Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market | Hacker News Reader

Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

bloomberg.com

256 pointslnguyen211 comments

The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.

I would be interested in knowing if better developers are more improved by having their own office above average developers or if they can handle the distraction more.

I think a lot of people value having other people around and in their sight, even freelancers leave their home office and head to coworking spaces and claim productivity gains. Personally I think the office per person idea is overrated, however I've worked in many places where the draw backs of open office hit sometimes. I think the best combo is open office, with hot private offices, and with the extra space, sleep rooms, relax rooms, big working table rooms, even put hipster stuff like a standing desk area in maybe etc.. Oh and if an employees ask for NC headphones just buy them! Also if someone really in the zone on something that distractions could be problematic be okay if Fred say's do you mind if I work from home today on this problem.

I second this.

I worked at a university for a few years, and lots of people were jealous of my private office in a distant building, but I just found it socially isolating. That said, I did get a lot done.

But at least you had the option to temporarily relocate yourself to a more social area. Then you could move back when you needed focus.

I actually didn't, there was no team.

Not with that attitude.

IBM did some tests and they found about a 15% improvement and this was across the board so no change between average and high performers

I'd love to read that study if you can find a reference.

steve mcconnell rapid development mentions the study where I found the 15% figure quoted.

Thanks!

I worked as a contractor for a while at a company that was pretty much entirely great developers, but they had one guy who had more experience than nearly everybody else put together (he was in his 50s, and had worked on all sorts of cool things in his career), who was also more productive than anyone else. The founders of the company knew he was their top producer, and so they gave him whatever he wanted (within the bounds of budget, etc.).

What he wanted most was a private office, and he got it, despite no one else in the company having one (it was kind of smallish and closet like, but he had a door that closed, and that made him happy). I always suspected that was a big part of why he was so productive compared to everyone else; though the huge amount of experience and his seeming disinterest in anything but churning out code (all of his hobbies also involved code to some degree, and he was always way out front on various trends in software development) were also big contributors. It's also worth nothing that he didn't put in long hours. When it was crunch time in the office, he wouldn't be one of the people there on the weekend. Paradoxically, I think that's another contributing factor to his high productivity.

So, yeah, I've often wondered whether Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. has internal metrics about this. Google is infamously an open plan office, Microsoft has offices, facebook is mixed (I think?). Surely, these companies who keep gigabytes of data about everybody on the planet has some idea about the relative productivity of offices vs. open plans.

> [...] were also bug contributors. It's also worth nothing [...]

I think you have a couple of typos here. Probably you meant to say "big contributors" and "worth noting".

Swipe keyboard perhaps?

Typos happen. I fixed /bug/big/ (I guess at the same time you responded), but didn't see "nothing" until after my edit link went away. You are correct in your interpretation.

> It's also worth nothing that he didn't put in long hours. When it was crunch time in the office, he wouldn't be one of the people there on the weekend. Paradoxically, I think that's another contributing factor to his high productivity.

I don't see how this is paradoxical. It makes just as much sense that better focused time, not "crunches", will increase productivity as the fact that offices will increase productivity. Same thing goes for telecommuting. The worship of overtime and 60, even 80 hour weeks is one of the big reasons I'm not in industry.

It is paradoxical in the sense that "more time working" should equal "more output", but most of us know that past a certain point the result of "more time working" is worse code that has to be fixed, leading to overall less productivity.

I'm not saying "more time working" equals more output. I'm saying there is a belief that it does, even among some people who should know better. The office I was working in did have occasional crunch times, and they'd put in extra hours; sometimes maybe it was necessary. But, old-timer I was talking about didn't really participate. His part of the job would have already been done earlier in the week.

As an almost 50 year old who has worked on many cool things I'll weigh in.

I get very tired of seeing the same mistakes in different guise. I don't get the youth culture of today and don't like it: including PC oriented culture and other media specific ideas designed to focus perception. I recognize patterns rather than specifics. I look at big picture and am careful about introducing paradigm shifts. I care about efficiency and ease of use, scalability and other ideas at inception of a project. If I am not respected for my approach and ideas I leave.

I'm older now myself (closer to 40 than 50, but well past "young"), and I don't think I meant what you think I meant.

"I don't get the youth culture of today and don't like it: including PC oriented culture and other media specific ideas designed to focus perception."

"PC oriented culture" just seems like expecting people to treat everyone with respect, and I think that's an improvement. Our industry hasn't always been good at that, but it has nothing to do with productivity. The old-timer I talked about wasn't racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise an asshole...he just liked to be able to close his office door and think really hard about things. He worked well with others; treating the women and brown folks in the office just like anyone else. Why would that be a source of contention?

And, I have no idea what "other media specific ideas designed to focus perception" could possibly mean. I know all the words, but they don't add up to anything, as far as I can tell.

These were my comments alone as a 50 year old in addition to your narrative; not in correlation but in comparison.

PC in this context meaning behaviors for the sake of change willy-nilly (think about the injection of feminine instead of masculine pronoun that was|is fashionable). I see the mercurial aspect of PC culture as reactive and dismissive and dislike it intensely.

Everyone these days seem to have some form of progressive agenda and most change is packaged in some media that makes it seem innocuous and correct in an engaging and entertaining way that would have been nearly impossible when I was a young man. In fact(as McLuhan might say) the media is the message. Chomsky is quite insightful in my opinion as to how the medium and vocabulary restrict available concepts.

"think about the injection of feminine instead of masculine pronoun that was|is fashionable"

This seems to have settled, after a few years of mild confusion, on everyone agreeing to just use non-gendered "they/them" when the gender of the subject is unknown. Pretty easy, it has historical precedent, and it can't possibly exclude anyone from the conversation. Seems like progress, to me. Where's the harm in making your docs about everybody rather than just men?

I guess I just don't get the hostility toward inclusiveness as a value in our communities/companies/etc. It costs me literally nothing and might make someone else feel more welcome to participate in the things I'm working on. It just seems like a win with no down side.

