8 ms·

The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something l

by tomc1985 4y ago

The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling. Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them. Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual impact. (edit- NOT knocking internal tooling, it's just that it is traditionally considered a cost center)

jen20 4y ago
What? Internal developer productivity tooling is one of the most important investments a company can make, especially at the scale phase. B tier companies give that work to juniors. A tier companies give that work to the most senior people they can find to do it.
- jchanimal 4y ago
  Here here. I’m not a 10x developer but I run in those circles, and the best of the best are working to reduce friction for the rest of the team.
lumost 4y ago
This strongly depends on the company. In high growth industries this is absolutely true, in low-growth industries/companies its somewhat debatable. I suspect that this is why software salaries were tightly correlated with tech growth for the last 3 decades. The 90s, and 2010s were great times to be a software engineer - but average salaries were more than cut in half during the oughts.
- tomc1985 4y ago
  If you're doing tech stuff to replace some kind of human, manual labor then I think this applies regardless of your sector or growth rating. Tech enables companies to do more with less -- at lesat, that's the dream -- and I suspect that if the economics aren't favorable for tech they'd rather have cheap expendable labor. We are the practitioners realizing that dream for our masters.
dolni 4y ago
> Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling. Why the knock on internal tooling? If internal tooling helps a value-add position go 10% faster, that's worth a lot. And most likely it isn't just one position, it's many.
- psyc 4y ago
  They didn't say internal doesn't add any value at all. They said it's more obviously justifiable with the product people, and it is. Given that total salaries paid per year is almost always small in proportion to revenue at a successful company, tooling cannot add anywhere near as much to the bottom line, even at the extreme where it reduced time to market to 5 seconds.
  - everforward 4y ago
    > even at the extreme where it reduced time to market to 5 seconds. If this is your impression of internal tooling, then your internal tooling team is terrible. The places I've worked with good internal tooling teams provided a dramatic decrease in time to delivery. Automated failovers? Don't have to write it, it's in internal tooling. Automatically rebalancing traffic across datacenters? Already in the framework. Service discovery? You already know. I could go down the list, but with a good internal tooling team, the only thing I've ever had to worry about was my app's business purpose. I don't have to muck with configuring monitoring, or load balancers, or getting authentication to talk to another app, or how to get a database, or etc. The difference in time to delivery is dramatic. Places I've worked without internal tooling take like 2 weeks just to get infra for a static HTML site. The places I've worked with bad internal tooling take 3 weeks to do the same thing, because you'll spend a week arguing about whether the tooling works. The places I've worked with good internal tooling take like 15 minutes to do it. I spend longer reviewing an MR than I do deploying infra. Tooling is a huge part of the reason companies throw fistfuls of money at clouds. They could get compute on-demand cheaper from Leaseweb or OVH or hundreds of other companies, but they don't. They pay the premium for AWS or Azure or GCP, and it's because of the tooling.
- Spooky23 4y ago
doliveira 4y ago
Do you think internal tooling is just a cost center?
chasd00 4y ago
well we all like to think we're the sole reason "the company" makes any money but there's a lot more to the equation than just the person typing out the code. Without the code there would be no value but the code is meaningless without all the other expertise required to turn it into bank deposits. The technical part is maybe 10% (if not lower) of the overall effort to get a paycheck in your hands.
- tomc1985 4y ago
  Nowhere does my post indicate that I think I'm the "sole reason" the company makes any money. We are all just cogs in the machine. But, as with anyone who makes the product, we are a huge part of the reason the company is in business and it would be nice if management would stop looking down at us. Maybe they should be looking up to us instead. (And if you disagree, read into the tone of the article.... "techies"??? Ideas for paying us less?) Not to discount other departments like marketing or operations -- they are important too. But they don't make the product, they are more numerous, and more interchangeable.
  - bosie 4y ago
    > But they don't make the product Not sure how important that is, though. Often the product gets sold despite of the product, thanks to marketing, operations, logistics, sales, support, legal and management (product/project). Genuinely curious but do you consider product/project management to also 'be making the product'?
    - tomc1985 4y ago
      If their project is said product, then yes; because they are, in a way, architecting the final deliverable. And that recognition goes up the chain, in an increasingly diluted form, until it reaches the top.
mrfusion 4y ago
> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. That’s a tautology though. They wouldn’t hire someone to break even and they wouldn’t hire someone to make a little more money since there’s work and risk in hiring.
- TimPC 4y ago
  It's really not. Start-ups routinely fail to generate value and engineers get hired by such companies all the time. All that is needed is the belief it's possible the value will be higher. The reality doesn't need to match the belief.
  - ubercow13 4y ago
    But then the engineers at the successful company can't capture a significant amount of the value that company makes, because the rest of it has to go back to investors to make up for all the other companies they funded that 'overpaid' engineers and failed.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. That's unfortunately not how markets work. If you create 10M of value every year, and are only paid 250K for doing it, it's because there is someone else out there who is willing to do it for the same. (Yes, there are asymmetries in information and power, but broadly, tech salaries are market-driven)
- bosie 4y ago
  Problem is more that the contributions of an engineere are hard to quantify, so that 10M never gets compared to the 250k
