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Comment by wootland | Hacker News Reader

Developers are dramatically underpaid, just like all non-exec labor. It's ridiculous to complain about devs making 300k-500k a year when execs are pulling in millions or tens of millions a year with 10M-100B worth of equity under their belt. Focusing on anything other than that is a complete distraction and counterproductive. Devs should be getting 10X their current salary and execs should be getting 1/100th theirs.

I'll add that if you can't easily afford a family house next to your office, you're not overpaid.

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They (well, we) are not underpaid.

Some time ago I used to work in a large organization on the very bottom of the food chain. I was making, say, $100k a year, which was quite decent money. Sitting there, doing same thing I could've grown to a "senior bottom of the food chain" of $150k. That was the limit. A soft one, but still the limit.

The organization was quite picky in selecting their workforce. Think FAANG. So in every team you have a bunch of quite smart opinionated folks, who somehow have to be steered in the same direction. With that I see it kinda reasonable for the team lead to make at least $200k a year. Give or take.

Now we move one step up. Someone has to pull all these "creme de la creme" cats together and herd them, so that at the very minimum teams don't work against each other. Ideally work together for some common goal. And I can understand team leads who is not willing to go to this snake pit for 30% salary increase. Why would they? 50% - may be. 70% - that sounds interesting and worth consideration.

Bottom line: according to my humble experience in "the organization", the salary roughly doubles each time you get up the ladder. And being on different steps of this ladder I can understand why.

> They (well, we) are not underpaid.

Can a family of 4 purchase a home within walking distance of the office? Is the CEO of the company making 1000X more than those at the bottom? How much equity do the execs have and how much is it worth?

Devs are very underpaid, it's just so much value is captured by those at the top that we're all used to fighting for the scraps that happen to fall off the real dinner table.

You could argue that devs are being paid the money that is being extracted from lower-class workers, too. Companies get to underpay for physical production labor, construction labor, etc., and some of that gets fed into developer salaries.

More gets fed into their profits and the executive salaries, but I think you get the idea.

I don’t think you can make the argument that devs are extracting money from lower paid employees when:

1. Exec pay is 100-1000x that of dev pay. I’d also include huge war chests of cash and stock buy backs as evidence that devs aren’t the problem.

2. The vast majority of “high paying” dev roles don’t pay enough money to buy a house in the real estate market that their office is in. A metric that I’d consider bare minimum to call someone adequately paid.

I guess my point is more that devs are a symptom, not the problem. We get the runoff from their exorbitant hoards, which are derived from whole swaths of people getting hosed.

I think if you account for inflation, devs are basically one of the only roles that have been treading water to keep a middle class lifestyle while everything else has dropped through the floor. I do think it's debatable that even developer pay gives you a middle class lifestyle if you can't afford housing.

I do agree that the entire system is broken and devs are mostly working on things that add negative value to humanity but effectively hoover up capital from the masses and deposit it in the accounts of the wealthy.

I have a question about overpaid execs. If execs are overpaid, why don't companies just hire less-expensive execs?

Because the capital market is opaque and corrupt. Execs aren't selected based on their ability to perform, they're selected based on how acceptable they are to the upper classes that control the capital. Even for those (few) who work their way up the ranks, jumping up levels will be based on politics and ability to be perceived as upper class and not based on performance (which is basically impossible to measure in a managerial role unless you want to give all of the credit of the worker's output to the manager).

So shareholders are dumb and execs are overpaid because they are good at duping them out of their money? Wouldn't a company that does NOT overpay their execs outcompete a company that does?

Shareholders are not dumb, but they have created a rigged game of castles in the sky paid for by greater fools. They look for execs that will successfully con the next bag holder, not people who create innovation, great products, healthy teams...

There's a lot of backscratching going on at that level as well. As an example, more often than you would think, VCs will invest in the parasitic children of potential LPs despite their terrible startup idea because they know it will make raising their own funds easier.

So the CEO is the face of the company, and companies are willing to pay a lot for a face that projects a certain image? If that's the case, then couldn't you argue that it's worth a lot for the company to pay to improve its brand image?

It's worth a lot to the shareholders to manipulate the stock price upwards, that's of no benefit to the customers though. Quite the contrary, choosing executives based on how well they sell equity opposed to how well they can operate a company produces worse results for the market (of goods/services, not of capital -- that's the distinction).

