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Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that CEOs are overpayed, I think the same applies to software engineers. Software Engineering has been a pay/perk bubble for years that was due for a correction, and like when Elon cut the free gourmet lunches and coffees for Twitter staff, I'm sure the Google engineers will survive.

Meanwhile Google's "raters", the army of workers who do the hard work of moderating and testing Google's platforms are getting paid crumbs in comparison: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/25/1166059832/googles-ghost-work...

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Show me another profession that can have such a dramatic impact on the bottom line where your work makes the company 100x-1000x your salary. If anything SWE are underpaid, we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue.

With my last job doing SWE for a bank, I know for a fact that my code saved the company hundreds of thousands dollars just from one project, and I know for a fact that some of my other code oversaw over a billion dollars in loan volume annually.

And what do I get come review time? No salary change and a variable bonus. It's fucking bullshit. These motherfuckers are getting rich off my back and they don't even share. Even 5% of revenue split across my entire team would be a million-plus or everyone, but nooooooooo we cant have that now can we? Whatever will the pathetic shareholders ever do then???

Well, you worked at a bank. Other than a few niche roles like algo trading, banks do not pay SWEs particularly well. Nor are they particularly well respected. You play second or third fiddle to the traders.

SWEs at FAANG and other top tier tech companies are at a completely different level of compensation. I don’t think they’re underpaid.

I worked in Algo trading at a bank. Banks do not pay SWEs that work in algo trading well. I left finance to work in tech and got a 50% bump right off the bat. And I was well paid on my team- the h1s and kids out of school were not breaking 100k. I know the guy sitting in my old seat and 10 years later he is maybe getting that 50% more while I have 4xed. He works 50-60 hour weeks like I did as well and I rarely go past 45.

And this was ten years ago when this stuff was the hot thing. This myth that big banks pay anyone in tech well needs to be dispelled. I worked at a few as well and they were all the same.

Algo trading and even general swe at the top places (e.g. citadel) will pay better than the top tech firms.

The top finance firms like Citadel, Jane Street, Two Sigma, and the like have the best paying tech roles, but also comparatively much fewer of them than FAANG and the top tech companies. They're also extremely difficult to get into. I don't remember where but I read someone saying it's easier to get an offer from all letters of the FAANG pantheon than it is to get an offer from Jane Street.

Also different banks pay better or worse. Goldman is the top of the hierarchy and pays competitively with a mid tier tech company depending on your team and role. JP Morgan is second place.

The rest of the pack (BoA, Citi, UBS, WF, others) probably can't compete with most tech companies.

Agree. Worked in the first group as well and it paid well and legit valued it's employees. The hours became a bit abusive at the end so I followed one of my bosses there to a firm he went to. But that's how I made the jump to 4x.

>we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue

Start a company then.

Pay is not determined by value, it's determined by leverage. The CEO pays himself the most money because he controls the company, he's not going to pay anyone lower than him more than he makes.

>we should be getting a slice of total business unit revenue

Start a company then.

Or go back in time 40 years.

It used to be very common for companies to give a portion of the yearly profits to the employees. It was called "profit sharing."

Somehow that perk evaporated in the tech industry.

It's publicly traded and they pay RSUs.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

CEO doesn't "pay himself the most money"; CEO pay is not decided by the company executives but directly by the shareholders/board.

How many companies pay VPs/senior employees more than the CEO outside of hedge funds?

You're discounting the people that identified the opportunity, scoped out and defined the project, and then briefed you about what was needed.

Sales, Marketing, and GTM are absolutely generating 100x - 1000x their salary if they take sole ownership of a project like you are doing.

SWEs are good are solving problems, but other people determine which problems to pay attention to, and how much investment to make in them.

In some companies, yes. In other engineering-driven companies it's the other way around.

In many organizations, marketing is just asking customers what they want. E.g. ask a farmer from the turn of the century, they'd have said "I want a horse that pulls harder and eats less oats!"

They'd never have said "I want a tractor!"

It's Engineers that conceive of tractors.

Hard disagree. Marketers conceive of tractors.

They are the ones by talking to the customers and knowing what they need. They are the ones that know that one engineer has been working on a high power engine, and other on rugged, high traction trailers.

Purely engineering firms fail in the long run as they drift away from what buyers want and chase interesting things because they think they know better.

Cough meta cough

Zilog too

I would’ve agreed with you if you had swapped marketers for product managers.

Marketers coming up with ideas and dictating those ideas to engineers is just wrong

> Purely engineering firms fail in the long run as they drift away from what buyers want and chase interesting things because they think they know better.

Eh, it's not about purely engineering. Many businesses who are not related to engineering fails exact same reason. They only care about short time growth and loses. Happens all the time.

