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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

FWIW Ford was hiring around this area (southern Ontario) for software engineers to work on their in-car systems like this. Not sure if this specific one. From what I've heard they were woefully underpaying. A friend of mine talked to them -- very qualified; like me he worked on similar touchscreen, interactive display type systems at Google/Nest, and had a general background on similar systems, and on QNX, etc. They tried to lowball him badly. Like 1/2 the rate he asked for (contract) and probably 1/3rd or 1/4 what we made at Google. I saw a posting from them recently, again, and they were crowing about how they wanted to see candidate's GPA's etc. etc. I don't have a degree, so even if I hadn't heard about their low pay, I wouldn't even consider applying despite being probably very qualified for what they were doing. We had a whole team at Google that worked on getting rid of "jank" and improving FPS and performance on a really low-spec SoC. I wasn't any kind of expert on that team, but I learned a little. But they clearly weren't willing to pay reasonable for talent (like most local Canadian employers, frankly)

All of this to say: You get what you pay for.

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I see this sentiment everywhere outside the tech first ecosystem. In the generalization of 'workers'/'engineers' v/s 'supervisors'/'managers', programmers are often seen as just workers. For whatever reason, an MBA or even a BBA is seen as an officer/supervisor.

Even product teams at tech first companies tend to represent this dogma. There are exceptions but the programmers are workers dogma is prevalent in this world. This is the main reason for suppressed pay for programmers and software engineers in all other industries except tech. Because of this, these other industries will never be able to catch up on the areas of hardware/software interfaces, let alone pure software craftsmanship. On the contrary, the software craftsmen are now learning the tropes of the non-software world and turning craftsmen in those areas as well.

So yeah, Ford might make a fast car, they will almost never be able to build a software driven car, which is the car of the future.

> ... they will almost never be able to build a software driven car, which is the car of the future.

Software can make a lot of things better, but for whatever reason most cars end up with closed software solutions with a limited amount of updates, problems with how responsive/inefficient they are and a plethora of other complications. At that point, slapping an Android tablet on the dash for navigation might be a better idea, since at least that can be changed out or customized with relatively few issues, versus being stuck with a flawed built in system that's a black box as far as you're concerned.

Alas, why even pay for that? Why not have a car with a simple dash, less electronics and simply mounts for you to bring your own. Of course, that's not the direction in which the industry seems to be headed.

Now, this might be a silly comparison, but I can't help but to think of comparing a simple soviet tractor (say, a T-25 https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/T-25?_x_tr_sl... ) which is simple to use and repair, to something like a modern John Deere. Perhaps that's one of the better examples, where the more complex design ends up rather expensive, even if you don't need all of the features. But the former, simpler design? Well, somehow ones like that aren't manufactured much nowadays.

Surely in regards to cars it should also be possible to pick the essentials (e.g. in regards to safety and security) and then offer plenty of different models, with varying different levels of technology embedded. Then again, it's easier to pump up the price if you cram more features in even in the basic models. Of course, it's not like that would be okay if those closed systems were to be replaced with open source either - since that might be a serious safety liability.

The principles behind the auto industry are primarily driven by the last motive. To pump up the price for some shitty upgrade that not many really want. It's the same core, with a few upgrades that are super cheap to manufacture. Like a dashboard change or change a knob to a button etc.

It's like selling a new iPhone with just a few changes to some superficial apps such as I donno, Numbers.

Agree with you on a modular car where you just let people customise and build whatever the heck they want. I even think you should be able to customize a 2 seater v/s a 4/5 seater with plenty of options.

I visited my friend while he was plowing his fields, and one of his tractors was out of commission due to a broken sensor. The first thing that came out of his mouth was: I don’t hate the sensors, they saved one of my tractors from an oil leak one time.

For tractors, the reason they gain features is to improve uptime, thus driving costs down. And they do.

They touched on this in the video atop the article. Ford is heavily leaning on Google/Android to help them overhaul the in-car software experience.

It would seem Ford is aware they lack in this area and have decided to outsource to the experienced craftsmen.

> So yeah, Ford might make a fast car, they will almost never be able to build a software driven car, which is the car of the future.

I would kill for a "low-tech" EV - think Toyota Corolla[1], but with an electric power train. No touch screen, no "self driving" beyond lane assistance & adaptive cruise. Unfortunately, manufacturers are unwilling to start off with a low-margin products, but I believe that is the car of the future, and will sell like hot cakes.

1. An electric Ford Maverick would fit the bill too, if they don't ape Tesla's cockpit design. The Nissan Leaf is close to my ideal, but the lack of active cooling on the battery is a non-starter.

This is what is desperately needed.

The main impediment for this approach is still the battery pack. Unless you can reduce the cost/kwh of batteries the corolla of the ev world won't happen. Battery costs per Kwh are on a downward trend. Tesla is probably around 100-110$ per KWh translating to about 7-8K for it's flagship 70 KWh battery pack.

7-8K in about 30K of manufacturing costs. https://electrek.co/2018/05/31/tesla-model-3-teardow-materia...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/12/01/ar...

So am not sure a low margin approach would fly right now, simply because of supply constraints for volume production. Probably at a 10M/year run rate, the economies of scale would tip in the low margin high volume favour.

How would you solve this conundrum. Can you just stick to a low margin approach from day 1 ? Focus relentlessly on cost reduction in all parts of the cars except the powertrain and the battery since those are the key reliability aspects.

May be a conventional 5 seater car is an overkill for most usage and can you instead build a version with a 35KWh battery pack but a 2 seater like a Miata. No frills, fast and safe car at nearly half the cost but am not sure if you can maintain the same range.

> I would kill for a "low-tech" EV - think Toyota Corolla[1], but with an electric power train. No touch screen, no "self driving" beyond lane assistance & adaptive cruise.

So... a base model Nissan Leaf?

A Nissan leaf would be perfect if it had active battery cooling. Replacement batteries prices eye watering (relative to purchase price), and Nissan Leaf batteries lose capacity rapidly (based on older models), especially in hot climes

I completely agree with your conclusion, this is why I feel that European tech companies can't compete with US ones at all. They just refuse to pay enough to attract the best engineers.

