Why would oil companies need to hire the same kinds of engineers that a SV giant would need? If they can get that kind of salary, more power to them, but I don't see the challenges being similar enough except on a smaller scale with device drivers for industrial equipment, etc.
I work for a large defense contractor, you know what I'm working on right now? I'm coding up REST services, and a couple of months ago I was helping to spin up a Kubernetes cluster.
Traditional industry may not have the same scaling needs as say, Facebook or Google, but you don't have to be an Aircraft Carrier to be in the Navy.
I work for a financial company. We have tons of tech. We get paid peanuts compared to big tech.
We've had about 35ish% turnover during the last two years. This is multiple times higher than normal. We still managed to retain the other 65ish%. I worked on a team that had over 100% turnover during that time (half lost externally and half moved in the company). You know what, that manager didn't care. She told me they expected to burn people out in 1-2 years and weren't going to compete with companies offering 50-100% raises. So it wasn't a big deal because they expect to lose people, won't compete, and they still retain the majority of people because the availability of better places to go are pretty low.
I remember a manager at an SV startup we were working with, tell me, essentially, the same thing.
They burned their engineers out. Many were H1Bs. Worked sick hours, In the couple of years we worked with them, they had, probably, a 75% turnover. Their managers shrugged. I would have been fired, if my team had had that kind of turnover.
But I totally understand what is happening with Exxon. That kind of problem starts at the top.
And there is some crazy tech, used in oil companies. My mother was a geologist, and she was using crazy tech, back in the 1950s, for prospecting.
Like if you have normal modern tech skills you shouldn't expect to make top 0.1%th percentile of the industry salaries. People with those normal skills make 50th percentile and up salaries. Which are high relative to other industries, but not top of our industry high, sorry.
Your (the general your, not you in particular) labor is valuable but not that valuable :P
Not to mention that the available amount of positions at these top tech companies are limited. Not everyone will get to them, because there just aren't enough.
Edit: However, I'm a big believer in the idea of "You can eat what you can catch." So if you can otherwise raise your earning power to that of a FAANG Eng for doing normal work -- more power to you.
My labor in particular is even less so.
Furthermore: pray tell who do you think built Kubernetes and web services?
Kube is a descendant of Borg, and for those who don't know that's Google's internal container management solution. General web services are a little more muddy but most of the top frameworks and services are the conception of devs either in or formerly from FAANG/MAANG/ACRONYM whatever.
Like there's still a reason having those names on your resume is used as signal in a lot of places. It doesn't always mean the dev is the best thing since sliced bread, but I get why people use it as signal.
So maybe demanding 300-400k/year is a bit much just due to the difference in industry/business models, but even the entry level FAANG salaries can be superior. Managers at my company are constantly complaining in all-hands meetings about losing people to better paying positions in the more-private sector. So they are competing with SV to some degree, and should act accordingly or be generally happy with second-tier talent. Sounds like Exxon is fine with being in the second category. From my perspective the Exxon engineers in question are just asking why they aren't being paid market rate. Labor-scarcity often pushes salaries up more than talent.
I didn't say they were gods among engineers I said they had skillsets general engs don't have or learn just from working at normal co. Getting things wrong is still very much a human thing, which everyone is, technical talent -- which is what these tech cos look for means they can pick up the skillset while at whatever acronym co they're at.
To be clear I don't idolize these engs or anything.
That's good. I think I probably have a deep latent jealousy or dislike for how much they make. Maybe that's just midlife regret.
Maybe I misinterpreted your comment, but you seemed to imply that engineers at FAANG making FAANG-level salaries in part earn those salaries due to rare technical acumen. My point is, for many of them, that probably isn't the case. Sure the 300/400k positions will go to the Wozniak and Carmack-equivalents of the world, but the 150k entry/mid level positions at FAANG are still well above entry/mid level for traditional industry despite, as best I can tell, performing roughly the same work with roughly the same talent. I don't know exactly what kind of salary the disgruntled Exxon engineers had in mind, but I don't think a market correction to that 150k level would be out of order if these companies really want to put their money where their mouth is, particularly given inflation and, in the case of Exxon, record profits.
