4 ms·

I'm going to share an unpopular opinion: US engineers are drastically overpaid, living off easy VC money for too long. We're not that much better than our forei

I'm going to share an unpopular opinion: US engineers are drastically overpaid, living off easy VC money for too long. We're not that much better than our foreign peers (if at all). We just live in an epicenter of speculatory investment, with easy money and careless spending meant to give the illusion of early success prior to an IPO or acquisition. The bubble finally burst and thousands were laid off, and the market is correcting itself slowly. Hopefully salaries will come back down to earth. US techies are hated for a reason, because we're drastically overpaid compared to the skill and education that it takes (vs other white collar jobs) and we drive up costs of living for everyone else while contributing much less to society than your average doctor or engineer. Covid made matters worse (I nearly doubled my salary switching companies during that time, although it was never my intent). The intensity of demand fueled even more unrealistic salaries, followed by even more intense layoffs. In this environment, especially with our lack of social safety nets, you can't easily make a small and stable tech company that wants sustainable business instead of hypergrowth. Every startup aims to be the next Alphabet / OpenAI, instead of meeting some practical need in a niche. The US has always been a gilded society with the capitalists driving society and economy, and we just happen to be higher up that pyramid for the time being, as their latest minions. Not because we are that special or that great, but just because they need us (for now) to recoup their investments. We're just pampered pawns in a sinister game, destroying cities and communities in our wake. I'm glad Europe doesn't have the same mentality. Don't copy us.

asdajksah2123 3y ago
While your opinion that US tech workers might be overpaid may be true, it bears questioning why this is happening in the Tech sector, one where even before COVID it was far easier to hire remote and offshore workers than say serving burgers. The gap between Tech worker salaries in the US and abroad dwarfs the gap in any other industry by a lot, and in many cases may also be reverse (where the US employees are paid less).
- solardev 3y ago
  US companies do frequently hire foreign workers. I worked with many at my last job. But there are still culture and language gaps to deal with, and even with foreign workers, these investment ventures couldn't hire enough people. And the bigger tech companies with insane wages gobble up way more devs than they need, leaving it hard for non tech US businesses to hire developers. We didn't care because it upped our salaries, but now the flip side is we've trained normal businesses to see us as unaffordable. You can't just have a dev or two paid a living wage to maintain a website anymore, you need a whole team or else just outsource the whole thing to Vercel etc. We've consolidated much of the labor side to SaaS instead of regular devs in regular companies. Anyway, I'm not arguing against the reality of supply and demand, but the sustainability of a demand side built off short term hypergrowth vs stable businesses spread across sectors. It's just another dot com bubble and I think it's not great for US society to have these extreme wage gaps, and not great for US business to basically invest everything we have into tech/advertising bubbles and not much else.
  - asdajksah2123 3y ago
    While this might explain why Tech salaries are high in general, it doesn't explain why US Tech salaries are so much higher than Western European ones (let's not even consider the gap with Asia/Eastern Europe). Heck, there is a significant gap between salaries in the US and UK which pretty much eliminates nearly every cultural factor as well. Why are employers paying over 2x to a SW developer in SF than they are one in London? There is no language or even educational advantage (I'd argue UK comp sci education has historically been far ahead of US education even) https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-metro-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-... https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-francisco-bay-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... Why are those non SAAS companies not simply hiring up all the London based developers? Why are the SAAS companies paying their SF developers the salaries they are when they could double their workforce for the same amount by hiring them in London instead? The obvious (and possibly wrong) explanation is that companies genuinely value employee colocation and were willing to pay a premium for that, and the obvious choice to colocate was the US since the largest absolute number of top tier SW devs are in the US. Another possibility is that the demand/clients are largely located in the US so there's a benefit to hiring people living in the US who would better understand the market. I don't think much of this explanation though, both because it's not true that the US is that much bigger a market (and for most companies RoW is bigger than the US) and also because of the prevalence of US culture most people (especially in the SW dev industry) are probably well aware of US cultural peculiarities.
mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
Disagree. SWE in silicon valley or FAANG and similar companies for sure. Out of all software engineers in the US though, they are likely the minority statistically. You've got your IBM's, GE, John Deere, payroll software, accounting software, etc. Toiling away at some blue-chip F500 company in software does not compel the same total comp levels by any stretch. Its an order of magnitude difference. No bonuses, crappy healthcare coverage (like thousands out of pocket for childbirth), years with inflation outpacing any annual raise, no stock options/RSUs, etc. Its funny how in forums like here on HN people comment about layoffs, PIP's before vesting of stocks, unfair labor practices, etc. and then tout those hypergrowth companies as well and join on the money train looking at leet code exercises to get in and comparing total comp numbers and stock grants. > you can't easily make a small and stable tech company that wants sustainable business There are many examples of companies that do this, Basecamp for example. There are also company structures (like a worker cooperative) that do not resemble the common S-Corp pyramid where all the profits rise to the few at the top. I've never heard of a startup or tech company go that route. As much as startups have these cool mission statements about changing the world, its the same capitalism as other industries.
- solardev 3y ago
  I don't know... I hear what you're saying, and I partially agree with it, but it's not as simple as "only FAANG is the problem". There are trickle-down effects on the rest of the industry and society too. Touched upon it in a cousin thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38473513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38473513), where I was arguing that the big tech companies have trickle-down effects that drive up wages across industries and makes devs more and more unaffordable to non-tech, non-FAANG companies. I've never complained about equity or such because I never had any, having never worked for a big tech company. Plus side, I never had to do leetcode either :) But even then, my last job was at a F1000 old-school manufacturer, and even there I was paid $100k, with free lunches, loose PTO, company paid trips, etc. -- all for making a simple frontend in React, utilizing less skill than I ever have before (because it's so specialized into that stack nowadays, vs the old days where you also had to deal with networking, sys admin, VMs, etc.) Those were cultural things they copied from tech companies. At other jobs before that, I was still paid much more than most of my peers, who had better education and who've worked their asses off for years. Before 2023, dev work could launch you into the middle class after just a few months of bootcamp and a good reference or two. What other profession is like that? I think that's my primary gripe with modern US SWE: it's a get-rich-quick scheme requiring little actual skill or training, and sometimes, little actual work. The work isn't that hard, and something like Upwork is probably more representative of what a realistic market would pay (much less). If I ever imagine myself to be fairly compensated because not everyone can do coding (which is true)... then I look at how teachers, adjunct professors, electricians, plumbers, truckers, etc. are paid and I realize yeah, no... I just sit on my ass all day, code a few hours a day and sit in on meetings and such and the money comes in. It's not even in the same league as other professions in terms of how hard you have to work vs how much you get paid. Especially when I look at my actual friends in tech proper, who work like 10-15 hours a week by their own admittance a week and make way more money. All around it just screams "bubble". We're not paid this much because of our skills. We're paid this much because capital was hoping to cash in on the hypergrowth before it bursts.
fuzztester 3y ago
>Covid made matters worse (I nearly doubled my salary switching companies during that time, although it was never my intent). The intensity of demand fueled even more unrealistic salaries, followed by even more intense layoffs. Yup. "Fear and greed drive markets." That well-known statement holds true not only in the stock markets, but also in any market where there are wild swings of supply and demand. Human nature, short-sightedness, and ignorance, folks. "Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it."
yourdiscomfort 3y ago
so much this

