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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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