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Comment by grumple | Hacker News Reader

Are we overpaid? The average software company is pulling in half a million per employee. That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people. Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses on their own without any of those people.

Software and the engineers that make it proves itself to be very valuable, engineers should be compensated accordingly.

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Individual engineers who start multi million dollar businesses also prove over and over again that they need those “worthless” other business people by immediately hiring them once they get to a certain size.

Not to mention that the engineers who do manage to start these companies are usually not top of the engineering field but rather the ones who are also good at sales and marketing and product management.

Software is a team sport.

> Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses

Beware of survivor bias, for every successful business, there might be a 1000 failed ones.

> there might be a 1000 failed ones.

For example, me.

(Hmm, perhaps I should try to use GPT to turn my old desktop Java shareware into browser-based Javascript freeware).

It's kinda the same for me, our product solved a problem that was not enough annoying to people for them to consider buying it, so we never had the product market fit, and never managed to sell a single license. The company still exists today, but it's mainly surviving with us doing freelance work and hoping one of our side project might generate some revenue.

Maybe as open-source, the product could have some success, but I don't know how to "sell" open-source or make a revenue from it.

"That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people"

Well, if those people are allmost worthless, then why not proof that, by making a buisness that thrives without them?

Apparently, thousands of "engineers" were deemed not that valuable in the last 12 months.

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