Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business.

Aren't you seeing it backwards? Other professions should have the same "luxuries", in a humane working world. Instead people are treated like cattle.

IT being an "amazing productivity" boost, means those "divas" you describe just get small part of the value they create, especially since a heck of a lot of the rest ends as unprecedented profit levels...

Under a capitalistic labour market theory, employees are not and can't be "overpaid" (and surely not for decades on end). They are paid exactly what they are worth, as price is based on supply and demand equilibrium.

Under a marxist labour market theory employees still can't be overpaid if the company makes a profit on top of what it would re-invest in itself (infrastructure, etc.).

So, under neither theory workers can be overpaid under any normal circumstances.

At worst, under capitalism there can be a higher market rate that gets adjusted to a lower one, but at each point in time none of those was "overpaid", it was the best the market knew to set. The higher rate was appropriate supply-and-demand-wise for when it was applied (and it might raise again as IT companies compete for developers, and so on).

Let's not forget the "US/Europe needs X millions more developers" reports churned out every few months...

Let's not forget what makes those amazing profits.

1. very copyright friendly regulations, EULAs

2. poor data privacy, transportability/migration regulations

3. Section 230

4. lack of good antitrust laws - especially in market places and advertising markets.

5. and lets not forget the complete anti-union sentiment and lack of "professionals" to unionize

I forgot about the complexity of stock options and transparency around compensation.

Imagine if startups had to disclose as much as a franchise or mlms regrading how the compensation works.

public funded research that's given away to "tech" companies

Tax incentives with no strings attached.

universities that provide the labor force for the companies to cherry pick the best from figure out whether someone should swipe left or scroll up.

This was almost cathartic.

> 5. and lets not forget the complete anti-union sentiment and lack of "professionals" to unionize

I would hate for my bonus to be negotiated by the union. Generally the union gets a new funding and the employee get 14,89€ a year as a “hard environment” bonus.

In fact I used to work in a unionized company as a developer, and not only there was groupthink, but the groupthink was bullying the weaker elements.

And as developers, we’re all socially inept, so the weaker elements were most people except the union.

Worst working conditions ever, it was ATOS in France.

your right I should probably say collective bargaining. Since there are probably better ways for labor to organize and use leverage than unions.

Might be covered by your bullet points, but is worth bringing up:

- Shady licensing practices

- Dark software patterns

I think the general idea would be poor customer/user bargaining.

we have regulations from lobbyists, industry bureaucrats and corrupt politicians(usually legally).

or choose another provider with exactly the same shitty terms.

because why invest in a consumer friendly platform except to gain network effects and change the terms of service.

As someone who spends every day in a state of the art FAANG office, I don’t think anyone deserves or needs this level of comfort. I think it’s wasteful and unnecessary. I can make my own coffee, I don’t need on-site baristas doing it for me.

The point of company perks is to convince people to forgo more salary than the perks costs the company. On-site baristas are cheap, but they seem really expensive. In the end it’s a subsidized company cafeteria which has been a thing for the last 100 years or so.

The amount people care about free snacks is vastly out of proportion with the actual cost of providing free snacks. That’s great because young people making ~200k don’t really care much about slightly more gold plated health insurance coverage relative to how expensive it is.

> The point of company perks is to convince people to forgo more salary than the perks costs the company.

It's also that the company can provide these things to all employees for less than it would cost for every individual employee to buy them by themselves.

Also, providing lunches and coffee saves company time from employees sneaking out to go get lunch or coffee.

I always assumed this was the reason.

On the other hand, if you're going to have a communal coffee machine, might as well have a bunch of other stuff and then pay dedicated staff to run it, for the convenience of everyone else.

Maybe it's copycatting of the college dorm startup vibe, too.

I can help with that, but that it's not it's aim.

The company could not care less about employees paying more for those.

Ok but cutting benefits just means that baristas are out of work and more $ goes into the pockets of billionaire shareholders who need it even less than you.

The only reason those perks exist is because of the unfathomable amounts of profit those companies make compared to others.

Tax the shit out of these companies and use the money to fund more socially useful jobs in healthcare, caring for elderly people, writing code for public services and a million other things.

The fact that luxurious living wastes labour is not a plus for luxurious living. There are tons of things society could be doing with that labour that are more useful, they just don't get done because we allow pseudo-monopolies to retain too much rent.

I agree with that. But until that happens (if ever) I'd rather companies spread the $ around to their employees rather than keep it all for the shareholders.

You don't need fancy baristas and exotic blends, but cafeterias with people making coffee for workers has been a thing in offices and even factories for a century or so, it's not some unique privilege...

