22 ms·

You're crap and paid too much for the little work you actually do

252 points by sbmassey 15y ago

A recruiter's guide on how to get mo' money...

SatvikBeri 15y ago
You can also just communicate the benefits of your work to people. This works especially well if you do it beforehand...eg with the backup process, tell your boss that it saves X hours/month, and include that in your performance review (you should always be writing your own performance reviews, by the way). There's no need to restrict yourself to tasks with visible, obvious value...you just need to take on the work of communicating what it is you contribute.
- dinkumthinkum 15y ago
  Well, honestly, for many of the work environments the author refers to, which may not be ones you are I would want to work, the author is correct. The CEO of XYZ corp doesn't care and is not interested in your explanation about how optimizing the thermocouplers makes things better. Even if you tried to relate to how it does save the company, he won't think you know what you're talking about. This is more about playing a psychological, even childish, game with your boss. And I suspect, in fact I'm completely sure, that in these kinds of companies, this is probably the advice you can get. These are the kinds of CEOs for which you could just explain until you're blue in the face about how important backups are for customers and they will stare blankly and wonder why they hired you in the first place.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    Why work for a CEO that "doesn't care and is not interesting in your explanation about how optimizing the termocouplers makes thing better"? There are plenty of companies run by people that do understand the low-level details that make their businesses successful. Work there instead. Remember, they need you more than you need them. They already admitted that they don't understand their own business!
    - dinkumthinkum 15y ago
      I agree, which is why I wouldn't work there. But that is the reality many face in our industry. Not everybody works at a hip startup. Many work at those "enterprise" places.
  - SatvikBeri 15y ago
    It's a continuum. In maybe 1% of companies you won't have to show your value, because everyone will know. In 10% it won't matter what you do, because you'll be distrusted anyway. But the vast majority of the time, learning to communicate your value will increase others' perception of you and lead to better raises.
kiba 15y ago
Very cynical view. If this is what's happening across companies, than the market system wasn't efficient enough or was impeded to make a change. We all know that the local cable or telephone companies aren't trying their damn hardest and we are not pleased with the services we're getting. However, we can't do anything about it. To me, it's incomprehensible that we can sit on our hand and not make things better. Instead of being a big bully in the market, why not aim to make our lives better? Why all the politicking when it's quite urgent that medical progress need to be made now? After all, a million dollars or three won't make much a difference in respect to making a billion dollars on a monopoly. With the billion dollars in hand, the future of you, and everyone else is worse off, because you focused too much on marketing rather than on groundbreaking research. Do pharmaceutical CEOs only care about their short term bottom line and not the future of their health, their family, and their friends? Do AT & T corporate board really only care about what they made each day rather than the future of the internet? By expanding and making the infrastructure cheaper, they will benefit from the numerous services of future internet. Expand pie, and don't focus too much on getting a larger portion of the pie. Don't compromise the size of the pie.
- epo 15y ago
  Try reading the article, it might give you something else to write a banal rant about. Or should I say rants, each sentence seems to be about a different subject. Your final exhortation about pies is just baffling, "don't compromise the size of the pie" is something I might just put on a T shirt.
  - kiba 15y ago
    Well, I thought "expanding the pie" versus "taking a larger portion of the pie" are particularly common metaphor for growing economy versus taking advantage of the economy.
    - ajross 15y ago
      Around here, the somewhat more technical terms "production" and "rent seeking" will probably serve you better. Folks on news.yc have already passed Randian Thought 101.
pagekalisedown 15y ago
A recruiter makes the most money by getting the most people hired, not by getting fewer people hired for the most money.
- protomyth 15y ago
  That isn't quite true. A lot of recruiters that I've met get paid based on the salary of the recruited, so fewer people at higher salary might make the recruiter more money.
  - pagekalisedown 15y ago
    It doesn't usually make up the difference.
    - salemh 15y ago
      salary fee % n fee total 65000 0.2 3 39000 80000 0.2 2 32000 90000 0.2 1 18000 120000 0.2 1 24000 Simplistic EG (and a 2x 80,000 vs 120,000 is realistic), but, like a real estate agent, the cost of NOT closing the sale is greater then pushing for a marginal increase in the sale. EG salary, pushing for 115,000 vs 105,000 the difference in fee on 20% is 2,000. Which is ~200-400 dollars difference in commission. Losing the offer for pushing for 115,000? 2,300~4,600 (10-20% of fee).
      - pagekalisedown 15y ago
        Prefix a line with double spaces preserves the formatting: salary fee % n fee total 65000 0.2 3 39000 80000 0.2 2 32000 90000 0.2 1 18000 120000 0.2 1 24000
        protomyth 15y ago
        Your making some interesting assumptions like it is three times as easy to fill a $65k spot than a $120k spot. The recruiters I knew had pretty good contacts that gave them the ability to place highly paid salaries (Oracle DBA, SAP developer) at a pretty good clip, much better than the generic recruiter. Their shooting for the higher-end gave them the right reputation to do this well.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
That EDS video was funny, haven't seen that before. Fwiw, the author Dominic Connor is a pretty well known financial engineering/quant recruiter. The 'Related Articles' section at the bottom has some other funny ones by and about him.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  The EDS video was a Super Bowl ad from the peak of the dot-com boom back in 2000. I remember it well because that was the year virtually all of the ads aired during the Super Bowl were dot-com related.. lots of money spent on lots of ads by companies that mostly don't exist anymore (see also: the infamous Pets.com sockpuppet guy).
theoj 15y ago
