4 ms·

You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and th

You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.

jshen 4y ago
There are not more than enough decent developers.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick. I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here. I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.
- est31 4y ago
  I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
  - askafriend 4y ago
    There is a difference between building a react app for your local bakery and building Facebook.com to scale. The experience in scaling products that big and that fast is concentrated and not evenly distributed.
    - pedrosorio 4y ago
      The average SV developer knows nothing about building Facebook.com to scale. More precisely, the number of people who were there when "scaling products that big and that fast" applied to Facebook (or other comparable companies) is a tiny fraction of all SV developers.
    - est31 4y ago
      You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them. But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good people from outside the US who don't make 250k+ total comp in basically any benchmark. Most SV employees never have to solve these problems. I picked frontend intentionally because it's probably the area that's the furthest away from these problems, but still compensated at 250k+ levels, if you work in SV for the right employers. But even among backend engineers, most have never touched hard to parallelize problems. I'd argue that most (definitely not all) FAANG backend tasks are easily scalable. Implementing them still takes work, whch is done by most FAANG engineers. FAANG level tooling definitely helps, and while developing that tooling is hard, the people who have built such tooling are only a tiny subset of FAANG employees (regardless whether they are more skilled than the average FAANG employee or not).
      - askafriend 4y ago
        This isn't quite right. I can see how you reached the conclusion you did, but you're missing a lot of context. For one, developing frontends at the scale and complexity needed for quickly growing organizations is just as complex as backend scaling in a variety of ways. If you're a frontend expert and can operate in the way needed to support a rapidly growing business/product - you can make just as much if not more than backend engineers (500k+ easily at senior levels). This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain. This is just simply experience not everyone has because it requires context. Also programming ability alone is not the sole reason for the outsized comp packages. In my view, it is at most 1/3rd of the reason. There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
  - bumblebritches5 4y ago
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    And yet, I show up at a company as a consultant and in two weeks I singlehandedly take care of something ten people have been struggling with for a year
    - dghlsakjg 4y ago
      Has it occurred to you that hiring a consultant is, by definition, an unusual situation? That, perhaps, you have never had to come in and save any team at my company, or thousands of other companies, because we are competent developers? Being able to do the work of 10 people once, does not mean that you are able to take 10 people from any company outside of a specific geographic area and replace them with one of you.
    - 88 4y ago
      Have you considered that a consultant hired to fix a specific problem, and salaried employees seeking to justify their existence, may have slightly misaligned incentives?
RestlessMind 4y ago
If you know "more than enough" decent developers, you can make a great business connecting them to prospective employers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Who will then fuck up the interview process and then return to complaining that there are no decent developers. There isn't a lack of them, there's a lack of being able to identify them.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Thanks for this. It's not just the interview process either, it's the entire industry which works against utilizing decent developers. If we really needed more decent developers, we've got thousands of companies pushing them into management, obtuse hiring practices and wades of middlemen to account for.
lysergia 4y ago
Small startups need to be poaching ‘Big Boys’ employees, not the other way round. I see many boutique shops offering (nearly) the same pay, and poaching from FAANG+M (The M is Micro$oft)
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  They have to because that's the status quo now. Go back a few decades and ask yourself who started this trend. If paying 250k+ for a developer is insane, then so is a company able to pay 250k+ without running huge losses. Those developers still make peanuts compared to what the stakeholders and executives do, despite these salaries. It's ignoring the elephant in the room which is fat profits being with a few companies, subsequently making it tougher to compete for anyone not born in wealth or able to get VC money to play with. SV could both bankrupt dozens of companies outside SV, slash that 250k locally and up to ante globally if it had a mentality shift, in less than a few years. That's how insane the profits are.

jshen 4y ago

There are not more than enough decent developers.

Firmwarrior 4y ago

Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick. I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here. I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.

est31 4y ago
I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
- askafriend 4y ago
  There is a difference between building a react app for your local bakery and building Facebook.com to scale. The experience in scaling products that big and that fast is concentrated and not evenly distributed.
  - pedrosorio 4y ago
    The average SV developer knows nothing about building Facebook.com to scale. More precisely, the number of people who were there when "scaling products that big and that fast" applied to Facebook (or other comparable companies) is a tiny fraction of all SV developers.
  - est31 4y ago
    You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them. But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good people from outside the US who don't make 250k+ total comp in basically any benchmark. Most SV employees never have to solve these problems. I picked frontend intentionally because it's probably the area that's the furthest away from these problems, but still compensated at 250k+ levels, if you work in SV for the right employers. But even among backend engineers, most have never touched hard to parallelize problems. I'd argue that most (definitely not all) FAANG backend tasks are easily scalable. Implementing them still takes work, whch is done by most FAANG engineers. FAANG level tooling definitely helps, and while developing that tooling is hard, the people who have built such tooling are only a tiny subset of FAANG employees (regardless whether they are more skilled than the average FAANG employee or not).
    - askafriend 4y ago
      This isn't quite right. I can see how you reached the conclusion you did, but you're missing a lot of context. For one, developing frontends at the scale and complexity needed for quickly growing organizations is just as complex as backend scaling in a variety of ways. If you're a frontend expert and can operate in the way needed to support a rapidly growing business/product - you can make just as much if not more than backend engineers (500k+ easily at senior levels). This instinct around large-scale abstractions is not developed by building small sites over and over gain. This is just simply experience not everyone has because it requires context. Also programming ability alone is not the sole reason for the outsized comp packages. In my view, it is at most 1/3rd of the reason. There are a lot of other qualities that are important that can only be gained through a specific kind of experience.
dghlsakjg 4y ago
The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  And yet, I show up at a company as a consultant and in two weeks I singlehandedly take care of something ten people have been struggling with for a year
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    Has it occurred to you that hiring a consultant is, by definition, an unusual situation? That, perhaps, you have never had to come in and save any team at my company, or thousands of other companies, because we are competent developers? Being able to do the work of 10 people once, does not mean that you are able to take 10 people from any company outside of a specific geographic area and replace them with one of you.
  - 88 4y ago
    Have you considered that a consultant hired to fix a specific problem, and salaried employees seeking to justify their existence, may have slightly misaligned incentives?

RestlessMind 4y ago

If you know "more than enough" decent developers, you can make a great business connecting them to prospective employers.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Who will then fuck up the interview process and then return to complaining that there are no decent developers. There isn't a lack of them, there's a lack of being able to identify them.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Thanks for this. It's not just the interview process either, it's the entire industry which works against utilizing decent developers. If we really needed more decent developers, we've got thousands of companies pushing them into management, obtuse hiring practices and wades of middlemen to account for.

lysergia 4y ago

Small startups need to be poaching ‘Big Boys’ employees, not the other way round. I see many boutique shops offering (nearly) the same pay, and poaching from FAANG+M (The M is Micro$oft)

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
They have to because that's the status quo now. Go back a few decades and ask yourself who started this trend. If paying 250k+ for a developer is insane, then so is a company able to pay 250k+ without running huge losses. Those developers still make peanuts compared to what the stakeholders and executives do, despite these salaries. It's ignoring the elephant in the room which is fat profits being with a few companies, subsequently making it tougher to compete for anyone not born in wealth or able to get VC money to play with. SV could both bankrupt dozens of companies outside SV, slash that 250k locally and up to ante globally if it had a mentality shift, in less than a few years. That's how insane the profits are.