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Comment by quadcore | Hacker News Reader

I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google.

Just to confirm, does that person code all day there? (real question)

...sometimes? One of the lessons I learned from him about that level of impact is that it means the structure of your day is dictated mostly by the problem you're currently focused on. So one quarter he might spend all his time interviewing. Next quarter he might spend most of his time profiling and reading code. The quarter after he might be coding.

Next to that is a constant overhead of talks with leadership and supporting other engineering efforts throughout the company through things like doc review, chats, pairing, etc.

What he doesn't generally do is "productionize" features - code is generally exploratory in nature or fixes a serious bug (or class of bugs).

Moreover, what is he coding. Because there is zero chance in hell Google is getting a multiple of that cost back in value from him. The value for them is that he's not working for a competitor. That's it.

> Because there is zero chance in hell Google is getting a multiple of that cost back in value from him.

I have seen engineers at companies 1/1000 the size of Google generate $4 million in differentiated costs savings (definitely would not have happened without them). It seems plausible to me that someone could generate 10x that at Google.

I did generate millions in differentiated costs - multiple times. Are you looking for a badass programmer? Im based in Europe but can do remote work for whatever time zone (almost any stack). Email in bio.

If you're the sort of person who makes the team around you 2X more productive, then sure, they're getting that money back. Christ, a great engineer can make that back for a company by delivering zero code, if he can keep a team of 20 productively getting the _right_ stuff done.

I don’t think you understand Google’s scale. Someone making kernel improvements for the whole fleet could easily generate >$10 mil in savings.

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