Well here's a North American company clearly not willing to pay competitive software engineering rates even within the continent, and trying to take advantage of sub-regional low rates. Like, they're not in Toronto, but just west of it, and companies there are paying less, so, hey, they should pay less, too, right?

You get what you pay for.

This is what happens when HR drones are allowed to do naive "compensation range surveys" for regions. They do not understand the subtleties of the market and try to lump people with specialized skills, lots of experience, etc. in with people fresh off the boat from overseas, pumping out bug fixes for boring internal legacy J2EE systems at ancient insurance companies.

Companies like this will be in real trouble if remote work continues to be a thing. They better hope it doesn't.

>Companies like this will be in real trouble if remote work continues to be a thing. They better hope it doesn't.

Would be much healthier for humanity overall if these poorly managed companies, you know, just died from their poor management.

Or at least outsourced the software engineering to companies that would do a proper job of it.

Which would probably still cost more than what they’re willing to pay, assuming that (cost) is indeed the problem.

I've found that paying companies a big pile of cash to do a thing is much more acceptable than paying an individual a big pile of cash to do the same thing. I don't know why. Risk management maybe.

If the person is a full time employee you have to pay benefits and you can’t just fire them when the project is done. Easier to just contract it out.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. It might be better to just contract the job out.

If recent US policy is any indication, it's far more likely that we'll give them billions of dollars of direct subsidy in a misguided attempt "protect American interests."

We're protecting jobs you see. People need jobs to survive, so we have to protect the jobs, not the people.

By giving companies money.

Won't somebody think of the meta-people?!

i.e. the corporations!

Too bad, so sad. They can adapt or die.

Reminds me of a back and forth I had with an NYT staff writer who claimed it was "inhumane" to expect people to totally relearn a set of skills every ten years.

People seem to forget that how they "feeeeeeeel" doesn't matter. The job market dictates what you do and don't have to do, and we live in a time when you must consistently learn new skills to be competitive.

I fully agree. Businesses can adapt or die. They shouldn't receive handouts because they're "job creators", and they certainly shouldn't be rewarded for having inefficient labour practices.

> Reminds me of a back and forth I had with an NYT staff writer who claimed it was "inhumane" to expect people to totally relearn a set of skills every ten years.

It is inhumane to expect people to relearn their skillset every decade on their own dime and time.

It's rare enough that companies pay for small-scale training - a full retraining is pretty much unheard of.

Maybe not. A lot of the lobbying from Ford/GM around electric car subsidies is based around the companies actually selling electric cars.

The board & management may have that plan but until they can sell electric cars that a) exist and b) dont spontaneously combust they wont get significant subsidies.

Yeah the fire thing isn’t ideal. Buy hey Toyota has wheels falling off their ev so yeah…

Also until that time, their competitors (foreign like Toyota, Hyundai, etc and specialized eg Tesla, Rivian, etc) will get more subsidies and continue to undercut them.

IMO what will really light a fire under their ass at this point, even if you forget about saving the planet, is that an EV is a lot more fun to drive than an equivalently price ICE (post rebates). Whenever I go back to an ICE vehicle for a rental situation, I tend to curse often at how sluggish it feels. Feels like an iPhone/Android vs Nokia situation, manufacturers will get with the program or they will get pounced out of the game by competitors.

This is very true. I now work for a massive global company with offices here in Vancouver. They bought the company I was contracting for, and lowballed me on salary saying it was competitive with the region, but in the same month, I was I interviewing across the street at Amazon for a hell of a lot more. If I had got the job it wouldn't have been even remotely worth considering. I tried negotiating, but no budge, so we'll see how long that lasts I guess. Not even competitive with other smaller companies in the city.

Companies don't seem to get that even though software devs tend to make more than most, the reality is that in the GTA or GVA it literally costs between $600k and $2m for a modest home. Even a renter would be stupid to not factor in the likelihood their rent will dramatically increase during the time they'll be employed.

Ya, great that I can afford a tiny studio basement suite while splitting rent, but I can't yet whether any significant emergencies or really think about eventually renting a place with a bedroom in it.

Everyone in lower income brackets is just really scraping by more than they'd care to admit.

The issue is that firmware engineering is strongly adjacent to EE which is sorely underpaid in the US considering the skillset the jobs require. Hiring managers are looking for EE refugees used to being underpaid.

That definitely is part of it.

Many of these traditional manufacturing OEMs have software outfits in the bay that clutter up my LinkedIn inbox. They're usually offering 130-170k with limited to no additional compensation in the same cities where FAANG is paying 100k+ over their rates in base alone. It's not just that they're doing silly regional surveys, they have fundamental misunderstandings of market rates.

Or they understand it perfectly and have made a conscious choice to target a lower tier of talent.

In a way I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the boardroom when this is discussed.

Because really, it's sad. I would have taken a significant salary drop to go work on something like this because the Ford office was local to me and the work sounded interesting and potentially more impactful than what I was doing at the time.

Except it's so far below a reasonable rate... and you pretty much know the place would be a crappy workplace producing a substandard product...

My brother-in-law is pretty high up at a traditional manufacturing OEM. To be clear, they don't manufacture anything that has electronics or software in it (but there is a pretty decent chance your car has something they made). They have a Bay Area software office that does general tech stuff - manufacturing software, business software, etc. Internal things plus some B2C stuff for people buying/installing replacement equipment.

I asked how they liked the software and how the office was working out. The response: "Oh, we don't do it for the software. We can hire 100 people out of Ohio State or Michigan and pay them midwest wages and get the same quality. The SV office is for the connections and investors we get."

It's entirely possible that they know exactly what they are doing ;)

I know they're not stupid, but it's still very frustrating when you have to go and use anything such offices produce. So many unnecessarily cut corners and penny wise, pound foolish decisions.

That's quite the statement considering how many corners, to pick one examole, Tesla is cutting constantly.