Depends where you get hired. This article seems to deal with getting hired at a company whose main line of business is not technology (say finance, which Dominic seems to recruit for). In that case, your employer will not care about your beautiful C++ code or super-efficient way to do X -- unless you can tie it back to the company's main line of business and making money for the firm. An internal squabble about the more correct way to do X will mean nothing to the non-technical upper management in a non-tech firm. Non-tech firms don't care about technology for the sake of technology because they don't sell technology -- the firm has other priorities and IT is just a side show to help get the firm's mission done.
pjmlp 15y ago
A bit cynical, but quite close to my experience in big companies, where employees are just seen as expenses.
csomar 15y ago
They key here is that you’re making a difference when it hits the fan, that’s not someone they want to lose. The crap getting paid too much is the author of this article. Your job as software developer (or any other field) is to do your job the best you can. You are offered the salary before you start the work and you agreed on it. The market will define how much valuable you are to the business. You can see that in the last year, our salaries have increased considerably.
- EliRivers 15y ago
  Actually, for what I do, they are paying me too much. They'd know if they were able to monitor what I do all day.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    What do you do all day?
    - tbsdy 15y ago
      Two words: Hacker News.
- zacharyvoase 15y ago
  What do you think ‘the market’ is? The market is made up of people just like you, a pool of bids and offers, with bidders (that is, employers or clients) trying to get the best price for a good or service, and the merchants (employees) trying to make the most money from the provision of those services—or at the very least to make a sale at all. Markets are most efficient when there is full transparency. Unfortunately you don't know the salaries of the people you work with, or the budgets of the people you work for. We have to accept this information asymmetry as a fact of life, because your colleagues probably feel uncomfortable discussing their compensation packages, and your managers don't reveal their budgets to you specifically so they can save money. They may have been willing to pay you $100k, but if you settle for $80k they aren't going to argue, and you've just put $20k back into their budget that they were planning on giving you anyway. That doesn't mean a lot to them, but to you that could have been a new car and a luxury holiday. The fact that you don't understand the importance of leverage in negotiations (that is, making yourself seem extremely valuable to the organisation) is precisely why you aren't on $200k or more at the moment. And please don't kid yourself that you'll get to avoid all of this stuff by joining a startup. A founder or CEO of a small company is going to be even more aggressive in getting you to sign on the dotted line for a low price, since the company may be funded out of their own pocket (as opposed to a manager controlling a budget). And what about founding a startup? Well, you'll have to decide on a price to set your customers. Again, you need those unique selling points and some great marketing to make your customers feel like they can't function without you. If you decide to go down the VC route, you'll be wrapped up in negotiations and due diligence for weeks or months, and if you don't bring the full force of your negotiating abilities, you'll be signing away a large share of equity at a low price that you may regret for the rest of your life. No-one, absolutely no-one gets to skip the negotiations and still come out the other end with a 'fair' price or salary. These are facts of life, and whilst I don't think they're particularly unpleasant, if you decide to ignore them you'll be left behind as the rest of us shoot up the career ladder.
jrockway 15y ago
This is sarcasm, right? All of these things are clear warnings that it's time to flee that company for your life. You get paid what you get paid because someone else is willing to pay you more. The market is competitive and you're being hired by your peers, who recognize the value of "making the backup 50% faster". If you wear a tie and are trying to become a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch, then yes, you need to play this bullshit game. But in that case, you're not getting a "pay rise" for your value to the engineering organization, you're getting paid for your ability to keep the status quo alive and well.
- protomyth 15y ago
  Sadly, every company of a decent size I have worked for seems to fit the profile perfectly. I get the feeling the transition takes place when inertia hits a point that the company can coast on bad decisions and the dedication of a few employees doing the right thing while everyone else plays games.
- dingfeng_quek 15y ago
  No. This is non-fiction in finance. "Dominic Connor is a City headhunter at QF Search with a sideline in teaching C++ to bankers", he's also a well-known and respectable enough online personality. Such evidence also provides a basis for many explanations (appealing to the financial products being to complex) of the 2008 global financial crisis. I've once played with the idea of a career in quantitative finance, but subsequently fled for my life. Yet, attesting to the wonders of biodiversity, many kinds of life have evolved to thrive in the harshest of conditions.
  - pja 15y ago
    Oh, it's Dominic. The first person I didn't already know to follow me on G+. He's dedicated to his chosen profession, I'll give him that.
- forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
  No, it is not. This is the reason big conglomerates should be split with an axe and left to the vultures. They are super inefficient because they have incompetents in place that can't measure the real value created by their workers but also because as a company grows bigger and bigger you forget who is your customer and start playing the Soviet Russia central planning trick of "looking like you work is more important than working". When those big companies like banks show looses, we join them together creating bigger monsters that parasites real economy even more. They then use tricks and more tricks to hide the reality(GM or Enron) so the party continues one more day. But one day the party will be over for them.
mopoke 15y ago
