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Comment by jensv | Hacker News Reader

Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

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I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.

It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.

Has anyone ever tried to hire someone requiring less than or up to max say 20k for such a job? I wonder which qualifications that are that you find only in people asking for >50 or even 100k/month.

I am from Europe so i might miss something that’s different in US. But 20k USD would make for a very good living here. Ok you only can afford one house with that an no 1000sqm villa and no Ferrari... but i state you don’t need either.

20k USD/month is in the range that Google/FB/Microsoft pays for direct managers of ~10 person teams: basically that would be the level of credentials that you would be competing for in that pay area.

Interesting info - but what does that mean in conclusion?

what proves us that the skills necessary to lead bigger teams or whole companies are so scarce that they have to be paid orders of magnitude more?

Put another way: is it proven that the pay needs to rise with the same or even any multiplier as the people you are “responsible for”? (and i even have to understand what that responsibility means - i saw too many bad managers doing bad in terms of people as well business. who takes responsibility for thousands of failed and misconducted IT projects,their exploded costs and burned out people, to speak only of my personal area of work?

Ok, maybe it’s the money you are responsible for... if you have to decide about a certain amount of money, especially in expenses, you might be prone to bribery as somebody who wants to sell your company something for a few millions could easily give you an “extra” of a few hundred thousands to buy from him and this would make uou “earn” a multitude of a months wage with just one signature.

But besides this? I see no proof that skills to handle certain management tasks are really so scarce that those who get these jobs get hundreds or some even millions a month for doing them. And they certainly don’t work hundred or thousand times more than others - that would make for extreeeeeme long days.

It might sound like bashing, but to me these questions are real, and i wanna know the answers.

That’s low for a manager. Many individual contributors make more than that at large companies.

What do they contribute that no one else could for this „low“ amount?

It’s not that “no one else” could do their job, but there’s not an unlimited supply of people who can meet the hiring bar at Google/Facebook/Microsoft, and there are a number of employers with deep pockets trying to hire them. Google in particular is known to offer people with competing offers a lot of money to keep them from going to other companies.

If there are other people who are able to do the job, but not meet the hiring bar, what does that tell us about the bar?

Did I say that?

No interview process is perfect, but here's what would happen if e.g. Google attempted to use your strategy of "make the interviews easier and pay people less":

Many candidates would interview at both Google and Facebook (as well as other companies). The smartest, hardest-working candidates are all able to figure out how to game the interview process and get really good at solving algorithms problems on a whiteboard. Many of them get offers from both Facebook and Google. They all choose to work at Facebook because Google's only offering half as much money.

The candidates who are less smart and/or too lazy to study for their interviews get rejected from Facebook, but get an offer from Google since Google's decided that interviews are stupid anyway. They all take the Google offer since they got rejected from Facebook.

Now Google ends up with a pool of employees selected on the basis of being not smart enough and/or too lazy to get a job at Facebook. Do you see the problem here?

Haha.

You question that you said „It’s not that “no one else” could do their job, but there’s not an unlimited supply of people who can meet the hiring bar“ Or what?

I didn’t propose a concrete strategy. I just doubt the things have to be as they are and pose a lot of questions why they are as they are.

Then you build exactly one fictional scenario that would make things maybe(not necessarily - there are options... maybe there is a number of smart people who don’t want to learn for artificial interview scenarios, maybe they don’t have some university degree) go bad for one employer and imply the conclusion everything has to be and stay as it is.

Do you see the problem here?

I don't understand your point of view. You work in tech, right? Do you want tech companies to pay their employees less?

We talk about the question if managers have to be that expensive.

And I’m open to a yes if there are valid points and my questions about it answered.

We don’t talk about what I want to get paid.

You’re steering away from the topic, right after questioning something that you said just exactly as cited, and dont answer straight questions. Do you wanna take part in a discussion or just confuse abd avoid it?

I'm curious about this too. My impression is studies show high-level CEO salary don't correlate at all with company performance. Surely there are folks who have run small businesses that have just as many stress, meetings, communication, and forethought as running a large business. There might be a bit of a learning curve, but there's that for anything. Basically we need a Money-Ball approach to CEOs...

As if no other city or country in the world had any competent developer willing to work with them.

Frankly, whoever solves the remote work 'problem' will make a lot of money.

It does seem counterintuitive, but the justification is that cutting a top employee's salary in half only frees up less than a percent increase in all the lower-level position salaries.

I know about 20 years ago, Ben & Jerry's tried to hire a CEO for a reasonable salary and decided they couldn't make it work.

So maybe it really does make sense.

That's what I was saying. It mostly seems to be a thing that happens in Silicon Valley and some big cities. There's good programmers in places with lower cost of living that are cheaper. Even the high end of them would approach the low end of the typical salaries in Silicon Valley. One approach I'd explore was a mix of highly-experienced people in the domain with large checks plus good programmers in the cheap areas supporting their work. There's also a few companies in my area that will pay for smart folks college if they do a 3-4 year agreement with the company. If they already program and have good mentorship, they should start getting pretty good in the first year. The salary combined with the yearly college expenses is usually about half of a Silicon Valley programmer. Multiply by several hundred people to get a lot of savings that could accelerate features or get into new markets.

If I was Mozilla, I'd doing the later buying small companies doing user- and privacy-focused variants of popular services. Then, they could have a whole umbrella of stuff to offer to differentiate them based on reputation. I'd at least try a paid offering in the enterprise space as well.

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