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Comment by eaandkw | Hacker News Reader

For some reason I feel like this is more of a way to reduce payroll and eventually outsourse most of the company. If everyone is working remote then it is only a small step to offshore everyone at that point.

Edit: Wrong word used

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You have to compete with the same Amazon, Twitter, Google, etc whether you're hiring 5 star engineers for $300k+ each or 3 star engineers for $100k and under. I don't buy into the theory that one engineer is innately 100 times as skilled as another, but you're going to have a really hard time competing with FAANG if you just randomly scoop up a bunch of mediocre engineers willing to accept 50k a year each.

If I leave Silicon Valley to settle down in rural Vietnam, I'm not going to work for $50k a year. If I couldn't find something paying at least $150k+, I'd start my own company and live off my savings until I get it up and running.

There's a real market-based reason engineers get paid as much as they do. It's easy to lose sight of that here on HackerNews, but just look at what your white collar, non-tech friends do at work all day. Their productivity can often be easily doubled or tripled by better tech. That is to say, someone generating $30k in value per year for your business could suddenly generate an extra $30-$60k a year with better software to help them.

1) 5-star engineers are not exclusive to the bay area/Seattle/NY. They are open to earning more than they are currently (but less than bay area engineers)

2) Some 5-star engineers in the bay area are willing to take a pay cut to work from low-cost areas

3) I agree there are market-based reasons, but there are also geographic considerations as well as WFO momentum - why fix what ain't broken? Companies were not interested in experimenting/implementing remote work because it costs money and had unclear benefit. Their hand has been forced and they had to tackle remote work

agree with your comment

Also, a genuine question

Are Amazon, Twitter, Google, Facebook really doing any very technically amazing things?

mostly they are building platforms to collect more and more data and spy more and more

that's hardly cutting edge stuff that needs the world's best engineers

perhaps Facebook is beginning to realize this

Google outpublishes most (maybe all) universities if we restrict to AI research. Not particularly surprising given they have several hundred AI researchers and likely over a thousand (deepmind alone is a couple hundred). They also do interesting distributed research. Multiple landmark papers come from (sequence to sequence learning, mapreduce, attention is all you need, etc). They have multiple major frameworks (tensorflow, angular). Facebook similarly has a ton of AI research and is one of the most prestigious labs you can work at. Talking to top AI researchers they see less and less of a motivation to choose academia over industry beyond teaching. Both facebook/google have a ton of freedom for their researchers. I'm focusing on ML just because that's the area I work in, but I know other research happens too, Microsoft has some programming language theory people and I think both microsoft/google have quantum computing research.

My first real software job was at a 10 person firmware consulting shop. Some guy from Microsoft got burned out and joined us, and it was mind-blowing. The dude barely came into the office. Even when he was there, he was half-aslseep at his desk 75% of the time, and he still singlehandedly got more done in a week than everyone else in the company combined. Some of us had been theoretically doing the same work for 5-10 years, and our company was well-respected in its niche as an expert on what we did, and we still just couldn't compare at all.

10 years later, I was burned out from working at my crappy FAANG job building platforms to spy on people, so I went into consulting on my own. Sure enough, it was a really similar situation.. I don't want to break any NDAs or sound like a jerk, but I was rolling in and doing things in hours that teams of my clients' best engineers had been failing at for months at a time.

You could grab just about any mediocre nobody from a FAANG company and drop them into any tech company somewhere else that normally pays sub-six figures, and they'd be the top performer there. I think it's something that can be taught, and maybe we'll have a tech renaissance now where everyone goes back to their comfortable hometowns, but there's a very real skill differential between the big tech hub cities and the rest of the planet. (And yes, I'm including other countries where even super hard-working geniuses make $35k a year or less.. because a lot of those geniuses eventually tend to either make their way to the USA, or start their own successful companies. If I found out I could eventually make $3.5 million/year by learning Chinese and working my way over there, you'd better believe I'd get it done)

I don't know you definition of mediocre, but in most of developing world you must be seriously good to earn $50k/year as an individual contributor.

What is wrong with that ? Free market at play.

Let me start by saying you're correct. '

However, it's also the case that the free market seems to now be only in play when it comes to reducing wages, off shoring, and other cost cutting.

The free market isn't at play when it's time for bailouts, subsidies, and government contracts.

Rugged individualism for all, except the wealthy elite.

I'm not sure the person who you replied to has a frustrated / discouraged tone, but that's what I read it as. I share the sentiment and the above is why.

> Rugged individualism for all, except the wealthy elite.

This is a direct consequence of considering money to be free speech: those who have more of it have louder voices, and this matters a lot when it comes to elections, and when it's time for politicians to pay back their debts to the donors.

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