Every time I hear this horse argument I picture a horse that is as strong as 1000 horses and goes 300 miles per hour and I get really sad that they invented cars instead of just giving people what they wanted.

But remember the horse shit you'd need to deal with.

Correction, that YOU would have to deal with. I’ll be three hundred miles away looking for oats.

That being said: you are absolutely right. How quickly the externalities are forgotten.

There's a straightforward (if not necessarily easy) way to test this hypothesis. Go look at founders and see what fraction are engineers vs project managers vs sales/marketing/business/etc. in their previous careers. Then go look at who is successful and how their success is positively or negatively impacted by their experience.

I haven't run the numbers but I have the impression that "idea people" tend to flounder without a strong technical co-founder. In contrast, technical co-founders can make it on their own, though there may certainly be challenges in doing so. Those roles are also very different in terms of what you can hire in as early employees vs what absolutely has to be a part of the founding team.

Almost everything in a big organization is a team effort, but that doesn't mean you can't tease out the relative contributions of the different parts. And I think you're undervaluing the engineering contribution substantially.

That's an interesting point, but I think having a Founder's or Entrepreneurial mindset is the key to success here and not the founder's professional discipline. It's about the combination of ideas, execution, and money. No single profession owns that.

Lots of successful businesses have been founded and run by founders with no formal engineering training. They all need some level of business knowledge, but that can to some degree be learnt on the job.

I think you’re just making a case that those roles are also underpaid. All of these things can be true.

That is why I said "across my entire team". The numbers are still ridiculous.

A lot of the time those guys are just making magical promises to customers with no idea how what they want could actually work.

Then they throw it to engineering and either take the credit or shift the blame.

Well... between Apr 6, 2023 and the time of this post I have single-handedly brought in >1.2MM for the place I work. From initial customer contact to service provided to billing to negotiation (there's always negotiation after billing) to payment received and deposited, me alone. I got a $25 gift card yesterday (along with my [relatively low] regular and overtime pay throughout, of course). And I'm ok with that, tbh. I could get frustrated and envious and bitter, but I also couldn't have done that without the decades of brand awareness and business infrastructure and equipment and facility and support staff keeping all the rest of it going. I see it as that revenue paying the salary of other people so that they can do other things that leave me able to do my part. I refuse to play the "I did the work for this job so I deserve it all" game.

You've just described what Marx identified 150 years ago.

> Show me another profession that can have such a dramatic impact on the bottom line where your work makes the company 100x-1000x your salary.

High frequency trading / propriety trading firms (buy-side) make FANG TC look like public teacher TC.

400-600K USD for 22-year old new grads. With 5 YOE, TC of $1M+ is not uncommon . If you do really well, $10M+ annual TC is possible with 5-10 YOE.

Even mid-career employees get fixed % cut of company profits. I’m not even talking about the company partners either.

So yes, FANG SWEs are underpaid.

The total number of roles in HFT firms and other top finance companies that pay tech employees that well are tiny compared to the number of roles in FAANG.

Along those lines, the number of SWEs in FAANG are tiny compared to the legions upon legions of SWEs working at nontech companies where a 60yo staff engineer retires with compensation similar to a FAANG 25yo junior engineer.

The comparison is even more dire if you bring non-US jobs into play. I’ve heard a typical Venetian gondolier is paid more than an Italian SWE.

So I disagree a FAANG engineer is underpaid compared to the vast majority of their peers at other companies.

FAANG is an anthill, and HFT firms are a wart on an ant’s thorax compared to the Mt. Everest that comprises the legions of companies that pay far, far less.

I disagree about being overpaid.

Similar to other professions - engineering and medicine for example - we have a career which requires a dedication to constant learning.

We build systems which allow companies to generate billions in revenue and deserve a slice of the pie.

>and deserve a slice of the pie.

...and deserve a fair slice of the pie.

I wish these companies would generate fewer billions in revenue, choosing to make their businesses more beneficial to society as a whole instead of apparently focusing on maximizing profit. It seems like all parties involved could still be quite adequately compensated.

Unfortunately (in my opinion), that's not how it is. Given our reality, I think I agree with you that SWEs do deserve that slice of that pie. But I very much wish that more people placed greater priority on benefiting others/society instead.

But you have much lower education and time costs, no?

>In all, it takes about eight to ten years to become a professional engineer, depending on whether you decide to get a master's degree.

>Doctors must complete a four-year undergraduate program, along with four years in medical school and three to seven years in a residency program to learn the specialty they chose to pursue. In other words, it takes between 10 to 14 years to become a fully licensed doctor.

