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I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free, giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I have to feed my family. But also I have to then see that I’m getting a big share of the pie too, because otherwise someone else will be eating some pie that was rightfully mine, and that feels wrong. Would my C-level pals get their $15m exit without my work? Maybe, but it’s less likely. Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No. So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Waterfall edge marble kitchen island indeed.

kewpiedoll99 4y ago
> why is ... mine [only] around about a year’s worth of salary? this complaint is almost as tone deaf as the satire. poor you. i was laid off, and only got a month's severance.
sagaro 4y ago
>Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? They tried this at twitter. But twitter survived. Turned out for KTLO not many people are actually required. Also, when you are over staffed, employees have enough free time to get political, run slack channels, do activism and in general reduce the entire org's productivity. Most companies were stuck in this phase the last few years, with Coinbase and a couple of other companies being brave enough to say they don't want their employees engaging in workplace activism. This whole macro-economic change and the twitter success after getting rid of 30% of its employees, has now given these companies an opportunity to follow without getting singled out. If they don't do it now, and do it 6 months later they will get called out as demons. Now since everyone is doing it, it is not that bad a PR hit.
mshake2 4y ago
>So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Honestly? Because 1) you are very replaceable and 2) you have a very low chance in succeeding at organizing any kind of group/union action. If either of those two facts were different, you would have more leverage. But they aren't so you don't.
- gunnihinn 4y ago
  Honestly every single one of those execs is very replaceable too.
  - mshake2 4y ago
    Says the person who lacks the ability to fire them. The reason why you don't have that ability is the same reason why you are seen as more replaceable.
    - arrrg 4y ago
      Is it necessary to fire them? That's the relevant question we should ask ourselves. A hiring freeze and marking obsolete positions as obsolete (meaning if someone switches teams or quits that specific position will not be replaced) should be a workable model for all profitable companies with some cash reserves. Sure, it takes a bit longer and probably costs a bit more (though probably not tons and lay offs also have other traumatic effects concerning knowledge loss, morale and motivation that can negatively affect the business) but it's a workable model. Embed that into overall more cautious hiring in good times (yeah, we can't time travel, so that's not an option - but to me that's the thing that should be learned from this) and you should never have to do any layoffs if your business is basically sound. I would be shocked, for example, if Apple were to do any lay offs. They seem to follow that approach (well, probably not in the retail context which I also think is unfortunate). To me it seems like those lay offs are primarily a tool to communicate and that just sucks. It sucks that something that should clearly be seen as a management failure (if you need to do lay offs it seems to me obvious that management is to blame, not those laid off) can in this weird upside down world be used as a communication tool towards the wider world that they are doing something useful. Even if it wouldn't be needed. Also, I just don't think people should be treated like that, especially if it's not needed. It seems so pointlessly cruel and inhuman. This is not the world I want to live in. And I know that's hard to pull off in capitalism. Maybe that's the issue. Though it's not as if you cannot modify capitalism to at least not allow for stuff like this.
jerrre 4y ago
> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No Why not try that? Or use it as leverage? If you believe this.
- Zvez 4y ago
  The (not so) fun fact here is that majority of IT workers won't do this. While exec might want their mansions, we want our latte and iphones. I work at a company which recently had big chunk of layoffs and I can clearly see how a lot of people are just relieved that they were not laid off. Yes, there are talks how everyone is outrageous, they are mostly kitchen talks. The company literally fired thousands of people with a single email and now we back to corptalk about family and values. So I don't see any major changes in unification of IT workers.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    That is seriously rough. Times change I guess. Last time me and my buddies from office survived layoffs, we kept a list going of who is where to see if we can help one another get through the rough patch. In the end, it did not matter since the company closed its doors, but the list remained so the underground railroad continued its existence. I actually got my previous job thanks to it.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I think, and this will not be well received, that US tech workers actually know they are paid extremely well compared to the rest of the working population, and that they don't have the right social skills and connections to get into the even more inner exec circle (which is also limited in number), and therefore although it's not as good as it was it's still better than 95% of the population.
- Shish2k 4y ago
  Because it seems like a majority of engineers believe themseles to be above-average, and believe that any kind of collective action would reduce all engineering pay to the lowest common denominator. Additionally in the USA there seems to be a strong belief that union leaders only care about themselves while the company execs have the worker’s best interests at heart. (I’m not sure where any of these ideas come from)
cycomanic 4y ago
