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Engineering salaries are too low. There isn't enough money in it, and startups are too much of a gamble. For every guy that makes a million dollars a year doi
by jcnnghm 15y ago
Engineering salaries are too low. There isn't enough money in it, and startups are too much of a gamble. For every guy that makes a million dollars a year doing startups, ten other people will make almost nothing.
Want more developers and engineers. Start paying what they are actually worth. And stop fucking people out of their options and equity. After Skype and Zynga, equity compensation is worthless. If the company really succeeds, you'll get screwed out of it, and if it doesn't, it's not worth anything anyway. In a $5M talent acquisition, the 1% of equity you'll get after 4 years of vesting is worth $50,000, not even enough to make up for the reduced salary. At this point, startups should be paying a 30% cash premium above market rates because of the risk of failure.
How about paying a market wage, instead of offering a "free lunch" to people that cannot negotiate. I am not interested in playing video games at work, I have a house for that. Last I looked at it, the difference in pay between finance and stem jobs is enough to hire a personal chef to deliver lunch to you at work every day, and cook for you at home, and buy all the games you want, with a bunch of money left over. Apple and Google are both posting ~25% net profits because engineers are willing to work for peanuts, and a free lunch.
An average (median) engineer should be making $200,000 a year, and the "rockstar" (>80th percentile) engineers that everybody is trying to hire for $85,000 and 0.5% of equity, should be making $350,000+. These are hard jobs that few people can do at all, and fewer can do well. Great engineers can create millions of dollars of value a year.
- temphn 15y agoAfter Skype and Zynga, equity compensation is worthless. The Facebook IPO is creating more than 1000 millionaires. Early people didn't do so badly with LinkedIn, Zynga, or even Groupon either. There were a grand total of four (4) people affected by the Zynga equity contract renegotiation you reference. startups should be paying Obviously startups don't have money, they have equity and a dream. This is the point of a startup. If all one cares about is median-case money rather than impact or max-case money, startups are indeed irrational and one should work at Oracle or something. That said, it is the presence of startups recruiting great engineers that don't care as much about money that is causing bigcos like Google to offer higher salaries. It is the only way they can compensate for the bureaucracy. An average (median) engineer should be making $200,000 Unfortunately, this is similar to saying that teachers, cops, firefighters, housemakers should be extremely well paid. Everyone thinks their own talent is surpassingly rare and their job is crucial to society. But the truth is that engineering salaries have been driven up by a startup bubble in much the same way finance salaries have been driven up. When the bubble pops and many of the startups without much revenue fail, salaries are likely to fall back down to earth. Additionally, savvy employers will find other ways to get more people into programming. As people who would have trained to become chemical, electrical, or mechanical engineers start retraining to learn programming (e.g. via sites like Codeacademy), in response to market signals, salaries will invariably go down.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]