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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

I worked in investment banking (as an analyst, not an engineer), so very different part of finance, but this was my take as well. Companies might love to talk about how important engineers are, but at the end of the day, if you can't directly link someone to revenue, they get viewed as a cost center and take on second tier status in the organization. Then the same companies complain that they can't find enough (or retain) engineering talent. Not many places get the balance right. Silicon valley treats engineers well because for the most part, the value they bring is more obvious (and also, they don't threaten the existing hierarchy in the company). Curious to hear if anyone has had the opposite experience.

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Yes, quite a few developers left our investment bank and went to work for our suppliers (of trading software), stating they'd rather work somewhere where they're seen as value creators rather than a cost center.

I worked for 15 years as a software engineer at Morgan Stanley where they valued the process of taking a 3 martini lunch idea into a production platform so value of engineers was recognized and rewarded as such ... its somewhat easier to whip up a new financial wrinkle its a whole other level of magic to design and implement that idea when it takes 60 software developers 3 years to get that idea to market before the rest of the street ... of course the IT department was/is the largest budgeted portion at the entire bank and for a good reason

Engineers get paid well in SV because they are in demand, have lots of employment opportunities, and therefore are more difficult to retain.

And because their contributions can be tied back to revenue. You need both, demand for talent, as well as the ability & justification to pay for it.

Engineers are in high demand all over the world. But most companies do not profit enough from technology to justify similar paying SV salaries.

Not always. Frequently, the connection between code that’s written today and revenue tomorrow is tenuous and difficult to package in a way that says “look at me! I’m valuable!”

And, then there are those somewhat rare occasions where a project is not intended to increase revenue, and may even decrease it. At my last employer, we guesstimated that a project I worked on for months could possibly have ended up costing us $2M per year in revenue. That was both accepted and expected, because we were doing it to gain goodwill with users, but in such a way that it might end up pissing off a small minority of our customers.

I really wish, just once, I could work on a project and put underneath it on my resume “Increased revenue by X%,” because I’ve never worked on anything that was so easy to directly trace back to the top line.

Cost savings are another story, because engineers can fairly easily quantify how much less money is being spent by doing $THING a bit more efficiently....

My partner leads engineering talent programs for a large SV company and I can assure you they do not track value added by engineers. In the overwhelming majority of cases the value added cannot be tracked. Now, if you're talking Product Managers, that's a bit of a different story. It's simply a supply and demand issue.

tell that to Mr Nugget from The Wire. How much you get paid is a reflection on the CEO | culture not on the value you provide.

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