You didn't tackle any of the real criticism in my message.

You remark on a discrete symptom (which is a precursor) and you affirm it's essential importance to your life without any historical consciousness. And that is my basic gripe with PC culture: sensitivity to every little thing that you feel hurts you or impairs you or makes you feel included. Hell is other people, get over yourselves.

I couldn't make much sense out of the rest of your comment; it seemed vague and a little paranoid. So, I latched onto the one concrete thing in your comment, assuming it was demonstrative of what you were criticising.

"sensitivity to every little thing that you feel hurts you or impairs you or makes you feel included. Hell is other people, get over yourselves."

That seems simple when you're white and male, and the entire industry (and much of the world) treats your existence within it as a default and correct thing. I try to assume honest intentions when someone tells me something I've said/done is hurtful, and try to remember not to say/do it again.

The backlash against "PC culture" just comes off as really entitled and overly sensitive, to me (which is, ironically the same thing anti-PC people accuse everyone else of being). I don't know how to resolve that clash. I, personally, want to be part of solutions to problems rather than an impediment.

I view the imbalance in our industry as a problem worth solving; welcoming more women and under-represented people of color into our industry as equals (even when it means making changes to how we do things and how we talk about things) is a net positive for everyone. It's just increasing the pool of talent devoted to solving the world's technical problems and that can't be bad.

But, it sounds like I still may not be understanding your position. Can you provide another concrete example of what you're talking about? I noted your preference for big-picture rather than details earlier, but I'm clearly not grasping the big picture you're drawing...I need more details to understand where you're coming from

You like to characterize as vague (or worse) what can be reasonably inferred or researched and have a knack for constructing positions by pleading ignorance: which makes it simpler when creating straw men and redirecting|reducing conversation scope.

You sound naive and well meaning but I think that is artifice. Your comments reflect the essentially reactive nature of the PC movement (to me) which is to reject what you find distasteful and inject whatever you believe in (edit: with no real historical consciousness).

Do you believe that experienced white men should be displaced (by default) by persons of color or women in a profession because of skill equivalency? Is there a ratio for that displacement? Is it based on merit or is it based on something else?

I heard (in Seattle area) that MS office are on the way out, depending on the team you're on :/

Maybe someone can confirm...

Yes, our buildings at MS are transitioning to open space. We now have a large room for each team. Everyone has a height-adjustable desk that can be moved around within the room and a pair of good quality headphones.

Each room has its own small meeting room for devs to have long design discussions, and a larger conference room that is shared with the room next door. For making phone calls, there are really nice phone booths in the hallways.

That's discouraging. MS did a study to determine offices improved productivity, so what happened?

Open office = more dense work areas = profit

That is certainly the idea in general but it will depend on how badly it affects worker productivity. It's just strange to see a company do a study, prove that offices produce the best results and still go with a measure that presumably isn't cost effective (else the initial study should have concluded that the difference was well within tolerable loss).

I think you've got Facebook and Google reversed. Facebook is famously all open-plan. Google has a mix of open plan areas and mini 4-person offices with doors, along with other configurations.

I don't consider a 4-person office to be an "office"; that's "open", to me. Google does have lots of meeting rooms and the like, so as I understand it, most developers can find a private workspace most of the times when they might need it. So, it's probably not awful to work at Google.

If facebook is even more "open" than Google, I'm amazed anybody ever gets any work done, but obviously they do, so I may just be more reclusive than most tech people when I work.

Some people prefer them. We used to have small open offices available. They'd seat six to ten people comfortably. If the employee wasn't okay with that, there were smaller offices with room for one or two people. Depending on which facility you were at, there were larger workspaces available that also worked for meetings and our HQ also had a larger conference room space.

It worked for us. Not everyone enjoys working in close proximity to other people and technologically creative people are sometimes introverts or have behaviors that aren't social normatives.

I'm not sure why companies are forcing people into open office plans. Unless things have drastically changed, real estate isn't a very high percentage of overhead. This might be different in SV, but it's not just being done in SV.

I'd also expect the increased productivity of happy workers to mitigate the increased real estate costs.

Six to ten is not an open office, those are team rooms which are fine - when you can have multiple teams in the same room, that's when you cross the threshold to an open office.

Ah, so it has to cross teams in order to be considered an open office? I was not aware of that requirement, thanks.

I personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH.

I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion.

Sure, at times it can be distracting - I usually put on my headset if my tasks demand uninterrupted attention. My team also understands this and won't disturb unless necessary.

Of course it's an enjoyable setting for you.

Your team "won't disturb unless necessary", but you have no problem disturbing them whenever you want to have "a quick discussion".

Not all tasks require uninterrupted attention all the time. Sure, if everyone is working on complex stuff everyone can put on their headsets; no one will disturb others unless required.

I think people need to state what kind of work they do when offering their preferences in these discussion.

Some complicated development tasks require 100% uninterrupted concentration for several minutes at a time. You're sitting there trying to build and maintain an extremely complicated model in your head, involving many complex parts, and their interactions along a time line, introducing permutations of that model to simulate the changes you are considering and simulating the outcome in your head. Then someone asks you something, or asks someone else something, or simply passes in your peripheral vision, and poof it's gone.

There a many tasks that don't require that kind of concentration, and many jobs, even in software development, that never involve those kinds of tasks. But with a setup that encourages 'communication', in the form of forced non-stop interaction, you have effectively made sure that the developers will never reach those heights, and most likely not by conscious decision, but out of ignorance.

Reminds me very much of this comic: http://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg

I used to think that way.

But then I started working with people who write simple and readable code. Now my programming isn't like that at all anymore.

Many complicated development tasks also require a high level of collaboration -- because there's simply too much for one person to be an expert in all of it.

I'd imagine that most highly-paid engineers are effective at both.

> I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion.

I read that as "I love disrupting the productivity of everyone else by interrupting them constantly." I personally hate that. When I'm in the middle of something I don't want other people asking me questions or having "quick discussions." Save that for when I'm between work.

Just use some judgement when asking.

