6 ms·

Other companies nickel and diming engineers think they are somehow getting something for free. All the highest performing companies in the world pay insane amou

Other companies nickel and diming engineers think they are somehow getting something for free. All the highest performing companies in the world pay insane amounts to their programmers

jdm2212 3y ago
Paying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  Right you are correct. But true talent on any random team is easily worth 3x the average salary on that team. Im speaking about programmers here
  - borroka 3y ago
    The "real talent" is worth nx of the average salary when the work of the real talent makes the company better. If one (“talent") is a stellar runner, but when the team goes on a run the "talent" has to wait for their teammates to get to the finish line, most of whom go running once every two months, and the "talent" gets dress shoes instead of spikes etc., the "real talent" is worth, to the team or company, as much as the average employee on that team. An easy and naïve recommendation would be to remove the constraints that limit the work of talent, but it is much easier for talent to move to organizations that, for a variety of reasons, are more conducive to the expression of their abilities than to fight the inertia of organizations. Those very organizations which, for one reason or another, have existed for a long time and pay salaries to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
    - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
      No even on a highly paid team of engineers making 250-400k, half of them are actively producing technical debt. One good engineer can replace 2, and then leave the code base simpler and more maintainable.
      - borroka 3y ago
        This seems like a broad generalization that has little support beyond -- perhaps -- the personal experience of the commenter, who, I suspect, considers themselves one of the "good engineers" and not one of the overpaid and decidedly less competent engineers, annoying producers of technical debt. Comments of this nature would be much more informative if were they to begin with "what I've seen is in my professional life", "in the three or four teams I've worked on", or "according to some friends, who consider themselves to be top engineers, working in teams similar in size and scope." Otherwise, we are left with the sometimes realistic and sometimes much more fairy tale-like story of incompetent leadership holding back talent for no other reason than incompetence or nepotism or envy of those who are smarter and more accomplished. I have been in similar situations and considered myself a top professional, which may well be true, but in large, mature organizations, regression to average performance is largely an inevitable consequence of size and the need for coordination, a problem whose solution is not to be found in a redistribution of salaries. How else, with a few exceptions, do employees at Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. think that back in the day things were so much better, that talent was treated better, that there was a real engineering culture, whereas now it's all about sitting in chairs, people in finance having the most power, interviews were so much harder, and we have so much technical debt? OpenAI is, at this point, a research organization, in spirit and in purpose. If and when it becomes a "normal company," the logics of scale and scope will lead the early employees to complain about how things have evolved. But I suspect that the "let's get rid of the makers of technical debt and use the budget to give top talent more money" will not produce the expected and desired result of a renewed engineering culture, because top talent will not be as useful as it once was. Whenever a top executive leaves a mature company (or dies, see Apple), the risk of catastrophe is aired, but catastrophe rarely occurs. There is a lesson there.
        ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
        I've got over ten years experience, working in "highly regarded" tech companies. Most of the time, management is both incapable of recognizing who is truly writing the best code and politically their hands are tied in terms of firing half the team. This is why startups like OpenAI can take on companies like Google. I've seen dozens of products fail because engineers making 400k+ could not handle the complexity of some code base.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Sure org problems can stifle good performers but they are not hiring 900k engineers to work with 90k engineers.
- biztos 3y ago