> Oh, we don't do it for the software. We can hire 100 people out of Ohio State or Michigan and pay them midwest wages and get the same quality.

No they can't... or they would.

Deeds. Not words.

I’ve encountered a bunch of people with that sort of background working that kind of job, it’s a real thing.

I don’t know why this is hard to believe. Not everyone wants to “grind leetcode” 24/7.

Yeah, I know someone who works at GE (in more traditional engineering). They have masters degrees and when I compare my salary or even someone starting out at a FAANG or Web 2.0/3.0 SWE with theirs, I'm genuinely surprised.

They also tend to not be aware of the salary ranges out there and I think these traditional companies are exploiting them because most of the engineers really respect the companies and what they stand (or at least stood) for.

They can, and they do.

Canadian companies always lowball Canadians.

20 years ago I worked in the US branch of a Canadian company - we weren’t paid richly but they were paid much less. As a new grad I made 20% more than a 5 year SWE as a Unix SA.

> Like, they're not in Toronto, but just west of it, and companies there are paying less, so, hey, they should pay less, too, right?

Hiring managers should really read [1], posted previously here in HN. TL;DR: It is not where you or the candidate are located. It is whom you're competing against for hiring talent.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

What a strange comment.

Ford is a us tech company.

Most people in Europe don’t want to leave.

Ford is not a tech company.

> Most people in Europe don’t want to leave.

I believe they're saying if European tech companies want to compete in business with US tech companies they need to pay their engineers more money.

> Ford is not a tech company.

By what standard?

Software is not their primary business.

If you mean ‘software company’ then say that - software isn’t the only form of technology - drive trains are also technology.

Is SpaceX a tech company?

> Ford is not a tech company.

By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company":

https://www.autoblog.com/2016/01/06/ceo-mark-fields-ford-dat...

Their software chops are certainly dubious, but there is no questioning their intent when it comes to entering the surveillance economy.

Ford sees itself as a "data company"

What a disaster. I wish they would focus on simply making good cars.

Ironically, Ford stopped selling the Focus and all other passenger cars (except the Mach-E) in the USA after 2018.

Margins for car companies are shit. Why would anyone invest in a race to the bottom high marginal cost company when differentiated zero marginal cost companies exist? And what if we just told everyone we were the latter?

Worked for Tesla so far.

> By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company":

The linked article quotes the CEO, "Overall, when you look at our business, we're not only a car manufacturing company. We are a technology company. As our vehicles become part of the Internet of things and as consumers give permission to us to collect that data, we'll also become an information company."

That's marketing related to the IoT buzzword. Next week they might talk about using blockchain. The other part of the statement is that they are a "data company," because they can sell information about their customers.

The words from the CEO are the same words from a data analyst, but they each mean something entirely different.

> By their CEO's own admission, Ford sees itself as a "data company"

What does this even mean? They don’t sell access to data. Oh! They use data to make business decisions? Well, welcome to 2004.

lol silly why would you think they use data to make business choices. They make the choices then make data to justify said choices. That’s how legacy companies do it

It means they figured that monetizing the data they collect on people driving their cars will bring them more cash than selling the cars themselves. The same way electronics manufacturer have doubled their profits on "smart" TV sets over a few years by feeding advertisers knowledge about what you're watching, and when, so you can be targeted more precisely in future ad campaigns.

Have you heard of those small companies called Google and Facebook? Care to compare their market cap with Ford's lately? Do you really think they're worth that much because of their quick web search and easy friend-finding?

I’ve spent the last decade working with very good EU engineers. If I wrote a list of the top 50 people I’ve come across in EU, I would estimate 45 of them now work remote for US companies or have moved to the US.

Anecdotal, but at least that’s my experience.

I worked in a tech company in US and it was full of PhDs from Europe. I'd say as much as 30% PhDs were Europeans.

> Most people in Europe don’t want to leave

Sure, but most people aren't skilled white collar tech workers with in demand skills who could be earning 3x post-tax salary in the US.

Health insurance is essentially free or cheap at any good tech company. EU pensions are underfunded (just like US ones) and as a high paid tech worker you're better off with maxing your 401k anyways.

If you look at the nationalities in any top US MS/PhD/MBA program, you'll find it's about 40% European, far above what undergraduate programs look like. That shows quite a few skilled workers in Europe want to leave.

If you are an unskilled worker, Europe is better as long as they can continue to sustain their social programs by taxing high earners and having defense be subsidized by the US. If too many high earners leave or the US becomes unwilling to pay for bases all across Europe, the whole system collapses pretty quickly.

Half the people I work with are from Western Europe and they won’t waste any time to take a dig at our lack of social safety net.

However, the thing I’d be worried about in their position, is, if the safety net is actually a sustainable project in a time of declining economic growth. They’re extrapolating on 30 or 40 years worth of data and if you’re retiring in 30 or 40 years a lot can change. Look what’s happened with the austerity crisis, something EU folks usually don’t want to talk about. Personally I’d want to manage my own retirement and risk tolerance.

The US is also funding medical research of most kind.

We don't want to leave but you can bet american companies have it easy fishing here. It's increasingly common for american companies to set small teams around here.

The only problem american companies have is dealing with the workers rights around here.

Are there any professions in European countries that are paid as well as US tech workers, for similar levels of skill and/or education?

Moreover, if EU tech companies are not willing to pay the best software/hardware engineers what they're worth, where do they all go? Not everyone wants to live in the US or work remotely.

Despite the general online sentiment, it's important to realize that the average American makes an absurd amount of money compared to their global peers. Even adjusting for PPP and other factors, average disposable household income for the US - a nation of 340M people - blows the doors off Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, etc. [1].

What's more though, median disposable income per capita ALSO places the US at the very top in the world, which is super impressive.

All of this is to say that the US is actually a very wealthy place for the white collar worker demographic, so companies need to pay high salaries to attract employees.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

And yet, I can't afford a house. I guess I'll go buy another Tesla.

As much as you can't afford a home in the US, you wouldn't be able to afford to buy a home in Europe even harder.

