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Comment by Singletoned | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree necessarily, but I'm definitely more cautious in criticising someone else's pay when I can't do their job.

I certainly know that a lot of people who know nothing about computers think that I'm overpaid as a software developer. Why should I earn several times their salary when I just sit at a computer all day, whilst they do hard work?

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In my case, I CAN do their job. They have a lot of support structures to delegate between. You may think you can't do their job, but you could, if you wanted - though getting there is a game of thrones of sorts, and you may not wish to play.

However, they can't do your job. Assuming you are a developer, they are making a living based on your work. Your work has equal value. Well, if you ARE doing hard work. If you are just sitting at a terminal, more ambition might be a good thing :) Cultivate it and you can get there. If you want.

We need not assume all leadership at the top is steering the entire ship, more so than steering parts of things, decisions trickling up as well as down, alongside information.

I think this is a bit naive. You seem like the software engineer type that thinks the company revolves around you, that both middle-managers and upper management are clueless, and you could do anybody elses job if you just put a weekend into studying it.

Getting a MBA, getting experience leading companies from the director level, then VP level, then CEO - that is valuable experience.

Should probably read the posters profile

Again, see profile :)

>>In my case, I CAN do their job.

Your overall point is diminished when you say things like this, because it comes across as arrogant. Without substantiating that, you're just pandering to everyone who holds the same ideology on CEO pay.

The way you describe it, technical jobs are the hardest in the world, and everything else is comparatively easy. You make it sound as though there is only one truly difficult discipline, which happens to be yours.

Furthermore, you're lumping the job duties of all CEOs together as though they all share a homogenous skill set you could pick up.

I'm unconvinced by an ethos that boils down to, "My work is hard because it's programming, their work is not because it's soft skills."

Missing lots of context.

(A) See profile. These are a lot of skills I HAVE picked up (B) I'm pretty non-technical these days. (C) when I'm suggesting hard work is hard work, I include everyone putting in hard effort - not just developers, but I do lean heavily in endorsing those who build the product.

I'm not saying I can run Goldman Sachs. I can run a few software companies a lot better than they are being run.

What I'm saying here is that CEOs are mortal. The more you know the more you know this. If you're just starting out you may not realize this, but as you start to experience various executives and know the decisions they make, and what the people under them do, with the experience over time - you just see the value that people should be valued more equally and the system should be fixed. To do this, we need the support of everyone in at least knowing the system is broken, not the defense of the broken system.

I am not a programmer these days. Hard work is hard work, and is mostly measured by the stress it inflicts on you. With practice, things get easier. But all people have value.

I think, though, Ycombinator is premised on the idea technical people can learn a CEO's job much easier than vice versa. I'm pretty sure he says something very close to that in one of his essays. (Business being relatively easy to learn for a talented technical person.)

Yes, and that premise is controversial at best.

True, but the YC success stories offer some anecdotal support for the idea.

That's the least that I expect. The implication that technical people can learn to hold a CEO position and do well is very anti-status quo.

This is a really, really naive thing to say - bordering on completely delusional. The CEO job is so much harder than you think it is. As a VC I see a huge number of amazing engineers and very few amazing CEOs. They are incredibly hard to find and can change the outcome of a company from a complete failure to a wild success. You MAY be able to do their job but in my experience very few can do it competently.

So why do they all get paid gangbusters?

Don't appreciate being called delusional. That being said, you underscore the point that many CEOs are not great -- which is exactly the point about overcompensation. Also, see my profile.

It's not wrong to tell everyone they may have the skills to match their current mediocre CEO that is pulling down the megabucks today. And believe me, a lot of mediocre CEOs are pulling down megabucks.

Being you are in the VC game, you are dealing with people in startups, where the compensation hasn't gone crazy away from things yet.

Finally, some of these views may be seen as socialistic. It matters what you value. In general, I have seen a lot of VC decisions that value capital ahead of ethics, and this is unfortunate.

I think caution is indeed warranted, but to say one shouldn't "criticize someone's pay when I can't do their job" is - IMHO - misguided. The problem I see is that the CEO is rewarded with the high salary (and exit options) regardless if the CEO does their job well! I can certainly criticize that.

> Why should I earn several times their salary when I just sit at a computer all day, whilst they do hard work?

Yeah, why should you? I mean, you are essentially being paid to surf Hacker News and plunk out a few lines of code every once in a while, while the janitor is working hard all day.

You don’t pay engineers to write code, you pay them to understand subtleties and edges of the problem. The code is incidental. —Ted Dziuba

Which is an argument that applies just as effectively to executive management as it does to engineers.

Actually IT as a category of jobs requires constant knowledge and skill improvements. If you aren't reading HN and/or other tech news sites very regularly you're going to become obsolete very quickly.

If you're doing the same thing in IT for more than a few years chances are you're digging a hole for yourself. Just ask any Silverlight developer.

Yeah, that's the excuse I'm going to use when my boss finally realizes what that site with the orange bar at the top is ;).

I've been a software engineer for close to 10 years now, and we are definitely overpaid for what most of us are doing, and that is mostly because of supply and demand.

I'd suggest rather than look at it as you being overpaid, look at it as everyone else being underpaid - in other words, corporate profit sharing is not what it should be.

We automate things. As Jaron Lanier says, "code is people who aren't there". We create substitutions for labor. The lot of mankind only began to improve rapidly after human and animal muscle power was substituted-for by engines.

All production is a mix of land, labor and capital. So it depends on cases, but when we are in the right place at the right time, we deliver stupendous amounts of value.

I've been involved in cases where two, three, four, twenty people could address tens of millions of cost $US per year. The interesting thing is that sometimes, even though you have the numbers on your side, the management team demurs.

It's all but impossible to actually evaluate what we're worth.

Appealing to supply and demand may involve what's called "The Lump of Labor Fallacy". We're not stevedores, and we're not surgeons. We're somewhere in between.

Nonsense. Relative to the value we provide, even average or mediocre developers are underpaid. "Everyone" else is, too, who isn't in upper management.

Define 'value'.

That turns out to be a deep and interesting question.

One response: https://archive.org/details/lectureonnotiono00lloy

Compared to our peers in the law and medicine and other professions we are not even more so outside of SV.

In the UK the average GP is on around £120k I bet very very few chartered (Peng) engineers make as much.

No, we're not. Considering how much money our stuff makes/saves, we're drastically underpaid.

If we were overpaid, companies with a large portion of developers would all go out of business. But they're not. Where is the money above the value we create coming from?

I've misread the tone of a few HN posts lately ... this is sarcasm, right?

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