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Comment by dzlobin | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, your friend at google feels under-paid? No offense to your friend or you, but It's hard for me to really understand that because of several reasons. First of all, he/she likely makes at least what..80k? 90k? I understand it's not a million dollars a year but that's not a bad salary. Second of all, there are people that would accept a lot less than that simply to work at google. I used to cook professionally, and was at one point working for FREE at Corton, in NYC, solely so that I can say I worked and learned there. All the cooks who work in fine dining get paid horribly but work there to learn from the best. This should be the same for hackers. Of course your friends from these great companies wouldn't have a hard time finding a wall street job for a lot more pay, but you'd have to agree that they are learning a LOT more than they would there, and that has to be worth something.

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"...that's not a bad salary."

That's entitlement thinking and it ignores economics. Salaries in software (and in most white collar jobs) are a negotiation. If all goes well the employer feels they are slightly overpaying and the employee feels slightly undervalued. If either side is happy then there's an inequity.

One is not entitled to specific salary, nor is one limited by a specific cap on salary.

The second point that there are non-monetary values to a job is well said though.

If either side is happy then there's an inequity.

Or you might get into the position where the employer and employee think they got a great deal. I've heard of it happen before. In any case, making sure neither side is happy is not really any way to ensure that there's no inequity.

The negotiation is rarely in equal footing, however.

During high unemployment, the employers are dictating the terms.

During low unemployment, the employees are dictating the terms.

I can't wait till the employment rates go up again. Unfortunately according to experts it won't for a LOOOONG while.

$80-90k doesn't go very far in Mountain View or Manhattan.

Believe me I know, I'm from NYC. But that's the average STARTING salary for hackers at the big companies, and surely it will be a nice stepping stone to bigger, better places.

I'm curious, when people say salary, do they mean compensation? 80-90k starting in NY is almost month to month, but there's a nice pot of bonus..

Starting salary for hackers? My ex made starte in that range with just her modest fluency with html. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that number is really low for NYC, in my personal exp.

Oh crap - stop posting those salaries :P

I'm in the 3rd world right now making 12000 U$D a year - and taxed like hell for being in the upper range.

I'll most probably emigrate within the next year, but I know it won't be a bed of roses...

If you're < 5 years out of college it does. Useful knowledge is that if you work hard, and don't tie yourself to one job, every job change you get for the rest of your career involves a salary increase. You've set a good base.

Not necessarily. I went from a smallish (40 person) company to a huge fortune 100 megacorp which has hip new offices and wins awards for being a great place to work and they flat out told me I was outside their pay range for the position so I'd have to accept a 4% paycut to go there. Maybe I'm terrible at negotiating but it was the first time I had a company dictate the salary rather than do the "desired salary" song and dance.

I do sometimes feel like it is all a massive fraud perpetrated by HR people who, in exchange for some hip decor and free food, can get engineers to trade raw salary.

All in all I learned that all the external reputation, perks and lime green paint in the world don't matter one whit compared to the competence of your immediate peers and you certainly don't need to go to a namebrand software shop for that.

written on a mobile phone so apologies for any egregious misspellings

You had the option of not going there though, right?

Yes, had I had the hindsight gained after a year at the megacorp when I accepted the offer. But thanks for the sincere and insightful question.

I had a long rant here, edited it to remove the vulgarities, edited to keep it fairly anonymous, and was left with just this sentence: Why on earth should someone have to change companies to get paid what they're worth?

Why on earth should someone have to change companies to get paid what they're worth?

Because the fact that your skill set has grown doesn't mean that your employer's needs have grown identically.

Companies always have rules about raise limits and such. If you want to get an increase in pay you nearly always have to switch to another company.

That's true, but it's often equally true that the supervisors making the decision are too lazy or unimaginative to initiate the pay raise. The threat of leaving the company isn't only a bargaining chip, sometimes it's the only opportunity. I've even seen people achieve big salary gains by yo-yoing between two companies over a relatively short period of time.

Yea, from my perspective the "company man" doesn't exist anymore for the most part. There are people who buy into the cool-aid, but most people treat the company they're with with the same loyalty it treats them: almost none. When a better opportunity comes along they tend to jump. I can't recall more than one or two cases where the person announced they were leaving and got a counter offer good enough to make them stay.

Because class struggle is making a comeback?

Managers set salaries. Guild professions (e.g. lawyers, doctors, accountants) set their prices and uphold the guild with cryptic languages and lengthy vetting processes.

The case where engineers (of either companies, processes, products or technology), instead, are in the position to set compensation (or more specifically, are able to profit by the fruits of their labor), are generally only available to very high ranking manager/engineer hybrids, consultants, and founders. This is probably the closest thing in the modern world, in the literal sense, to the Marxist Socialist ideal of the workers taking control of the means of production.

Other than that: ask yourself the question -- why do the bankers have all of the money?

PS: Some resources.

6% of all US income is now earned by the top 0.01% of the income bracket. This is as high as it's been since at least 1913.