If getting the answer in one minute saves you one hour, it is obviously good for the company to "waste" the other person's time.

You should definitely be careful not to waste the time of your coworkers. Just don't waste your own time either!

If everyone used their judgment this way, in a team of six, there are five others trying to save their own time and punishing the person who's worked to build up some knowledge.

This has to be fixed by ensuring that the bus factor improves and the knowledge is spread around more. I disagree that the solution is to let everyone interrupt the one who is trying to get stuff done.

> punishing the person who's worked to build up some knowledge. ... I disagree that the solution is to let everyone interrupt the one who is trying to get stuff done.

In essence we are talking about training new people and so this opinion seems selfish and unethical with respect to one's obligation to the firm.

The senior person should sacrifice some productivity until the new people are up to speed so that eventually the team has 5 senior people instead of one. If the new people are forced to figure out everything on their own, they might be only 5% as productive as they could be for perhaps their first 1-2 years. If the senior person simply gave up 20% of his time in order to answer questions for the first couple months, these 5 new guys likely would be closer to 80% productivity, representing a huge net gain in aggregate.

I only spoke against interruptions - not against spending time spreading knowledge. That, in fact, is in my good books as I already stated in my comment.

I guess I see these as 2 sides of the same coin; if the knowledge was properly spread via training and easy-to-use documentation, the junior developers would not need to interrupt much during the day.

>>> When I'm in the middle of something I don't want other people asking me questions or having "quick discussions."

Yeah, I get that, but most of us work in a team.

I have seen open-setting that are pretty quiet and where you can get more or less work done during regular work hours. The open space where I work today, though, is an absolute nightmare. It's not that I get interrupted for technical questions, I am interrupted for all sort of things: people around me telling jokes, playing basket-ball, laughing, singing, gossiping, reading their news feed out loud...

The thing that baffles me the most is: the person that generates much of the noise is actually quite productive, but destroys all the productivity around him.

Someone from management obviously needs to step in and do something about it. But they are probably afraid of loosing half the workforce in that area of the office, if they did anything serious to prevent this to happen.

Their system is already built, a slight tweak might increase the revenue by $100 million a year, paying for all the salaries. The top engineers don't need to sit down and code 9-5. Plus, this is also a Hail Mary strategy, every "Google" in China is aiming for their business.

There's also this image (https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i2FW30Wmwe2...) of some of their programmers doing work on their laptops which they hold, well, in their laps. After 10+ years of programming for a living I can't imagine myself typing code with elbows hanging in the air, I need to rest them on a desk while pressing the keys.

Some casual chat / browsing like that is fine, working? I can't do it.

Optimal size of team in one room is about 2 - 3 members. Any outside disturbance is likely to affect all team members.

Trying to explain this to management can be very frustrating because they don't understand that coding is a focus intense task. And it does not matter if you cite research. Coincidentally, management usually have their own rooms.

Some links in Swedish with Google Translate

Worse working environment in open office landscape (2014) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Opening office landscapes causes stress (2015) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Open office gives higher sick leave (2008) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Opening office landscapes leads to overtime (2014) https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

[M]any sparrows died from exhaustion; citizens would bang pots and pans so that sparrows would not have the chance to rest on tree branches and would fall dead from the sky - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Playing devil's advocate a bit here: maybe the negative impact of open plan offices is much lower than typical if every single employee is feeling exceptionally motivated through far beyond market rate compensation? Of course there would be more boxes to check than just that, e.g. how often are people on the phone.

It is possible to demotivate people by not paying enough but it is unlikely that such strong motivation is achieved purely from greater pay. A frustrating work environment will eventually cause th motivation to fizzle. One might continue working to keep the paycheque coming but it is a tall ask to keep the motivation levels high.

In other words, the only thing paycheck motivates people to do is to stay in the environment of low motivation for too long.

If any company thinks that it can fix the motivation with paycheck, they are very wrong and it will actually be more costly in the end.

Just giving a 20% raise across the board won't do much, and piecemeal rewards for visible successes will be even worse as they will cause more optimization for visibility than for success. I fully agree so far. But an engaging work environment with high pay will keep people a lot more motivated than the same environment with low pay. You can't fix a bad environment with higher wages, but higher wages make a good environment even better.

As for open plan offices, it's not the open plan that is frustrating, it's the coworkers that the office is shared with. Nobody is a perfect office-mate all the time. But open plan multiplies not only negative but also positive morale, so I would not generally rule out the possibility that it can be net positive in places where all other factors are close enough to perfection and that the problems only really start when they are copied by the less exceptional. High pay would be an important contributing factor (maybe even one of many necessities), not a silver bullet solution.

Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.

Nobody will ever be happy. If someone says hey I can't pay top of market but we're doing something groundbreaking, they are talked about like they are a bunch of scammers. If someone is paying top salary but doing something mundane, it's "sigh."

No approach will ever make everyone happy, but some people would be happy with those deals. It's only natural to want to work on interesting problems and be paid well & I don't think there's anything wrong with striving for that. In an ideal world we'd only work on what is the most interesting to us with no concern for money. In the real world there is an unfortunate flaw where we need money in order to survive. Lots of companies have an even worse issue when trying to recruit where the work is boring and the pay is average.

i think you mean, there will always be at least one person who is unhappy.

Because in a better world, the "top salary" would go to those doing "something groudbreaking". As it is, the pay structures in society are totally inverted compared to social value they provide. In particular, the system is set up to give highest rewards to those who work on scamming other people.

You say that like it is some basic task that any idiot with a computer science degree would be able to code up in a couple of weekends. Hey, maybe it is! But that just means the competition is even more fierce so it takes a lot to stand out. Like many things, it's not achieving the 95% that makes you successful but that extra 5% on top of all the other guys that makes the difference.

I suppose his comment was vague enough to interpret it however you want. To me, he's lamenting top talent being paid top dollar to work on better ways to get people to buy tchotchkes.

The original comment was quite lean, I'm not surprised we're all reading it differently.