I'm a marketer. I hold a Master's and a couple of Graduate Diplomas. I have a professional designation that requires constant CPD. I spend a significant amount of my time undertaking professional development. I work longer hours and can make a good case that my work has more impact than engineers, and I get paid significantly less than engineers with similar tenure.

I can't see any reasonable argument that engineers are intrinsically worth more, (and I say that as a person that dropped out of Engineering to pursue other opportunities). There might be fewer (good ones) than what the market needs, and this obviously pushes salaries up.

Have you run into a lot of great software engineers that didn't spend at least that many hours working on their own projects? I don't think you could even pass an internship interview if all you did was go to class for 4 years. (Passing the classes is of course predicated on doing a lot of programming outside of class, if only to have some text files to turn in!)

Most of the job training for this field comes from within. Hours, weeks, years alone with a computer. Nobody sees that, and you don't pay someone to administer it to you. But it's absolutely required.

Are you familiar with the medical pathway in the US? Software really isn't comparable for any but maybe the absolute most extreme developers.

1) Premed - 4 year degree + easily 1-2k+ hours spent volunteering, doing research, gaining medical work experience, obtaining LOR, shadowing, MCAT prep etc. This isn't optional if you actually want any chance of being accepted. Fail to get in and you're working with a (typically) biochem bachelors as a lab tech for $12 an hour and no upward mobility outside of grad school.

2) Medical School - another 4 years of pretty much nonstop studying outside mandated classwork and clinicals. Multiple large exams that basically dictate your entire future and whether you'll be able to match (ie. actually work as a doctor ever) along the way. A few thousand fail to match each year and invested 8 years + 250k med school + 50-100k undergrad to go back to that lab tech career I mentioned at $12/hr. Keep in mind those student loans are non-dischargable through bankruptcy.

3) Residency - 3-7 years. Family Medicine is one of the least rigorous and shortest at 3 years and averages about 10k hours of on the job during that time making less than minimum wage. Surgery is more like 80+ hours/week for much longer with 28 hour shifts standard at the start (minimum, better hope you don't have to finish any work at the end). Oh and don't fuck up because you literally have lives in your hands and face multi-million dollar lawsuits if you mess up after being awake for 20 hours straight on the job.

At the end of all of this and if you matched the most competitive specialties and busted your ass you might be able to make as much as a senior level SV software dev. Or you might be a pediatrician making 150k/yr if that appeals to you more than being wrist deep in someones bowels all day every day, or getting a 3 AM call to come do neurosurgery, or an urgent heart cath. Not feeling it tonight? Well someone is going to literally die if you aren't there within the next 30m- sleep well.

> Have you run into a lot of great software engineers that didn't spend at least that many hours working on their own projects?

Despite the HN bubble, most developers go to work, do their jobs and go home and don’t think about “side projects”

Yeah, but how do you get your first job? Doctors don't have a job when they go to 12 years of medical school. That's to get the job.

Well, I got my first for pay opportunity because a college about a hour and a half away from mine saw a HyperCard stack I wrote and posted on AOL - it was an improved Eliza clone. He wanted to integrate it into a HyperCard based Gopher server that was in 1994.

Then that led to an internship in 1995 at another company and I got a job there in 1996.

I haven’t written a single line of code “for fun” since then. The only reason I have any type of open source presence now is because my current job has a very straightforward open source process that allows us to get approved to put reusable artifacts from customer engagements on the corporate open source Github organization (https://github.com/aws-samples) under an MIT license.

That means I am free to fork it once it gets approved so it shows up on my own profile.

> we have a career which requires a dedication to constant learning

95% of that is chasing dumb fads, pop cultures, pointless shiny objects, technology fetishes

That's part of it, but there is truly a lot to know in software development, and while people can argue it's not on the same level as doctor, lawyer, and engineer, it's definitely a harder job than most others out there.

Here's a list of the 25 most common jobs in the US according to Indeed: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/most-comm...

I will confidently say Software Developer (# 24 on the list) is a more difficult job than almost all of them.

Yup, but that’s the job. I have an organizational mandate to change deployment stacks every 18 months.

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That's literally what they said...? (that is, engineering and medicine are professions of dedicated learning)

My apologies, I've been up for 18hrs today

Perhaps it's the meaning of the word "similar" that is giving you trouble.

Most engineers earn nothing close to FAANG comp. Even some really great computer scientists who just don't happen to live in the silicon valley bubble don't.

FWIW I'm not at FAANG level or even have a good educational background. If anything FAANG developers skew the statistics for the majority

> Similar to other professions - engineering and medicine for example - we have a career which requires a dedication to constant learning.

So do adjunct professors, and they're paid peanuts.

> We build systems which allow companies to generate billions in revenue and deserve a slice of the pie.