Bear in mind that this from The Register whose audience is much more skewed towards those working in large corporates, BOFHs and PFYs than the typical audience here. For me the key sentence to the whole article is "Your boss has no idea if you’re good at your job." Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology? There seems to be this idea that IT folks are "special" and don't understand business and, because it's always been that way, there's no need to change. If you work for a business, it's not OK to be a not have a clue how a business works.
- dotBen 15y ago
  "Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology?" because there is the opposite fallacy which is also derided: the one where the best engineer in the team is promoted to be a manager and in turn no longer does much/any development work. The bottom line is that while there are great people out there, most people are average or worse (bell curve 101, sorry) and they end up progressing up the career ladder too.
  - mopoke 15y ago
    Even the best engineer on the team should understand how the business works though. There's more to being a good engineer in a business than understanding the technical side. I tend to see people on three paths - they're an engineer and they want to keep coding and getting rewarded for that; or they're an engineer who wants to manage process and people; or they're an engineer who wants to focus more on architecture and design. The person you want to "manage" is the second one - they've a working knowledge of how the tech works but they're actively developing their leadership skills. Leadership skills are no different from any other skills - they can be learned. In some cases people show more of a "natural" skill in that area but that doesn't meant that it can't still be learned - it'll take you out of your comfort zone but you don't tend to advance unless you do that.
- parfe 15y ago
  >Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology? From my experience I think the issue stems for looking at management as the next rung on a ladder. A good developer might never gain or want the experience needed to make her a good manager. A manager might never learn what it takes to be a developer. But the idea of moving up to management ignores the real issue. Management relates to handling people and handling projects. If you can't deal with people enough to understand how they fit into your project you manage poorly. If you can't manage a project well enough to use the people you have, then you manage poorly. The skills to manage, and the skills to be a developer/engineer/designer/widgeteer seem, to me, orthogonal. I could write code for ten more years and never learn a thing about management. The best run tech project I ever worked on involved a PM who could still remember the Great Depression. She had the ability to ask the right questions and had a clear picture of how to move the project forward. The worst managed projects came from the PM who used to code.
ilaksh 15y ago
I think that most of this is STILL true, even for many startups and small departments. There are a lot of fundamental problems with our society, and studying this article may help people realize that. This man should win an award for being honest.
ChristianMarks 15y ago
This article pertains mostly to large, sclerotic firms with a pronounced suit-geek divide, somewhat like the blood-brain barrier. But it also exists in IT in higher ed as well. I suppose anyone with a modicum of professional pride would not want to work at a firm where the executives believe that managing IT is like herding cats--unless they were paid enough to guarantee the author a sufficiently high commission. (Knuth, incidentally, distinguishes computer science from IT and states that his interests lie with the former.)
- mattquinn 15y ago
  When you say "IT in higher ed", are you referring to personal experience? That's a pretty specific domain, just wanted to know if you have any specific anecdotes.
  - ChristianMarks 15y ago
    I'm afraid to say now that the original comment was downvoted without explanation. ;)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
jmitcheson 15y ago
This article could be an advertisement for starting your own company.
mokus 15y ago
If "your boss has no idea if you’re good at your job," then he is not good at his.
- salvadors 15y ago
  You say that like that would be unusual.
- paulhauggis 15y ago
  my boss, the owner of the company, had me explain my job to him at least 3 times during my time there. He was the one that hired me and still didn't know exactly what I did. It was extremely frustrating when he asking me to do graphic design work and he didn't understand why it wasn't part of my job (I was hired as a developer, I wrote their entire e-commerce system which ran their business for 4 years).
kirillzubovsky 15y ago
A bit one-sided argument, but might be very common in some large companies. Indeed, if you're in the situation described in the article, the best bet is to play the game, knowing the constraints, and to do the least work for the most bang. If you actually want to enjoy your work, having a chance to create something new/different/efficient, in the environment where your "boss" is your peer, and your boss understand the value of 50% performance increase and is willing to spend time to understand why your backend is better than other's backend, then pick a startup. I am not just saying pick my startup, no, pick any startup that fits you. There are so many companies out there, if you search hard enough you can find the product / team that interests you, and people you're willing to work with. That said, be prepared to work hard, to have to fix bugs on the weekends, to probably carry your laptop everywhere you go, and finally, to have a lower salary than before. It's pretty simple, imho, you can't have everything all at once, but you can pick the combination that is right for you. All you need is to do it. Do or do not, there's no try. ;)
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  I think this article is aimed at people in the UK where there is not much of a startup culture except in a small handful of places. It also seem to be more aimed at general IT/tech/MCSE type guys rather than developers who are probably in less demand for startups.
Radzell 15y ago
Programmer and Scientist tend to be the nice guys in life so I would be surprised if some programmer were underpaid.
zoowar 15y ago
Your product sucks and is over priced for what little value it actually offers.
patio11 15y ago
I wish I had written this. If the humor/cynicism gets to you please power through and look at the actionable tips which will earn you more money. There is approximately no-one on HN, not even at the best managed firms with the least BS imaginable, who would not experience positive ROI from "Congrats guys, we just shipped X, let's have a celebratory dinner at $FAVORITE and I'm buying." That idea is freaking genius. It gets you instant political capital and will make sure decisionmakers actually remember X the next time it rolls around because they'll have a hundred projects to worry about but only one or two which were so important they had celebratory dinners at completion.