"Toutiao is on pace to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising."

If the media landscape isn't well organized across such a large society, or particularly when you have a massive new audience to introduce to news systems (China has gained what, 600 million new regular Internet users in the last seven years?), there's an amplified benefit to aggregation / managing all of that information. Which explains the seemingly crazy $2.5 billion in revenue.

Doing that service well, is every bit as valuable as something like Twitter or YouTube. It's about communicating valuable information to an extremely large audience. Why shouldn't that be quite valuable?

It only seems trivial because the eg US and European media landscapes are well established / entrenched, the audience is stagnant (there's little to no growth in the news business in the US or Europe) and the consumers are relatively experienced at mass societal consumption.

Consider the value of portals to early US Internet adopters for one example of how this concept works. Why were AOL, Yahoo, Netscape's portal, and numerous other portal-like services, so frequently used and valuable back then (but no longer)?

I think the sigh is about top talent being used for ads instead of something more fundamental to the advancement of technology, such as AI for things more significant like vision and language translation, etc.

What's more valuable than building a top notch system for delivering news (and everything that tends to go with that) to a billion people?

A very large number of engineers were dedicated to building out the radio and television technology platforms over decades. Was it all just to deliver ads? Trivial then right? Well that's what paid for a lot of it. It delivered community, it delivered news, it delivered entertainment, it connected people to the rest of their nation.

Delivering news is a solved problem.

And the Jinri Toutiao app is just an aggregator delivering other sites' news.

It would appear there is no consensus about that.

I'd agree with them, by the way. I don't think we really have that many solved problems. I'd consider that to be hubris and see many things that can be improved on, across the spectrum of ideas and implementations.

In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of much of anything that is a solved problem. Most everything can be improved.

It's solved from a technical point of view.

You might want to find ways to optimize it form non-technical aspects, such as, how to get more users, how to write better titles, etc. But there's nothing that is technically challenging about it.

Both of your examples, more users and better titles, can absolutely be technical improvements. Both of them could be, for example, improved by using machine learning to attract more users by appealing on an individual level and doing things like optimizing titles for the individual and pushing those individualized results out.

I'm sure there are even more technological advancements that can be made - and I suspect there always will be.

I'm not saying that it is currently ineffective, just that it isn't solved - meaning that there are still solutions to improve efficiency and efficacy. I actually see 'solved problem' as a kind of defeatism.

I think using AI to make clickbaity titles is still sigh-worthy.

In theory, it doesn't have to be evil. In theory, it could be good to attract users to information that benefits them and increases discoverability for that purpose. In theory...

The same thing can be said about spam. It could be good to be able to send useful information to users right to their inbox while avoiding being detected as "spam".

In reality it's mostly just dark pattern marketing.

Well, maybe we could use the news to make more people aware of it and help mitigate human behavior? ;-)

But, yeah, it can be used for nefarious purposes. In fact, it probably will be. Hidden under that will be good uses.

I suspect there's going to be constant innovation. There are people who thought that personal transportation was a solved problem back when we rode animals. These days, we are looking at an EV revolution and SDV somewhere in the not-too-distant future. Along the way, it hasn't been a solved problem, even though it looked like it was.

I guess that's what I've been clumsily trying to say.

> What's more valuable than building a top notch system for delivering news (and everything that tends to go with that) to a billion people?

Making it remotely accurate? Wiping out infectious diseases? Providing a billion people access to a healthy, nutritious diet? Saving the planet from ecological devastation?

I can think of a lot of very hard problems that have far more value than delivering advertisements packed into clickbait and fake news.

Software developers are not wiping out infectious disease.

Then maybe we should stop being software developers!

There's room for software to help alot in these efforts.

"Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh"

Google? Facebook?

Also $TWTR, in some sense, as a 1-to-N medium.

Channeling that old quote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

Channeling a reaction I once heard to that old quote: "Well better than what the best minds of the last generation did: devise more powerful ways to kill communists."

Ads kill communism.

Much better than killing communists.

At least we got nuclear power, a space program, cryptography, the internet... out of that project. I just hope that today's project will be similarly useful. All the machine learning for ad targetting looks promising.

Nah, they're probably working on game engines. See UDK release notes.

Yeah, I could have done things much more important. But this is what I do to make money. sigh...

news aggregation, and the selective targeting of individuals for advertising might just be the most powerful social influence today. Wins elections even...

Yes and that's what's so depressing about it.

As engineers, wouldn't it be cool if the most valuable thing we could do was building tools that are inherently valuable instead of valuable because of the tool's ability to connect users with someone who wants to buy their attention?

You know, build some software that doesn't make you feel like a pimp.

Your first problem there is monetizing it. If nobody can pay for it, nobody is going to get together to make it.

I've posted this on HN before but we at Datajoy are trying to solve the problem of consuming without paying which lets ad platforms treat us as the product: https://datajoy.us/fupm.html.

Use it, block ads, pay for content...sleep better?

Money isn't the only motivation someone can have. People write lots of open source code for free, for example.

A lot of open source work is professional paid work.

And good thing too but not all of it is - in fact, it's a sign of how well developers are treated that they can afford to volunteer their time and expertise for everyone: developers don't need to spend every second of every day on the grind for basic living.

Yes, and a lot of it isn't, which is what I'm saying :)

Maybe we should get rid of capitalism, then. It's obviously not doing the job of allocating resources to beneficial goods or raising productivity.

I was unaware allocation of resources toward "beneficial goods" (to whom?) was every a touted positive effect of capitalism.

I was unaware that anyone actually believed deontic moral justifications for an economic system, so I would have thought actual benefits to the population are the only effective anyone's ever touted.

It's important to separate society's tastes, preferences, and incentives with market-based resource allocation.

At the very least, corporations and capitalism give us a productive place to put sociopaths (the alternative is religion, healthcare, government, exile/six feet under). And more communal economic systems seem to work well until the anti-social types take over - North Korea was actually better off than South Korea for awhile after the war and the anti-social types always do take over.