Capitalists don't care what you think you deserve. Their morality says if the labor market situation means they can get away with paying you peanuts, it's righteous for them to do so, regardless if you do things that "allow companies to generate billions in revenue."

The people who care about getting people paid what they deserve will play a tiny violin for you, since most workers have it way, way worse than software engineers have it now.

The thing Googlers conveniently leave out is that this multiplier effect that is seen almost nowhere else is not due to super human brilliance, it's build on the backs on all the rest of us. Our information. Our content. Typically provided for free or forcefully soaked up by surveillance tactics.

You're the operator of a machine that exploits on a planetary scale. You might be awesome at operating this machine, but you don't supply the actual value that leads to those billions.

> Similar to other professions - engineering and medicine for example

Those other professions don't get paid nearly as much though

People generally get paid the amount that it costs to find someone else to do their job¹

It is very easy to find someone else to be a "rater". Certainly easier than it is to find another software engineer

You can argue SWE wages are inflated but comparing them to someone testing whether YouTube search returns the right results is inaccurate and feels disingenuous

"Fairness" is a vague concept which nobody can agree on. It's definitely not as easily observable as, say, the marginal cost of replacing a worker

---------------

1. This also happens to be a helpful framework for establishing "value", beyond the context of labor. For instance: how much is a company worth? The amount it would cost to replace them if they were taken out of the picture

By that logic, Sundar's pay is completely justified, as well as the pay cuts for Software Engineers, as more and more people become software engineers every day and available pool of workers continues to increase.

You don’t think they could find a competent CEO for, say, $100M?

You don't think you could find a competent software engineer for $80k?

Sure can.

A race to the bottom for engineers at the same time there’s ever-increasing CEO pay is gross. That’s the point.

No chance if the competitor next door pays $300k

Depending on the field: No. Depends also on the definition of "competent."

Well the whole argument here by a big section of comments -- if not the majority -- including Googlers is "they haven't found one in Sundar."

I think finding a great CEO for the particular strategy and company is harder than we all think. (Yes I know the fault of the previous sentence -- it was on purpose.)

They probably could find "a competent CEO", but that's not the bar, and it doesn't make sense to do so, because of the oversized impact and risks. If you're 99% certain that a person is as competent as the current CEO and 1% they're a dud like Carly Fiorina, then saving a measly $100m is not worth the enormous risk. And if you've got a candidate that makes you certain that they would be even slightly more competent than Pichai, then it would be worth paying an extra $100m to get them; if CEO A can get e.g. 1% more efficiency than CEO B (for example, by being more aggressive at laying off people) then that's easily worth that money.

You can't be certain of any of this, though, without a time machine to do some A/B testing.

Well, yeah. Experience with multibillion companies is lottery, knowing software a commodity.

Software engineers are the only highly paid professionals that can convince themselves they are worth less than the going market rate. Not sure i've seen this common sentiment in banking, law, medicine, real estate, or high $ sales.

Maybe in the US, but around the world it us usually just a decent job. The main problem is not the engineers being overpaid, is the rampant inequality that the west has been experiencing without anyone doing anything.

The situation is crazy right now. Engineers are not overpaid. The other jobs should have a better pay, while the CEOs should be paid a lot less.

Heck, from my perspective other professions are highly underpaid. I know a couple of friends who work in healthcare as medical proffesionals (nurses, doctors etc), their wages (especially of nurses) are atrocious compared to the value to society they provide.

Definitely. Everybody in education and public health should be paid a looooot more.

I never understand why well paid SWEs feel guilty instead of realize that being able to live comfortably if you're working most of your waking day should be the baseline accepted state for society.

> While I agree that CEOs are overpayed, I think the same applies to software engineers.

You know who is really overpaid? Landlords. They are the reason everything in Silicon Valley is so damn expensive. I'd gladly take a pay cut if the "landlord association of america" would collectively take a pay cut of their own. That will make this place slightly more affordable.

You know who else is really overpaid? A good chunk of the healthcare industry. My healthcare expenses are by far my highest money drain other than rent.

Except engineers bring value.

If engineers are to be paid less, then where should the profit go?

Profits go up. Sh*t goes down.

The money has to go somewhere. Why don't you want it to go to the employees?

> I think the same applies to software engineers. Software Engineering has been a pay/perk bubble for years

IMHO the reason is because American tech companies are located in cities with insane costs of living.

If Silicon Valley wants to save some serious money on salary, bribe and cajole state and local governments to change housing policy.

Totally agree. Tech salary bubble is going to burst soon. As a software engineer myself, I've already started looking for a plan B.

Found anything good? I’ve had a few ideas over the years, but they all involve expensive school I’d need an high salary to even afford.

I'm thinking of getting into construction. The only other classmates from high school who are making as much as me, or even more are those into real estate.

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