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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

This mindset applies to many things besides growth. For example, how much money (as an annual income) is enough for you? Have you ever sat down and reasoned it out? I see many people stuck chasing larger and larger payouts, to the extent it makes them unhappy or even unwell, who never stopped to consider how much money was enough.

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According to one theory, people can generally be classified either in people who are satisfied when something is good enough (satisficiers), or people who are driven to maximize every result (maximizers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

(Incidentally, the theory was first put forward by Herbert A Simon, who received both a Nobel Prize in Economics and the Turing Award.)

Money and income are more complex than that. It is related to ones sense of self-worth, fairness, etc. Ideally, one should try to detach money & income from these senses, as it is a pretty much lose-lose situation. But it's not easy and I think recognizing that it is the case, that it does have impact, can go a fairly long way.

This is what I feel when I see people complain that developer salaries have an upper limit in the mid 100s.

I mean, I kinda get it, but honestly $100k is more than enough for me, let alone $150k.

I believe that to be not just about earning more money but also more appreciation. People might not be looking for just more money, but as they see their managers making double their salaries while taking credit for people's work, they want more money to feel more appreciated.

I think some people probably conflate the two without realising. You think your work is just as valuable to the company, if not more valuable than your manager's, and you could very well be right. However, value of your work is only one factor that determines your salary, there are other market forces in play, and it's hard to rationalise about such things.

But developers and engineers should take the matter into their own hands and don't just bury their head in the sand and let the 'business' people decides their benefits and compensations.

It would serve them better if they can treat themselves as product and services providers in a free market. Band together and unite! Don't stab each other in the back for meager bones being thrown at you.

This is why we can quit and launch our own SaaS business. No one but us to profit or take the blame for a decision.

Agreed. It's about fairness to some extent. Software developers are often in the position of providing most of the value of a company while the business people writing the paychecks pay themselves most of the profit.

I've seen situations where the company got $950K of a $1.2 million contract simply for negotiating the contract with the client, while the dev who did 6 months of work got the other $250K. $250K for 6 months work is a lot, but $950K for 2 weeks work + occasional maintenance of the business relationship is a lot more.

Of course, I've also seen the flipside: I worked at a company where the CEO was salaried less than me and his share in the company wasn't likely to grow in value such that his compensation vastly outstripped mine. I've been paid more at other places, but nobody complained about compensation there.

100k is enough to live on, but when you get more than that you start to see the potential of civic engagement, of funding causes you believe in.

And if your work contributes millions of dollars to the company's bottom line, what justice is there in the company giving 99.9% of the surplus of the surplus you generate to upper management's bonus, or the fund that gets inside info on your next quarterly report?

There are ways to spread that money equitably. It's a classist, self defeating belief that a programmer should let her superiors take home the profits of her work.

I like this argument a lot more than "I want more money". In my experience, programmers sadly do let their superiors walk all over them with regards to salary and work hours.

If you are so efficient at generating millions of dollars all on your own maybe just go into business yourself.

It's a scaling issue. If I'm being paid $100k to generate $200k worth of value, fair enough. If I'm being paid $120k to generate $2 million worth of value, that starts to seem unfair.

It's only unfair if someone else is willing to pay you more in order to generate that 2 million OR if no one else is willing to generate that 2 million for 120k. In that case, switch jobs. I find that programmers often overestimate their value.

To take a slightly different angle on it: if someone is taking an unfair percentage of the value you create, consider breaking out on your own and keeping 100% of the value you create.

Immediately, you start to think about costs, hurdles, and PITA to doing that. Those costs and hurdles represent the value that someone else is adding to allow you to "just code".

My feeling is that I may be able to take my talents elsewhere (even to my own company) and make a competing (or even completely different) product and take home a bigger slice, so you better make it worthwhile for me to stay at your company if you want those talents. I happen to work for a company that pays significantly higher that $150k, so it's not an issue at the moment, but it's always in the back of my mind.

"honestly $100k is more than enough for me, let alone $150k"

Same with CEO salaries, movie star salaries, professional athlete salaries, and VC profits. $100k is more than enough.

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