Capitalism does a really good job of making it easier to do more with less. My phone is a weather station, a flash light, a calculator, a camera, a camcorder, etc. and it's cheaper than most Cameras were just 30 years ago. On the flip side, a lot of the materials that make my phone come out of conflict zones and I'm sure that my phone funded some warlord's attack helicopters and that's not great and it's unfortunate that the 'past of least resistance' involves such unsavory things but the solution rests with more capitalism - the warlord needs to demand a higher price or operate the mines and figure out how to build a phone and go legit.

Even the USSR had money and wealth. Desire to accumulate wealth in some form is a primitive instinct.

Sex work is way more honest.

And porn and games always lead the way on innovation.

stopped me from innovating though

I wouldn't give advertising that much credit. An equal amount of money is spent on lost elections too.

> An equal amount of money is spent on lost elections too.

That's false. There's a pretty strong correlation between outspending and winning elections. The losing side usually spent less. In aggregate, much more money is spent winning elections than losing them.

eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/04/th...

> There's a pretty strong correlation between outspending and winning elections. The losing side usually spent less. In aggregate, much more money is spent winning elections than losing them.

A lot of money is wasted on lost elections. I did say "equal", but my point was a lot of advertising dollars fail.

Barney Frank: "If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...

How does this explain the Republican party's continued support for healthcare bills with sub-25% approval ratings? Also I don't see Barney Frank, Signature Bank board member and author of a piece titled "Yes, I Took Bank Money. And It Made Me a Better Regulator" as a disinterested commentator.

Among the Republicans I know, all Obamacare-lite bills are more popular than Obamacare.

And there's probably a belief that people will like the bills after it passes. Just as a lot of 'conservatives' eventually came out in favor of Obamacare (like McCain), I'm sure a lot of people would admit that they like Obamacare-lite more than Obamacare. Self-interested politicians might think that the bills would be more popular once some people saw their health care burdens drop. And I don't think they're wrong, the healthy people who make Obamacare possible stand to gain the most under the Republican healthcare proposals - the young, the wealthy, the healthy.

Half the country votes and half the country votes GOP, a 25% approval rating can translate to near-universal approval in a political faction.

I think the problem is that elections are this ridiculous zero-sum game that is able to consume ever increasing amount of resources, where almost entire contribution of one party goes to cancel out the contribution of another party.

I don't actually feel it is zero sum. There is a lot of learning that happens through debate at all levels. One might argue it is the foundation of our society.

I wasn't thinking about the debates. I was thinking about all the money spent on campaign advertisements - on posters, phone calls, radio ads, TV ads, Internet ads, and so on, and so on. All that does is cancel out similar efforts from other candidates.

All that stuff leads the rest of us to debate too. The system depends upon having informed voters. As silly as that may sound today, I do feel that puts us in a better position to make progress than the other forms of government that exist.

The amount of money spent on American elections is incredible.

In the 2012 US Presidential election (seems the data is not yet available for 2016), an estimated $7B was spent in total by all candidates and private groups. This is about $21.54 per person.

For comparison, in the last Canadian federal election, the top 5 parties combined received $127M in funding (public + private contributions). This amounts to about $3.60 per person, about one sixth as much on a per capita basis.

Yeah but a $2.5 billion in revenue news aggregator. The revenue makes a bit of a difference, or a lot of it.

>> Toutiao is on pace to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising. It was just valued at more than $20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, roughly the same as Elon Musk's SpaceX.

On the one hand, as an engineer, it feels good to be paid top salary. On the other hand, I feel kinda sad Toutiao is the company that's doing it. They have a pretty bad rep for stealing content without compensating the content owner, sometimes even without attribution. Heck, they have stolen my post before without me seeing a single dime of that two billion dollars…

Yeah that's disgusting.

There's a lot of talk about work-life balance on HN, and I usually lean way towards the "life" end of the spectrum. For the last few years I've only been doing a couple of hours of paid work per day.

But yeah, I'd be happy to work 70 hour weeks for $3M per year.

> But yeah, I'd be happy to work 70 hour weeks for $3M per year.

I think I might compromise to work 70 hour weeks for $3m for one year. The trick is, you don't get to pick when that year happens, and there's actually a lot of build up to get to where you're worth $3m a year. There's a couple of Paul Graham essays with this as one of their themes:

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

http://paulgraham.com/start.html

I love the idea, but I don't think I'm good enough to pull it off, and I don't like the odds.

Well, for at least a single year. I mean.. Work twice as hard for one year, and get paid close to what I can reasonably expect to make in 20.. yea, seems like a no brainer.

Ditto. I'd be happy to that for 6-12 months. :) Then I'd work on whatever I wanted thereafter.

These revenue numbers strike me as a bit odd, even for US market with it’s relatively high CPMs:

$2.5 billion / 365 days / 120 mil daily users * 20 ad impressions (assumption on my part) * 1000 impressions (to account for CPM pricing) = $2.85 CPM

That’s not bad avg. CPM even for US/EU market assuming mostly display/native display ad units and the relatively lower value of mobile dominant audiences. However, average of 20 ad impressions per user is fairly high.

If they somehow have a lot of video ads, it changes the calculations somewhat, but still seems oddly high. Does anyone have any insight into how believable that $2.5 billion number is?

The way the app works is that as you scroll you see more ads interspersed between headlines/topics. You click on one and you can comment and then go back to scrolling. Or maybe you're done with that topic group and you switch to another. More scrolling.

20 sounds fine to me.

If it helps, think of the way people sit on hacker news or reddit waiting for the next story to come out, navigating down to comment, and then back to the next story. There are a lot of people who only do 1-2 impressions and a lot of people to do 100.

And if you're still unconvinced: 10 ads only double your CPM estimate; A popular four-lettered sports site charges between $1-3 CPM for "un-targeted" display advertising, and $3-5 CPM for demo/interest targeted.

But is that popular four-letter sports site in US or China?