A flat in a nice part of Barcelona can be had for €300k.

What kind of flat is that? Size, building age, amenities, etc.?

I suggest you check out www.idealista.es and www.fotocasa.es.

So it's not real. Got it.

It's not my job to do their research for them, but two minutes will show that it very much is the case.

Most spaniards can't pay that. Even a large portion of devs.

I picked a higher-end example to counter the original assertion that American city prices are also similar in Western Europe (they're not).

Mmm, but housing is usually more expensive around here, except for SV and some other hot spots in the US.

US listings have plenty of houses for about 150k, which is unheard of in my low income area. And any blue collar american is making way more than me or my peers.

Services in most EU good, groceries are cheaper and better average quality for what everyone who's done shopping in both places, and some other stuff too. But in general I'd say that unless you go to Switzerland most euroa have lower disposable income and harder access to housing.

Even flats for 150k are old and in bad shape. You'd have to get very far from the city to get something nice for 150k and good luck with Internet and having services around.

Good luck buying a house in Toronto for under €600k.

Barcelona is absolutely a steal in comparison (and the food, transport, and weather are better, and the public healthcare is just as good).

Barcelona is a steal for you. The modal income for spaniards is under 20k.

So even if you manage to save money sharing a flat or living with your parents, good luck.

And plenty of houses for 600k around here by the way.

I have no interest in living in Sant Cugat. ;)

> And yet, I can't afford a house.

You can, but need to move elsewhere within the US. I know it's not great situation though.

You're not wrong, I just can't figure out where. From a purely jobs standpoint, SV is an engineer's paradise. Yes, I know remote work is a thing.

Yeah I guess so but we (americans) also have to worry about healthcare and having (basically) no parental leave etc so always kind of figured it wasn’t as good as it sounds. Open to interpretation maybe. Was under the impression Australians are paid very well in comparison? Like pretty good minimum wages and holidays - in addition to lucrative trades work. Just have personal experience to vouch for his though.

>Yeah I guess so but we (americans) also have to worry about healthcare

The disposable income figure that boc quoted includes things like healthcare.

Most tech companies here have 3-4 months of parental leave and have free or nearly free healthcare.

High value workers in the USA are the best compensated in the world by a wide margin. Other places are better for low value workers.

High value tech workers make a lot because:

Their companies figured out a way to make Ford pay millions to be the first result for "Ford" when a user searches for "Ford" instead of users getting a result for "Chevy" (tiny ad disclaimer and recent court cases overseas notwithstanding). https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/why-businesses-have-...

Other successful ones (often the same companies actually) charge (even after their expenses) a higher fee than federal taxes to be part of their store, compelled by a series of hidden ecosystem costs to the consumers, monopolization tactics, and network effects. That company in Europe with the low profit per employee is potentially paying out 30% of their gross (taxes are at least only on net) to one of these.

Basically many of these jobs are "bullshit jobs," working on problems the companies themselves create to rip people off.

That “adjustment” is really tricky to do convincingly.

I’ve been trying to compare an offer in the US and one in Montreal. The raw number for the US blows Canada out of the water, obviously, but adding in healthcare and childcare really starts to close the gap. That’s at least sort of calculable, especially if you ignore their option values, but it’s harder to price in other intangibles, like living somewhere walkable or with good public amenities (parks, schools, events). Basically no amount of money will buy you a walkable neighborhood in parts of the US: we looked—-hard—-in Houston!

>I’ve been trying to compare an offer in the US and one in Montreal. The raw number for the US blows Canada out of the water, obviously, but adding in healthcare and childcare really starts to close the gap.

The disposable income figure that boc quoted includes things like healthcare.

You need to look at the adjusted disposable income to include “social transfers in kind”. The US still leads there, but not as dramatically.

Even so, I’m not convinced that these numbers are actually that meaningful. They might tell you how many new Macbooks someone can afford, but do you think the median person’s quality of life is actually 50% worse outside the US? That seems implausible to me!

Kingwood is the closest thing, because you can at least go for a nice nature walk or have your kids safely bike to school, but there is zero 'walk to the corner store' infrastructure. It's a shame becausse my mother grew up in a much more walkable houston but now this was the best neighborhood she could retire in.

Thanks! We ended up not making the move for other reasons too, but it's good to know that we didn't miss something.

Top of the developed world in infant mortality and school shootings too! Us outside the US, who had the option to come and joining a FAANG; call it danger money.

School shootings kill dozens of people per year in the US, it’s a similar magnitude risk as lightning strikes or train crashes.

Infant mortality in the US is more common and indicative of problems that affect a lot of people. Namely, inequality in access to high-quality prenatal health care, and obesity. If you’re coming to work as a software engineer in the US, you are going to get good health insurance for yourself in your family. Obesity is potentially more relevant - lots of wealthy professionals in the US are obese. Not sure how much this tends to affect people who immigrate from healthier countries.

School shooting is bad example, it gets a lot of headlines but means nothing when averaged for whole US population.

There are other, more serious topics which somebody from ie Europe who isn't desperate for money should consider. Overall workoholic culture and much less free paid days and vacations (no, 20 days per year isn't that great rather bare minimum, 30 begins to be interesting if you actually want to have great life before retirement, on top of plenty of public holidays). Overall crime rates are important though, and thats very high in US for an european. Your taxes are (well repeatedly were, and definitely will be again) used to kill some poor civilians half around the globe for no moral reason whatsoever, bravo for making the world a better place. Low food/produce quality, the amount of NOK chemistry and procedures for growing and raising cattle that is banned in EU is staggering. Most of the country apart from big cities is remarkably full of backwardish fanatical christians, I mean isn't teaching evolution still banned in most schools? Abortions topic?

Healthcare is a topic on its own. There were many posts here before that even with good insurance, you pay hefty sums and very well earning folks were desperate to save enough for high quality healthcare for retirement, especially once you know you have some long term issue for the rest of your life (which we all end up having unless dying way too early). What about when you are between jobs? Or if you retire, since obviously this is when you need good medical system the most? If you had big accident/serious long term illness and employer fires you?

