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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Top talent probably never had much issue negotiating whatever they want.

It's the rest of us who are impacted. Most companies don't need or want top talent, just good enough mediocrity that will fall in line, do the work, and not make a stink about it. They don't care if they lose a few percent of top workers as long as they have a steady stream of easier to manage mediocre applicants. It's kinda a filtering process both ways.

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But it's not just "top talent" as in the people who can walk into the number one company in an industry and negotiate their millions in compensation, it's "top talent" as in "the upper segment of whatever talent pool suits the roles".

If there are ten small dev companies who aren't competing with FANG because the upper end of their salary range is $80k, the ones that force office work will lose out on the top talent within people who're willing to work for that salary to the other small companies who offer WFH, even if none of the companies are discussing the type of "top talent" who are the best of the best in their field.

"the upper end of their salary range is $80k"

In my experience quite recently, the smaller non-FAANG technology jobs are in the $100K to $120K range. FAANG jobs, if you can get one, are more in the $150K and up range.

I dont live in the US, I was picking a random non-best-developer-in-the-world salary to make the point, not trying to accurately price specific jobs.

But surely 100-120k is far too small a range even for the US considering the variance of states AND the variance of companies from those doing similar work to FANG for cheaper all the way down to companies that just need a few wordpress devs to create small business websites?

BLS stats on all US software developers, 10, 25, 50, 75, 90 percentiles:

$ 71,280, $ 96,790, $ 127,260, $ 161,480, $ 198,100

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

Then I'm pretty pleased with my random $80k as an example of a salary that isn't near the top industry wise, but still has a sizeable pool of people earning, within which there's top - relatively - talent!

Thanks

I’ve seen projects DOA and entire product lines and services slowly die once the engineering talent leaves. Cheap talent can be used for maintenance but new products and major revisions need a certain creative drive to envision the future and push through corporate entropy.

Is it talent, or is it experience and a sense of ownership?

Projects and products can fail when key people leave, because the organization no longer knows what it's doing. When the knowledge is gone, new people will have a hard time rediscovering it on their own. But they can have more success with new projects, because it's their project and they understand it.

For greenfield projects, voracious and relentless talent is integral to building great products. Talent is general aptitude coupled with fast learning within the general domain.

Experience can often be detrimental as the person may be too biased to see what they are missing.

I have experienced this bias first hand at AWS. Experience can be blinding as it doesn’t let you explore new ideas.

I didn't mean experience in general but experience with the specific project. If an organization loses everyone with that experience in a project, it's no longer their project. If they want to continue working on it, they must spend a lot of effort to understand it.

I have more experience in the academia and with volunteer projects than in industry. Based on what I have seen, while talent does exist, it's rare. Success comes mostly from having the right mix of people working on the right project in the right environment. There are far more successful people and successful projects than truly talented people.

The word talent is being used in two senses here. The original meaning - an employee, you’re using it to mean an inherent ability. The article is about the top performing employees.

Disagree. Every place I've ever worked has had 1 or 2 key guys on each team who made shit work while 8-10 others worked as you described. In the 27 years I've been working in the industry I've seen endless attempts both by individual managers and the industry to re-org or best practice or agile their way out of this, but the situation remains the same like a law of the universe.

I don't think this is a reality we disagree on... companies accept it too, but still keep hiring those 8 to 10 folks. But those 1 or 2 usually get special treatment of some sort. The 8 or 10 are disposable commodities.

OK, but still I think the logistics of "everyone comes to the office except for Dan who can WFH because he's just really good at getting things to work" is probably kind of a hard policy to implement.

Is it really that unusual? Even in the pre covid days, all the places I've worked had someone working remotely because of some reason or another, but the general policy was that everyone had to come in all or most days.

The WFH became almost a perk, like if you work hard enough and prove yourself, maybe we'd consider it.

It is not when you look back and realize Dan has been WFH whenever he wants all this time, even before the whole Covid thing

First two jobs out of university everyone pulled its weight. Great team spirit and atmosphere in both jobs, but after this the experience in my third job hit me even harder. Suddenly I am one of those two guys and the other one quits.

If you look at the valuation of companies that hire or were started by top talent, all companies should want them. Crab mentality can make you rationalize scaring them away.

Valuations are mostly bullshit free cash flow net of share compensation is what matters.

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