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Comment by moosey | Hacker News Reader

Tech salaries are high for a number of reasons: programmers are highly productive, reducing the amount of work that others must do, the job is hard, and requires basically autodidacts to do it. The personality traits for being a good programmer, I think, are rare. There are a whole suite of poorly paid positions in the United States that are similarly difficult and not as highly paid as they could be: teachers, for instance.

But why do we even discuss it when there is a whole cohort of salaries that actually make no sense in comparison: All of the VP's, CEO's, etc... even stock holders just wasting efficiency collecting dividends from existing wealth and the productivity of others. Why are tech people trying to defend their salaries when we could just point at the next people up the chain?

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You're saying that programmers have a unique set of skills which is why they're paid so much.

And in the next sentence you're questioning why CEOs get paid so much. A good CEO or CFO or CMO can generate value for the company at a scale that's much much larger than what a single programmer does.

During Satya Nadella's reign as the CEO, Microsoft went from people speculating its impending demise to a trillion dollar company. Don't you think he deserves a billion from that $700bn rise in market cap?

TSLA stock will tank the moment Elon Musk decides to step down? In a cynical world, maybe he's just a figurehead and there are others running the show behind the scene, but creating such persona is still something that a CEO has to do.

This is the same old Tesla vs Edison discussion. It's a common misconception among people that it's enough to be a genius lone worker to be able to provide value to a company.

> Don't you think he deserves a billion from that $700bn rise in market cap?

No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.

Seems like an odd thing to say in response to such a clear example. Deserves maybe isn’t the right word but they earn it and people are willing to pay for the value so why not?

Even if you had been earning your current salary since the day Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have today even a quarter of a billion dollars. That's the outrageous part. That kind of wealth should not be attainable for any single person. If the company is doing that well, the wealth should go to everyone who's part of it. After all, without them no actual work would be done.

(a) depends on the salary and (b) have you heard of compounding? :) But seriously, that's a weird way to think about it. Nobody pays you to be a billionaire - it happens that you create something that grows in value and takes you up with it. I used to work for Bloomberg - Mike is rich because the thing he created is just that valuable. He didn't take the money from anyone, didn't make anyone pay him a crazy salary. He just made something amazing that's been generating value for 30+ years, and has made lots of people rich in the process. Why begrudge him that?

Because there is a limit in how much money a person can spend, and the rest of the money is working in the rent-seeking domain simply reducing the efficiency of everyone else.

You know, I respect Mike for what he created and I believe he should be doing very well. Still, he didn't do all the work himself. And billions of dollars is a ridiculous amount of wealth for someone to own. Employees should have gotten their fair share of that too.

> Employees should have gotten their fair share of that too.

You mean the employees should have asked for higher salaries and refused to work for his company if the company refused to pay? I don't think a single person has claimed that Bloomberg has paid them a single cent less than the salary specified in their contract.

That's the rub, isn't it? This is a protest against market forces, not against people. If I write a book and everybody in the world pays a dollar to read it (JK Rowling), how on earth could anyone say that I shouldn't have a billion dollars? Shouldn't they be ranting at the all the people who gave me the money of their own accord?

In Bloomberg's case, every employee made a conscious decision to work for the company to increase its value, and every employee was paid what they signed up for. What's unfair about it?

If you somehow published, distributed, translated, and marketed the book yourself then sure, you deserve a billion dollars. However, because you probably didn't do any of those things, just wrote the book (probably had a separate editor as well), you don't.

The second assumption is that people join companies to "increase their value". That may be true for some people on this forum, but most people join companies for a paycheck, because they can't live without income. If no one had to work to live comfortably, I doubt anyone would care about billionaires.

>He didn't take the money from anyone

So he summoned it out of thin air

>After all, without them no actual work would be done.

Leadership is the other side of that coin.

It is. It's not that leadership should get nothing. They just shouldn't get everything.

They don't really get everything. They often give a lot up to get what they do too.

Just translate "deserves a billion dollars" to "gets to decide how most of a billion dollars gets allocated".

Nobody can actually spend/consume more than ~10% of 1Bn. But if someone is smart enough to make 1Bn, it's probably a good bet for society to "promote that person to being in charge of how most of that 1Bn gets allocated". In most of the civilized world 1Bn doesn't automagically translate into "you're a god now, you can buy off the police and the judges and the government and do whatever". (Now sure, in a corrupt country one could fully spend 1Bn by "buying out" lots of people and institution and making himself a god, but in "the civilized world" it doesn't work, or would require significantly more than 1Bn.)

The alternatives are bureaucracies / central-planning committees. For some things they work well, for some they are catastrophic, but for most thing they are simply very very very suboptimal / wasteful and non-innovative!

Hence we "bet on capitalism" and let the guy "keep" his billion.

(There are issues ofc, one could spend a significant part of the money outside of the "legal market of civilized society" or use them to subtly "bend the system"... hence it's probably a good idea to cap personal wealth at 1Bn or smth like that and force other forms of power be shared or politically mediated. Or to just monitor that the use of the money is on goods and services that are actually legally buyable and are "bought to be used or sold at a profit" instead of "bought to profit the buyer and buy his servitude" or other schemes, or not on fake donations that buy influence.)

