My experience confirms this. The least paid jobs I had were also the most stressful.
This is completely false.
You get paid more when the company values you more.
The company values you more, when they make more from what you are able to contribute, on average.
Highly paid engineering work environments are strongly correlated with interesting work and with good working conditions.
> This is completely false.
I wouldn't say it's completely false. For example, I'm guessing many enterprise software developers make more than many CS professors. Said professors are obviously qualified to make CRUD apps but they would rather do research or teach curriculums based on their interests.
> The company values you more, when they make more from what you are able to contribute, on average.
Yes, this is true. But your conclusion does not follow from that:
> Highly paid engineering work environments are strongly correlated with interesting work and with good working conditions.
There is probably some correlation between interesting work for the engineer on the one hand and profitable work for the employer on the other, but it's not nearly as strong as you make it seem.
Simply ask for more in salary and benefits. When they ask why, state all the reasons why the increase is warranted. If they deny the request, look for another job that pays the higher amount.
When I was hired for my absolute first job, over two decades ago, I was asked how much I want. I did not know how much I can ask so I asked some minimum that I thought would pay for my expenses. The guy who interviewed me, who was to be my manager, said he shouldn't be telling this but I can ask twice as much.
Sounds like what happened at Intel, from the top comments.
I'm not surprised Intel does this and the telecommunications side I have seen from them in Europe was rotten to the core. I have several anecdotes here just one: A friend got poached from Intel in a cushy job with great pay in a key role a lot of niche knowledge, they had to know how valuable he was, after the first week on the new job with Intel he got told that the department decided to reduce the headcount due to a restructuring and so he was the first to go.
If it sounds like "business as usual" let me add nobody else was fired, he had a 3 month long negotiation, 6 months notice period on the old job, 3 kids, and in his late 40ies in a specific market. What he was promised would have justified taking the risk. Later I heard they do this all the time from a guy who recruits for Intel. Also this was not in the enterprise market with lot of talent but telecommunications O&M (operations and maintenance plane). He eventually went to go beg to get his job back. He'll never have the same standing in the company tho.
> A friend got poached from Intel in a cushy job
> after the first week on the new job with Intel ... he was the first to go.
He got poached from Intel or should it be by Intel? Since his new job apparently was at Intel
> Later I heard they do this all the time
Why do they do that? Sounds like a waste of time for the recruiters (and him but apparently they don't care about that)
If nothing else, making 30% more and saving it would allow you to retire 30 percent earlier. Is half assed slacking for 10+ extra years really that good a proposition when instead you can actually crush it now and then be fully free?
Also, to be honest I've never seen the "he's underpaid so we expect less" dynamic in management. What I see much more often is "this guy is bad, not quite so bad that we can fire him but almost. We can't justify raising his comp so let's give him shit work that others would rather not do." Maybe your situation is as you say but seems odd.
But you're glossing over the downsides of trading your youth away for a hopeful payoff at a later date. Not all of us like that bargain.
I make a fraction of what people in this thread are saying they make. But what price do you put on being 30 and single on a beach in Mexico, happy, with a low stress job? You could look at it as if I paid half my salary to buy back my time.
We all value things differently, but notice that it's your youngest self that's most eager to bargain your youth away.
Intel engineers design chips, used by billions of people. There is a certain value, placed on such jobs. And it appears, that Intel management is happy to exploit that value.
I’m well established in my career (and I don’t have SV costs of living to be fair) - but anywhere even in the galaxy of $200 an hour would be life-changing for me.
There are ways to move anywhere you want, and ways to get remote work at us companies, especially now, if you don't want to move. They are not easy, but they exist.
Not easily at all, clients usually avoid working with offshore freelancers directly, and established freelance platforms tend to cap the overseas rates (because they want their cut and also clients expect offshore devs to cost much less)
Or am I totally wrong here?
If someone has other solutions for out-of-the-US, non-US-tax-reporters to applying to US remote jobs that list "US based" as a requirement I would love to hear about it.
If the government offered jobs at the minimum wage there would be an effective price floor for wages. Better yet, if those government workers spend their income they can drive economic demand which ends up creating jobs above minimum wage. Eventually every job pays more than minimum wage and nobody is dependent on the jobs guarantee.