Because the people who decide exec salaries are execs in other businesses, so they generally have 1) An inflated view of the impact of execs compared to other employees. This is a well studied psychological phenomena. People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. (There was a study which gave some subjects a head start in monopoly, i.e. more money, the subjects tended to talk significantly more about the advantages of "their" strategy in the game, then the subjects that we not given the head start). 2) It's in the interest of execs to keep C-suite salaries high, because it increases their own salary. So it's not surprising that we have seen a dramatic increase in ratio of exec to average employee compensation, and why execs are typically isolated from economic downturns.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  > People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. I don't personally understand this one, although I don't doubt its veracity. I am an engineer with years of experience in the industry, but I don't think my contribution is high or important; I could be fired at any moment and would anyone notice? Maybe in the short term yes, but mostly no. I am easily replaceable, my boss is easily replaceable... Society will continue on without me because like most of us I work a B.S. job. So I really struggle to empathize with the viewpoint of a self-perceived 'Hero IC', is it just narcissism?
  - John23832 4y ago
    Because the threat of firing and the driving down of your self worth as a worker is core to (American style) capitalism. Your fear for your job or the prospect of having to find another one makes you take suboptimal economic positions, the arbitrage of which keeps the gears of capital spinning. We couldn’t have the workers collectively realizing their worth now, could we? The inmates would be running the asylum.
    - Aunche 4y ago
      This narrative is counterfactual to how capitalism actually works. Your worth is determined by supply and demand. Investors would never agree to paying American developers twice as much as European developers if they knew they would be on the hook for them until their cash reserves bled dry.
Zvez 4y ago
simple answer - without you they easily find other developers. Without them you will have to find another exec to work for. And as long as it is easier for them to find replacement than for you to find another/better job, they have an upper hand.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Hmm, but are developers that easy to find? Not to search very far, but my most recent interaction with a vendor suggest even relatively simple things are not so simple. OTOH, MBAs are aplenty ( hell, even I have one ).
quickthrower2 4y ago
Not all founders get a good exit though.
mattmanser 4y ago
No-one is going to tell you the truth, but it's because the US so successfully turned workers against unions, that's why.
Kinrany 4y ago
> Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I have to feed my family. Wrong: salary is determined by your ability to negotiate, and your ability is higher when you could be doing the same satisfying activity for someone else.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> Why draw a salary then? Or stock? On my own time, I only work on stuff I personally care about, only for as long as I want and I usually don't even publish the resulting code because of the implicit responsibility associated with that. They'd have to pay me to work continuously on code I don't care about or even own. Why solve other people's problems for free?
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I love software development. It's not just a job, but a hobby, as well. My GH Activity Graph is solid green, because I code every day. Sometimes, more, on weekends. I haven't been paid since 2017. I was laid off, after 27 years. It was totally expected, and I was prepared. What I wasn't prepared for, was the rejection from the industry. Once I got over that, I was fine. I found some 501(c)(3) work that interested me, and I've been doing that. I did some writing, started trying to implement many of the ideas I had, while being paid (but were ignored), and found out that I had been absolutely right, the entire time (It is not hubris to postulate that, if I had been allowed to implement my ideas, the layoffs would not have been necessary, but that's all water under the bridge). I used to say that "My dream is to work for free." Livin' the dream...
hospadar 4y ago
> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No. So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Unionize baby!
WalterBright 4y ago
> So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Because their decisions make or break the company, and your's do not. For a well known example, Steve Jobs took over Apple when it was 90 days from bankruptcy. With the same group of workers, he took it to the biggest company in the world. Just by making different leadership decisions. That's why he made the big bucks. For a more recent example, see how James Daunt turned around Barnes&Noble: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barne... > some pie that was rightfully mine Found your own company, and the pie will be rightfully yours.
- ninjagoo 4y ago
  Mr. Bright, are you hawking coffee shops again ;-) [1] A bit reductive, innit? :-) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542692
- ruko 4y ago
  no, founding a company does not make a person more virtuous or deserving of orders of magnitude more money than people who don't. even if we lived in a fantasy world where everyone had equal opportunity to do this, those people would not actually have a greater claim to a higher standard of living
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    It's not about virtue. Founding a company is a very risky endeavor, and more risk means more (potential) reward.
- ShroudedNight 4y ago
  It's clear that Jobs was critical to Apple financial success. The abnormal clarity of his contributions would actually obscure the argument, though. There are many more Ginni Romettys than Steve Jobs, how does one successfully apply this analysis in less obvious scenarios?