- skrebbel 15y ago
  Come on, seriously. A team of 20 ships a product and some junior engineer buys everybody a dinner out, incl all the bosses and their bosses? Yeah, OK, that's one way of making all your peers feel really awkward and uncomfortable. And wondering what the little suckup is up to.
  - vacri 15y ago
    "The ramen and kool-aid's on me!"
  - marvin 15y ago
    Wow. I didn't realize there is actually peer pressure in IT companies not to use knowledge of social relationships and human nature for your own benefit. In my opinion, the general unwillingness of computer workers to stand up for their own rights and interests is keeping our entire profession back from getting the money and respect it deserves. If we actively sabotage efforts of people who are trying to improve things, I don't see that there is much hope. Being nerds does not have to imply being clueless nerds.
    - skrebbel 15y ago
      Serious question: how is sucking up to your bosses by giving them treats "trying to improve things"? Note, not trying to be cynical here. Maybe I'm so ingrained with this culture you describe that I can't see your point.
itmag 15y ago
I found this article very enlightening, in an odd way. I've committed several of the errors mentioned in it (out of blithe naiveté, I might add). Very interesting take on Machiavellian job hacking, this. Personally, I would rather be myself always. Even if I could speed up my career by X% using methods like this, it would still take years upon years to get where I want to be, and by that time my soul would be a burnt out husk. If you have the intelligence, patience and willpower to put on a mask for that long, I would think that doing a startup is a saner and more enjoyable pursuit in any case.
- drucken 15y ago
  I would agree with every word you said, except failure rates on startups are very high (much higher than 50%). So, there is already a large opportunity cost due to the flat time and effort invested plus loss of corporate experience which has the many significant side effects such as skill, social/business contact and guaranteed compensation accrual.
wisty 15y ago
There's no law against refusing to promote weasels. And it's really not too hard to detect them, if you spend any time with them - psychopaths are superficially charming, but always trip up with their continuous and inconsistent lies. But businesses think "he's a weasel, but he's our weasel". Yeah, right.
mvip 15y ago
...and that's why smart people avoid enterprises.
- billswift 15y ago
  No, that's why honest people avoid enterprises. There are lots of smart people with slack morals working for big businesses and Wall Street. ADDED: There are also plenty of less smart and honest people working for big businesses on lower level jobs, I was just objecting to the claim that all smart people avoided them.
billybob 15y ago
I'm not huge on the cynicism, but there are solid points here that I wanted to remember. Here's my less-cynical spin in a motivational-speaker style condensation: Show, Celebrate, Support. Show: make sure the awesome stuff you do is visible to people, and prioritize stuff that will be visible. Celebrate: do something visible to celebrate your successes and your team's. It makes people feel good and reinforces a sense of progress and success. Buy a round at the pub, bring in a cake, whatever. Support: publicly support and thank others: other devs, business people, etc. Find nice things to say. All of these really fall under "be nice and encourage people", and may have the side benefit of getting you paid more. That's not too hard to swallow, is it?
- kpennell 15y ago
  I like this TLDR much better than the article!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ttt_ 15y ago
I hope this is some kind of joke that I just didn't get, but otherwise: This is just a guide for you to be hipocritical and a complete jackass to your coworkers while throwing out any values you have out the window. That's the kind of atitude that ruins the workplace for everyone, congrats on getting more money and also an even shittier job than before. I know plenty of people that are willing to act like this in order to get more money and they have no respect from me. Grow up and start trying to make yours and everyone else's life better not shittier. Please. I rather take my work seriously, constructively criticize bullshit company police, and make less money if that's what it takes. At least I won't regret being myself.
- spqr 15y ago
  Get over yourself. I've been in IT for 20 years and have met so many other IT people that think they know best and love spouting off on things they don't begin to comprehend. You sound like one of them. What precisely do you object to in this article? Was it the "smile more"? I love my job, pride myself on being able to work with anyone in the workplace, have made decades long friendships from work and last year made over $230k. Can you say the same? The author of the post comes across a little strongly but he seems to understand some rudimentary principles of getting ahead. No need to compromise on principles in the process.
- lani 15y ago
  err.. the visibility thing's all too real. just happened to me last week. project is nine months old. was an orphan until 1 month ago manager(s) 2 levels up asked about it. now ? daily updates. and i work at a well known co.
spinchange 15y ago
This is like The Prince for Nerds.
itmag 15y ago
What are your favorite career hacks? A dude at a previous place of work took the following initiative: he emailed everyone at the company asking for their ideas for improvement, promising a daily prize in the form of movie tickets (which were presumably funded by upper management). He did this for several weeks, collecting a ton of great, actionable ideas from the people in the trenches. It was all kinds of stuff, from IT to customer service to employee morale, etc. Then, he went to upper management with a bunch of curated, highly relevant, enterprise-spanning improvement ideas. Win-win-win situation: employees get movie tickets and fixes, upper management gets a better-running business, idea-rally dude gets to take credit for all of it. Brilliant move.
jyou 15y ago
My fellow readers, this article is definitely not cynicism or sarcasm, it has some very good suggestions for the "IT" people in corporate of America, especially Fortune 100. If you think or use the word "hack" in your job, then it is not for you - and that is a good thing, isn't.