asdajksah2123 3y ago

While your opinion that US tech workers might be overpaid may be true, it bears questioning why this is happening in the Tech sector, one where even before COVID it was far easier to hire remote and offshore workers than say serving burgers. The gap between Tech worker salaries in the US and abroad dwarfs the gap in any other industry by a lot, and in many cases may also be reverse (where the US employees are paid less).

solardev 3y ago
US companies do frequently hire foreign workers. I worked with many at my last job. But there are still culture and language gaps to deal with, and even with foreign workers, these investment ventures couldn't hire enough people. And the bigger tech companies with insane wages gobble up way more devs than they need, leaving it hard for non tech US businesses to hire developers. We didn't care because it upped our salaries, but now the flip side is we've trained normal businesses to see us as unaffordable. You can't just have a dev or two paid a living wage to maintain a website anymore, you need a whole team or else just outsource the whole thing to Vercel etc. We've consolidated much of the labor side to SaaS instead of regular devs in regular companies. Anyway, I'm not arguing against the reality of supply and demand, but the sustainability of a demand side built off short term hypergrowth vs stable businesses spread across sectors. It's just another dot com bubble and I think it's not great for US society to have these extreme wage gaps, and not great for US business to basically invest everything we have into tech/advertising bubbles and not much else.
- asdajksah2123 3y ago
  While this might explain why Tech salaries are high in general, it doesn't explain why US Tech salaries are so much higher than Western European ones (let's not even consider the gap with Asia/Eastern Europe). Heck, there is a significant gap between salaries in the US and UK which pretty much eliminates nearly every cultural factor as well. Why are employers paying over 2x to a SW developer in SF than they are one in London? There is no language or even educational advantage (I'd argue UK comp sci education has historically been far ahead of US education even) https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-metro-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/london-... https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-francisco-bay-area https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... Why are those non SAAS companies not simply hiring up all the London based developers? Why are the SAAS companies paying their SF developers the salaries they are when they could double their workforce for the same amount by hiring them in London instead? The obvious (and possibly wrong) explanation is that companies genuinely value employee colocation and were willing to pay a premium for that, and the obvious choice to colocate was the US since the largest absolute number of top tier SW devs are in the US. Another possibility is that the demand/clients are largely located in the US so there's a benefit to hiring people living in the US who would better understand the market. I don't think much of this explanation though, both because it's not true that the US is that much bigger a market (and for most companies RoW is bigger than the US) and also because of the prevalence of US culture most people (especially in the SW dev industry) are probably well aware of US cultural peculiarities.