Typically, ad CPMs follow income levels/disposable incomes in the country/area the user is from. The quality of data the advertiser has about the specific user is also important. For example, since a lot of the tracking is illegal in Germany, even though incomes are similar to US, the CPMs are lower because US has more highly cookied/tracked users with higher CPMs.

I’m not familiar with the Chinese ad market, so asking if anyone has concrete experience there and thinks such CPMs are plausible.

Generally speaking, you should assume that there is a portion of the Chinese economy that is approximately the same size as the US with about the same amount of disposable income.

This is very much an apples to oranges comparison, but a large part of China is effectively "rich" by international standards.

Note that there is also a very much not-rich part of China that brings down the avergages. The averages don't matter so much when analyzing a polarized population.

You can make that statement about any country - some people are wealthy, while others are not.

Chinese consumer economy is not the same size as US in nominal terms, so the ad spending can't be the same either. Which led me to question the revenue numbers in the first place.

I suspect that some combination of real revenues and inflationary/artificial cash flows from investments being poured in their customers are the underlying reason. Similar to the feeding frenzy with bike share companies that were profiled in the news a few weeks ago.

So I did some googling and here's their price sheet:

http://toutiao.toproi.cn/kanli/kanli.html

They charge 4-6RMB for the "precision auction" and 0.15-0.3RMB per click, which are only a little lower. These ads are small and only at the tops of certain sections. This suggests a price about half of western prices.

They have "guaranteed delivery" at 160RMB CPM (about $18 CPM).

Oh, and btw: I know more than one person who uses 300+ frequency in Germany, so while yes, tracking helps a marketing manager justify spend in the US, the lack of tracking also helps marketing managers justify spend in Germany.

Thanks!

This is fairly coming financial technology except less base and more bonus. I've seen plenty of $500-800k base with 4x bonus (and more especially if you are close to the money or on the front desk).

I think it is very healthy. It creates tiers in the profession because some developers are that much better. Being good glueing together frameworks isn't going to command that salary.

You mean quant? Or what exactly you mean with 500-800k base and 4x bonus?

Sorry, where?

In the UK at least, you're talking about the top couple of dozen in any of the major investment banks. Only a couple of hundred in any given bank make more than a million total comp.

https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/159654/everything-y...

NYC and Chicago mostly.

I'm talking about those who are exceptional producers and director level and above and including all forms of compensation including guaranteed bonus minimum and a percentage of pnl at a trading firm.

Wow, I don't see these kind of developers walking around. I see managers in finance do this sometimes though. But definitely not plenty. You must be living in some paradise.

Sorry I didn't mean to make those numbers sound common. They are debuggers the exceptional end and either director or above or getting a percent of pnl and a trading firm.

With just the people I know about i can probably list over a dozen easily dev or dev leads at $1000000+ last year.

I'm not sure I'd want that kind of money... I mean I would but I wonder what kind of expectations you could put on someone who makes $1M at a "normal" desk job?

Would it be expected that I had a wife that didn't work so I wouldn't have to take care of sick kids all the time? Would it be ok to work 9-5?

I'd be happy to take the money but it feels a bit like there are hidden assumptions about what you are actually compensated for, once you get into these obscene levels of compensation.

> Would it be expected that I had a wife that didn't work so I wouldn't have to take care of sick kids all the time?

In China, having a nanny is normal and pretty much expected even at six-digit salaries, let alone seven. (And it won't cost much more than $10k a year either, so it is a no-brainer and might be even a perk paid by the company here - just like the company car with chauffeur or free meals.)

> Would it be ok to work 9-5?

Also no (unless you are just THAT good and have THAT much leverage to negotiate, which is unlikely). Even a normal skilled job will have the expectation of 50-70 hours of facetime, let alone this sort of high-profile position.

> In China, having a nanny is normal and pretty much expected even at six-digit salaries, let alone seven. (And it won't cost much more than $10k a year either, so it is a no-brainer and might be even a perk paid by the company here - just like the company car with chauffeur or free meals.)

Having a nanny helps, but it only helps with the chore (e.g. dropping off a kid), you can't substitute your own face time with the kids.

> Even a normal skilled job will have the expectation of 50-70 hours of facetime, let alone this sort of high-profile position.

How can companies assume that paying $1M will get them the best talent, while at the same time assuming that requesting 50-70h work weeks doesn't rob them of a lot more talent?

I mean if given a choice between $1M comp and 50-70h workweek, and .5M comp and a sane 40h work week - there has to be tons of people who choose (or had to) take the lower comp?

My understanding is that all Chinese tech jobs are crazy hours. ~No one works 9-5.

The thing with excessive remuneration with startup’s are, it’s highly unlikely one could switch to a better paying job when the need arises.

Update : To people who ask why would someone need another job?

There are multitude of reasons, a well funded startup which could pay several times the industry standard - when fails; puts excessively paid employees to compete in the same standarised job market. If you live in the part of the world where the HR asks about your previous pay to assess your eligibility for current job, you will soon end up settling for a sub-par(quality) job with standard pay i.e after giving up the ego. Also if the high paying job didn't provide you with necessary foundation to consistently improve your skill set, the moment you are out to compete in open job market; you'll be facing tough competition from better skilled people with standard pay whom the companies would likely prefer. Again, my arguments are based on the fact that you live in part of the world where your previous pay matters for current job interview.

Sure, but at $3M a year, sock $2.5M away, live extremely comfortably, and have one hell of a rainy day fund.

or work for 5-6 years, and retire (while still working for your own sake).

I agree but you are not remotely considering taxes.

At $3M a year, taxes are probably the least of your earthly worries. And also, you probably make enough to get a good tax accountant.

At $3M a year taxes become a more significant worry.

The relative amount of taxes paid doesn't really change anymore once you've reached six figures. On the other hand, the absolute amount still increases, which makes it more reasonable to spend significant money on tax accountants. So, if anything, taxes should become less of a worry, because you can more easily let really good professionals take care of it.

But yes, I'm aware most people won't look at it rationally.

If you're an employee, you generally can't optimise much. Perhaps you can take some basic deductions, but that's in.