Raising kids - TCO is ridiculously huge, mainly due to University fees that in Europe you often simply just don't have, or they are rather token sums. Public schools are often crap with heavily underpaid teachers (the salary part is probably true everywhere though).

So you end up with higher income but you can lose it very easily if you have bad luck / ignore your health, or simply have few smart kids. Not even going into the topic of being treated as sub-human by US government, since you are not US citizen and somehow doesn't deserve basic human rights when it suits them.

Of course there are many positives but that's another topic.

Ive never heard that term, and let's be honest, it's ridiculous. There are plenty of places more dangerous than the US.

I think even their doctors are paid lower than US counterparts. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

There’s two ways to look at this. The first way is the shallow way, the raw numbers. The other way is that Europeans have a better social ethics and don’t need the gaudy numbers. Americans do. We don’t have a real culture of social welfare. We value capitalism unlike any other country in the world.

Yes, people in the medical field (doctors, nurses, administrators) are generally paid far lower than in the U.S. it’s one of the ways that European countries are able to spend so much less on healthcare than the U.S.

Euro doctors are significantly underpaid. Euro knows this and the reason you don’t see doctors coming to the USA is that the medical board would require them to retest. Indian doctors don’t mind so they come over and study again.

My hope is the USA changes the law so doctors from Western Europe countries can freely emigrate to the USA and practice for significantly more money. There’s no reason the USA shouldn’t drain Europe of this talent by offering far more money to these workers.

Licensure of physicians in the U.S. is controlled by medical associations through state licensing agencies. They have an incentive to limit the number of people who receive licenses to practice medicine.

They also control the number of new doctors through strict control of the number of new medical colleges and seats

Medical licenses are controlled by cartels in the US. They lobby the government to limit the number of residencies so we end up in a situation where only 40% of people who apply to medical school get in since they can't expand until the number of residency slots increases.

Teachers?

How does Europe make it work? Lower salaries, higher cost of living. Is it just that so many essentials are handled by the government? Or are they still coasting on the colonial wealth (this doesn’t seem likely)

Cost of living is way lower in Europe, especially if you also account for health care and higher education.

Europeans use weird tricks like charging two digit margin on medication, socialized education, and taxing fuel to pay for road maintenance.

They also use weird tricks like underpaying health staff (doctors and nurses make 40% of what they do in the US, look at NHS salary tables), relying on US defense subsidies, and taxing everyone making over 100k at insane rates.

We already have "socialized education" in public schools in most blue states if you make under 120k. The financial aid is generous enough that you aren't paying any tuition. The 70k sticker price is only paid by wealthy students, as a means of price discrimination.

> doctors and nurses make 40% of what they do in the US

Oh, those US nurses living the high life.

> relying on US defense subsidies

It's more like "keeping the US defense industry afloat by buying expensive gadgets we don't need".

> Oh, those US nurses living the high life.

More like oh, those UK nurses in the poorhouse. They deserve to make what their US counterparts are making.

> It's more like "keeping the US defense industry afloat by buying expensive gadgets we don't need"

Yes, because that's what's defending Europe against Russian invasion, right? Expensive gadgets you don't need? Or is Germany's broken down, dysfunctional army [1] going to do that?

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-biggest-enemy-thread...

>underpaying health staff

yes, things like surgeries or dental dont bankrupt you in Europe, and doctors dont automatically become millionaires collecting vintage cars or buying private planes.

> doctors dont automatically become millionaires collecting vintage cars or buying private planes

Yes, instead they make less than new grads working in literally any white collar field in the US, less than nurses in the US, and less than most blue collar trades in the US [1]. 91k GBP for the highest pay grade specialist doctor is just sad given how much training you need to become a specialist. That doctor could be making millions here in the US with their own practice.

GPs in the US (lowest paid specialty) get paid 2-3x what GPs get paid in the UK, according to the NHS payscales.

I think doctors working 80 hour residencies and grinding through med school deserve to get paid more, don't you think?

[1] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...

Is grinding thru med school somewhat sacred? should they earn more than EEs? civil engineers? architects?

> making millions here in the US with their own practice

yes, fixing noses or fake tits

>Yes, instead they make less than new grads working in literally any white collar field in the US

like almost everyone else. Newsflash - US is really expensive.

> Is grinding thru med school somewhat sacred? should they earn more than EEs? civil engineers? architects?

Everyone you mentioned should (and does in the US) earn more than 90k GBP. Nurses in the US (at least in California where they make 50-60$/h) earn the same as top pay grade specialty doctors in the UK according to that NHS payscale.

> yes, fixing noses or fake tits

No, there are many specialties which don't involve plastic surgery but make millions. Cardiologist, dermatologist, dentist, etc. Or if you're a surgeon and work at a big hospital, you can also make 500k+. All of these involve mitigating pain and suffering and saving lives.

Sorry you think plastic surgery is the only way to earn a good living in medicine.

> like almost everyone else. Newsflash - US is really expensive.

Compared to what, London? Amsterdam? Paris? The US isn't more expensive than anywhere else, and for a doctor working in the suburbs, it's way cheaper than any major city in Europe. Don't forget, health insurance for white collar workers in the US is cheap compared to their salary, and taxes are lower. Energy costs as well. And a 401k is a lot cheaper than paying progressive social security taxes that redistribute earnings.

At least the US doctor can afford a house, whereas the UK one will never buy one within an hour's drive of London in their lifetime.

From a tech workers perspective in Western Europe, we have relatively high wages compared to the median, but it's just heavily taxed. For reference: when I started my first tech job 5 years ago, I started off at a pay higher than my mom who's 30 years into a career in public services. I started off in the highest tax bracket from the get go too.

These high taxes are indeed used to run a lot of public services such as schooling, infrastructure, socialized healthcare etc. As such there's a high degree of wealth re-distribution since the people that don't/can't contribute as much still get the benefits of all of these public services.

