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Comment by smattiso | Hacker News Reader

I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it because there are enough problems to solve that if you are a smart engineer and you aren't doing shit and hating your day then you are wasting your talent.

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>If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it

>So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better.

You and the OP are essentially saying the same thing, except they are adding that an honest days wage deserves an honest days work

You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?

Employees are very rarely the exploiters and almost always the exploited.

If it wasn’t fair, why did you accept the offer?

Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass that has to accept a job out of desperation.

It can simultaneously be true that 1) FAANG employees (including myself) are compensated and rewarded well above the national average, and potentially better than any other stable option available, and 2) FAANG employees are not adequately compensated for the value and revenue they generate for the company.

Amazon does not get the richest CEO in the world by truly compensating employees what they are worth to the company. Facebook literally tells employees that they target 90-95% of "market rate" for engineering salaries, based on location of the office they work in, and they refuse to negotiate with competing offers, resulting in massive compensation disparities between London and Seattle/Menlo Park.

I'm 35 and compensated far and above what I ever could have dreamed of making as a teenager, but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair". A pat on the back, an "exceeds" rating, and a 15% increase in my bonus for that half is peanuts by comparison.

Yes, but where it goes off the rails is when people expects the corporation to act against their own incentives. When people complain about compensation they get confused about how compensation is set.

Pay is not about the value you bring as much as it is about your leverage in negotiations. There’s many ways to get leverage like being the only person who can solve the problem, or systemic levers like unions.

If people aren’t getting paid adequately it’s usually because they don’t have the negotiation leverage to fix it. Conversely, we all probably know people who are of dubious value yet can command handsome salaries because they have some unique leverage.

Yes, unions and coordinated negotiation are the correct answer, but that's very difficult to pull off in companies this large with employees compensated so far above the cost of living.

100% agree that it's not easy, but it's almost certainly easier than the fight for collective bargaining during the industrial revolution. The idea that people just have too much to lose by fighting for it just underscores the point about negotiation leverage.

> but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair"

This is a failure in reasoning about how pay works.

Pay (salaried jobs, not commission) for a role is related to the difficulty in hiring (replacing) and retaining an employee for that role. A role's impact in terms of dollars changes over time. The safety in this is that if you don't happen to save $10mm this year, you still probably have a job. And your company can have roles like R&D (where many projects don't generate money at all), internal tools, etc.

> when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work

I would hazard a guess that this work wasn't 100% yours. Ops, oncall, infosec, accounting, etc etc all participate. This is Obama's "you didn't build that alone" argument.

The question isn't how much did you save, the question is could your employer hire someone else to drive the same outcome for less (or more).

> Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass

Depends on your baseline.

If you use other workers in the US, then you are correct.

If you use a counterfactual in which employees meaningfully participate in corporate governance, then you are incorrect.

>If you use a counterfactual in which employees meaningfully participate in corporate governance, then you are incorrect.

Can you elaborate on this point? Do you mean that FAANG employees do or do not have a seat at the table?

Even shareholders have a historically unusual inability to participate in corporate governance at Facebook. The closest comparison I have found is the oil trusts from the 19th century. But that's not a good comparison, because they were trusts, not corporations.

I seriously can't believe Delaware allows Facebook's voting structure. Corporate law has evolved in a really strange direction over the past few decades.

Interesting, I don't know much about FB governance. I would venture to say it's probably (and unfortunately) becoming the norm rather than the exception that employees have little input into governance. This is another area where I think unions have benefit.

My point about being a tech "underclass" was more about avoiding conflating FAANG employees with those who have little opportunity or options. FAANG employees generally have more portable skills than, say, an uneducated immigrant employee and I don't know that I agree they could both be "exploited" in the same way. While it may be rooted in valid points, it's a bit cringey to use the same language to describe both.

> You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?

Are you saying companies should have no profits in order to be fair? Profitability doesn't really reflect ethical pay, just look at Amazon, they had no profits for years.

I think it's a fallacy to think that you are smarter if you land a job at a Big N company. I know a few, you I wouldn't qualify as smarter than average on any scale are working at those companies because they happen to get good referrals and got lucky on interview days.

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