  I'm sympathetic to this argument, because I know both low-quality and high-quality engineers at most FAANGs, but in principle isn't offering a lot of money a good way to attract talent? In the case of OpenAI you also have interesting tech and a brand that will massively accelerate your career if you want to stay in that field. So while yeah, you have to hire the best people; and OpenAI like everyone else will be paying $LOTS to a few useless engineers in the mix, I think "$900K and everyone knows it" is a pretty good substitute for talent-spotting, which anyway can't be bought.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    > but in principle isn't offering a lot of money a good way to attract talent? offering a lot of money attracts everyone including in-demand talent. offering less turns away in-demand talent.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      not everyone. There are motivations other than money, and if someone has a dislike of Sam Altman for whatever reason, they could be the best person in the world for a job and still not want to work there. If some has moral or ethical reasons against something, they won't be swayed by money.
  - dasil003 3y ago
    It's both things. Offering more money increases the inbound applicants dramatically. You want this because top talent is disproportionately likely to have better options and may have a high floor. This does, however, create a non-trivial filtering problem, and one that is hard to scale because recruiters can't reliably differentiate real talent from good talkers. The key here is to make sure your best people are active engaged in recruiting and to minimize the type 1 and type 2 errors in hiring. This is hard to sustain at scale, and I think places like Google and Facebook have been losing the battle on this for many years—also due to engineering brand dilution because they don't actually have that much impactful work relative to the headcount—but OpenAI is small and focused enough that they ought to be able to manage pretty effectively.
  - 3y ago
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  Paying someone more also doesn’t mean you can charge your customers more. A budget is a budget. There’s a reason McDonald’s pays employees differently in India vs NYC, the work maybe the same but the market is different
rvz 3y ago
Only when overfunded with VC money. At that point, they are not hiring you, me or anyone who directly applies themselves via the job form. They are hiring their friends from elite circles.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  The unfortunate reality is that those elite circles usually do have the best among them. And having worked in FAANGs, there is some aspect of meritocracy, the code doesnt lie
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    FAANG employees sure are full of themselves considering they've worked at companies that have failed to innovate for two decades. What was the last successful product that Google launched with all their highly paid engineers?
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      Engineers at Google aren't supposed to be designing new products, they ostensibly have separate people for that.
      - ilyt 3y ago
        They are doing shit job with keeping existing ones competitive too
        Gunnerhead 3y ago
        You’re thinking PMs rather than engineers.
    - joshuamorton 3y ago
      I always see this and it always rubs me the wrong way. You're presuming that the only form of innovation is an entirely new consumer product. But keep in mind that Google regularly launches new products and features that are more profitable than many startups, and then shutters them, and regularly launches individual features or pieces of infra that are industry leading (or defining, as in the case of k8s). They just aren't new consumer products.
seydor 3y ago
overpaying is going to attract the wrong people
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Who are these “wrong people”? The ones who “don’t believe in the mission and are just working to get paid”?
- leoh 3y ago
  I think this is often, but not always true. I think it's not true (and rational for employers) if they: * have a set of interview questions that help clarify they have the "right" kind of person * have a performance review process that ensures that hired individuals continue to engage in ways that are understood to be most useful to the company; i.e. that validate (or invalidate, as the case may be) hiring practices
sacnoradhq 3y ago
Meta cut back on everything: microkitchens, wellness cash, assigned->shared desks, WfH->RTO, and looking for excuses to lay people off. I wouldn't take a job at Google, Amazon, Apple, or Meta. Netflix and Microsoft seem doable. Target and Costco are also decent non-tech companies.