Your solution isn’t better. The government cannot be everywhere the way that Walmart is.
I really don’t think its impact is going to be that big. Low skilled labor will still find ways to get hired for less, off the books if the need is great enough...it happens all the time.
The government already offers jobs like that too, just that it's through the prison system and the floor is much too low
I think the largest pay bump I've ever seen in a year was right at 2% or possibly even less.
I think GP is worried this may not be the case, and he would lose purchasing power.
Nothing may happen, but I think we'll have to wait and see if this is the case or not.
And one would assume you'd see rents and housing prices very rapidly start going up, then presumably other prices over varying levels of time.
What would happen if we were to set the minimal wage at 100K so that we eliminate the poverty in one swift move and everyone is either equally rich, or as you are worried - equally poor :)
Recruiter H/R: "We need to hear your salary requirements to move forward with this position".
me: "I would like to hear your offer".
Recruiter / HR: "We won't be able to consider your candidacy without your salary expectations"
Me: "Then, despite my interest in this outstanding company, and the high value I believe I can contribute to it, I will be forced to go with the employers that make a salary offer first".
Best fuck I ever had.
Not only this shows a little more negotiation savvy, but once in a blue moon this could give you an offer you have not expected. For example, they could just say "OK".
As the other reply pointed out, you are cutting yourself (a) out of the conversation (b) out of finding out what your actual range is.
Here's a dirty secret for you - very often the recruiters don't share the range because the range is broad, they may fill the role with a mid-level or a super-senior at 2x the comp. If they tell you the range, it's likely a more cookie cutter mid-level role and you don't even get to learn where you could land (or what your level doesn't hit and maybe you want to work toward)
You make it sound like if they don't tell you what the range is, they are somehow doing you a favor. No, if they don't tell you the range it's not because they're nice or whatever, but because they're trying to get you to sign on for the lowest amount possible. If you hear the range is larger than what you were expecting, you're gonna try to hit that upper bound. Both positions are understandable from their own points of view, no hard feelings here. But, in general, the recruiter is not your friend and not there to help you. Them not disclosing information is to their advantage, not to yours.
An employer, upon reasonable request, shall provide the pay scale for a position to an applicant applying for employment. For purposes of this section, “pay scale” means a salary or hourly wage range. For purposes of this section “reasonable request” means a request made after an applicant has completed an initial interview with the employer.
Based on the wording, in that it appears to be addressing employers in the law's jurisdiction, I believe the answer is a).
1. The candidate will ask closer to the upper end of the range but will get declined. Both company and candidate lost because divulging the upper end created unrealistic expectation by the candidate.
2. The candidate will or will not ask closer to the upper end and if he asks, the company declines and proposes more realistic rate. Now, both still loose because the candidate is "tainted" by thinking the company did not think he is worth the money and that he could get so much more.
The alternative is to have very narrow range but this is also suboptimal, because it is better to be flexible and once you get to know the candidate figure out where he/she fits.
Asking for rate at the beginning also allows to fine-tune the recruitment process. The company should NEVER propose less than what the candidate stated as their minimum. That's just a way to get an unhappy employee from day one. So, by specifying your rate you also specify minimum requirements you have to pass for the company to be interested in you. If you say you are expensive, that's the standard you are going to be evaluated against.
Again, having a flexible rate but not letting the candidate know is better for the company, not for the candidate. Keeping the range a secret instead of defining the range correctly and specifying the job correctly seems like laziness on the part of recruiter/ HR.
I've spoken with (drunk to be honest?) recruiters that got a lower overall commission the higher the salary for the recruited person got.
Not to be an asshole, but that wouldn't suprise me. Maybe I got more cynical with age but anytime someone I don't know tries to tell me, implies, makes me feel that he/she is my friend and wants what's best for me, without a clear reason or incentive for it being so, I get real suspicious real fast.
I personally like it much better than having rigid positions and have to pass on a candidate just because he/she does not fit a rigid set of requirements.
What kind of seniority are we talking about here?
I think that's an unhelpful point of view in any but most commoditized-labor situation.
The more rare and hard to find your combination of skills and experience, the longer the recruiter has spent looking for you, and the more motivated they are to get you the best offer possible to get you in the door. It's not in their or your interest to lose you to save a few tens of thousands of dollars.