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Hah, no. The problem is whenever someone talks about pushing back, you can find at least one guy saying "ok then I'll do the job" and 3 people saying "I don't care, my 250k is super comfy". Like others point out, it's incredible the US hasn't mass outsourced their work to Europe yet.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  That's why people unionize. Hasn't happened to tech yet, don't know if it will, but it isn't a forgone conclusion this is how markets have to work.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    And when costs get to high, what’s stopping tech companies from just expanding their overseas presence?
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      The same thing that is causing reshoring: rising developing world wages, culture, language barriers, etc. If you have the necessary support in government, labor law. The defeatists will always argue against improvement of the status quo; they are not to be indulged, as their goal is not improvement. Only 30% of an org's workers need to vote for the NLRB to hold an election [1], and then you only need a simple majority to unionize. Are we arguing against the attempt when a quick glance at the financials for FAANG and Co shows ample profit margins available for worker compensation? [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-right-to-form-a-union https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
formerkrogemp 4y ago
> Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them. This is true of every industry going on decades of increasing productivity and stagnating pay. What's new here besides greater awareness and labor churn? Will there be an actual change going forward? Of course the demographics favor workers now, but the laws and politics often don't. Immigration and outsourcing and automation can change that power dynamic very quickly. What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere? Interesting times we live in. > Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual impact. All of my friends and aquaintinces in nursing, tax, retail, and trucking have a few people who are trying to break into programming because of the benefits and pay. Outsourcing, scope creep, and automation exist and are expanding in my industry as well. How long until this drags down programmers as well?
- tomc1985 4y ago
  > What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere? Quit and work for myself. Personally I'm sick of the capped upside with working in tech (among myriad other issues) and the kinda shit you have to pull to raise it.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    Good on you. I hope you do well.
Spooky23 4y ago
I have a colleague who left and is essentially doing the same work as I do, but is making about 5x more due to getting a cut of the revenue, but has a low base compensation. Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now. But you can bet that I will be out the door the minute the clock ticks to the appropriate date.
- mavelikara 4y ago
  > Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now. Do the monetary value of these cover for the missing 4x on your base?
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    I can't speak for the parent commenter, but I can say that in my case, I just found out that my blood pressure is through the roof because of bad exercise/snacking habits during the lockdown. If I die while I'm working for BigCo, my wife and kid will get something like $2.5M from life insurance and immediately-vested RSUs I'm very confident that I could buy a nice house in a low cost of living area, throw together a SaaS that pulls in a few grand a month, and then work on a more ambitious business while living comfortably. BUT if that ticking time bomb in my chest goes off while I'm doing that, my family will be relatively fucked. (~$250k life insurance payout plus our ~$500k net worth, so the wife will suddenly have to become a working mother with out of date skills in a relatively crappy locale..) So in my case, it's worth sticking around at BigCo for another year or two and getting in shape while I'm still under the benevolent gaze of Master Faang EDIT: Dang, I've been a fool.. looks like it's only about $100 a month for $1M in life insurance actually, haha. Maybe I should sneak out of here sooner rather than later
    - austinsharp 4y ago
      My tip on life insurance: don't buy it from your existing auto/home insurance company. In my recent experience it's far cheaper from a dedicated life insurance company. I also got a discount going through Costco.
7speter 4y ago
> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling. Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them I mean, I’ve seen people working in retail make this same point. And I’m not saying either of you are invalid in your claim, thats just how work is, it seems
- googlr29783 4y ago
  That's how capitalism works, specifically delivering to capitalists the difference between the product's value and the worker's wage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus_labour_and_labour_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus... It can be difficult to remember that the system wasn't always like this.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    I didn’t say it wasn’t how it works? Nor was I complaining, just pointing out that the sentiment is universal.
scarface74 4y ago
I work as a billable consultant. Therefore I know to the dollar the revenue I bring in in a given year. However, that revenue goes to support accountants, lawyers, marketing, internal tools, HR, healthcare, employer side taxes travel that’s not related to a customer, infrastructure costs, etc. I am not saying in a perfect world I shouldn’t be making more and honestly, I probably could. But, I like having a large corporation to take care of all of the stuff I mentioned above.
sam0x17 4y ago
Depending on the industry, this can be so true that at a certain point you start to wonder why VCs are even tolerant of companies with zero technical founders in 2022 given the obvious risks of this situation.
jcims 4y ago
How far down the stack does this mentality go? My brother does fiber construction and repair for a major telco. I bet there's been a trillion dollars of economic activity conducted over glass he's put into place, but he just gets paid an hourly wage plus overtime.
pyuser583 4y ago
This is what makes me feel underpaid. I see how much value I’m adding. I get a tiny, tiny fraction. I didn’t become a Marxist until I hit six figures, but dang it I want the wealth produced by my labor!

