Hacker News Reader

Comment by fweespeech | Hacker News Reader

> I've been on the hiring side as a manager in a number of companies, and I've NEVER seen a situation where a candidate was so uniquely awesome that the company was willing to make an offer drastically larger than their normal range for that role. A bit more? Sure. Some more stock or something? Often. But not, say, 50% more salary than anyone else at that level is getting.

Fyi, at $DayJob we have one guy at my level who makes 50% more than anyone else at the level he is at.

So it does happen but its unusual. [e.g. Developer A-Z get $60-80k, Developer Unicorn gets $120k]

View on HN

How about when so-so dev makes 50% more than rock star dev! It's real.

Why? The underperformer w/high-salary was brought in by some idiot manager x years ago - that manager has since lost their job - but this ok performer still pretty good and still in their job.

Have had rock stars contact the company - willing to work for 50% under market and we'd be crazy not to put them on. Without even having an open position at the time.

It is ALL negotiation. Don't assume there is solid logic and "fair" salaries.

A lot of times in situations like this there's eventually pressure from above to manage such people out ... for obvious reasons.

From my experience at small medium startups, some dev gets higher pay because he/she is attractive and socially well adjusted and not nerdy. Not necessarily better coder.

> socially well adjusted

Don't underestimate this. Being a better code doesn't make you a better employee.

Nope but they tend to serve other needs like keeping a good social structure within the company and being presentable to investors or doing client facing pre-sale / post-sale work besides coding.

There are allot of ways that a company can monetize their employees and allot of factors that end up being calculated to come up with the figure they end up paying for them, being socially well adjusted and attractive can have a good effect on your salary as people both tend to equate intelligence to good looks oddly enough and that they could use you for other things as well.

In some cases it also might be ticking a box kind of thing I've seen companies recruit attractive females before to both tick the diversity box and to keep some of the more social awkward coders working harder (this came directly from the mouth of a female headhunter that even boasted she specializes in hiring office eye candy that can do some coding on the side).

The thing is none of the coders at old job were needed in customer interaction. Think it was more of eye candy, cool guy to have around, founder had common hobbies like football etc.

Not saying they were needed, however your old employer still might have had a couple of boxes that said "can be presented to investors?" "can be used for pre-sale?" which the hire manager had to tick off at the time they hired them.

Many people at the end tend to do other things than the basis they were hired on, how many times have you seen some "X guru" or "Y expert" and "Z evangelist" being hired at a premium only to end up doing the same crap as everyone else once that specific project fell through?

Salaries can be quite "arbitrary" mostly because that while there is some fine tuned formula behind it on many occasions it doesn't really survives it's with meeting reality, the more traditional "old school" enterprises are probably the best at actually maintaining some logical relationship between experience, responsibilities and salary while the newer tech companies tend to be more erratic and considerably dislike rocking the boat even in cases when an employee does no longer deserve their initial starting salary.

I know that happens but it sucks. We pay everyone based on merit. The quietest, nerdiest person is paid the same as the most attractive, outgoing person with the same skills.

How are you defining 'level'? Two individual contributors are not at the same level just because they do relatively the same job. I'm sure some of the better IC engineers at my company make 2x or more what the new guys do, but there is 15 years of experience between them.

Same job title. All relatively junior developers with less than 10 years of experience. Unicorn has 4.

How are you a junior developer after 10 years of experience? That's pretty mid/senior level at that point.

I said relatively junior. [i.e. They have no management responsibilities and are pure developers]

We pretty much have Developer -> Senior Developer -> CTO.

Depends on indistry, but 10 years is far from senior. (ignoring title inflation.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com