 4y ago>How could you possibly think the economy hasn’t grown in real terms since the 70’s? "The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie." Pretty clearly stated its obviously growing. >Almost every consumer item is vastly better and cheaper. Middle class lives are luxurious in the extreme compared to then. "I can buy an Iphone so therefore it's irrelevant that the Koch brothers own significant portions of the US Congress?" Non sequitur imo. >Who cares if 100 people at the top are getting more rewards faster, does it actually make your life worse? No. Only if you are jealous and mean-spirited does Musk’s quarter trillion dollars bother you. Because there is literally less to go around. https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-growing-employer-power-have-generated-a-productivity-pay-gap-since-1979-productivity-has-grown-3-5-times-as-much-as-pay-for-the-typical-worker/#:~:text=Productivity%20and%20pay%20once%20climbed,released%20ahead%20of%20Labor%20Day https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro.... A huge portion of the productivity gains in the past 50 years have gone straight to those 100 people at the top so yes people should be upset that they are taking more. >In fact, these people tend to invest in things that lead to further improvement. I fail to see how Spacex or Blue Origin will improve life on Earth in this century. >Furthermore, if Twitter bothers you that much, go on Parler. Pot calling kettle black? You seem to be parroting near word for word arguments from Ayn Rand/Alt Right etc. so Parler seems like a natural fit for you.
- oh_sigh 4y agoYou're only closer to the homeless guy with a completely naive take on the utility of money.
- adamsmith143 4y agoCan you check my math? 0 -> 1M -> 10B Not sure how far away from 10B 1M is. Maybe you can help
- oh_sigh 4y agoYes, that is the naive take on the utility of money that I was talking about. By your logic Sergey Brin is closer to the homeless man you step over on the street than he is to Elon Musk. Which would be a silly thing to say.
- ben_w 4y agoAs the other response is somewhat condescending — and as the usual utility of money calculation is log($), your example numbers would normally suggest the second difference is greater than the first — I think you may find it more useful to ask yourself what you can do with 10B that you can’t do with 1M. Sure, there are plenty of nice big houses that cost more than 1M, but you’re not off by much, and the first million makes a massive difference, including being able to talk to the bank rather than being escorted out by security. But: anything over about 100M, the only difference the number makes is which company you get to own because that’s the only[0] thing people sell at that price… and at that level you get the money as a way to keep track of the score of how well you’re running them. [0] OK, sure, private islands, and I don’t know how yachts work in law, but you get my drift
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoMy vote for most taken advantage of is the on-call Ops people. Salaries sometimes half that of the SWEs, expected to be woken up at 3am, interrupted all day by "urgent" requests ("I can't connect to the server I need access now" -> "whoops it was my SSH key"), responsible for the product running 24/7, respond immediately to security incidents ("patch this asap"), stay up overnight for maintenance or deploys to legacy systems, act as de-facto architects, expected to be experts on virtually all technology. Wouldn't be surprised if one dude in Texas working 60+hrs/week is singly responsible for every Tesla in the country continuing to get remote updates.