kewpiedoll99 4y ago

> why is ... mine [only] around about a year’s worth of salary? this complaint is almost as tone deaf as the satire. poor you. i was laid off, and only got a month's severance.

sagaro 4y ago

>Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? They tried this at twitter. But twitter survived. Turned out for KTLO not many people are actually required. Also, when you are over staffed, employees have enough free time to get political, run slack channels, do activism and in general reduce the entire org's productivity. Most companies were stuck in this phase the last few years, with Coinbase and a couple of other companies being brave enough to say they don't want their employees engaging in workplace activism. This whole macro-economic change and the twitter success after getting rid of 30% of its employees, has now given these companies an opportunity to follow without getting singled out. If they don't do it now, and do it 6 months later they will get called out as demons. Now since everyone is doing it, it is not that bad a PR hit.

mshake2 4y ago

>So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Honestly? Because 1) you are very replaceable and 2) you have a very low chance in succeeding at organizing any kind of group/union action. If either of those two facts were different, you would have more leverage. But they aren't so you don't.

gunnihinn 4y ago
Honestly every single one of those execs is very replaceable too.
- mshake2 4y ago
  Says the person who lacks the ability to fire them. The reason why you don't have that ability is the same reason why you are seen as more replaceable.
  - arrrg 4y ago
    Is it necessary to fire them? That's the relevant question we should ask ourselves. A hiring freeze and marking obsolete positions as obsolete (meaning if someone switches teams or quits that specific position will not be replaced) should be a workable model for all profitable companies with some cash reserves. Sure, it takes a bit longer and probably costs a bit more (though probably not tons and lay offs also have other traumatic effects concerning knowledge loss, morale and motivation that can negatively affect the business) but it's a workable model. Embed that into overall more cautious hiring in good times (yeah, we can't time travel, so that's not an option - but to me that's the thing that should be learned from this) and you should never have to do any layoffs if your business is basically sound. I would be shocked, for example, if Apple were to do any lay offs. They seem to follow that approach (well, probably not in the retail context which I also think is unfortunate). To me it seems like those lay offs are primarily a tool to communicate and that just sucks. It sucks that something that should clearly be seen as a management failure (if you need to do lay offs it seems to me obvious that management is to blame, not those laid off) can in this weird upside down world be used as a communication tool towards the wider world that they are doing something useful. Even if it wouldn't be needed. Also, I just don't think people should be treated like that, especially if it's not needed. It seems so pointlessly cruel and inhuman. This is not the world I want to live in. And I know that's hard to pull off in capitalism. Maybe that's the issue. Though it's not as if you cannot modify capitalism to at least not allow for stuff like this.

jerrre 4y ago

> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No Why not try that? Or use it as leverage? If you believe this.

Zvez 4y ago
The (not so) fun fact here is that majority of IT workers won't do this. While exec might want their mansions, we want our latte and iphones. I work at a company which recently had big chunk of layoffs and I can clearly see how a lot of people are just relieved that they were not laid off. Yes, there are talks how everyone is outrageous, they are mostly kitchen talks. The company literally fired thousands of people with a single email and now we back to corptalk about family and values. So I don't see any major changes in unification of IT workers.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  That is seriously rough. Times change I guess. Last time me and my buddies from office survived layoffs, we kept a list going of who is where to see if we can help one another get through the rough patch. In the end, it did not matter since the company closed its doors, but the list remained so the underground railroad continued its existence. I actually got my previous job thanks to it.
- pjc50 4y ago
  I think, and this will not be well received, that US tech workers actually know they are paid extremely well compared to the rest of the working population, and that they don't have the right social skills and connections to get into the even more inner exec circle (which is also limited in number), and therefore although it's not as good as it was it's still better than 95% of the population.
Shish2k 4y ago
Because it seems like a majority of engineers believe themseles to be above-average, and believe that any kind of collective action would reduce all engineering pay to the lowest common denominator. Additionally in the USA there seems to be a strong belief that union leaders only care about themselves while the company execs have the worker’s best interests at heart. (I’m not sure where any of these ideas come from)

cycomanic 4y ago

Because the people who decide exec salaries are execs in other businesses, so they generally have 1) An inflated view of the impact of execs compared to other employees. This is a well studied psychological phenomena. People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. (There was a study which gave some subjects a head start in monopoly, i.e. more money, the subjects tended to talk significantly more about the advantages of "their" strategy in the game, then the subjects that we not given the head start). 2) It's in the interest of execs to keep C-suite salaries high, because it increases their own salary. So it's not surprising that we have seen a dramatic increase in ratio of exec to average employee compensation, and why execs are typically isolated from economic downturns.

