4 ms·

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.
        borroka 3y ago
        Assuming what you say is true ("50% of team members in mature organizations are a net negative on team performance, we should get rid of them and pay more the top talent"), what I gather from your comments is that you think the problem lies in incompetent management in mature organizations -- it is a miracle that all those companies are still alive and somehow making money -- or their inability for political or reputational reasons (let's conveniently forget the very large layoffs that have occurred in the last year), to lay off incompetent people (who hired those hundreds or thousands of incompetent people, given the notoriously difficult interview process of top tech companies? ). Personally, from my life in tech, I do not feel that OpenAI has done a great job (and rather frankly, work that has been supported by both "press" and popular sentiment, because who doesn't like the heroic effort of a group of smart people facing poor odds against the Goliaths?) because management in Google or Meta cannot recognize who is writing great code. Think about the problem of "hallucinations" with GPT. After all, it was considered a minor hiccup on the road to the AGI, a path opened by a team of mavericks. But if Google, had it been first to market, had delivered such a product, the press would have gone from "oh, that's funny, it will get better with time" to a more worrying "Google is destroying humanity with those hallucinations." It is much easier to be innovative when you are small, hungry, with little to lose and much to gain, rather than when you are worried about your current salary or equity or reputation. It's not just a matter of paying top talent more and getting rid of more average people; I'm sure there are enough brilliant, highly paid people who have enough capital to build small, high-IQ teams in any of the major technology companies to get to GPT-like models before OpenAI. But incentives, reputation, the nature of public companies play a role in being slower, less innovative, less risk-taking.
    - dasil003 3y ago
      You are correct in terms of raw talent. And I agree, there are a significant number of NNPPs in many teams who could be culled for a net increase in productivity. However what this viewpoint doesn't account for are team dynamics. A strong TL can turn NNPPs into incremental positive contributors. A great programmer without leadership capabilities will not be able to outpace the technical debt. There are also more subtle dynamics depending on the structure and personality traits of the individuals. Ultimately programmer productivity is not an absolute value, it depends on the whole ecosystem (including other functions, leadership stance, etc). After doing this for 25 years (IC, TL, EM, CTO), I strongly believe a healthy team is about harnessing and orchestrating different individuals unique strengths rather than trying to set too high a bar—the latter will lead to counter-productive competition and ultimately burn out your best folks.
      - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
        Sure, a great team lead can boost productivity of other engineers. But you dont end up with world changing products that way, you just end up completing some incremental project on time. Probably alot of the core innovations at OpenAI were done by < 10 people.
        dasil003 3y ago
        Way to move the goal posts and waltz right past my point without meaningfully engaging. I thought we were talking about engineers making $250k-$400k at big tech companies and what makes people productive. Now you're talking about the impact of small teams with the right talent in the right place at the right time. That's great, if you were at OpenAI over the last few years, or Google in 1998-2004, or Facebook from 2005-2009, I'd love to hear your thoughts on those moments that teams caught lightning in a bottle. For the rest of the 99.99% of industry, a reductive view of "fire your underperformers" is not necessarily going to net them better results.
  - 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

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.
      - borroka 3y ago
        Assuming what you say is true ("50% of team members in mature organizations are a net negative on team performance, we should get rid of them and pay more the top talent"), what I gather from your comments is that you think the problem lies in incompetent management in mature organizations -- it is a miracle that all those companies are still alive and somehow making money -- or their inability for political or reputational reasons (let's conveniently forget the very large layoffs that have occurred in the last year), to lay off incompetent people (who hired those hundreds or thousands of incompetent people, given the notoriously difficult interview process of top tech companies? ). Personally, from my life in tech, I do not feel that OpenAI has done a great job (and rather frankly, work that has been supported by both "press" and popular sentiment, because who doesn't like the heroic effort of a group of smart people facing poor odds against the Goliaths?) because management in Google or Meta cannot recognize who is writing great code. Think about the problem of "hallucinations" with GPT. After all, it was considered a minor hiccup on the road to the AGI, a path opened by a team of mavericks. But if Google, had it been first to market, had delivered such a product, the press would have gone from "oh, that's funny, it will get better with time" to a more worrying "Google is destroying humanity with those hallucinations." It is much easier to be innovative when you are small, hungry, with little to lose and much to gain, rather than when you are worried about your current salary or equity or reputation. It's not just a matter of paying top talent more and getting rid of more average people; I'm sure there are enough brilliant, highly paid people who have enough capital to build small, high-IQ teams in any of the major technology companies to get to GPT-like models before OpenAI. But incentives, reputation, the nature of public companies play a role in being slower, less innovative, less risk-taking.
  - dasil003 3y ago
    You are correct in terms of raw talent. And I agree, there are a significant number of NNPPs in many teams who could be culled for a net increase in productivity. However what this viewpoint doesn't account for are team dynamics. A strong TL can turn NNPPs into incremental positive contributors. A great programmer without leadership capabilities will not be able to outpace the technical debt. There are also more subtle dynamics depending on the structure and personality traits of the individuals. Ultimately programmer productivity is not an absolute value, it depends on the whole ecosystem (including other functions, leadership stance, etc). After doing this for 25 years (IC, TL, EM, CTO), I strongly believe a healthy team is about harnessing and orchestrating different individuals unique strengths rather than trying to set too high a bar—the latter will lead to counter-productive competition and ultimately burn out your best folks.
    - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
      Sure, a great team lead can boost productivity of other engineers. But you dont end up with world changing products that way, you just end up completing some incremental project on time. Probably alot of the core innovations at OpenAI were done by < 10 people.
      - dasil003 3y ago
        Way to move the goal posts and waltz right past my point without meaningfully engaging. I thought we were talking about engineers making $250k-$400k at big tech companies and what makes people productive. Now you're talking about the impact of small teams with the right talent in the right place at the right time. That's great, if you were at OpenAI over the last few years, or Google in 1998-2004, or Facebook from 2005-2009, I'd love to hear your thoughts on those moments that teams caught lightning in a bottle. For the rest of the 99.99% of industry, a reductive view of "fire your underperformers" is not necessarily going to net them better results.
- 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