If you take two people earning $1M a year, the employee will in most jurisdictions (both relative and absolute) pay significantly more in taxes than the self employed person.

At the $1M you have much more options to optimise your tax eg in the UK ESI and VCT's become practicable investments which they would not really be at say $70k

Just being able to max out your Pension and ISA at $27k is a big win for those earning enough - basically you can put £20k a year beyond the reach of CGT and Dividend Tax per year

VCTs are generally high risk, though. You might not want to make investments that way, even if you're on £1m a year. Same applies to SEIS and EIS.

And while putting £20k a year in your pension pot is nice, it's hardly a massive saving on £1m.

You can put more than 20k into pensions its 20k for ISAs -though you do have to watch the max limit imposed by Red Osbourne

yes but if your on £1M a year you can risk 20-50k on EIS and VCT's don't foe get you get some very nice tax perks for VCTs (which are collective investments) et all unless your a rock star and snorting all the £ up your nose

And moving dividend paying equites into an ISA is decent tax saving esp for higher rate tax payers.

You cannot put away $2.5m while making $3m. At best you'll take home $1.5m.

If 80-90% of it is in stock / options with vesting (as I'd suspect it is based on that article) it is likely only true after the targets / target dates are hit.

> If 80-90% of it is in stock / options with vesting (as I'd suspect it is based on that article) it is likely only true after the targets / target dates are hit.

My initial reaction was:

Does anyone actually do this? If someone says "salary" package, I'd assume all of it is cash.

but then I took a peek.

> Top performers can make $1 million in salary and bonus a year, plus options, according to people familiar with its hiring. Total compensation can exceed $3 million. Zhang declined to comment on specific figures, saying most employees prefer stock over cash.

So it is $1M in salary/bonus and up to $2M+ in stock grants bla bla (paper that I can't spend).

> Zhang isn’t backing off his aggressive plans, despite the controversies over pay and business practices. Asked about one competitor's concern that Toutiao is trying to hire 200 AI engineers, a huge number given the limited pool of talent, Zhang says that's not quite right: "It may be more than 200.”

This is the interesting part. at $1M per head, 200 engineers is $200M. It sounds like a lot and it is. I feel like someone is getting taken for a ride and I suspect it is the poor idiots who are taking $3M+ in paper over a little under $1M in cash salary and bonuses.

I'd take the $1M cash and save like crazy because this is ridiculous overspending. I cannot imagine why you'd need 200+ data scientists to work on this project.

But then I want to remind the reader that I have been wrong before and spectacularly so about Dropbox. I cannot believe Drew and gang are doing so well for themselves. Make sense that I am a poor idiot on the Internet.

Because each of those data scientists are a billion+ dollar per year lottery ticket. $3mm per year is a steal when you look at it that way.

And assuming no dilution or other ways of reducing the value and the Chinese stock market does not even have the protections that the LSE or NYSE have for share holders.

Don't mean to nit pick but you are going to give up roughly a third of that to taxes.

Maybe a certain amount is enough.

Why would you ever need a better paying job afterwards?

Your assumption is that the position is tenured for life, which is not.

After you make seven figures for two years you don't really have to work anymore. You can just live off your savings.

Why?

I don't understand, how would having a higher pay disqualify you for a position? Has this happened to you?

Toutiao is more than just a news aggregation app, it's a huge interest mining and data recommendation system. Moreover, the company expands its services to mobile video sharing platform and many other fields so as to collect more dimensional data of users. --- In my opinion, ByteDance is a data/intelligence company and Toutiao is just a great app to adopt the technology and grow fast. So, we look forward to seeing an even brighter future of it, which might be able to leverage the market.

BTW, the company has acquired many popular user-data-content apps and companies worldwide, while few of them were exposed.

Flipagram for one

Truth is what majority people like are just BuzzFeed taste stuff. And that is exactly what Toutiao is producing and excelling at distributing.

As one popular belief stated in machine learning, garbage in garbage out. They might use some really sophisticated model, but that is just another way of doing spamming a little better.

> Zhang declined to comment on specific figures, saying most employees prefer stock over cash.

His employees must be pretty confident considering that a few years of cash could set them up for life.

Or they are nieve - reading about the Chinese stock market it sounds like the NYT before the crash of 29 eg house wives trading on margin

This article strikes me as a submarine with a buried lede, namely,

So basically, these engineers are getting paid $1mm, which is not a crazy multiple off of top end dev cash compensation in Bay Area, plus equity in a Chinese software company.

This does not seem like news, per se. Compliments to Mr. Zhang's PR agency for getting an article published in Bloomberg that makes the client look sexy, mysterious, and elite.

And yet the company still can't afford walls.

I know a HN trope is to be anti-open-office but maybe it's better to be imitating the guys valued at 20B than the guys valued at 200k.

We need a "Show me the code" équivalent for claims about business. "Show me the money"

If open offices were a big factor, I'd expect private office startups to out-compete.

"Show me the money" is biased toward the status quo. If your litmus test for smart policy or decision-making "is everyone else who is successful doing it?", you will always lag behind the best.

That's true, and I can't think of a good alternative.

But there's a clear problem on HN where people who don't run businesses and don't know how to pontificate on things like this citing nebulous results on productivity.

If open-offices are so remarkably detrimental, then I await the disrupting startup that blows the rest of the industry out of the water by using private offices.

IBM did not find it nebulous its just that the tail services HR Building Services are lowed two much power and game the system to save money short term (and get a bonus) with no thought to the longer term value.

> If open-offices are so remarkably detrimental,

Assume they aren't. This place may of course be a bit biased - but among developers the opinion is at least appears to be very clear on that open offices suck. I'd even dare argue that many developers would either not work at a company with open offices, or would at least factor it in and weigh it against compensation.

Now if this is the case, then regardless of whether there are tangible benefits of having private offices, companies would either lose out on talent, or need to compensate them more than they otherwise would. See the point isn't only whether developers are less happy or less productive in open offices - the point is also whether they believe they are less happy and less productive in open offices. And that is much easier to test/prove than whether they actually are.