I don't expect FAANG people to have "rare technical acumen" I do think most people working at a FAANG are 80th percentile and up. So upper quartile in technical capability. Thing is Carmack and Dean types are 0.1% talent, they make anywhere from 700k to over a million at a FAANG. I don't think you're correctly level set on what people are earning. A person making 400k at a FAANG is like a staff engineer. But their base salary is probably 200-250k? The rest of that is bonuses and equity compensation in the form of RSUs.
For the record I'm in this earning bracket (not the dean/carmack one, but a high earning senior dev) so I have some idea of what I'm talking about with these numbers.
Perhaps my perspective is slightly skewed. Even just comparing to FAANG base salaries: From the perspective of a big defense contractor, we recently had a new grad start on our team, level 1 software engineer with a bachelor's in computer science from a mid-rank university, and he's making 85k/year. Maybe in 5 years he can expect to make about 115k between yearly raises and promotion to level 2, maybe 130k if he busts his ass and makes level 3 in that time. 200k+ is reserved for the engineers that manage to get their names on patents and know the right people/get lucky, and typically have decades of experience at the company and extremely deep knowledge of a high-value subject.
Then do the same for some big tech companies. Call that 'Y'. The employee count is way less than for Exxon.
Most likely, Y >> X. Vastly greater.
So to a corporate bean counter, the "value" of an Exxon employee, X, is about what they're paying them now. Hiring one more, even a brilliant tech guy, will have a negligible effect on any numbers they care about. Especially since he'll be frustrated by the dinosaur culture and his inability to have any impact.
You can say "you're wrong, what about <new energy thing>?" Well, this finance guy understands Exxon's numbers pretty well.
The point is that this metric is dominated by the most numerous workers, which probably isn't IT outside of big tech (or even in big tech). The real metric is impact that a particular hire has on the bottom line, which is hard to measure. Really, I think it is more about their separate job markets: Exxon posts positions in Dallas and pays what they have to to fill their positions, Amazon does the same in Seattle and gets a very different set of candidates.
I wouldn't use Amazon since they have so many warehouse workers, unless you can restrict it to IT.
I was imagining some data scientist (call her "Diane") at Exxon, getting so-so wages in Dallas, and yearning to triple her salary at Facebook. Exxon just can't do that for Diane, because they have too many middle-managers who make only 30% more than Diane does now.
It contributes to the ultimate profit in the same way that HR, Legal, and Finance do. Indirectly, in support of the actual revenue-generating functions.
And if you think developer comp is high, in Hollywood the revenue-generators make more for a few hours of work than GAMMA developers will make in a year in a rising stock market.
Clearly the most successful businesses and business people in history agree with my assessment
Objectively false. The most successful businesses in history, adjusted for inflation, are the railroad and oil barons, followed by the Hollywood studios. And note that at least two of the GAMMA companies are now worth less than a retail chain.
Even outside of those departments, the challenges are significant (though companies underinvest in digital in those areas). Every downstream refinery, for example, is a unique beast full of custom equipment, sensors, and systems, so tying those into digital twins in a scalable, effective, and efficient way is a massively hard problem, and one that has potentially dire real-world consequences. Midstream distribution is full of complex optimization issues from both physical and financial points of view. And upstream E&P, in addition to the geology side mentioned above, is full of literal life-and-death decisions that require sophisticated real-time analytic models that can guide driller behavior.
Leaving aside the moral issues raised by working for carbon-intensive energy industries, the technical challenges are significant, impressive, and fascinating to work on -- more so, I would argue, than trying to slightly increase social media ad click rates.
At the retail level. The analytics to track sales and optimize distribution marking sure fuel trucks arrive as needs to tip up supply is massive.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcsG4X8Zn_UDTy6BqKzhq...
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2019-06-18-IBM-Develops-Worlds-Most...
So I have to laugh a bit when apologists here declare Big Oil Tech with the "power of HPC" or whatever.. they are in a ghetto niche full of expensive equipment. Also I think it is telling that the math guy was not a rank-and-file employee, but instead sheltered in an academic town with lots of time for careful math at a very decent salary.