wildrhythms 4y ago
> People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. I don't personally understand this one, although I don't doubt its veracity. I am an engineer with years of experience in the industry, but I don't think my contribution is high or important; I could be fired at any moment and would anyone notice? Maybe in the short term yes, but mostly no. I am easily replaceable, my boss is easily replaceable... Society will continue on without me because like most of us I work a B.S. job. So I really struggle to empathize with the viewpoint of a self-perceived 'Hero IC', is it just narcissism?
- John23832 4y ago
  Because the threat of firing and the driving down of your self worth as a worker is core to (American style) capitalism. Your fear for your job or the prospect of having to find another one makes you take suboptimal economic positions, the arbitrage of which keeps the gears of capital spinning. We couldn’t have the workers collectively realizing their worth now, could we? The inmates would be running the asylum.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    This narrative is counterfactual to how capitalism actually works. Your worth is determined by supply and demand. Investors would never agree to paying American developers twice as much as European developers if they knew they would be on the hook for them until their cash reserves bled dry.

Zvez 4y ago

simple answer - without you they easily find other developers. Without them you will have to find another exec to work for. And as long as it is easier for them to find replacement than for you to find another/better job, they have an upper hand.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Hmm, but are developers that easy to find? Not to search very far, but my most recent interaction with a vendor suggest even relatively simple things are not so simple. OTOH, MBAs are aplenty ( hell, even I have one ).

quickthrower2 4y ago

Not all founders get a good exit though.

mattmanser 4y ago

No-one is going to tell you the truth, but it's because the US so successfully turned workers against unions, that's why.

Kinrany 4y ago

> Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I have to feed my family. Wrong: salary is determined by your ability to negotiate, and your ability is higher when you could be doing the same satisfying activity for someone else.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> Why draw a salary then? Or stock? On my own time, I only work on stuff I personally care about, only for as long as I want and I usually don't even publish the resulting code because of the implicit responsibility associated with that. They'd have to pay me to work continuously on code I don't care about or even own. Why solve other people's problems for free?

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I love software development. It's not just a job, but a hobby, as well. My GH Activity Graph is solid green, because I code every day. Sometimes, more, on weekends. I haven't been paid since 2017. I was laid off, after 27 years. It was totally expected, and I was prepared. What I wasn't prepared for, was the rejection from the industry. Once I got over that, I was fine. I found some 501(c)(3) work that interested me, and I've been doing that. I did some writing, started trying to implement many of the ideas I had, while being paid (but were ignored), and found out that I had been absolutely right, the entire time (It is not hubris to postulate that, if I had been allowed to implement my ideas, the layoffs would not have been necessary, but that's all water under the bridge). I used to say that "My dream is to work for free." Livin' the dream...

hospadar 4y ago

> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No. So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Unionize baby!

WalterBright 4y ago

> So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary? Because their decisions make or break the company, and your's do not. For a well known example, Steve Jobs took over Apple when it was 90 days from bankruptcy. With the same group of workers, he took it to the biggest company in the world. Just by making different leadership decisions. That's why he made the big bucks. For a more recent example, see how James Daunt turned around Barnes&Noble: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barne... > some pie that was rightfully mine Found your own company, and the pie will be rightfully yours.

ninjagoo 4y ago
Mr. Bright, are you hawking coffee shops again ;-) [1] A bit reductive, innit? :-) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34542692
ruko 4y ago
no, founding a company does not make a person more virtuous or deserving of orders of magnitude more money than people who don't. even if we lived in a fantasy world where everyone had equal opportunity to do this, those people would not actually have a greater claim to a higher standard of living
- WalterBright 4y ago
  It's not about virtue. Founding a company is a very risky endeavor, and more risk means more (potential) reward.
ShroudedNight 4y ago
It's clear that Jobs was critical to Apple financial success. The abnormal clarity of his contributions would actually obscure the argument, though. There are many more Ginni Romettys than Steve Jobs, how does one successfully apply this analysis in less obvious scenarios?