As to the higher cost of living, I personally feel like we tend to have access to the staples at a similar level of purchasing power as Northern Americans, but our disposable income doesn't stretch remotely as far beyond that. Automobiles are far less accessible, a new iPhone would eat up a substantial amount of my monthly take home, etc.

Just my anecdotal and very top level two cents right here.

Having worked in both US and Europe I think this is very much less about average engineer and much more about engineering management and product management. There are many excellent software engineers in Europe already, and they are generally OK being paid much less than in the US. But the strategy, ambition, and execution discipline imparted by management are not there, so folks end up being underutilized there. The average engineer - even at a FAANG - often gets lionized but really isn't that amazing IMO.

Yes, in the industry Euro engineers are considered to be generally high quality and underpaid. A good value. The danger being there are awful ones too that are hard to fire. In my experience Euro devs are really good though if you interview well. Individual contributors from Europe are generally a great value.

Euro managers however are generally thought to be of extremely low quality and unreliable as well as 20-30 years dated in terms of running an org. Except at the top, never rely on senior or middle management in Euro to be much more than followers. Never let them run an org unless you really know them as their management techniques do not apply to modern software companies. Managers from Europe are generally of poor quality.

Sad to hear. What differences did you notice?

You see it everywhere but in general I see a lot of superficiality in Euro managers. They love to have direct reports, but because they need them but because it makes them feel more official. This is more frequent in Euro in my experience.

You don't see outside the box thinking as much. Very vanilla approaches to things that are generally dated approaches. A culture that lacks innovation.

You see a bit of gaming the system to meet KPI goals. Things that are probably not useful to the company but help them hit a defined goal.

Just not very aggressive in their approach to the business. A very conservative business culture that doesn't really understand scale and is obsessed with throwing lots of bodies at a problem rather than finding novel and innovative approaches.

Insistence that "this won't work here" when that's just not generally true. It's that they don't understand why the approach works and are stuck in older approaches to things that are not relevant to todays business world.

Secretive and inward looking.

From my limited experience, I think in bigger European companies (not 10-20 people tech startups) you will have people with little to no technical background doing the domain research and the managing of engineers. I've worked in a French company which calls itself a "tech" company, but upper and middle management was purely people with a controlling, legal, or MBA background.

The engineers working there were great, but criminally underused, because you had only MBAs in product owner roles who spent their time dreaming up products or features with absolutely no idea of feasibility. Like the time one of them presented their idea that the company should "create something like Facebook" to make customers stay on the company website longer. Or the constant requests why the engineers wouldn't consider using "AI" in the company's React Native reporting app.

They were probably trying their best, but the problem was the company's culture of engineers being merely tools to execute the ideas of non-tech people. When we asked for POs or managers with an engineering background, the reply was always along the lines of "they don't know the business, so they don't understand our customer's needs".

Accordingly, it always took months even for very small features or changes to make it past the "agreeing on the requirements" phase, because there was no tech person high up enough in the hierarchy to tell the dreamers straight away that they're living in a phantasy world.

I wonder if car makers have similar problems, i.e. old school car industry guys trying to manage software engineers.

> "create something like Facebook"

There's nothing inherently wrong with adding social media features to your customer portal, as long as you understand people will use it to vent their complaints, and you will have to spend money on moderation to keep it from turning into a cesspool.

I still remember when Netflix turned off all their social integration, especially the ability to leave movie reviews and get kudos via upvotes. I spent a non-trivial amount of time engaging with that feature. But I'm sure someone finally pointed out that this sort of engagement wasn't driving any revenue.

I agree with you, if a company has a big enough name and user base, social-network-like features can add to the UX.

What our managers were seriously pondering was to create an actual competitor to Facebook that would draw their user base to our website, a company with around 10.000 b2b customers (if even) which had nothing to sell in the b2c channel.

Not necessarily a bad idea in itself, Bloomberg is a b2b only service which has some built-in social networking features that have made it quite sticky because it's an exclusive club with relatively little noise and high trust. But I'm guessing that company isn't Bloomberg :-D

It's not just the pay, it's the attitude of both middle and upper management that is woefully inadequate as well.

Do they have the margins that allows them to pay equivalent salaries?

From what I recall, Meta and Google have gross revenues on the order of one million in revenue per employee, while SAP AG has revenue per employee around 200k.

What is their profit per employee ignoring employee compensation? That tells you more about how much they can pay employees.

This. The OP wrote:

> They tried to lowball him badly. Like 1/2 the rate he asked for (contract) and probably 1/3rd or 1/4 what we made at Google

FAANG arrogance never ceases to amaze me. It's like these guys live in a different universe blissfully unaware of the world around them. Did it ever occur to him maybe Ford is paying normal average human salaries and not grossly inflated Google wages?

Remember Ford (and this analogy extends to most companies in traditional industries) still has to be able to sell cars to the average blue collar Joe at a price point he can afford, and still turn a profit. Outside SV most people don't drive $80k Teslas. Somebody's still gotta write software for the $16k econoboxes. I'm sorry but nobody deserves to get paid more than e.g. a specialist doctor to hack JavaScript code I don't care how smart you think you are, when there's a guy in India probably just or nearly as good at it who'll do the job for $40k/year. FAANG is swimming in money and can afford to piss away $$ in talent wars, artificially driving up salaries and the prices of everything else, which is why no average person can afford a house in SF anymore. Those that won the FAANG lottery and managed to cash in? God bless them. But don't let the reality distortion field make you think that's how the rest of the world works.

I agree mostly with your points, other than when you get into how much the cars cost.

The unit price of the cars isn't really relevant to the cost of developing it's software. A low cost model that moves sells a lot of units, can likely afford to spend more on software compared to a high cost model that moves only a few units.

That's not how unit costs and margins are calculated.

I don't think I described how unit costs and margins are calculated.

>> The unit price of the cars isn't really relevant to the cost of developing it's software. A low cost model that moves sells a lot of units, can likely afford to spend more on software compared to a high cost model that moves only a few units.

You didn't? Of course software costs are part of the unit costs for each car produced, just how those development costs are actually allocated is up to Finance (accounting and controlling) to decide. And of course those costs are relevant, as all the other costs of a car maker.

