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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

most of my bosses have made me feel petty when asking for an extra $10k/yr

i've found that when working for corporations, it's all about the number you ask for up front. after that, it takes quite a bit to get more than the average 3-5% merit pay bump.

how FANG companies work with the $500k/yr total comp for average engineers, i have no clue... i think from what i've seen from levels.fyi the most common salaries are $160k-$180k/yr. after that, you get your salary again in stock options apparently... not sure what the interview process or job workload must be like.

how sustainable is programming? $75/hr to basically just write SQL tables and APIs that are advanced CRUD wrappers with light business logic on them? seems ripe for automation.

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I think programming is moving away from automation. We're no longer writing code or fancy algorithms. We are plumbers connecting systems and APIs. However, the true value of the engineer in 2020 is that they're the one trying to make sense of idiotic product requirements. They're the ones turning shiny, half assed mockups into real products. That cannot be automated. If the value was only in pissing lines of code there wouldn't be a single engineer left in the US. There is a reason massive outsourcing failed decades ago.

But yeaj, if you're in there to build SQL tables its pretty boring.

I've read similar things about how most programming work is just plumbing together existing code fairly regularly on HN. Is that really what most people do? Is it a web development thing? That's not my experience at all, and it sounds mind numbingly awful.

How often do you write hashtables? JSON serializers? Mutexes? HTTP clients? Transaction managers? Connection pools?

In my last job as a mobile engineer I can claim that I wrote code all day, and that's true to a point, but most of that code is shepherding data from one format to another, using libraries that I didn't write, causing the UI (whose framework was written by someone else) to update.

And you know what? It's still a hard and rewarding job! Having pieces to plumb together hasn't made our jobs easier or dumber, it's just raised the level of abstraction at which we work day-to-day.

There is a “Red Queen’s Race” between the accelerating productivity gains of abstractions, frameworks, libraries, and other stacks we can leverage, balanced against the fact that each one is a leaky abstraction, and the leaks interfere with each other in weird, mysterious ways.

Programming with all these tools is wonderful. Debugging problems in such am environment, not-so-much. But net, it’s a massive win.

I don't want to necessarily draw general truths just from my XP. I think it's a spectrum :)

When I compare programming (as in, just writing code) today and 20 years ago, there is nothing really interesting to write anymore. We have libraries for everything, and half of them are clients to integrate with a SaaS that does what you want. The challenges I see that still makes the job stimulating are more found in the architecture design (we have all the building blocks now, but we still need to organize it all in a way that works) and the product (as I said, making sense of business reqs and turning them into something do-able).

I think the whole reason software is so productive (economically speaking) is that you can leverage software written by others. Depending on your mindset, you could call that “just plumbing”, but a more positive way to describe it is “using the best tool for the job”. The person who wrote the tool you are using could also think they are “just plumbing”. There’s always layers below you and often layers above you too. Nobody wrote their own stack top to bottom other than the TempleOS guy.

>Nobody wrote their own stack top to bottom other than the TempleOS guy.

He was the greatest programmer that ever lived.

He passed? I’m genuinely sorry to learn this. His work was a welcome reminder of unexplored possibilities.

Yeah, I believe he did die. From what I understand he was mentally ill and lead a fairly troubled life. Watching his walkthrough of TempleOS is pretty fascinating.

And for those who didn't get the reference:

https://youtu.be/o48KzPa42_o

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis

He died in Aug of 2018.

To some extent this is how most engineering works. If you're building a bridge, you don't usually start off by building the steel mill first.

Last month one of my friend joined Amazon. At one point this person worked along with engineers who would implement highly optimized systems in C/C++. Now at Amazon his job will be to write little Javascript turdlets to call and parse ten different Amazon services and generate some sort of database table/report to be used by product managers.

The way this guy described his work made me (developer of half-assed micro services) feel like a rocket scientist.

> Javascript turdlets

thank you

Yes, plumbing together things because we don't want to reinvent the wheel every time, but on the next level of abstraction you're all on your own. What approach do you take, how do you represent your data, what kind of user interface, how do you negotiate the project scope - that's on you and your experience. Not to mention that there's always a corner of the project that needs a clever new approach or algorithm and you can do amazing things there.

