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Comment by keepper | Hacker News Reader

So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this. The other side of the coin is that these companies pay WAY ABOVE average salaries. I'm intimately familiar with this having

FAANG companies average of 50% more compensation than average. Especially outside of the bay area.

Typical range TC Sr. SDE in nyc: 150-250k + Bonus. Typical range TC for Sr. SDE in nyc: for Google/Facebook/Amazon 300-400k ( and goes higher ).

Only the most well paid Quants working in horrible environments made 500k+ There's a good portion >E5 engineers at these companies making well over that.

Anti-competition is bad.. but they are at the top of the industry on compensation. :( So again, don't know how to feel about this.

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> So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this.

Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and power for the business owners?

Serfdom

Serfdom doesn't pay that well.

Note well: I'm not saying that this is OK, either legally or morally. I'm just saying that the parent is way overhyping the problem.

Naw. You're underhyping it.

Creating this artificial ceiling in the low 6 figures is awful, regardless of how badly people making less than that are getting screwed. As far as I'm concerned, they're as hopeless as a bucket of crabs and we shouldn't use them as a bar or relative bar for anything.

Do I-bankers look at they're comp and say "yeah that's pretty good. I'm ok getting screwed out of any more"?

I think we should always be advocating for our group as hard as we can.

Absolutely everything you say could be true, and that still wouldn't make it serfdom, nor even close.

These aren't the only choices. I think our industry is actually a little better with that, where we have some software engineers advocating for more money for the contractors. [1]

[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/4/4/18293900/google-contractors-ben...

Additional irony is, that behavior is condemned while any sort of orchestrated labor union in the industry is met with resistance at every turn.

Your employers, even as competitors dealing with monetary counts in billions, try to unionize (aka collusion). Stop pretending businesses are looking after your best interests. Chances are, if the business supports something, unless your goals align on that thing with the business, you probably want to do the opposite. Compensation maximization and labor expense minimization are nearly orthogonal.

Exactly.

I don't think people really understand the gravity of those fortunes.

Jeff Bezos could now (in theory, at market prices) buy Tacoma, Washington.

As in buy every piece of real estate, private and public, all utilities and infrastructure.

A town of 200,000 people. One man could buy it all. The assessed property value for 2017 was just over $105B, including government-owned, plus wiggle room for other properties.

That "should not" be possible. Buying (or being able to buy, rather) a "mid sized urban city", as an individual.

That makes his wealth seem pretty small, to me.

> That "should not" be possible.

That actually seems pretty small compared to Bezos impact on global commerce.

I am all for constraints on wealth being created or compounded by political and market corruption. But see no reason to discourage or cap wealth created by productive means.

No, being clear, since it seems you aren't separating concepts.

You're not happy that these companies have SINGLE large shareholders. That the founders kept so much company equity. I FULLY AGREE no one should have that much wealth. But, no one here is complaining about families or others having similar wealth. They are complaining that founders kept that much ownership.

The real wage suppression is happening in other industries and companies. How about the lack of a livable wage in industrial and service industries? How about that fact that the average wage has not kept up with cost of living?

Why are you advocating for engineers like myself making many times the average income and living way above average lives? That's insane!

How about oil companies with similar profits paying engineers 80-100k? at an actual risk of loss of life?

We should focus on the actual problems. The lack of ability to tax generational and asset wealth. The reason they accumulate so much is that we can't tax their share of ownership.

I agree with what you've said, but there's not much that individuals on here can do about it. I'm just trying to convince readers here not to willingly participate in reducing their own wages for the benefit of insanely rich business owners.

Who gets to judge how much an engineer is worth to a company making billion upon billions of dollars a year? If some of these engineers are what is enabling these companies and their executives to make millions then maybe they really are worth a 1 million dollar salary.

Also, this happened many years ago. Wages have soared since this was uncovered. Now (actually 4hrs ago, the last I checked) a college hire’s signing bonus is 2/3 my base salary was 6yrs earlier.

Sure, but the ones who aren't doing that are also getting paid really well.

In your scheme they would not :)

> Sure, but the ones who aren't doing that are also getting paid really well.

So, don't require a 4.3 GPA from Stanford/MIT/Caltech for entry-level back-office/maintenance type developers. It seems like you're claiming that FAANGs are overpaying non-contributors, or at least those whose impact is not easily measured. So, stop paying so much and see what kind of developers you get.

I think the fair thing to realize, as a society, is that corporate profit taxes just make sense. If a company is operating in a high profit margin line of business it has more than enough money to invest in future growth, fairly compensate employers and owners _and_ provide a societal benefit for all those other community members that work in less high profit margin societies. Sure, you've got good healthcare and what not, why not make sure your barista has the same access before buying that third house.

I applaud anyone who decides to do this of their own volition, but I think we can agree this makes sense societally and it'd just be easier if a third party was responsible for shifting the money around as needed and made sure everyone was paying proportionate to their ability.