A lot of bad takes in response to this. An actual reason is that if you are as productive for FAANG as the numbers imply, $1M+ in revenue per employee per year, then the value of having a barista make your coffee instead of you taking 10 minutes to do so is well worth the cost. It might cost the company 80$ of your productivity when you make a coffee but only 13$ to pay the barista. That delta over thousands of employees and hundreds of work days adds up.

> can make my own coffee, I don’t need on-site baristas doing it for me.

Hey, some FAANG offices require you to make your own coffee. I had to make my own espresso on one of the $5k+ espresso machines in the microkitchen. Of course, I'd do that after company-provided breakfast in the cafeteria. My cash compensation alone was what I imagined my total equity would be worth if my first startup "hit it big" and IPO'd.

I agree that it's totally unnecessary, and would cringe when people would complain about the quality of the coffee purchased for the machines, that office X got free laundry service and we didn't, or that it was lame that there was no free dinner on Friday nights.

When I started my career, some Hot Pockets in the freezer seemed like an extravagance. I want a decent pay, a clean work environment, IT infrastructure that isn't a burden, and to feel like I'm making a real impact. Beyond that, it's all gravy.

I don't see why not, it's simple division of labour. A barista churning out coffees all day saves a full day of developer time, while being more efficient and skilled at the task. Same with canteens.

When those benefits get stripped, the savings won't be used to feed the hungry or the homeless. It'll get capitalized into equity values or profits raked in by the 0.1%.

And the baristas will be out of a job

OK, but the costs aren't coming from fancy coffee. They come from salaries of engineers. So the question is really about how many employees there are and how much those employees are paid. And maybe, secondarily, how many facilities are needed to provide space for a certain employee headcount.

And then 99% of the industry is nowhere near these perks.

You have on-site baristas for free coffee?

If US/EU get just a significant fraction of those developers needed, software dev salaries will go to the level of other engineering, say mechanical, construction or material one. Employers would be very happy with that. And lets be honest here, its not that different job despite what some bigger egos think about their work and echo chambers that keep them in that dream.

I don't agree those other engineers are treated as cattle, merely as normal employees. IT, mostly in SV and other places cargo-culting ie Google is often really treated like divas. Bear in mind that this was never true in corporations where IT was treated as a cost center, ie banking. But from various HN posts it seems that typical young SV dev has no experience with that and many feel they are changing the world for the better, when reality its at best a zero sum game, and often not even that (ie optimizing ad revenue stream for your corporation is definitely loss for mankind as a whole, or anything that makes societal parasites who breed depression like facebook/insta/tiktok more effective at their goals).

But folks for some obscure reason need to feel that their work has a good purpose and high moral ground, hence sometimes quite advanced mental gymnastics seen also here.

As you hint, incredible demand for full stack developers created high salaries at businesses that viewed that as their core product. Businesses that built things that had software mostly kept paying what they always had. That voracious demand seemed to feed on itself a bit and grow on its own. When times got rough those businesses asked themselves if they were getting the expected roi on all those positions, and if they could be more efficient and do almost as well with fewer heads. They apparently decided they could. I don't find that surprising, software isn't infinitely improvable. Once you have a product done and refined, there simply becomes less to do over time. If the hours spent maintaining a site never decrease from initial development levels, you are doing something wrong.

> IT, mostly in SV and other places cargo-culting ie Google is often really treated like divas. Bear in mind that this was never true in corporations where IT was treated as a cost center, ie banking.

It's interesting to look at fintech, where banks purchase tech focused company with great engineers because their internal IT simply can't compete thanks to a cost-center culture.

Any industry that doesn't have a regulatory moat around it has tech circling it, looking for the parts of the business with the biggest margins. Even Amazon and Apple are timidly entering highly regulated markets such as health.

For any curious re: software vs. mechanical engineer salaries:

Software: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

Mechanical: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes172141.htm

The 75th percentile for Software is $151k vs. $120k for Mechanical. Median is $120k vs. $95k.

So about 20% higher for Software.

I would have expected the difference to be higher based on levels.fyi and anecdotal salaries shared on HN. I guess the average software engineer also isn't working for a top 5 tech company who pay well above average.

This is just academic gymnastics. If market conditions dictate that a worker produces 10 dollars in value so you hire people for 9 dollars, and then the value of their production is reduced to 7 dollars you need to fire someone. In the real world there is uncertainty in the projected value their work (if it can even be measured, and not taking into account non economic consideration). So someone can be overpaid for a while until it is discovered, at least in the way most people think about the meaning of overpaid.

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