252 points by sbmassey 15y ago

A recruiter's guide on how to get mo' money...

You can also just communicate the benefits of your work to people. This works especially well if you do it beforehand...eg with the backup process, tell your boss that it saves X hours/month, and include that in your performance review (you should always be writing your own performance reviews, by the way). There's no need to restrict yourself to tasks with visible, obvious value...you just need to take on the work of communicating what it is you contribute.

dinkumthinkum 15y ago
Well, honestly, for many of the work environments the author refers to, which may not be ones you are I would want to work, the author is correct. The CEO of XYZ corp doesn't care and is not interested in your explanation about how optimizing the thermocouplers makes things better. Even if you tried to relate to how it does save the company, he won't think you know what you're talking about. This is more about playing a psychological, even childish, game with your boss. And I suspect, in fact I'm completely sure, that in these kinds of companies, this is probably the advice you can get. These are the kinds of CEOs for which you could just explain until you're blue in the face about how important backups are for customers and they will stare blankly and wonder why they hired you in the first place.
- jrockway 15y ago
  Why work for a CEO that "doesn't care and is not interesting in your explanation about how optimizing the termocouplers makes thing better"? There are plenty of companies run by people that do understand the low-level details that make their businesses successful. Work there instead. Remember, they need you more than you need them. They already admitted that they don't understand their own business!
  - dinkumthinkum 15y ago
    I agree, which is why I wouldn't work there. But that is the reality many face in our industry. Not everybody works at a hip startup. Many work at those "enterprise" places.
- SatvikBeri 15y ago
  It's a continuum. In maybe 1% of companies you won't have to show your value, because everyone will know. In 10% it won't matter what you do, because you'll be distrusted anyway. But the vast majority of the time, learning to communicate your value will increase others' perception of you and lead to better raises.

kiba 15y ago

Very cynical view. If this is what's happening across companies, than the market system wasn't efficient enough or was impeded to make a change. We all know that the local cable or telephone companies aren't trying their damn hardest and we are not pleased with the services we're getting. However, we can't do anything about it. To me, it's incomprehensible that we can sit on our hand and not make things better. Instead of being a big bully in the market, why not aim to make our lives better? Why all the politicking when it's quite urgent that medical progress need to be made now? After all, a million dollars or three won't make much a difference in respect to making a billion dollars on a monopoly. With the billion dollars in hand, the future of you, and everyone else is worse off, because you focused too much on marketing rather than on groundbreaking research. Do pharmaceutical CEOs only care about their short term bottom line and not the future of their health, their family, and their friends? Do AT & T corporate board really only care about what they made each day rather than the future of the internet? By expanding and making the infrastructure cheaper, they will benefit from the numerous services of future internet. Expand pie, and don't focus too much on getting a larger portion of the pie. Don't compromise the size of the pie.

epo 15y ago
Try reading the article, it might give you something else to write a banal rant about. Or should I say rants, each sentence seems to be about a different subject. Your final exhortation about pies is just baffling, "don't compromise the size of the pie" is something I might just put on a T shirt.
- kiba 15y ago
  Well, I thought "expanding the pie" versus "taking a larger portion of the pie" are particularly common metaphor for growing economy versus taking advantage of the economy.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Around here, the somewhat more technical terms "production" and "rent seeking" will probably serve you better. Folks on news.yc have already passed Randian Thought 101.

pagekalisedown 15y ago

A recruiter makes the most money by getting the most people hired, not by getting fewer people hired for the most money.

protomyth 15y ago
That isn't quite true. A lot of recruiters that I've met get paid based on the salary of the recruited, so fewer people at higher salary might make the recruiter more money.
- pagekalisedown 15y ago
  It doesn't usually make up the difference.
  - salemh 15y ago
    salary fee % n fee total 65000 0.2 3 39000 80000 0.2 2 32000 90000 0.2 1 18000 120000 0.2 1 24000 Simplistic EG (and a 2x 80,000 vs 120,000 is realistic), but, like a real estate agent, the cost of NOT closing the sale is greater then pushing for a marginal increase in the sale. EG salary, pushing for 115,000 vs 105,000 the difference in fee on 20% is 2,000. Which is ~200-400 dollars difference in commission. Losing the offer for pushing for 115,000? 2,300~4,600 (10-20% of fee).
    - pagekalisedown 15y ago
      Prefix a line with double spaces preserves the formatting: salary fee % n fee total 65000 0.2 3 39000 80000 0.2 2 32000 90000 0.2 1 18000 120000 0.2 1 24000
      - protomyth 15y ago
        Your making some interesting assumptions like it is three times as easy to fill a $65k spot than a $120k spot. The recruiters I knew had pretty good contacts that gave them the ability to place highly paid salaries (Oracle DBA, SAP developer) at a pretty good clip, much better than the generic recruiter. Their shooting for the higher-end gave them the right reputation to do this well.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

That EDS video was funny, haven't seen that before. Fwiw, the author Dominic Connor is a pretty well known financial engineering/quant recruiter. The 'Related Articles' section at the bottom has some other funny ones by and about him.