>> You make it sound like if they don't tell you what the range is, they are somehow doing you a favor. No, if they don't tell you the range it's not because they're nice or whatever, but because they're trying to get you to sign on for the lowest amount possible.
Again that kind of only works in the most commoditized situations (eg: "hire anyone with 6 months experience with React" or whatever.) The more specialized the recruiting search, the broader the range becomes: for example, "we need someone who knows technology X and Y, has been in industry A and has shown attributes B and C" they recognize they may end up hire a more junior or a more senior person and expect different things from them. So the role may pay 250 or it may pay 500 based on who you are. If you're in the 250-level experience range, it's meaningless for you to hear that it can go up to 500.
Which would that be, if you have multiple offers, where they name the first number, and then you offer them the opportunity to bid higher against each other?
So yeah sorry, not moving for a lower value
Probably the simplest strategy would be to always ask for the amount you curently make, plus 30% or 50%. And keep interviewing once in a while even if you are okay with your current job. If you asked for less than you could get, the next jump will fix it.
Then don't increase your expenses, save the extra money, retire early.
A big piece of career advice I have for any folks that feel like they're in dead-ends or are just getting started is that, in modern society, you should be constantly expending time and energy to ensure you're in the most personally rewarding position - the world is a cruel place where the socially awkward and introverted have a constant uphill battle to not be exploited.
Oh and we're all super lucky to be in tech because in a lot of other fields there is just no way to advance yourself.
This was both uplifting and an apt commentary on how to survive in the modern age.
Well said.
> Oh and we're all super lucky to be in tech because in a lot of other fields there is just no way to advance yourself.
I feel like this is a pretty cynical take. Really, what's happening is that more and more jobs are becoming tech jobs. It may not be as glamorous as going to stand-ups each morning, but there's plenty of opportunity out there and we're just in an awkward transition period where societies are trying to play catch-up with, historically-speaking, a lot of changes in a short amount of time.
Whether that transition ends with peace or chaos is going to depend on how easy the transition is made for everyone
I must have extremely different definition of glamorous to you.
It is also economically inefficient. If you are worth $100k/y and you sell yourself for $50k/y then you are basically doing charity for your company. If you really cared about charity you would ask for the higher salary and then donate the money yourself. What really happens is that you are keeping an economically inefficient company alive. That's not just bad for you but also for the economy as a whole because your "talents" are being wasted.
>Oh and we're all super lucky to be in tech because in a lot of other fields there is just no way to advance yourself.
It's the opposite. Low skill jobs are drying up. Most of them are going overseas. Getting a high skilled job is not luck, developed countries are restructuring their economies to specialize in high skilled jobs.
Just a bunch of sentences to say that $/hr isn't the end all, but a decent at-a-glance way of comparing.
Everyone is 15+ inches and making six figures minimum and if you're not, you're pathetic and are getting taken advantage of.
Not a very healthy situation, even now with everybody WFH
HN is great, but it really is not an accurate sample of real world wages.
$45 * 8 (hours a day) * 22 (days a month) * 12 (months) = $95k
You were getting paid the equivalent of $95k/year as an intern??
I was originally hired for the summer at $35/hr or so, and then got a raise at the end of the summer when they asked me to stay on part-time during the school year.
The immigrant will agree to a low salary because the alternative is getting deported.
$45/hr|$90K would be too low nowadays. GP's experience could have been more than a few years ago.
!!!...
Well, Netflix might come close. I can count two principal-level architects pulling north of 700k/y, but I doubt they work just 40 hours a week.
Think of it as a $200k salary with $500k of "just to ensure you won't find a better offer elsewhere" on top.
These aren't the kind of roles you can work your way into. You have to be in the right place at the right time and be there for a long time.
Sorry for grammar. On mobile but wanted to quickly contribute.
I was incredibly lucky in my last role. Something I don't think I'll ever be able to match again.
When I joined the company as a sysadmin there were 30 staff, and they really liked the work I did and eventually they put me on this innovation incentive scheme that basically said "If you keep delivering innovative solutions and driving the technology direction in the way that you are, we will pay you a bonus of 1.5% of the profit made from e-commerce sales every 4"
At the time sales profit from e-commerce channels was about 250k for each period, so a very nice $3500~ bonus every 4 months.