Other companies nickel and diming engineers think they are somehow getting something for free. All the highest performing companies in the world pay insane amounts to their programmers

jdm2212 3y ago

Paying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Right you are correct. But true talent on any random team is easily worth 3x the average salary on that team. Im speaking about programmers here
- borroka 3y ago
  The "real talent" is worth nx of the average salary when the work of the real talent makes the company better. If one (“talent") is a stellar runner, but when the team goes on a run the "talent" has to wait for their teammates to get to the finish line, most of whom go running once every two months, and the "talent" gets dress shoes instead of spikes etc., the "real talent" is worth, to the team or company, as much as the average employee on that team. An easy and naïve recommendation would be to remove the constraints that limit the work of talent, but it is much easier for talent to move to organizations that, for a variety of reasons, are more conducive to the expression of their abilities than to fight the inertia of organizations. Those very organizations which, for one reason or another, have existed for a long time and pay salaries to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    No even on a highly paid team of engineers making 250-400k, half of them are actively producing technical debt. One good engineer can replace 2, and then leave the code base simpler and more maintainable.
    - borroka 3y ago
      This seems like a broad generalization that has little support beyond -- perhaps -- the personal experience of the commenter, who, I suspect, considers themselves one of the "good engineers" and not one of the overpaid and decidedly less competent engineers, annoying producers of technical debt. Comments of this nature would be much more informative if were they to begin with "what I've seen is in my professional life", "in the three or four teams I've worked on", or "according to some friends, who consider themselves to be top engineers, working in teams similar in size and scope." Otherwise, we are left with the sometimes realistic and sometimes much more fairy tale-like story of incompetent leadership holding back talent for no other reason than incompetence or nepotism or envy of those who are smarter and more accomplished. I have been in similar situations and considered myself a top professional, which may well be true, but in large, mature organizations, regression to average performance is largely an inevitable consequence of size and the need for coordination, a problem whose solution is not to be found in a redistribution of salaries. How else, with a few exceptions, do employees at Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. think that back in the day things were so much better, that talent was treated better, that there was a real engineering culture, whereas now it's all about sitting in chairs, people in finance having the most power, interviews were so much harder, and we have so much technical debt? OpenAI is, at this point, a research organization, in spirit and in purpose. If and when it becomes a "normal company," the logics of scale and scope will lead the early employees to complain about how things have evolved. But I suspect that the "let's get rid of the makers of technical debt and use the budget to give top talent more money" will not produce the expected and desired result of a renewed engineering culture, because top talent will not be as useful as it once was. Whenever a top executive leaves a mature company (or dies, see Apple), the risk of catastrophe is aired, but catastrophe rarely occurs. There is a lesson there.
      - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
        I've got over ten years experience, working in "highly regarded" tech companies. Most of the time, management is both incapable of recognizing who is truly writing the best code and politically their hands are tied in terms of firing half the team. This is why startups like OpenAI can take on companies like Google. I've seen dozens of products fail because engineers making 400k+ could not handle the complexity of some code base.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Sure org problems can stifle good performers but they are not hiring 900k engineers to work with 90k engineers.
biztos 3y ago
I'm sympathetic to this argument, because I know both low-quality and high-quality engineers at most FAANGs, but in principle isn't offering a lot of money a good way to attract talent? In the case of OpenAI you also have interesting tech and a brand that will massively accelerate your career if you want to stay in that field. So while yeah, you have to hire the best people; and OpenAI like everyone else will be paying $LOTS to a few useless engineers in the mix, I think "$900K and everyone knows it" is a pretty good substitute for talent-spotting, which anyway can't be bought.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  > but in principle isn't offering a lot of money a good way to attract talent? offering a lot of money attracts everyone including in-demand talent. offering less turns away in-demand talent.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    not everyone. There are motivations other than money, and if someone has a dislike of Sam Altman for whatever reason, they could be the best person in the world for a job and still not want to work there. If some has moral or ethical reasons against something, they won't be swayed by money.
- dasil003 3y ago
  It's both things. Offering more money increases the inbound applicants dramatically. You want this because top talent is disproportionately likely to have better options and may have a high floor. This does, however, create a non-trivial filtering problem, and one that is hard to scale because recruiters can't reliably differentiate real talent from good talkers. The key here is to make sure your best people are active engaged in recruiting and to minimize the type 1 and type 2 errors in hiring. This is hard to sustain at scale, and I think places like Google and Facebook have been losing the battle on this for many years—also due to engineering brand dilution because they don't actually have that much impactful work relative to the headcount—but OpenAI is small and focused enough that they ought to be able to manage pretty effectively.
- 3y ago
therealdrag0 3y ago
Paying someone more also doesn’t mean you can charge your customers more. A budget is a budget. There’s a reason McDonald’s pays employees differently in India vs NYC, the work maybe the same but the market is different

rvz 3y ago

Only when overfunded with VC money. At that point, they are not hiring you, me or anyone who directly applies themselves via the job form. They are hiring their friends from elite circles.

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
The unfortunate reality is that those elite circles usually do have the best among them. And having worked in FAANGs, there is some aspect of meritocracy, the code doesnt lie
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  FAANG employees sure are full of themselves considering they've worked at companies that have failed to innovate for two decades. What was the last successful product that Google launched with all their highly paid engineers?
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Engineers at Google aren't supposed to be designing new products, they ostensibly have separate people for that.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      They are doing shit job with keeping existing ones competitive too
      - Gunnerhead 3y ago
        You’re thinking PMs rather than engineers.
  - joshuamorton 3y ago
    I always see this and it always rubs me the wrong way. You're presuming that the only form of innovation is an entirely new consumer product. But keep in mind that Google regularly launches new products and features that are more profitable than many startups, and then shutters them, and regularly launches individual features or pieces of infra that are industry leading (or defining, as in the case of k8s). They just aren't new consumer products.

seydor 3y ago

overpaying is going to attract the wrong people

scarface_74 3y ago
Who are these “wrong people”? The ones who “don’t believe in the mission and are just working to get paid”?
leoh 3y ago
I think this is often, but not always true. I think it's not true (and rational for employers) if they: * have a set of interview questions that help clarify they have the "right" kind of person * have a performance review process that ensures that hired individuals continue to engage in ways that are understood to be most useful to the company; i.e. that validate (or invalidate, as the case may be) hiring practices

sacnoradhq 3y ago

Meta cut back on everything: microkitchens, wellness cash, assigned->shared desks, WfH->RTO, and looking for excuses to lay people off. I wouldn't take a job at Google, Amazon, Apple, or Meta. Netflix and Microsoft seem doable. Target and Costco are also decent non-tech companies.