georgemcbay 15y ago
The EDS video was a Super Bowl ad from the peak of the dot-com boom back in 2000. I remember it well because that was the year virtually all of the ads aired during the Super Bowl were dot-com related.. lots of money spent on lots of ads by companies that mostly don't exist anymore (see also: the infamous Pets.com sockpuppet guy).

theoj 15y ago

Depends where you get hired. This article seems to deal with getting hired at a company whose main line of business is not technology (say finance, which Dominic seems to recruit for). In that case, your employer will not care about your beautiful C++ code or super-efficient way to do X -- unless you can tie it back to the company's main line of business and making money for the firm. An internal squabble about the more correct way to do X will mean nothing to the non-technical upper management in a non-tech firm. Non-tech firms don't care about technology for the sake of technology because they don't sell technology -- the firm has other priorities and IT is just a side show to help get the firm's mission done.

pjmlp 15y ago

A bit cynical, but quite close to my experience in big companies, where employees are just seen as expenses.

csomar 15y ago

They key here is that you’re making a difference when it hits the fan, that’s not someone they want to lose. The crap getting paid too much is the author of this article. Your job as software developer (or any other field) is to do your job the best you can. You are offered the salary before you start the work and you agreed on it. The market will define how much valuable you are to the business. You can see that in the last year, our salaries have increased considerably.

EliRivers 15y ago
Actually, for what I do, they are paying me too much. They'd know if they were able to monitor what I do all day.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  What do you do all day?
  - tbsdy 15y ago
    Two words: Hacker News.
zacharyvoase 15y ago
What do you think ‘the market’ is? The market is made up of people just like you, a pool of bids and offers, with bidders (that is, employers or clients) trying to get the best price for a good or service, and the merchants (employees) trying to make the most money from the provision of those services—or at the very least to make a sale at all. Markets are most efficient when there is full transparency. Unfortunately you don't know the salaries of the people you work with, or the budgets of the people you work for. We have to accept this information asymmetry as a fact of life, because your colleagues probably feel uncomfortable discussing their compensation packages, and your managers don't reveal their budgets to you specifically so they can save money. They may have been willing to pay you $100k, but if you settle for $80k they aren't going to argue, and you've just put $20k back into their budget that they were planning on giving you anyway. That doesn't mean a lot to them, but to you that could have been a new car and a luxury holiday. The fact that you don't understand the importance of leverage in negotiations (that is, making yourself seem extremely valuable to the organisation) is precisely why you aren't on $200k or more at the moment. And please don't kid yourself that you'll get to avoid all of this stuff by joining a startup. A founder or CEO of a small company is going to be even more aggressive in getting you to sign on the dotted line for a low price, since the company may be funded out of their own pocket (as opposed to a manager controlling a budget). And what about founding a startup? Well, you'll have to decide on a price to set your customers. Again, you need those unique selling points and some great marketing to make your customers feel like they can't function without you. If you decide to go down the VC route, you'll be wrapped up in negotiations and due diligence for weeks or months, and if you don't bring the full force of your negotiating abilities, you'll be signing away a large share of equity at a low price that you may regret for the rest of your life. No-one, absolutely no-one gets to skip the negotiations and still come out the other end with a 'fair' price or salary. These are facts of life, and whilst I don't think they're particularly unpleasant, if you decide to ignore them you'll be left behind as the rest of us shoot up the career ladder.

jrockway 15y ago

This is sarcasm, right? All of these things are clear warnings that it's time to flee that company for your life. You get paid what you get paid because someone else is willing to pay you more. The market is competitive and you're being hired by your peers, who recognize the value of "making the backup 50% faster". If you wear a tie and are trying to become a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch, then yes, you need to play this bullshit game. But in that case, you're not getting a "pay rise" for your value to the engineering organization, you're getting paid for your ability to keep the status quo alive and well.

protomyth 15y ago
Sadly, every company of a decent size I have worked for seems to fit the profile perfectly. I get the feeling the transition takes place when inertia hits a point that the company can coast on bad decisions and the dedication of a few employees doing the right thing while everyone else plays games.
dingfeng_quek 15y ago
No. This is non-fiction in finance. "Dominic Connor is a City headhunter at QF Search with a sideline in teaching C++ to bankers", he's also a well-known and respectable enough online personality. Such evidence also provides a basis for many explanations (appealing to the financial products being to complex) of the 2008 global financial crisis. I've once played with the idea of a career in quantitative finance, but subsequently fled for my life. Yet, attesting to the wonders of biodiversity, many kinds of life have evolved to thrive in the harshest of conditions.
- pja 15y ago
  Oh, it's Dominic. The first person I didn't already know to follow me on G+. He's dedicated to his chosen profession, I'll give him that.
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
No, it is not. This is the reason big conglomerates should be split with an axe and left to the vultures. They are super inefficient because they have incompetents in place that can't measure the real value created by their workers but also because as a company grows bigger and bigger you forget who is your customer and start playing the Soviet Russia central planning trick of "looking like you work is more important than working". When those big companies like banks show looses, we join them together creating bigger monsters that parasites real economy even more. They then use tricks and more tricks to hide the reality(GM or Enron) so the party continues one more day. But one day the party will be over for them.