jen20 4y ago

What? Internal developer productivity tooling is one of the most important investments a company can make, especially at the scale phase. B tier companies give that work to juniors. A tier companies give that work to the most senior people they can find to do it.

jchanimal 4y ago
Here here. I’m not a 10x developer but I run in those circles, and the best of the best are working to reduce friction for the rest of the team.

lumost 4y ago

This strongly depends on the company. In high growth industries this is absolutely true, in low-growth industries/companies its somewhat debatable. I suspect that this is why software salaries were tightly correlated with tech growth for the last 3 decades. The 90s, and 2010s were great times to be a software engineer - but average salaries were more than cut in half during the oughts.

tomc1985 4y ago
If you're doing tech stuff to replace some kind of human, manual labor then I think this applies regardless of your sector or growth rating. Tech enables companies to do more with less -- at lesat, that's the dream -- and I suspect that if the economics aren't favorable for tech they'd rather have cheap expendable labor. We are the practitioners realizing that dream for our masters.

dolni 4y ago

> Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling. Why the knock on internal tooling? If internal tooling helps a value-add position go 10% faster, that's worth a lot. And most likely it isn't just one position, it's many.

psyc 4y ago
They didn't say internal doesn't add any value at all. They said it's more obviously justifiable with the product people, and it is. Given that total salaries paid per year is almost always small in proportion to revenue at a successful company, tooling cannot add anywhere near as much to the bottom line, even at the extreme where it reduced time to market to 5 seconds.
- everforward 4y ago
  > even at the extreme where it reduced time to market to 5 seconds. If this is your impression of internal tooling, then your internal tooling team is terrible. The places I've worked with good internal tooling teams provided a dramatic decrease in time to delivery. Automated failovers? Don't have to write it, it's in internal tooling. Automatically rebalancing traffic across datacenters? Already in the framework. Service discovery? You already know. I could go down the list, but with a good internal tooling team, the only thing I've ever had to worry about was my app's business purpose. I don't have to muck with configuring monitoring, or load balancers, or getting authentication to talk to another app, or how to get a database, or etc. The difference in time to delivery is dramatic. Places I've worked without internal tooling take like 2 weeks just to get infra for a static HTML site. The places I've worked with bad internal tooling take 3 weeks to do the same thing, because you'll spend a week arguing about whether the tooling works. The places I've worked with good internal tooling take like 15 minutes to do it. I spend longer reviewing an MR than I do deploying infra. Tooling is a huge part of the reason companies throw fistfuls of money at clouds. They could get compute on-demand cheaper from Leaseweb or OVH or hundreds of other companies, but they don't. They pay the premium for AWS or Azure or GCP, and it's because of the tooling.
Spooky23 4y ago

