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Comment by Zhenya | Hacker News Reader

Or, you know, the market is dictating the rate.

The market is rarely as good at setting prices as its most ardent defenders claim. (Or, to be fair, as bad at setting them as its most ardent critics claim.)

What does this statement tell anyone reading it? Or, in pretentious terms, this involves an argumentum ad temperantiam (fallacy that you can compare two unquantified extremes and get something useful)

That the market is manipulable should be evident from the quantity of money that is spent on lobbying legislators about it, and how much opposition there is to unions.

Belief in a totally free and natural self-regulating market is just as bad an appeal to Naturalism as to say we should eschew health care because people were meant to die if they get sick.

There is very, very little money in politics given the power that’s at stake.

> (in case you’re keeping track: all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

We haven't even begun to see the ceiling for experienced engineers imo. We hit $500k TC not being a completely-unthinkable offer for anyone other than extreme domain experts way earlier than I expected.

"The market is dictating the rate" is pretty tautological. The interesting questions are whether the market is rational, whether this is what we as society want the market doing (which is not to imply regulation, just that we could collectively decide to prioritize other things), whether existing regulation is influencing the market in some way, etc.

It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant. It isn't obvious to me that these two companies have approximately the same hiring budget, or if one has a higher budget than the other than giving market offers to start negotiation instead of above-market is a winning strategy.

> It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant.

From your first paragraph I get the feeling you might be familiar with this, but for others the term this is alluding to is called elasticity. Essentially a little change in supply and a little change in demand aren't always worth the same. What you experience (and what others have measured) suggests the demand for competent software developers (the company side) is relatively inelastic compared to the supply of competent software developers (the employee side). Put another way, if they tried to pay you less the number of applicants they got would go down quite fast. Put even simpler, the market for software developers is a seller's market.

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