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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

I think the comparison to biology/chemistry/physics is interesting. Perhaps even more than software, there's a huge spread between the value of low and high performers - the best scientists make new discoveries that can be worth billions.

On the other hand, if you think the software industry has a hard time figuring out (at hiring time) who the high performers are... science is driven by serendipity. Nobody can predict who will find the billion dollar discovery. Not even past performance is a reliable indicator.

So it makes sense to me that the salary spread in science is relatively even. If they could reliably figure out who to dump money on, they would. On the other hand, the FAANG companies clearly believe their hiring practices can select out the high performers... and perhaps they are right? If they're paying 3-4X what everyone else does, they expect to get at least 3-4X the value.

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I've worked with good people at every company I've been at... but the nice thing about being at a top company is I never have to deal with totally incompetent or helpless people. Nothing frustrates me more than having my job responsibilities include training someone with no initiative.

The selection process seems to do a good job of keeping out the lowest tier at least, although we openly acknowledge that we miss a lot of good people as well.

> Nothing frustrates me more than having my job responsibilities include training someone with no initiative.

Years ago, I worked someplace where a colleague was tasked with working with another developer on project X. After about 15 minutes it was clear the other developer ... wasn't? A web project, and this person had been employed as a "web developer" for at least several months. Questions like "how does this information in this browser get back to the server?" came up.

Colleague goes to manager and says "I can hit the project deadline, or I can make sure other_dev learns the basics enough to be able to contribute and understand projectX, but I can't do both by the deadline. Can we move the deadline back a few weeks?"

No, and no. Train other_dev and hit deadline.

Deadline was hit, other_dev moved to another project afterwards, and was pretty much as ineffective as before, but colleague was then saddled with this reputation of being a 'bad mentor' because the next team learned other_dev didn't know how things worked. Why the hiring manager wasn't tarnished... who knows?

Sadly reputation comes from result.

He was given 2 tasks and he only delivers one result.

I know this sounds... not ideal... but it is what it is.

His manager probably has to operate at the same level of expectation: given 3 tasks by his manager (or director), either you finish all 3 or you're less dependable.

That just sounds like a place that doesn’t have smart people. He was done a favor because it forced him to move on to somewhere better

Isn't the hiring manager tasked with "hire someone with basic competence"? And they failed? But their reputation/credentials don't get called in to question?

Science doesn’t reinvent itself every couple of years either: new discoveries build upon a foundation of old discoveries. Software is more like the fashion industry.

I think they expect to not have to face another Google or Facebook to compete with by hiring everyone at 3-4x. Then employees just rotate among the big techs. The big techs then decide where they want to compete with each other... e.g Netflix and amazon video/prime... so if stocks decline I’d expect a rise in bonus or base pay or more stock.

Part of the issue is that the metric for "high performers" can be well out of line with skill, at least as measured as a product of profitability.

One way that they may be getting 3-4x the value is in the long term. Although I've only worked as a programmer, I'd expect that the impact of having one negatively valued programmer is far larger than having one negatively valued chemist or physicist. Legacy code can often be years old and far outlive the jobs of the people who wrote it.

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