The CEO's compensation is usually determined by the board of directors at large public companies [0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/11/18/...

...yeah, but there's still a "market mechanism" - you're not going to be able hire and keep a good CEO if you don't pay at least "market rate". Also, probably most people worth >1Bn have not made that by being CEOs, that's more like what you get through successful investment (the "rich daddy" + "some brains" combo), or through being really really incredibly lucky as a founder.

> No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.

If somebody single-handedly invented a cure for all cancer and made it free to the world... you'd have a hard time convincing me that person didn't deserve a billion dollars.

Thing is, bad CEOs that drive their company into the ground still get paid way more than we do. Terrible managers often get paid more than the talented people working under them. Salaries are determined more by power than by supply and demand. Also by supply and demand, but more by power. People who wield power get paid more, even if they're bad at it.

Thing is bad programmers draw salary way more than ...

Thing is, bad programmers do sometimes get fired. (Way too rarely, might I say, but that's the CEOs valuing cheap labor and speed over quality.)

Bad CEOs get a severance package on millions and go working elsewhere.

What's worse is that someone who is faking-it can impact the income of many people. For example, if you're a young engineer that works at a company that switches a good CEO for a bad CEO.

Bad CEOs get paid a lot since if they fuck up, their failures are public and nobody will hire them afterwards so they need the money as insurance.

If you're a bad programmer, your failures aren't public and you can job hop to the next gullible company.

> nobody will hire them afterwards

I don’t really think that is true at all.

They don't need the money; their pay is already more than enough to retire from. Also, a bad CEO needs to fail spectacularly to not get hired. Plenty of mediocre CEOs keep getting hired for insane salaries.

Trust me, terrible developers still get paid.

And thank goodness for that!

Supply and demand is just a form of power.

And a terrible programmer can cause a lot more problems than they solve...

Both programmers and CEOs (and others) can be "force multipliers". If they're really good, they can help their company do better than the sum of the parts.

If the programmer is mostly working on code it's usually easy to discover if they're detrimental. Though if they're doing more fleeting stuff like design, it can be more difficult because the effects are less direct.

In a similar way, a CEOs performance can easily be masked by other factors, such as the market in general and good employees. Say the company increases sales by 10x, but most other candidate CEOs could have done 20-30x or more.

That said, I do think there's some other factors at play when hiring CEOs, as some with known repeated terrible histories still get hired etc.

> A good CEO or CFO or CMO can generate value for the company at a scale that's much much larger than what a single programmer does.

Based on the numbers, usually it's luck. It isn't to say that there are some outstanding CEOs. But the majority are in the mediocre camp and just get lucky.

https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/study-luck-looking-the-par...

"It shouldn't take a careful empirical study to convince you that CEOs don't get where they are on the basis of ability alone. If that were true, the C-suite would not be so dominated by white men," Frick writes.

Down-votes when there's numbers to back up the statement. Some upset C-level people (or people planning to be C-level some-day) reading Hacker News today?

I wouldn't be CEO for the kind of pay they get. Getting a few million dollars a year sounds nice until you realize they all work excess hours, are often on the road: they don't get to spend much time with their family. Seeing my 6 year old solve "laser maze" puzzles is worth far more to me than the money.

I'm young and don't have kids (and plan not to). I think my wife and I would gladly trade a year or two of overworking to effectively be able to retire immediately thereafter (or at least, have financial independence and get to choose work and hours).

EDIT: I'm not suggesting a large company is going to hire me as CEO...

You need to work up the ladder - it isn't one or two years, it is 30 years of this. The pay does go up as you go up the ladder, but still...

Well, I think it would be pretty rare for someone to suddenly find themselves the CEO of a large company without first having spent many years working just as hard at lower levels. And it would also be rare for someone to be hired as CEO if the board knew they were planning on leaving after a year or two (unless it was an interim position).

Since the OP mentioned Matt Levine's Money Stuff, here's a fun little bit from today's newsletter [1]:

> Every time you read about a workaholic billionaire and think “boy, not me, if I had a billion dollars I’d be on the beach,” the answer is always “well that’s why you don’t have a billion dollars.” If you have the characteristics that enable you to make a billion dollars, you don’t usually turn them off once you get there.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-03/amazon...

Sure, but you can also fuck upwards, as in the company can fail under your leadership but you'll still get a nice bonus with the excuse that they don't want to scare off potential incoming CEOs or some other nonsense.

"A few millions" is enough to retire if the money is invested properly. The problem is that the type of individual who even has the connections to become a CEO of a big company tend to have a lavish lifestyle.

But yeah, give me a few millions and I'll slave away for one year, then retire.

It's almost impossible to directly quantify in dollar terms the productivity of individual programmers. I am suspicious of the claim that all programmers who command a high salary are "highly productive" and "reduce the amount of work that others must do." Unlike professional sports or finance, where extreme outperformers are generally compensated in proportion to their contributions, the output of engineers is generally less quantifiable at tech companies so median engineers are paid more than their personal labor can justify. Tech salaries are also a function of how much VC money has flooded the sector since the crisis - expect this effect to dissipate as (i) investors focus on profitability before growth at all costs in the wake of WeWork etc. and (ii) if/when valuations in private capital markets undergo a correction (for which they are long overdue!)