mopoke 15y ago

Bear in mind that this from The Register whose audience is much more skewed towards those working in large corporates, BOFHs and PFYs than the typical audience here. For me the key sentence to the whole article is "Your boss has no idea if you’re good at your job." Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology? There seems to be this idea that IT folks are "special" and don't understand business and, because it's always been that way, there's no need to change. If you work for a business, it's not OK to be a not have a clue how a business works.

dotBen 15y ago
"Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology?" because there is the opposite fallacy which is also derided: the one where the best engineer in the team is promoted to be a manager and in turn no longer does much/any development work. The bottom line is that while there are great people out there, most people are average or worse (bell curve 101, sorry) and they end up progressing up the career ladder too.
- mopoke 15y ago
  Even the best engineer on the team should understand how the business works though. There's more to being a good engineer in a business than understanding the technical side. I tend to see people on three paths - they're an engineer and they want to keep coding and getting rewarded for that; or they're an engineer who wants to manage process and people; or they're an engineer who wants to focus more on architecture and design. The person you want to "manage" is the second one - they've a working knowledge of how the tech works but they're actively developing their leadership skills. Leadership skills are no different from any other skills - they can be learned. In some cases people show more of a "natural" skill in that area but that doesn't meant that it can't still be learned - it'll take you out of your comfort zone but you don't tend to advance unless you do that.
parfe 15y ago
>Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology? From my experience I think the issue stems for looking at management as the next rung on a ladder. A good developer might never gain or want the experience needed to make her a good manager. A manager might never learn what it takes to be a developer. But the idea of moving up to management ignores the real issue. Management relates to handling people and handling projects. If you can't deal with people enough to understand how they fit into your project you manage poorly. If you can't manage a project well enough to use the people you have, then you manage poorly. The skills to manage, and the skills to be a developer/engineer/designer/widgeteer seem, to me, orthogonal. I could write code for ten more years and never learn a thing about management. The best run tech project I ever worked on involved a PM who could still remember the Great Depression. She had the ability to ask the right questions and had a clear picture of how to move the project forward. The worst managed projects came from the PM who used to code.

ilaksh 15y ago

I think that most of this is STILL true, even for many startups and small departments. There are a lot of fundamental problems with our society, and studying this article may help people realize that. This man should win an award for being honest.

ChristianMarks 15y ago

This article pertains mostly to large, sclerotic firms with a pronounced suit-geek divide, somewhat like the blood-brain barrier. But it also exists in IT in higher ed as well. I suppose anyone with a modicum of professional pride would not want to work at a firm where the executives believe that managing IT is like herding cats--unless they were paid enough to guarantee the author a sufficiently high commission. (Knuth, incidentally, distinguishes computer science from IT and states that his interests lie with the former.)

mattquinn 15y ago
When you say "IT in higher ed", are you referring to personal experience? That's a pretty specific domain, just wanted to know if you have any specific anecdotes.
- ChristianMarks 15y ago
  I'm afraid to say now that the original comment was downvoted without explanation. ;)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

jmitcheson 15y ago

This article could be an advertisement for starting your own company.

mokus 15y ago

If "your boss has no idea if you’re good at your job," then he is not good at his.

salvadors 15y ago
You say that like that would be unusual.
paulhauggis 15y ago
my boss, the owner of the company, had me explain my job to him at least 3 times during my time there. He was the one that hired me and still didn't know exactly what I did. It was extremely frustrating when he asking me to do graphic design work and he didn't understand why it wasn't part of my job (I was hired as a developer, I wrote their entire e-commerce system which ran their business for 4 years).

kirillzubovsky 15y ago

A bit one-sided argument, but might be very common in some large companies. Indeed, if you're in the situation described in the article, the best bet is to play the game, knowing the constraints, and to do the least work for the most bang. If you actually want to enjoy your work, having a chance to create something new/different/efficient, in the environment where your "boss" is your peer, and your boss understand the value of 50% performance increase and is willing to spend time to understand why your backend is better than other's backend, then pick a startup. I am not just saying pick my startup, no, pick any startup that fits you. There are so many companies out there, if you search hard enough you can find the product / team that interests you, and people you're willing to work with. That said, be prepared to work hard, to have to fix bugs on the weekends, to probably carry your laptop everywhere you go, and finally, to have a lower salary than before. It's pretty simple, imho, you can't have everything all at once, but you can pick the combination that is right for you. All you need is to do it. Do or do not, there's no try. ;)

jiggy2011 15y ago
I think this article is aimed at people in the UK where there is not much of a startup culture except in a small handful of places. It also seem to be more aimed at general IT/tech/MCSE type guys rather than developers who are probably in less demand for startups.