doliveira 4y ago

Do you think internal tooling is just a cost center?

chasd00 4y ago

well we all like to think we're the sole reason "the company" makes any money but there's a lot more to the equation than just the person typing out the code. Without the code there would be no value but the code is meaningless without all the other expertise required to turn it into bank deposits. The technical part is maybe 10% (if not lower) of the overall effort to get a paycheck in your hands.

tomc1985 4y ago
Nowhere does my post indicate that I think I'm the "sole reason" the company makes any money. We are all just cogs in the machine. But, as with anyone who makes the product, we are a huge part of the reason the company is in business and it would be nice if management would stop looking down at us. Maybe they should be looking up to us instead. (And if you disagree, read into the tone of the article.... "techies"??? Ideas for paying us less?) Not to discount other departments like marketing or operations -- they are important too. But they don't make the product, they are more numerous, and more interchangeable.
- bosie 4y ago
  > But they don't make the product Not sure how important that is, though. Often the product gets sold despite of the product, thanks to marketing, operations, logistics, sales, support, legal and management (product/project). Genuinely curious but do you consider product/project management to also 'be making the product'?
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    If their project is said product, then yes; because they are, in a way, architecting the final deliverable. And that recognition goes up the chain, in an increasingly diluted form, until it reaches the top.

mrfusion 4y ago

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. That’s a tautology though. They wouldn’t hire someone to break even and they wouldn’t hire someone to make a little more money since there’s work and risk in hiring.

TimPC 4y ago
It's really not. Start-ups routinely fail to generate value and engineers get hired by such companies all the time. All that is needed is the belief it's possible the value will be higher. The reality doesn't need to match the belief.
- ubercow13 4y ago
  But then the engineers at the successful company can't capture a significant amount of the value that company makes, because the rest of it has to go back to investors to make up for all the other companies they funded that 'overpaid' engineers and failed.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. That's unfortunately not how markets work. If you create 10M of value every year, and are only paid 250K for doing it, it's because there is someone else out there who is willing to do it for the same. (Yes, there are asymmetries in information and power, but broadly, tech salaries are market-driven)

bosie 4y ago
Problem is more that the contributions of an engineere are hard to quantify, so that 10M never gets compared to the 250k
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Hah, no. The problem is whenever someone talks about pushing back, you can find at least one guy saying "ok then I'll do the job" and 3 people saying "I don't care, my 250k is super comfy". Like others point out, it's incredible the US hasn't mass outsourced their work to Europe yet.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
That's why people unionize. Hasn't happened to tech yet, don't know if it will, but it isn't a forgone conclusion this is how markets have to work.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And when costs get to high, what’s stopping tech companies from just expanding their overseas presence?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    The same thing that is causing reshoring: rising developing world wages, culture, language barriers, etc. If you have the necessary support in government, labor law. The defeatists will always argue against improvement of the status quo; they are not to be indulged, as their goal is not improvement. Only 30% of an org's workers need to vote for the NLRB to hold an election [1], and then you only need a simple majority to unionize. Are we arguing against the attempt when a quick glance at the financials for FAANG and Co shows ample profit margins available for worker compensation? [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-right-to-form-a-union https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...