> programmers are highly productive

This is an extremely optimistic view of the majority of developers who are essentially building glorified Wordpress themes.

It would be more precise to say that programmers can be highly leveraged by the scale of organizations.

A glorified Wordpress theme for a cornershop isn't valuable. The same thing for a redesign that materially affects the decisions of millions of consumers may be super valuable.

> All of the VP's, CEO's, etc

According to one theory, if you overpay the guy at the top, it makes all the underlings work harder to try and climb up that greasy pole. The more grossly and obviously overpaid that top guy is, the more desirable it is to try and somehow work your way to his position.

According to another theory, it's demotivating for the underlings because they know they're not getting paid fairly.

"The personality traits for being a good programmer"

Could you expand on this? I would be interested in what part you find 'rare' -- I find there are tons of different niches/archetypes that a SWE can have.

My very anecdotal experience: After teaching/mentoring quite a few SWEs from varying skill levels, the two traits that I find are the most important and at the same time rare are:

- Attention to detail

- High frustration barrier

Over the course of a career those become less and less important as one learns to use the appropriate tools (e.g. linters) and processes, but you still need them to get to that point. Especially for beginners, those two in practice most often break the "everyone can learn to program" trope, that I'd like to be true.

Indeed, I think it's two different frustration barriers. There's a high barrier to being frustrated enough to stop working on a difficult problem to improve a situation. There's a fairly low barrier to being frustrated enough with an existing solution to want to make that improvement.

I agree that that's also a very nice trait for a SWE to have, but I actually had the far more boring attention to detail in mind: Spotting syntactic errors in code and similar things like misspelling of variables, etc.. Hunting those down in the beginning also goes hand in hand with a high frustration barrier.

> everyone can learn to program

Indeed. Everyone can learn to write code. Not everyone can learn to program.

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...

For lack of a better descriptor: behavioral traits one might identify as autism.

The person who for some reason is up on a Saturday night reading the NGINX source code in C to better implement their company's Lets Encrypt integration.

The person who actually stepped through Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes the Hard way just because they thought Kubernetes was really cool.

The person who writes code for personal projects during "social hours" where others may be out with friends, out with their significant others, etc.

EDIT: I'll leave it for the integrity/honesty of the comment, but here are some descriptors I wish I'd used in the first place instead of 'autism':

* On the spectrum

* Extreme Introvert

* Socially disconnected

* Ties self-value to work-output in extreme ways

* Seeks joy from work versus social interaction & status

> For lack of a better descriptor: behavioral traits one might identify as autism.

I wouldn't identify any of your examples as signs for someone being on the autistic spectrum.

Heh, you do need a better descriptor. That is the media's idea of the autistic savant. A very small minority of people on the lesser end of the autism spectrum may have some of those traits. The reality for the other 99% is vastly different.

What about individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP)? What the GP said probably does describe quite a few BAP individuals.

(And the boundary between BAP and ASD is rather ill-defined and subjective anyway.)

none of these have anything to do with autism...

I don't think people should be so hard on you for your terminology choice. The term "autism" is overly broad. One might be talking about:

(1) Classical autism

(2) Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

(3) Broader autism phenotype (BAP)

If people were to understand you as talking about (3), well I don't think you said anything inaccurate. You obviously weren't talking about most individuals included under (1). As far as (2) goes, well at one end (2) includes (1), and at the other end (2) has a very vague boundary with (3).

> that one might identify as

Everyone seems to be missing this. It doesn't have to be in the DSM criteria, the parent poster is talking about the popular view.

I don't necessarily agree – I don't seek joy from work but I do things that others (my wife included) would consider as "work". The moment you tackle that label on them – or whenever I lose control of what I'm supposed to be doing – I'll no longer have the same joy.

> The person who for some reason is up on a Saturday night reading the NGINX source code in C

Sigh

Now this I have issue with. I think the best programmers I know will do something like this out of their own self interest. Maybe they are setting up some elaborate and over-engineered system for their own amusement.

If this is for work, though? You bet your ass I'll be reading that NGINX source code, if I have to, during work hours, however loosely defined those are. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes your mind will be so focused on something that it _just won't let go_. In which case, fine, Monday can't wait and I'll try this thing. As long as there is no expectations from the part of the company.

Saturday night I'll be mucking around with 3d printing, game engines, programming my own blog software for the 30th time in a new Scheme dialect, anything. Just not work.

I agree with you, but I think there’s an even more important point: spending your Saturday integrating nginx with certbot is quite frankly, an easy task - technically speaking. This is not even learning - this is your routine work task.

In your opinion CEO role is easier then programmers?

In your opinion CEO role is thousands of times harder then programmers? or tens of thousands harder than working long hours doing construction?

Sure, it might be a little harder, but to me its absurd to claim the salary difference makes any moral sense.

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