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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

If you are a Software Engineer you are likely in the top 10%. Just mentioning this because I saw a thread in /r/programming the other day and some Software Engineers actually thought they were not in the top 10% of Americans when it comes to salary.

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It can be frustrating to read HN sometimes when it feels like you're the only one making under 200k. I do wonder how many engineers realize how astonishingly well paid they are compared to, say, their kid's teacher.

Teachers being criminally underpaid doesn't change the fact that most engineers are underpaid. A good engineer can generate multiples of their salary in revenue.

And a bad engineer can destroy as much.

One fun thing about humans is that almost all think they're underpaid. This says a lot about people and nothing about wages.

We may have different experiences, but in a long career the worst I've seen are useless engineers. Are you seriously claiming that the population of engineers destroying multiples of their salary (sabotage/gross negligence) is comparable to the population who create multiples (and are exploited)? Silicon Valley lore is filled with stories of fortunes earned on the backs of engineers being paid market rates. You don't have to look hard to find them, start with Apple, or look at any modern "unicorn."

It's also filled with many more startups that lost $20M, mostly in engineer wages, and died unsung deaths.

Bad engineers do bring negative productivity to a team. Hard to say how common they are.

Implying that those startups failed due to engineer negligence and not due to strategic business blunders.

I didn't mean to imply that at all.

Though of course that is sometimes a factor.

My main point was completely different:

You can't claim engineers are exploited because some cherry picked tech companies make huge profits. You have to look at the tech sector as a whole, including the parts that lost untold billions while the famous ones raked them in.

I've seen several engineers who make more work for other people to fix than they contribute in progress themselves. Sometimes it is by bikeshedding on code reviews, other times by choosing some pet architecture/technology for a project which everyone else has to waste time learning about and/or migrating to, or by putting something in that bottlenecks all development of a critical codebase through only them, leading to people getting constantly blocked. Then again, these have been great lessons for me in what not to do, and what to recognize as red flags.

yes, they make more work for other people to fix than they contribute, but they don't make more work to fix than the people who are making work that fixes are doing. There is no -10x engineer, hardly even any -1x engineer - probably the worst you find are -.5 engineers.

In fact I knew a guy whose effect on a project was to wipe out several years of progress but to be fair he was not a -.5 engineer, in some ways it was just the bad chance that led to him having such a detrimental effect, in another scenario he might very well have been a +2 or more engineer.

Any bad engineer in a position of architect or similar can easily destroy the efficiency of a full team. Hell, of the whole company.

I saw -10x: they chose some crazy architecture for something then dug their heels in. The two people who historically got all the work done, both about 5x, decided to quit because of this. So now the work still needed to be done, in the crazy architecture, without the two best engineers, and on top of that time needed to be spent on hiring. Go forward a year and the progress the company made was probably less than it would have in a month before the fancy new architecture was introduced, and the loss of talent.

Additionally I've seen managers/HR demotivate a team of 5 so thoroughly that nobody got work done for 2 weeks. That is -5x from a single meeting.

It would have to be an extraordinarily bad engineer to actively remove revenue consistently. You can also hedge against this with disaster recovery.

How about the good engineer, employed to design the wrong thing?

I feel like I've put good quality engineering work, in to projects that were completely wrong-headed in the bigger picture, and thereby lost the company money.

This seems more of an issue with where the company invests resources than to the engineer themselves.

I agree; my point was just that the "goodness" of an engineer doesn't necessarily relate to their impact on revenue.

In the particular situation I was thinking about above, it actually could've been better from a business perspective had I not been as "good" of an engineer. I took over a project that was simply not working at a technical level - it was a DSP-based thing, and the chosen DSP appeared not to have enough oomph. I managed to optimise the electronics and firmware enough to make it go, so it went on to production and AFAIK (I'm no longer at that company) has been a money pit ever since. The other possibility was a redesign with a burlier DSP, but I'd bet that the project would've been cancelled instead.

There are a number of people I see consistently in the commit logs at work and I am quite confident that they have created more than a handful of new jobs each. So while they didn’t directly remove revenue, these people have an astonishingly bad ROI.

This is true. The performing engineers are underpaid; the underperforming ones should be trained or fired.

> And a bad engineer can destroy as much.

Often claimed, rarely proven. Usually in those cases it's actually management doing the value-destroying, by either misallocating people or refusing to act on removing bad engineers.

If you have a good engineer who is constantly tutoring the bad instead of building things, then you are losing a good portion of value (the $10m that would've otherwise been created) by the good engineer. This is not as big a problem for Google with thousands of engineers but is a huge problem in smaller startups.

At one point, WhatsApp had 40 engineers and 400 million users.

That’s 10,000,000 users per engineer.

And more users than the US population.

If WhatsApp generates $1 per user per year in revenue, each engineer would be responsible for $10,000,000 in revenue. From my view, no issue paying them $250,000 each and spiffing them with stock options to compensate them for taking full advantage of that insane leverage that modern Internet platforms provide.

Yeah, but it wouldn't really matter if it were a billion users per engineer if engineers with the needed skills/qualities etc. were a dime a dozen. Market scarcity determines price.

I mean, a computer allows me to do analysis that would take years in seconds, and to share it with millions of people trivially, but it's still dirt cheap because, well, there are lots of computers and not particular barriers to building more.

The average engineer is average, and isn’t producing massive multiples of revenue.