It exists lots of research how bad open offices are.

You could argue that the big companies could be even more successful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15329605

Cheaper than an acquihire and without the hassle.

How is a company $2.5 billion in (projected) revenue a "startup"?

Depends on age and size? If I created a business model where I give you 1.15 for every $1 you give me, I bet I could see billions in revenue. And my company only has three employees. Two of which are cats!

But your point is well taken.

Hey leave Uber alone.

Just wondering how much of this will actually cause a toxic work environment. Sure the people hired will have top talent but do they actually work well together? And are they comparatively paid? Because people will compete on salaries with each other causing the environment to go bad a bit.

There is a big difference from being paid in USD and being paid in the equivalent of USD in Yuan. Ever try to get 1 million USD equivalent of Yuan out of China before?

If these engineers are Chinese (which they are) and live in China they don't need to get it out of China.

You could say the same about people living in Venezuela, Ukraine and Russia. I would assume most (at least as a store of value) would prefer not to hold their local currency.

I'm willing to give it a shot.

You couldn't pay me enough to work in the office pictured in the article.

Is there an English language equivalent of Toutiao? If not, why?

TouTiao is a literal translation of Headline.

（头）Tou = Head; （条）Tiao = Line

条 is a measure word for things that are long (rivers / snakes / pants), but it's not the word for line. The character most closely related to the concept is 线 xian, and 线 is indeed the word for "line" in many senses. In other senses, you find words of more than one syllable.

Yes, it's not very accurate in term of word-by-word translation. Maybe it's for suiting the context and habits.

A strip (条) of news is works better than A line (线) of news in Chinese.

Sure, the landscape for aggregators is more fractured though, due to the long duration of establishment of huge news sources in the English markets (ie the English market is very consolidated at the top).

Eg: Hacker News, Google News, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, Reddit, Huffington Post, Drudgereport, Digg, Flipboard, Techmeme, Redef and about 57 others. Some of them mix original content with blatantly regurgitated content, some are pure play aggregation. They're all playing in or right around the Toutiao neighborhood.

The established players, and how well known they are, makes it far more difficult to build super valuable aggregators. If you want business news, you likely already know about Bloomberg, CNBC, etc. and they're going to cover most stories that matter.

Wavii. They did news aggregation and produced summaries with links back to the most popular article on the subject. They were bought by Google in 2013. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/googl...

Prismatic was similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)

There are currently possible ways for early employees to cash out their stock options, which further incentivizes talents to work for start-ups.

EquityZen is a platform that lets employees sell shares before IPO: https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombin...

The diminishing returns must be staggering.

I can only imagine their management practices are comparably dismal with their focus on individual talent.

Is this surprising?

A lot of people haven't really updated their expectations with regard to what the top of market looks like.

at a certain level you're not paying people for their work but to keep their knowledge hostage.

That's a start! What about paying all employees well and having executives stand for election by employees once a year?

The desire for more often blinds us. We all are looking for more wealth, and perhaps working for a startup like this will get us there. However, I personally think that talent is priceless. You can't just throw money for top skill.

In field like startups, you have to passionate on what you're working on to make it the best it can be. Sure, say I have "top talent". But, what we fail to realize that "top talent" may not translate into more revenue or users. I must be willing to work the extra hours and focus my mind one hundred percent of the time to utilize this talent.

And, honestly, I do not think even money would motivate me to work to such a degree if I'm working on something I don't believe in.

true that. Top talent engineers make their companies >20X in profit, no amount of "money" could make someone do this work. They just love it.

> talent is priceless

Only when you are shopping for hallmark cards.

On an individual level, a few million in the bank funds a lot of personal passion projects.

And I'm passionate about what I'm working on. I'm passionate about my craft. I'm passionate about investing in my team and their tech stack. To some degree, the employment agreement and the salary is pointing my drive in a direction. I don't shut it off, I just move it.

It's true that all that doesn't necessarily translate to more revenue or users. But that's also true, at least in the long run, of anything a firm might invest in, including top compensation packages for sales or management. Or expensive exclusives with vendors or clients. If the competitive advantage of a firm is its tech, then investing in that tech and recruiting and retaining top talent is a bet on a particular business plan.

> I do not think even money would motivate me to work to such a degree if I'm working on something I don't believe in.

Of course not. Ad absurdum, I wouldn't work for a drug cartel moving poison. I don't think that's a controversial position.

Or are there something inherently unethical or soul-sucking about working for a large compensation package?

Does anyone actually believe in adtech? Are people truly passionate about social media monetization?

Most signaling about passion is transparent bullshit. For a first pass: do the people you hire apply exclusively to you and your competitors? No? Then they aren't passionate about your company's mission. At least, not any more passionate than the they are about the missions of the other companies they would have worked for instead.

Motivation and performance will be driven by autonomy, quality, work environment, peers, growth opportunities, technical interestingness, choice of tools, etc. way more than what the company actually does. And how many software engineers actually work on their company's core line of business, anyway? Some of the most interesting work is at systems level. The scheduler doesn't care all that much whether its processes are doing video transcoding, HFT, or protein folding.

We're professionals, and that's okay.

Good points.

I recall a compelling RSA animate video about motivation and job satisfaction, which distilled their factors down to just three: mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Yes, that's a really nice video. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc (Unfortunately, the highest resolution supported is 240p. Anyone has a link to a higher resolution video?)

> you have to passionate on what you're working on to make it the best it can be

You need to be passionate about being a professional who only delivers the best they can.

You don't need any passion for the particular domain or project per se.

Who in their right mind can be passionate about "schlep" anyway?

> You can't just throw money for top skill.

There comes a point when you're offered so much money that you're not motivated by the thing that you're doing but rather by the performance bonus you're trying to earn, or by the amount you're going to increase the share price by.

Does that lead to the same outcome as having a very passionate person instead? Maybe, maybe not, but if you're peddling advertising you probably haven't got much else to offer people other than money.

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