When I left the company ~15 years later:
- 5000+ staff
- Had moved into a role managing a large team of sysadmins and was responsible for the technical innovation strategy/direction of the business overall.
- Same CEO and and my original "IT manager" was now the CTO who I still reported into.
- They kept me on the same bonus scheme for my whole time at the company.
- By the time I left online sales profit for each 4 month period was $50,000,000.
Right place, right time, right people.
:-)
I gave up a lot for that job and worked damn hard though. I let it consume me and ended up very unhealthy.
That said, I think this is only achievable because of how relatively young and greenfield software is - the industry hasn't existed for more than a eighty years in any real sense (and arguably didn't really begin until things moved from academic to commercial in the seventies or so) and thus a lot of software can add massive value to society while doing relatively simple things. I think in a few hundred years all the low hanging fruit will be gone and software development will be extremely different from these wild-west days but right now yea - the value you can produce for a business can absolutely justify pretty ridiculous salaries.
I think the important counter point for humility here is that those folks aren't particularly special, maybe a 700k architect is a literal genius at the peak of their career, but there are other folks out there that are just as creative and making 80k. Maybe we just need to think of the strange wage imbalance in development as being as fickle and arbitrary as celebrity - could that actor at the local playhouse have been the next Jennifer Lawrence if only they'd gotten cast for the role? Quite possibly, but luck wasn't on their side and passed them over.
I'd say that people that command such high salaries are certainly worth it (in the cases I've seen at least) but they have also benefited from some fantastic luck in their career progression - they could've been someone else and be earning far less for the same set of skills.
If you write a webapp to solve a $5000/day problem, that’s worth $X. If your company sells that to 10 companies, your work is worth 10X. But if it’s sold to 10000, wow.
Think of your work in terms of value provided to the buyer, not in terms of cost to yourself. Thus you unlock career potential
I think it's important to recognize the semi-arbitrary source of where this value is coming from and understand that while employees impacting a lot of customers are indeed creating a lot of value the work they are doing isn't significantly different from the work made by folks with more modest salaries.
Basically, at the core, I think there's a significant ethical question here and I would highlight the relative infancy of the industry. It's likely that in a few hundred years all this incredible value creation will be highly commoditized and that innovative development will be relegated to academic pursuits that companies only adopt and bring to market after a lot of investigation and research.
Uh hrm - as another parallel you might compare this to speed running. Right now we can do relatively simple things to dramatically create value (time saved off the run) but as time goes on and the run gets more "perfected" then the ability to shave time off the run (or create value for the business) will require a lot more investment of effort. I'm not certain if this will happen since everything in how development works points to this being a really hard state of the industry to accomplish - but looking at economic trends it feels inevitable that eventually it will be more profitable to, for instance, produce a cheaper better whatsapp then being the first market entrent into the coveted Deciduous Tree Vlog Platform market.
If the webapp can solve $5000/day problem but there is literally millions of people that can do this, you are certainly not getting a share of that. Somebody else is maybe going to be rewarded for spotting an opportunity but the most you get is a "market rate".
The only way you can get paid proportionally is if you are literally the only one that can solve the problem and you know it and they know you know it.
Your goal is to maximize the value delivered. Their goal is to minimize how much of the value you capture.
You’ll find balance somewhere in the middle.
And ultimately there’s only so much a company will pay if they can’t extract value out of your work. Regardless of how good you are.
In non-tech companies, IT is seen as a cost. Half the time your contribution is just saving the company from hiring x number of people to do the work manually.
I worked at a startup, became amazed at the sales crew’s ability to find buyers. I could make the app (and Co. could find few willing & capable to), but in no way could find anyone to fork over that much for it.
Google for example makes about 7-figures per employee. That’s a loooot of room to negotiate.
Short gigs where you being in a solution, point a team/company on the right direction and then jump off compensate for the accrued knowledge transfer more than for the hour worked
Think of it like a top end athlete, they aren't paid for the few hours of play, but for the years of training that keep them competitive
An oil man had a pump on the fritz and needed someone to fix it, fast. He sought the advice of the best expert he could find, and luckily when the expert listened to the problem he said, "let me spend a day with it and see what I can do."
