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Comment by pdntspa | Hacker News Reader

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???

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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.

>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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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