Radzell 15y ago

Programmer and Scientist tend to be the nice guys in life so I would be surprised if some programmer were underpaid.

zoowar 15y ago

Your product sucks and is over priced for what little value it actually offers.

patio11 15y ago

I wish I had written this. If the humor/cynicism gets to you please power through and look at the actionable tips which will earn you more money. There is approximately no-one on HN, not even at the best managed firms with the least BS imaginable, who would not experience positive ROI from "Congrats guys, we just shipped X, let's have a celebratory dinner at $FAVORITE and I'm buying." That idea is freaking genius. It gets you instant political capital and will make sure decisionmakers actually remember X the next time it rolls around because they'll have a hundred projects to worry about but only one or two which were so important they had celebratory dinners at completion.

skrebbel 15y ago
Come on, seriously. A team of 20 ships a product and some junior engineer buys everybody a dinner out, incl all the bosses and their bosses? Yeah, OK, that's one way of making all your peers feel really awkward and uncomfortable. And wondering what the little suckup is up to.
- vacri 15y ago
  "The ramen and kool-aid's on me!"
- marvin 15y ago
  Wow. I didn't realize there is actually peer pressure in IT companies not to use knowledge of social relationships and human nature for your own benefit. In my opinion, the general unwillingness of computer workers to stand up for their own rights and interests is keeping our entire profession back from getting the money and respect it deserves. If we actively sabotage efforts of people who are trying to improve things, I don't see that there is much hope. Being nerds does not have to imply being clueless nerds.
  - skrebbel 15y ago
    Serious question: how is sucking up to your bosses by giving them treats "trying to improve things"? Note, not trying to be cynical here. Maybe I'm so ingrained with this culture you describe that I can't see your point.

itmag 15y ago

I found this article very enlightening, in an odd way. I've committed several of the errors mentioned in it (out of blithe naiveté, I might add). Very interesting take on Machiavellian job hacking, this. Personally, I would rather be myself always. Even if I could speed up my career by X% using methods like this, it would still take years upon years to get where I want to be, and by that time my soul would be a burnt out husk. If you have the intelligence, patience and willpower to put on a mask for that long, I would think that doing a startup is a saner and more enjoyable pursuit in any case.

drucken 15y ago
I would agree with every word you said, except failure rates on startups are very high (much higher than 50%). So, there is already a large opportunity cost due to the flat time and effort invested plus loss of corporate experience which has the many significant side effects such as skill, social/business contact and guaranteed compensation accrual.

wisty 15y ago

There's no law against refusing to promote weasels. And it's really not too hard to detect them, if you spend any time with them - psychopaths are superficially charming, but always trip up with their continuous and inconsistent lies. But businesses think "he's a weasel, but he's our weasel". Yeah, right.

mvip 15y ago

...and that's why smart people avoid enterprises.

billswift 15y ago
No, that's why honest people avoid enterprises. There are lots of smart people with slack morals working for big businesses and Wall Street. ADDED: There are also plenty of less smart and honest people working for big businesses on lower level jobs, I was just objecting to the claim that all smart people avoided them.

billybob 15y ago

I'm not huge on the cynicism, but there are solid points here that I wanted to remember. Here's my less-cynical spin in a motivational-speaker style condensation: Show, Celebrate, Support. Show: make sure the awesome stuff you do is visible to people, and prioritize stuff that will be visible. Celebrate: do something visible to celebrate your successes and your team's. It makes people feel good and reinforces a sense of progress and success. Buy a round at the pub, bring in a cake, whatever. Support: publicly support and thank others: other devs, business people, etc. Find nice things to say. All of these really fall under "be nice and encourage people", and may have the side benefit of getting you paid more. That's not too hard to swallow, is it?

kpennell 15y ago
I like this TLDR much better than the article!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ttt_ 15y ago

I hope this is some kind of joke that I just didn't get, but otherwise: This is just a guide for you to be hipocritical and a complete jackass to your coworkers while throwing out any values you have out the window. That's the kind of atitude that ruins the workplace for everyone, congrats on getting more money and also an even shittier job than before. I know plenty of people that are willing to act like this in order to get more money and they have no respect from me. Grow up and start trying to make yours and everyone else's life better not shittier. Please. I rather take my work seriously, constructively criticize bullshit company police, and make less money if that's what it takes. At least I won't regret being myself.

spqr 15y ago
Get over yourself. I've been in IT for 20 years and have met so many other IT people that think they know best and love spouting off on things they don't begin to comprehend. You sound like one of them. What precisely do you object to in this article? Was it the "smile more"? I love my job, pride myself on being able to work with anyone in the workplace, have made decades long friendships from work and last year made over $230k. Can you say the same? The author of the post comes across a little strongly but he seems to understand some rudimentary principles of getting ahead. No need to compromise on principles in the process.
lani 15y ago
err.. the visibility thing's all too real. just happened to me last week. project is nine months old. was an orphan until 1 month ago manager(s) 2 levels up asked about it. now ? daily updates. and i work at a well known co.

spinchange 15y ago

This is like The Prince for Nerds.

itmag 15y ago

What are your favorite career hacks? A dude at a previous place of work took the following initiative: he emailed everyone at the company asking for their ideas for improvement, promising a daily prize in the form of movie tickets (which were presumably funded by upper management). He did this for several weeks, collecting a ton of great, actionable ideas from the people in the trenches. It was all kinds of stuff, from IT to customer service to employee morale, etc. Then, he went to upper management with a bunch of curated, highly relevant, enterprise-spanning improvement ideas. Win-win-win situation: employees get movie tickets and fixes, upper management gets a better-running business, idea-rally dude gets to take credit for all of it. Brilliant move.

jyou 15y ago

My fellow readers, this article is definitely not cynicism or sarcasm, it has some very good suggestions for the "IT" people in corporate of America, especially Fortune 100. If you think or use the word "hack" in your job, then it is not for you - and that is a good thing, isn't.