I think that's besides the point. If a qualified developer can get paid more elsewhere, they'll go elsewhere, and Ford will end up with marginally- or un-qualified developers. That's just how the job market works.

Only if money is the only thing you're optimizing for, which isn't necessarily the case for everyone.

I once went for a job because of the money alone - it was the worst experience of my life and made me realize that money is not worth optimizing for beyond a certain point of comfort.

Sure, but you have to look at total costs, span over lifetime. How long will it take you to pay for that house you probably live in? How much time do you waste commuting? How draining is your job? How much do you spent when going out on some show, restaurant etc? How close to true nature are you?

I've followed money in my job decisions in the past and it has worked out OK for me so far, but of course I have no clue how my life would look like with other choices. But living in cramped place like SF for double the salary (thats max) and double the costs... no thank you.

So for context, I'm in automotive on the FAANG side and work closely with people at traditional companies.

There's some misunderstandings here. For one thing, there are obviously skilled people working at every salary level. What you're missing is that this is largely irrelevant. Relative compensation (in software) is a shockingly good proxy for all the associated support and people investments to support them. Employees that cost less are less supported and thus less enabled to produce high quality work than their better-paid counterparts, as a very rough rule of thumb.

It's my experience that OEMs are significantly less invested in their developers and the quality of the software they produce than any FAANG. They don't consider software to be a core competence and they rarely invest in the technical expertise to understand quality or push it internally.

The scale of dev costs is also pretty minor for vehicles as a whole. Amortized labor costs are typically on the order of 10-20% per vehicle. Devs are a small portion (~100s-1000s) of the tens of thousands of engineers that work at major OEMs and their suppliers. An extreme 2-3x wage increase would end up as a few percent increase, but the truth is there are cheaper ways to do that than salary. "All" they have to do is care about the software components the way many do about the mechanical components. It's a cultural problem rather than a strictly monetary one.

>> They don't consider software to be a core competence

Because it isn't for OEMs, theirbequipment is their core competency and aoftware, especially the entertainment side of things for automotive OEMs, is just part of that.

Would you argue that software isn't a core competency for Apple or Samsung because they sell phones? Same situation.

Modern vehicles are just distributed computers with tires, and self driving vehicles are worse. Virtually every feature is either massively supported or entirely enabled by software.

> OEMs are significantly less invested in their developers and the quality of the software they produce than any FAANG.

We must be using different FAANG software because the ones I use on a daily basis are slow and buggy as all hell. The last few versions of macOS/iOS have been atrocious. Every version of CarPlay I've used has bugs. Amazon apps are full of glitches. Compare that to developing engine ECU software which I think is a far more difficult engineering task that the average overpaid UI JavaScript slinger could not handle. You can't just update ECU software every week because you sloppily overlooked something. Unless you're Tesla of course.

I don't deny that there are many outstanding, technically excellent engineers at FAANG that deserve every penny they make. But the sad reality is many of them are just TC-chasing posers who got lucky and have subsequently deluded themselves into believing that whatever narrow expertise they now possess is worth far more than it is on the open market.

I think you’re conflating the UI of Amazon with the more difficult problem of getting a large distributed system to work at scale.

Conversely, if your ECU has minor glitches, will you notice? Unless it results in catastrophic failure, you will not even know if happens to result in the occasional 0.1 mpg increase in consumption.

And I’m sure VW and the other companies put a lot of resources into software engineering the exhaust emissions defeat workaround.

Want to know something terrifying? ECU code is often nearly as sloppily written as that JavaScript. They follow MISRA and usually have a couple "QA" teams to catch the most egregious errors of course, but the overall quality is eerily similar to what you'd get if half the team came straight out of a time machine from 1995. I've had to give informational sessions on why boot systems should have redundancy and what undefined behavior is, for example.

And yet the ECU shipped with nearly every car for the past few decades almost never fails through millions of cycles.

I think all this "ECU code is bad" stuff is just people who don't like the style of the produced code. Are you sure those edge cases aren't accounted for in other ways? Maybe they decided that everything should be "best case" code, and any error just resets the ECU which boots up before the next spark event needs to be triggered.

I just cannot square how much people complain about the code in ECUs with how utterly reliable they are. Consider the group that investigated VW cars cheating on emissions. The system was complex and obfuscated, but also powerful, reliable, and configurable by the manufacturer.

A similar argument was made by Toyota about their systems during the lead-up to the unintended acceleration debacle. I recommend Koopman's talk [1] on the subject for details, but long story short the Toyota ETC was apparently utterly reliable and installed in some of the most popular vehicles on the market at the time. However, detailed investigation of the systems and code behind the few publicized incidents revealed basic system issues like the watchdog failed to detect task crashes, rampant memory safety issues, and even a failure to follow their own internal code guidelines. All of that was manifesting in people's vehicles, but it was only rarely turning lethal and even those cases went mostly unrecognized.

Things have improved significantly since the Toyota acceleration issue, in large part because all those details came out. Model-based design is now basically standard for most ECUs, which eliminates large amounts of buggy human-written code. Formal methods tools that don't entirely suck exist. However, most of the issues Koopman points out (especially memory safety) still exist in many places on modern vehicles and all of his points about the issues with relying on testing to surface quality problems remain relevant.

[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...

https://youtu.be/DKHa7rxkvK8

Putting your accusations of arrogance aside, the point is ultimately this: unlike the work done by a worker on an assembly line, software work scales out "infinitely." You may pay that team of developers a huge amount but the work they have done is reproduced at "zero" cost hundreds of thousand of times.

It makes sense to invest in quality there.

I have made the point that ad revenue distorts FAANG practices elsewhere. I agree on this. You'll note that myself and my friend had no intention of seeking a FAANG salary elsewhere, it's unrealistic. However. There are limits. And sane practices.

The low compensation band reflects a lack of recognition of a) the importance of software and b) the economics of it. It isn't just that they pay bad, it's that they produce bad software because they don't get it.

on the other side, I'm not beholden to work at less than what I could potentially make just so some blue collar worker can have a car.