The reality is that lots of waste and bullshit is obscured by growth. Once that train stops, reality bites.

A limiting factor on salaries is competitiveness. It doesn't matter how much value you produce if somebody else is able and willing to do the same work, of comparable quality, for less pay. And as there has been a huge push to get more people into computer science, over time I expect we'll see compensation for such work begin to decrease, not increase. The only way this would end up being not true is if proportionately more desirable jobs emerge than the push to bring more people into computer science manages to achieve.

absolutely. the problem is there are cheaper engineers abroad and tech CEO's only care about their personal wealth, not those of their employees.

And if you pay each person for their marginal impact on revenue, many business models wouldn't work. E.g. the engineer can only drive another $1m+ because marketing and product management and support staff and everyone else are also doing their jobs. If you pay for marginal impact, you'd have to give the same dollar to multiple employees.

On less than half that in London, if that's any consolation.

But at least you have chippies and kebab shops. Don't take that for granted.

There are hardly any kebab shops in London.

There are over 15, according to Foursquare.

You're kidding right? https://i.imgur.com/GapKBh1.png And I know from experience living in that area that Google Maps is lacking a great many of the local kebab shops.

I've tried a few of these and they don't do kebabs. I think the word designates different foods to different people.

My understanding is that "Kebab" as such simply means "meat". In continental Europe, "Kebab" is often short for "Döner Kebab" (meat sliced off a central rotating skewer in thin shavings), while in the US, it seems to usually stand for "Shish Kebab", (skewers of meat cubes served on a plate either with or without the skewers).

Thank you very much. From what I'm used to, kebab would be a doner kebab in a wrap/sandwich. There are very few places doing that in London.

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

Anywhere else in UK the average is less than a half of your half.

And the rent is less than half of that.

What rent? We actually own our house ;)

Ah thanks but I don't really need consolation, I knew what I was doing when I left California. Also I sometimes don't understand why we don't get more Brits over here in Ireland since we seem to have somewhat better pay.

Sounds pretty decent for London, I was appalled at what some of the game companies were offering over there when I last checked.

Give me three+ months a year off, every year, and I will gladly take less pay.

It is not sensible for a teacher to make the same as someone who works fifty weeks a year.

How much less pay would you be willing to take? 50%? 75%? Teacher salaries in San Francisco range from 61-81k a year (this includes teachers master's degree). See https://www1.salary.com/CA/San-Francisco/Public-School-Teach...

That’s crazy - you can move 20 odd miles away and make a lot more and have cheaper housing:

https://www.dublin.k12.ca.us/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx...

I understand what you are saying but I would argue that few jobs have as much of a long term economic impact as teachers. They serve as child care during the day allowing parents to work. They teach and care for children who then grow up to be wage earners and business starters. The quality of their future work and the direction they take can often be linked directly to the quality of education they had in elementary through high school.

Living in a district with poor quality schools strongly encourages those that can afford it to send their kids to private school (me included). I am very not rich. The money I spend on private school would allow me to start a business, retire early, donate to charity or any number of things. The quality of local teachers and schools has a massive impact on my financial well being. I would gladly pay more in taxes to raise the quality of public education if it allowed me to save on private school. Sadly public education in many areas is very weak and the low teacher pay as well as the general lack of respect causes many people that would make excellent teachers to seek employment in other fields. Our children, economy and nation suffer as a result.

> It is not sensible for a teacher to make the same as someone who works fifty weeks a year.

This is a dumb way to value things.

You could take 3 months off a year and still earn more.

Those months aren't "off", they're spent doing course prep, professional development, and other admin tasks. And during the school term, teachers spend at least a couple of unpaid hours a day on marking and lesson prep. And their contact time is spent wrangling a large group of immature psychopaths who don't want to be there.

It's not as tough as some teachers make out but it's nowhere near as cruisy as it looks from the outside, either.

I prefer to justify my salary not by benchmarking myself against an excellent teacher, but against a mediocre investment banker.

You don’t need to be making 200k to be in the top 10% nationally - that’s actually just under 140k.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...

It sounds weird because it's an anonymous forum, but it's pretty common for people to lie to fit in, especially when there's no way of verification.

70% of teachers in Palo Alto make over $100,000, and that's for 38 weeks of work.

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/05/23/with-new-cont...

When you figure out pension, health, and other benefits, teachers compete favorably with developers in many parts of the country.

I work remote in a rural western state, I make closer to the national average for an SE than the SV worker. I ran the math once in my county and found that I was in the top 1% wage earners for my county.

This isn't necessarily true in Canada. The top 10% of "working-age" Canadians earn around 100k/year, and there are lots of software engineers who get paid less than that.

The top 10% individually was 108k in 2017. The median software engineer was making 107.6k in 2017.

So, on a technicality you are wrong - most software engineers are not in the top 10%. But even if you were right, there is a wide range of pay for software engineers, so it should not be surprising that some of those getting paid less will comment.

Software Engineers are also hugely underpaid.

If you’re a software engineer, you’re likely in the middle 30% of whatever city you live in. Which, if it’s the Bay Area, probably does mean the top 10% of America.

Totally onboard for Americans. But is this true of the SV area? I'm curious to see numbers for it.

That’s amusing - would it be possible to link the thread? I must have missed it.

here is a link

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9o0bcc/inequal...

A lot of software engineers think they are on the poorer end of inequality which is obviously not true.

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