formerkrogemp 4y ago

> Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them. This is true of every industry going on decades of increasing productivity and stagnating pay. What's new here besides greater awareness and labor churn? Will there be an actual change going forward? Of course the demographics favor workers now, but the laws and politics often don't. Immigration and outsourcing and automation can change that power dynamic very quickly. What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere? Interesting times we live in. > Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual impact. All of my friends and aquaintinces in nursing, tax, retail, and trucking have a few people who are trying to break into programming because of the benefits and pay. Outsourcing, scope creep, and automation exist and are expanding in my industry as well. How long until this drags down programmers as well?

tomc1985 4y ago
> What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere? Quit and work for myself. Personally I'm sick of the capped upside with working in tech (among myriad other issues) and the kinda shit you have to pull to raise it.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Good on you. I hope you do well.

Spooky23 4y ago

I have a colleague who left and is essentially doing the same work as I do, but is making about 5x more due to getting a cut of the revenue, but has a low base compensation. Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now. But you can bet that I will be out the door the minute the clock ticks to the appropriate date.

mavelikara 4y ago
> Due to the nature of my employment and some benefits, it doesn't make sense to leave right now. Do the monetary value of these cover for the missing 4x on your base?
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I can't speak for the parent commenter, but I can say that in my case, I just found out that my blood pressure is through the roof because of bad exercise/snacking habits during the lockdown. If I die while I'm working for BigCo, my wife and kid will get something like $2.5M from life insurance and immediately-vested RSUs I'm very confident that I could buy a nice house in a low cost of living area, throw together a SaaS that pulls in a few grand a month, and then work on a more ambitious business while living comfortably. BUT if that ticking time bomb in my chest goes off while I'm doing that, my family will be relatively fucked. (~$250k life insurance payout plus our ~$500k net worth, so the wife will suddenly have to become a working mother with out of date skills in a relatively crappy locale..) So in my case, it's worth sticking around at BigCo for another year or two and getting in shape while I'm still under the benevolent gaze of Master Faang EDIT: Dang, I've been a fool.. looks like it's only about $100 a month for $1M in life insurance actually, haha. Maybe I should sneak out of here sooner rather than later
  - austinsharp 4y ago
    My tip on life insurance: don't buy it from your existing auto/home insurance company. In my recent experience it's far cheaper from a dedicated life insurance company. I also got a discount going through Costco.

7speter 4y ago

> The money we make pales in comparison with the size of our contributions to the company. Especially so if you are in a value-adding position and not something like internal tooling. Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them I mean, I’ve seen people working in retail make this same point. And I’m not saying either of you are invalid in your claim, thats just how work is, it seems

googlr29783 4y ago
That's how capitalism works, specifically delivering to capitalists the difference between the product's value and the worker's wage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus_labour_and_labour_theory_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Surplus... It can be difficult to remember that the system wasn't always like this.
- 7speter 4y ago
  I didn’t say it wasn’t how it works? Nor was I complaining, just pointing out that the sentiment is universal.

scarface74 4y ago

I work as a billable consultant. Therefore I know to the dollar the revenue I bring in in a given year. However, that revenue goes to support accountants, lawyers, marketing, internal tools, HR, healthcare, employer side taxes travel that’s not related to a customer, infrastructure costs, etc. I am not saying in a perfect world I shouldn’t be making more and honestly, I probably could. But, I like having a large corporation to take care of all of the stuff I mentioned above.

sam0x17 4y ago

Depending on the industry, this can be so true that at a certain point you start to wonder why VCs are even tolerant of companies with zero technical founders in 2022 given the obvious risks of this situation.

jcims 4y ago

How far down the stack does this mentality go? My brother does fiber construction and repair for a major telco. I bet there's been a trillion dollars of economic activity conducted over glass he's put into place, but he just gets paid an hourly wage plus overtime.

pyuser583 4y ago

This is what makes me feel underpaid. I see how much value I’m adding. I get a tiny, tiny fraction. I didn’t become a Marxist until I hit six figures, but dang it I want the wealth produced by my labor!