I can't understand how people don't realize that putting some of our massive, massive wealth towards building a better society would not benefit them.

Can you imagine how many more inventions and advancements there would be if everyone had access to good education? Didn't have to worry about going bankrupt or dying because they can't meet medical expenses? If we put money into things that don't necessarily directly directly go into corporate bottom lines by next financial quarter? (roads, transportation infrastructure, clean water and air...)

When you're super rich, you already have that better society, it just costs a bit more (nothing you can't easily afford). Who cares about the rest of the hoi polloi.

That's how our society works and we applaude it by promising the potential to become one of the super rich, when much of obtaining that degree of wealth isn't earned through hard work and innovation but instead, pure situational luck and ability to curb your morals and ethics to climb over people and pull the ladder behind you.

You know, this, and you see this in the way the super-rich politicians elected to represent most of the country act.

"We want to grow the pie, rather than redistribute anything, so everyone can live the American dream" -- when in reality, the pie is plenty big but verrrrry badly distributed when you're among the working poor.

There was also a great video making the rounds recently about Rep. Katie Porter grilling Jamie Dimon about the base wages at his bank in Irvine, CA. She got out a posterboard and did the math on a hypothetical single mother working full-time as a teller ($16.50 an hour). After some very straightforward math, the hypothetical single mother is in the hole $587 every month. She kept pressing Dimon for how he expects that role to be filled, and he had no answer (repeating "I'll have to think about it.") Obviously, on some level he doesn't give a shit, but I think it's the sort of thing where he's also simply never confronted with the reality for someone who doesn't make $31 million a year plus whatever other non-cash he takes home.

I think you probably meant to say: "I can't understand how people don't realize that putting some of our massive, massive wealth towards building a better society would benefit them." (removing the extra 'not')

you're right. But there's MANY other companies making similar profits.. yet not of them pay anything similar?

I think you guys can't separate your dislike for these companies, with an actual, thoughtful analysis.

Most oil companies make similar profits.. yet the average oil engineer makes 80-100k. With a lot more risk, and in similar high demand as a software engineer.

The skill required is much lower though. With a lower bar, it’s much easier to work as a oil rigger. All it requires is a high school degree.

To be clear though, the people doing data analysis, land exploration, etc. for oil well discovery get paid much more by the way. They make similar amounts to what tech companies can offer in fact.

You've got the timeline backwards. The compensation only went up after this collusion ended.

This argument is very weak IMO. Paraphrased “I got paid happily, industry collusion to suppress wages is therefore OK”

It was never OK but was settled long ago and compared to the many, many other forms of injustice in the world that are ongoing and more severe, why focus on this one? Even if you limit your scope to tech companies, there are more important things.

Have you actually look at wages in other industries?

Why are we focusing on the companies that actually do PAY ABOVE. how about we focus on the industries that UNDER pay. Someone getting compensated many times the average income is not the person we should trying to advocate for. The market can decide that.

That industrial or service worker not getting paid a living wage. THATs who we should be fighting for.

I love how i'm getting downvoted for my parent comment, but no one has taken the time to compare to other industries and companies with similar profits, who pay their engineering talent SUBSTANTIALLY less. Oil industry has similar profits, yet pays engineers 80-100k.

> The market can decide that.

How, since they were not allowing the market to decide that.

> THATs who we should be fighting for.

It's not binary. Both fights are important.

There is a lot of ageism in this industry. I'd be curious if SWE at FAANG is equivalent to football players in the NFL.

Aka, Sure you might make more but what's the earnings over total career?

The salaries and other compensation are often high enough that if you live modestly, invest your money, and most importantly, the stock goes up, the career might be over when you realize you have enough to retire early.

But as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Yeah, until you compare how much they spend on wages to their market cap, which is just insanely low relative to most other industries.

Remember this happened before FB / Netflix / Unicorns started an open war for talent and blew salaries up.

Now compare the wages against CEO and shareholder compensation.

Yea, this is where things get really stupid. The contribution of shareholders is very close to nil - the CEO may be the most impactful employee (though I think they're honestly not nearly as important as modern society says, being a replaceable cog themselves) but they are not worth the equivalent of 20 or 5000 employees.

How about we compare to engineering wages in other companies with similar profits? Pretty much any other large engineering company. Or how about the oil industry? where profits are higher, the risk to life way higher, yet engineers make 80-100k?

What you have in these companies are single large shareholders vs institutional or family shareholders. That's what you're ultimately uncomfortable with. One person having so much net work.

> How about we compare to engineering wages

Why? Why not vs. CEO compensation? Is there some rule that CEOs and shareholders must make absurdly more money than workers, or society will collapse? CEO salaries are routinely defended with "that's what they're worth" - why does this not apply to the lowly worker?

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