The lowest earning member of thix bracket in 2005 was earning $5.9 million a year.

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/08/18/the-percent-of-inco...

http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/category/share-of-income...

This isn't the difference between Bob down the street who went to college and Jim who didn't -- or the kid in your class who became a Harvard trained lawyer working in a big firm on wall-street versus the smartest kid in your math class who's now at Lawrence Berkeley labs. This isn't the difference between the kid who's working at some cool post series A company and one that went to Microsoft, or the student body president that went to work for a hedge fund rather than a non-profit.

This is the difference between the founders and partners of the law firm, the founders, investors, or CEO's of the startup, or the CEO's or partners or founders of the hedge fund, and A-list directors/producers/athletes/musicians/actors and nearly everyone else.

> Why on earth should someone have to change companies to get paid what they're worth?

"paid what you're worth" is incomplete the the point of being meaningless.

You get paid what you're worth to the company where you work.

Correction. You get paid the minimum the company you work for thinks they can get away with.

Exactly what compensation do you think entry level employees should be getting? Exactly what should the be making 10 years later after you've (nearly) doubled their salary.

There is also the benefit of down-the-line wages you can earn from having great experience on your resume. Maybe by turning down a 200K job for an 80K one, it makes the candidate eligible for a 350K job two years later.

Saying you worked for Google, or Corton, or any other top-of-their-field employer is something that has long-lasting benefits. The payment is just deferred and spread over 30+ years.

Has this actually been verified? I haven't happened on any stories yet about someone "doing their time" at google to go pick a job making way above their normal range.

At this point Google is probably too large for there to be a sense of exclusivity about it. I'm sure that being one of the first 50 at Google or Amazon would be a particularly effective resume builder (though given where those companies went, perhaps a financially unnecessary one).

I've been recruited to positions specifically because of D. E. Shaw on my resume/LinkedIn profile. Whether that got me way above range or not is impossible to say, of course, but I've never been one to complain about salary in my life either. At my current company, I took a significant pay cut to come here in 2003, N years pre-IPO. N turned out to be 2.5.

there's a mention higher up this exact comment thread of people doing exactly that. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098358

It was posted 6 hours after my post. :)

It is the other way round, at least in Germany. During your interview you will always be asked how much you got at your last job. Then there is a magical cap at say 20% above the last salary (depends on how much they want you of course).

So it is very important to have a good salary at the beginning, because it will always be a reference point.

Germany just seems bizarre. I've heard stories of forced union membership for high-level positions like engineers, low-level employees having voting rights on executives, exorbitantly lengthy vacations (with increased salary to make it easier to vacate), etc.

It's all relative. There is no money for the workers in the service industry because the competition for most roles is unlimited. The supply of technologists is far smaller, however. Every once and a while Google calls me up asking to interview, I politely tell them no. When they ask why I wouldn't want to work there, my response is "You will pay me $100k-$120k. I can make $140k-$160k elsewhere". They start going into this schpeel about their 20% "free time", their stock grants, their free shuttle (Living in SF and would have to commute 2 hours a day to get there). Their culture. They're working really hard to sell me on why I should make $20-$40k less working for them, then to take some other crappy job at a mature startup within 4-6 blocks of my apartment.

You have a good point, I wasn't making the connection to say that cooks should be paid more (which they should because a 100 hour work week is average at that level) but rather to emphasize the sacrifice they make to learn and work for the best chefs

Out of personal curiosity, if you don't mind telling me, what's your age/education/job? I'm curious as to who Google actively recruits. BTW: feel free to email me if you don't want to post that

Google constantly emails me asking if I want to apply, though I'm not sure they'd hire me if I had the patience to go through their interview process properly.

I'm 34, have a bachelor's in math and one in comp sci from Carnegie Mellon, and I have about 11 years of full-time software engineering experience on my resume, primarily in C and C++.

30/high school drop-out/systems administrator (with 18 years experience)

You've been a systems administrator since you were 12? That's hardcore.

Me and a friend have a running joke/friendly rivalry about how I started coding when I was 7, and he started when he was 6... but he's a year younger than me, so we have the same number of years of experience.

I used to think that .. Until I turned '30 and realized I'd given more than 1/2 of my life to a career that I now find rather unfulfilling financially, intellectually, and personally.

What's wrong with stock grants? That's much better than stock options. If you get 40,000 shares vesting after, say four years, why would you complain? Sure, there's no guarantee the stock won't collapse, but on the off chance the price holds or goes up, isn't two million after four years not too shabby? Not sure I understand why Google would be lumped together with companies that offer only options, or grants of dog stocks.

What's wrong with Stock Grants? Why not just go to Vegas then, the odds might be better. Stock options or grants are just another form of gambling. Stock options at a startup are a joke, and for the most part have been a worthless tool that induces slavery for the past 10 years. As for grants, no corporation with stock of any value is giving significant grants. Google gives employees grants of 200 shares nowadays.

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