I honestly think having an underpowered low-spec SoC is a huge problem. Sure, if you have top programmers who have experience writing low-level code and best in practice algorithms and data structures for speed you can get that low-spec SoC to have a good experience. But, I think the odds of you getting/retaining, and finding more of those types of programmers is low. So soon you have some programmers trying to cram python or javascript or lua in the underpowered SoC and using Qt or some other wholly inappropriate high-level API and then you end up with those gas station gas pump computers that take 3-9 seconds to respond to single clicks.

Of course having high-powered SoCs won't guarantee you'll get performant displays either but I think have low-powered ones generally guarantees failure except for maybe some initial small team of experts.

It's super easy to blow your budget on a higher-spec'd SoC, too.

We made responsive applications on 1980s era 16-bit and 8-bit computers. We did it by being conscious of what we were doing in each cycle.

There's a huge budget to burn on even an older super cheap SoC.

Often what is making the screen lag is accidental stupid pointless idle states (blocking on I/O etc.) inside tight animation loops.

Lag and jank aren't usually a throughput problem, but a latency problem.

Diagnosing and fixing this requires concern and effort and recognition that it's actually super important to the consumer experience.

You get what you pay for.

University types infect the private market. They think they can turn programmers into standard office workers to lower their pay. And, unfortunately, they're right. Consumers will buy, so no need to produce quality. They can slave away graduates that have to pay back loans and have 0 guidance on the market or how to negotiate.

All apart of the plan.

Excuse me guys, but I think your comments although interesting for their story are out of place here. The Verge articles talks about a slow computer. The F150 issues can literally be fixed if Ford decides to install a quicker one on MY23.

What does this thing have to do with software engineers payment and the rant that followed?

>The F150 issues can literally be fixed if Ford decides to install a quicker one on MY23.

I’m unconvinced the problem can be fixed by “installing a quicker computer”. The functionality here isn’t materially different from what Tesla offered almost 10 years ago at this point. If nearly 10 years of hardware advancements couldn’t close the gap, a marginally faster computer next year won’t do it either.

You're assuming that the processor they're using today is ten years more advanced than what Tesla was shipping ten years ago. Automotive is very conservative. I wouldn't be surprised if the processor used here were very old indeed.

The unavoidable Tesla comparison sorry, I am not convinced. What functionality is better? Not everybody is interested in fart apps or Steam games or other questionable "extra" functionality. OK, let's just say that Tesla has better software. It lacks however in other departments, such a build quality.

But fact of the matter is here the following: if one reads The Verge article, his complains are mainly about the slow software and some unlabeled functionality here and there. Which can easily be fixed in a future iteration (ie MY23). He does not complain about the software being "that bad" or needing to offer fart apps or anything. Just slow.

Hardware problem, not software. And yes, the same applies for many car companies, even ones that sell premium products (BMW, etc). They need to offer faster processors.

You can write programs that run very well on underpowered hardware. The fact that they haven't does not indicate that they "just didn't buy a fast enough computer", it indicates that the quality of their software is low.

Sure, for MY23 they can upgrade the hardware, but probably also they will add more functionality to their software. And if they're not careful (which it seems like currently they are not), those features will require more compute, causing the software to remain slow regardless of hardware upgrades.

In embedded, software developers are always running up against the bean-counters trying to get the BOM cost lower. You can pretty much expect an underpowered SoC.

It's the job of embedded developers to work with the constraints. This isn't end consumer hardware. The cost of the device is multiplied by the number of cars shipped. So you keep it as low as you can.

You have a budget of cycles between display refreshes. Often the perception of slowness is not that the throughput of the software is too much for the hardware, it's that the work is done in the wrong place or wrong time. It's that the budget was poorly allocated -- work was done in the wrong thread or on the wrong core or in the wrong loop or at the wrong time.

All of this to say the perception of bad performance on these type of devices can honestly just come down to sloppy programming, not the power of the device.

Because in the end, what are they actually doing? Mostly just moving stuff around on the screen. The thing isn't computing a giant spreadsheet or blockchain crap. It's telling the MCU in the climate system to turn on.

So you learn how your display controller works, and you optimize optimize optimize.

>The unavoidable Tesla comparison sorry, I am not convinced. What functionality is better?

I never said the functionality was better. My post says "The functionality here isn’t materially different from what Tesla offered." 5 year old Teslas, today, do not have laggy interfaces.

Your claim that it will be "easily" fixed will remain to be seen. Ford isn't new to touch screen interfaces. Every consumer has been opining for Android Auto/Carplay because they know stock interfaces will be laggy, unresponsive and unintuitive. This has been an issue for years, before EVs, and it takes a very healthy amount of optimism to believe it will just be fixed next year.

The iPhone was able to have smooth, responsive interfaces on a battery powered device in 2008. That was 14 years ago. How much more powerful of a device do you need than the iPhone 3GS to open a touch screen menu at 30fps? Only a handful of auto manufacturers care about software, and it's been that way for years. This isn't new.

>. The F150 issues can literally be fixed if Ford decides to install a quicker one on MY23.

Have you profiled the code ? Understood the bottlenecks? I have not, not convinced the writer has either.

The old "throw more hardware at it approach", doesn't fix poorly written algorithms.

I am tempted to take a joke at your expense here, but that won't further the conversation.

The software in my 2021 F-150 ecoboost is... flakey. It seems like every OTA update fixes one bug and introduces another....

At least I can now get my iPhone to connect semi-reliably without restarting the truck :/

If I don't keep the various sensors clean (I live on a dirt road in Alaska) the collision mitigation system can get a bit... touchy.

My 2015 F150 had a TERRIBLE interface for navigation

https://youtu.be/Py92XdJwgqo?t=62

As a candidate who turned down an offer, I can confirm they were not even hitting the margins.

Meanwhile people in Myanmar are desperate enough to pump poisonous chemicals into mountainsides to make magnets for motors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32489998

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