mattbrewsbytes 3y ago

Disagree. SWE in silicon valley or FAANG and similar companies for sure. Out of all software engineers in the US though, they are likely the minority statistically. You've got your IBM's, GE, John Deere, payroll software, accounting software, etc. Toiling away at some blue-chip F500 company in software does not compel the same total comp levels by any stretch. Its an order of magnitude difference. No bonuses, crappy healthcare coverage (like thousands out of pocket for childbirth), years with inflation outpacing any annual raise, no stock options/RSUs, etc. Its funny how in forums like here on HN people comment about layoffs, PIP's before vesting of stocks, unfair labor practices, etc. and then tout those hypergrowth companies as well and join on the money train looking at leet code exercises to get in and comparing total comp numbers and stock grants. > you can't easily make a small and stable tech company that wants sustainable business There are many examples of companies that do this, Basecamp for example. There are also company structures (like a worker cooperative) that do not resemble the common S-Corp pyramid where all the profits rise to the few at the top. I've never heard of a startup or tech company go that route. As much as startups have these cool mission statements about changing the world, its the same capitalism as other industries.

solardev 3y ago
I don't know... I hear what you're saying, and I partially agree with it, but it's not as simple as "only FAANG is the problem". There are trickle-down effects on the rest of the industry and society too. Touched upon it in a cousin thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38473513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38473513), where I was arguing that the big tech companies have trickle-down effects that drive up wages across industries and makes devs more and more unaffordable to non-tech, non-FAANG companies. I've never complained about equity or such because I never had any, having never worked for a big tech company. Plus side, I never had to do leetcode either :) But even then, my last job was at a F1000 old-school manufacturer, and even there I was paid $100k, with free lunches, loose PTO, company paid trips, etc. -- all for making a simple frontend in React, utilizing less skill than I ever have before (because it's so specialized into that stack nowadays, vs the old days where you also had to deal with networking, sys admin, VMs, etc.) Those were cultural things they copied from tech companies. At other jobs before that, I was still paid much more than most of my peers, who had better education and who've worked their asses off for years. Before 2023, dev work could launch you into the middle class after just a few months of bootcamp and a good reference or two. What other profession is like that? I think that's my primary gripe with modern US SWE: it's a get-rich-quick scheme requiring little actual skill or training, and sometimes, little actual work. The work isn't that hard, and something like Upwork is probably more representative of what a realistic market would pay (much less). If I ever imagine myself to be fairly compensated because not everyone can do coding (which is true)... then I look at how teachers, adjunct professors, electricians, plumbers, truckers, etc. are paid and I realize yeah, no... I just sit on my ass all day, code a few hours a day and sit in on meetings and such and the money comes in. It's not even in the same league as other professions in terms of how hard you have to work vs how much you get paid. Especially when I look at my actual friends in tech proper, who work like 10-15 hours a week by their own admittance a week and make way more money. All around it just screams "bubble". We're not paid this much because of our skills. We're paid this much because capital was hoping to cash in on the hypergrowth before it bursts.

fuzztester 3y ago

>Covid made matters worse (I nearly doubled my salary switching companies during that time, although it was never my intent). The intensity of demand fueled even more unrealistic salaries, followed by even more intense layoffs. Yup. "Fear and greed drive markets." That well-known statement holds true not only in the stock markets, but also in any market where there are wild swings of supply and demand. Human nature, short-sightedness, and ignorance, folks. "Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it."

yourdiscomfort 3y ago

so much this