The old expert pulls up in an empty pickup with only a hammer and nail in hand, calmly walks over to the pump, places the nail on the side, and taps it. Then, the expert dusts himself off and hands the oil man a slip of paper that reads,
"Total $1,000. Nail $1. Where to place the nail $999"
Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1. Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
There are vanishingly few people getting $500/h and getting 40 hours worth of contract a week, 50 weeks a year. I don't think I've ever heard of one.
Edit for background: I have 9 years experience, an MSIS working at a financial company.
He may still be underpaid, but it's not apples/apples.
A recurring issue I've found is, "Jack the EE picked up programming in a week, why are you worth as much or more than him when you aren't even a 'real' engineer?" Substitute another field for EE based on industry. Software is simultaneously too easy for them to take seriously, and too hard for them to fathom its depths.
The company should definitely be paying more out of their pocket to employ good tech talent, but I'm not so certain whether it's good for society for all that created value to be given to the developer who happened to create it. I think there is a big value gap in how much developers can produce with relatively little labour compared to, say, a car mechanic - but I think that it might be best for everyone if a really big proportion of that value gap was sliced up and distributed more evenly across society in the form of social programs to benefit us all.
Sometimes I think about becoming a mechanic. They make good money.
I definitely would not work at a dealer or chain. Being part of a small company or your own would be great. Not moving up wouldn't be a big deal in that kind of role.
On a side note, I'm confused why everyone is obsessed with moving up. Can't people just be happy where they are? I really don't see much difference in my company between the various levels, nor is it a very big promotion at 7%.
And since management teams in large companies tend to grow out of whichever departments are the primary domains, if software is always seen as tertiary then managers with software background are consistently absent or too few to clear up this confusion.
Just because an arbitrary person can learn how to do X, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a huge shortage of people who can competently X. The price paid for software development is a product of supply and demand, not how “special” software developers are.
In west coast tech hubs, that's about half of median salary alone. If you factor in bonus, stock options, etc. That's about 1/3 or 1/4 of total comp.
Software engineering and development field is extremely difficult. There are many opportunities in this field, because there are so few candidates that can do the work. HN is self selected group of people with experience in the field. But they are actually very few in number.
The average worker does not have in demand skills in tech sector.
Its not so much that the skills themselves are in demand, its the enormous experience that someone who can command that kind of fee has. The skill set you're talking about can be learned probably in a year or two of 8-5, M-F self-guided learning from Udemy / Coursera / YouTube, but its the experience of using those skills to build something of value that is driving that hourly rate, not so much the skills themselves.
If you feel I'm missing something here, please go into more depth, because I find this all quite fascinating. :)
$200/hr in the UK would put you in the top 1% of earners.
That roughly equates to $400,000 a year. Which may seem like a lot, until people actually see what the market rates are in west coast tech hubs.
Also, Mark Zuckerberg is worth $100 Billion, for creating basically a CRUD app in php.
That said, 45 is really low for any position in an engineering company, unless it’s ancillary support services that get farmed out. Something like ‘Lab Admin’ type of thing.
It works out for some people but it will not work out for everyone.
And, honestly, I think that after the pandemic companies are going to have a lot of trouble trying to pull employees back into in-office full time work.
Or did you mean this is $45/hr post-tax rate?
Had a flat. Not a big deal; got the spare on, schedule some time at the mechanics to get a new tire. Tire gets put on, everything is great, time passes.
Later, come back for a regularly scheduled tire rotation. "We can't get the lug nuts off. They've been over tightened." the mechanic says. "Well, how do you suppose that happened?" I ask. Of course, it goes a. completely over that their head, (they were the last ones to touch the lug nuts) and of course, b., it's my wallet that pays for their error.
They were not the mechanic for a while after that. Aside from that gaffe they did good work, and everybody else I tried for a while was all around worse. Eventually returned to them, and that was really the only problem I ever had…
Having contracted a lot in the past, the fact that Intel is hiring contractors signals a hiring crisis.
Either nobody wants to work there, or work is ramping up. But a company full of contractors might not be too healthy.