The shareholders are the ones paying the CEOs, though, so it sounds like they are worth it.

You're confusing the market for equity with the market for the goods and services produced by the company. The shareholders are optimizing for the former at the expense of the latter.

Is there enough homes within walking distance of the office for all the developers?

Well, all developers should be WFH so that shouldn't be an issue. For those companies backward enough to force their devs onsite, if there aren't enough homes to house the workforce local to the office, then the office is in the incorrect location.

This is like pure corporate propaganda, "of course execs do much harder work than devs so they of course they deserve 10x the paycheck!"

It's completely silly, if the average employee at google is generating $1.5M in revenue per year but only gets paid $250k then there is a massive delta in value missing in that equation that is going to Sergey Brin or Sundar Pichai instead or some other Stanford MBA in the massive web of "totally useful and productive" middle management at Google. Surplus value 101.

Isn't most of the surplus value supposed to go to capital, i.e. the shareholders?

If people need supervision from someone so extraordinary they will be paid half a million a year, in order to stop them from working against each other, maybe they're not really la "creme de la creme", and maybe organizations should be picky about the right things when selecting their workforce.

Or maybe developers are being overpaid compared to most workers, but underpaid compared to most "decision-makers" (most workers being so vastly underpaid it's not even funny anymore). Overpaid / underpaid is relative.

There's this ridiculous idea that management is partially responsible for the productivity of every developer, which means their salary should be increased commensurately.

You could just as easily argue the reverse: every developer is partially responsible for the productivity of management (whose productivity is zero if the devs get nothing done), so the devs' salary should be increased commensurately.

A hierarchy based on promotion and with increasing salaries isn't based in ironclad logic.

(In fact, you can see this in (in my opinion) two of the most important roles on a development team: the agile lead and product manager! Neither of them are hierarchal managers, yet both influence the direction of the team in critical ways. It works really well; far better than if either or both of those roles is filled by a hierarchal manager.)

This comment right here is proof of the bubble - normalising 300-500k per year salaries. Developers don't have a skillset that is harder to develop than university academics or mechanical/electrical engineers in industry. Out in the real world for equivalently skilled professionals in other industries, a 100k salary is great and a 150k salary is fabulous. I'm a 16-year-experienced engineering team leader responsible for process safety on multiple billion-dollar oil and gas facilities and I'm on a great base salary 140k, which is more than many of my peers. There are engineering professors who outstrip my skills level by a factor of ten who are on half my salary. The exponential elevation of dev salaries into the stratosphere was a natural overshoot of demand vs supply of suitably skilled labour. Now the overshoot is resolving itself starting with decreased demand. Anyone who banked on 300k-500k salaries being the norm has made the same mistake as oil and gas folk have done in every boom throughout the 20th century.

$300k a year will not buy you a 3bd house in the geographies that pay $300k a year. That's a middle (not upper) class life milestone. That others are paid even less is a travesty and a sign of a deeply broken society. Again, the problem is not with those making $XXXk a year, it's those making $XXXM+ a year, or not working at all but controlling $XB. The problem is also that capital has distorted the housing, health and education markets to the point that basically no worker can afford what used to be a middle class lifestyle.

I'd be fine with equitable profit sharing, writ large.

Resume progressive redistribution by taxing wealth more than income, switch back to pensions (and fully fund them), and fund the social safety net.

>I'll add that if you can't easily afford a family house next to your office, you're not overpaid.

You are correct, though I will not say that underpayment per se is the problem. It's more along lines of housing is very expensive due to a whole combination of govt interference like taxes, inflation, regulations etc.

The number of developers making $300k-$500k/yr is a rounding error.

The rest of us plebes, who make more or less the same kind of white-collar salaries as non-programmers, are certainly underpaid.

If you truly think that this radical change will make the company more productive, what's stopping you from raising a seed round for your new company built on this innovation as competitive edge?

I have done that and it's a great management strategy. You can hire world class developers and talent if you just treat them as peers and don't jack your own compensation up to astronomical levels. It's like a "cheat" to win at management. People will also be less likely to quit and much more likely to join you at your next role.

> what's stopping you from raising a seed round for your new company

Knowing what’s true and being able to convince some investors, who are not universally omniscient and reasonable and open to conversation from people they don’t already know, are different things.

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