I think the more successful shift in the last 20 years was to train non-CS Majors towards a minor in CS and inventing another dozen nonprogrammer "tech" roles.

That could be the end of a lot of local engineering jobs as people from other majors can now actually manage the offshore programming in their field without as much miscommunication. At any rate it seems like a very different landscape than back when even other parts of a tech company might not know the basics of what their developers do.

I’m not so sure a CS degree prepares anyone to program things - maybe some very light embedded work. I’ve interviewed many a person with a CA degree or even a masters degree that can’t code well.

> how sustainable is programming? $75/hr to basically just write SQL tables and APIs that are advanced CRUD wrappers with light business logic on them? seems ripe for automation.

The end of programming has been breathlessly predicted for at least the last 30 years (particularly with the whole 4GL thing). I'll believe it when I see it.

i think the answer is - come work for a FANG company. it's not a simple crud app, the engineers are not excited. they are above average, and they get paid more based on col and value add - for faang, the engineering is not cost center, it's the business value.

Is $500k really "average" engineer compensation at top tech companies? That's the average compensation for an L6 at Google, which has an average tenure of 13.2 years https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html. Many people will max-out at L5 in there careers.

Compensation is really good in tech, but I don't think saying "$500k/yr total comp for average engineers" is helping anybody.

> Is $500k really "average" engineer compensation at top tech companies?

(from my own experience) Absolutely not.

What is average compensation at top tech companies if average compensation at normal companies is $120k-$160k/yr?

https://www.levels.fyi/ you can't scroll 15 seconds there without running into a $250k+ compensation package.

> average compensation at normal companies is $120k-$160k/yr

This also doesn't like up with my experience. It's hard to get true averages for things like this in America.

Also, 250k is a lot less than 500k. It's still a ton of money -- I don't mean to say that top companies don't pay you well. They absolutely do. But 500k is a TON of money.

Not even close to it. Anecdotally, most are between low $100k to $400k depending on level, luck and tenure. However stacking RSU appreciation and refreshers can skew those numbers a lot.

The $500k plus is L6+ or Netflix-like companies

I find it a bit strange that people count stock appreciation when reporting total compensation. It’s not very helpful for someone looking to compare salaries.

Those RSUs and refreshers are always granted based on a dollar amount that gets divided by current stock price, and that’s the value that the company recognizes in its accounting. Stock price increases are nice, but they distort the picture of how the company is valuing your compensation internally.

Plus, that stock compensation vests typically over 4 years then goes away. A few companies do “refresh” grants to partially make up for this, but you’ll never get up to the amount you got in your first 4 years. It’s not uncommon to take a 25-50% TC cut going into year 5 (ask me how I know).

When people come into HN salary threads and say things like “software engineers make $500k” what they really mean is: “Some outlier high level software engineers at a handful of FAANG companies in the Bay Area can potentially top out at $500k total compensation in year 4 if they are in a fast rising stock market, and if they are master negotiators.”

> Plus, that stock compensation vests typically over 4 years then goes away. A few companies do “refresh” grants to partially make up for this

This depends on the company. Amazon and Microsoft generally don't, but facebook and Google do. If I hadn't negotiated my initial grant upward, my refresh last year (year 3) would have been the same size, and the one I'll get in a few months will very likely be larger.

I'll still see a drop in comp year 5 due to an interaction between stock growth and my first year's grant being small, but ehhh.

> When people come into HN salary threads and say things like “software engineers make $500k” what they really mean is

Yes and no. Like L6 is certainly not common, but it's also not a particularly outlier level (I can crank of a list of 10 people at that level I work with on a weekly basis), and they're probably all pulling in something close to 500K, and will be forever.

Yes and no. Amazon, for example, takes future growth into account when providing refreshes. They have a target take-home in a calendar year, and if you're above it you don't get a refresh, if you're below it you may.

"basically just write SQL tables and APIs that are advanced CRUD wrappers with light business logic"

That's a somewhat defeatist perspective. Don't think of yourself as "I ONLY do x,y,z", but rather as "of course I do x,y,z but more importantly a, b, and c too! (where a, b, and c are things that are very valuable to company).

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