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Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

There’s some truth to this I’ll admit. But if most of the work is dull why do you need the “best” ?

I saw an explanation later in this thread that made more sense. FANGs do have a lot of good employees. And if they didn’t pay high salaries other companies would simply swoop in and free ride on all the hard work they do to find and groom talent. FANGs spend a lot of money scouring the entire globe and interviewing so many people in detail. It’s a juicy target for recruiter raiding. And just like you can’t get fired for hiring IBM you can’t get fired for hiring FANG. This attracts yet more talent. But yes the level of the engineers is not as great as the salaries would suggest.

But on the flip side for anyone doing hiring. If you want some wicked smart devs who don’t ask for as much then look at game devs.

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Theres no reason to not pay for the best. Engineer's provide so much value compared to an individuals cost. I can give an a example of what I'm working on. I'm doing maybe 2-3months of work, the project cut a one time cost in half saving 10million dollars. I make about quarter million in a year. A tiny fraction of the value I provided this year alone. Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good? 100k is 1 percent of that value.

Now that I type this out I feel like I'm getting ripped off. BRB to demand a raise lol

>Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good?

with regards to the game industry: because outside of maybe a dozen studios worldwide (EA and Rockstar studios level of profit), most of the games industry literally cannot compete with the salaries FAANG offers.

all those trillion dollar companies have dozens of services and products to monetize off of (indirectly or directly). Games need hundreds of employees to deploy one short lived project in a few years minimum. And attempts to monetize in a service format (the default for FAANG) has been met with much criticism. So games operate on razor thin profits.

>Why penny pinch on pay and risk having employees that might not be as good?

Because they can afford to not pay you as well, and your value ( or rather, the "damage" caused by the not-so-good employee) is hard to prove.

FAANG doesn't need "the best", but they do need to deny upstart competition that talent.

FAANG needs good employees because of how big and complex everything is. A lot of work is just integrating the 100s of services that already exist into whatever new product is coming out.

Is the work novel, not really, but it is difficult and very complex.

Dull doesn't mean you can half ass it - I worked for telco billing systems and getting it right to the penny is important.

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