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Comment by chank | Hacker News Reader

They're still looking for a sucker. That's what they expect to pay someone coming into that role. They likely had the last sucker at that salary and hope to find another. It's possible you can expect to take a hit when going "social impact" roles, but who's willing to take $100k reduction just for that. Either that or they're inflating the title a lot and really just want a Sr. Dev. who again would be taking a salary hit at todays rates.

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I just hired a couple of good guys around this salary. Especially if you hire remote, there’s no need to pay these types of roles $300k.

Some dude living in Buffalo will have a better standard of living at $150k than a $300k guy in SFO. And frankly, for the lower level roles where remote is fine, it’s hard to ignore Eastern Europe.

Sorry guys, but these premiums were all about Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc trying to keep talent away from competitors. If you were making $500k to be a sysadmin, that’s probably a gravy train that will slow down.

> Some dude living in Buffalo will have a better standard of living at $150k than a $300k guy in SFO.

It doesn't really matter what your standard of living is when you look at how much faster you can fill your retirement fund.

These companies are all making multiples[1] of that in revenue per employee. An "average" employee making $200K/yr at Apple is not even capturing 10% of the "average" value he's bringing in. If anything, tech should be paying much more than it already is. The shareholders are getting away with murder.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...

I'm afraid that's not how employment markets work. As an employee you are in a competitive environment and worth what at least one employer is willing to pay you. How that relates to the value you generate for the employer is largely irrelevant in an employer's market and that is what we have today. If you want to price based on value then you might consider a different path that leads to more of a B2B relationship such as entrepreneurialism, contracting or freelancing. The traditional alternative would be something like unionisation and collective bargaining but I don't see that happening effectively for software developers any time soon.

So, err, shouldn’t they also be paying their retail workers more? As in, much more? Since they are Apple employees too.

Don’t forget the janitors, accountants, HR people…

It’s all supply and demand. No (well run) company is ever going to pay their employees more than they need to.

Isn't lot of value generated by those who put together the overpriced devices? Shouldn't the margin of those go to them, working in factories?

Individuals have no leverage; they only get better valuation with collective bargaining.

Sysadmin is no longer a role because now every commit has a little bit of sysadmin rolled in.

The larger systems, AWS Batch, K8S, Fargate, etc... have all replaced sysadmin with specific commits in specific TF files. There's no longer a need for someone to "watch" for servers to go down or discs to run out of space if everything is using the appropriate service.

If you're unaware of this, of course you won't have a sysadmin job going forward. 8 9's is now guaranteed if you just choose anything but us-east-1

So is $250K the salary for every location in the US or just for SV/NYC?

Honest question; my lair is a remote beach paradise.

$250k is about right for a Principal "DevOps Enginner" for a company in a major city. Principal engineers are well paid, and SREs (what people often mean when they say DevOps eng) are often the highest paid engineers at a company.

You wouldn't get this in small or midsized towns in the US.

> SREs (what people often mean when they say DevOps eng) are often the highest paid engineers at a company

Nope. It is usually the higher stack eng.

What do you mean by "higher stack" here? SREs being highest paid is true for my anecdotal knowledge and what I've seen in salary surveys. I'd be interested in updating my understanding though.

My bad, I think you are right.

I did some more digging and couldn't find stats supporting this either way.

I was thinking more ML eng but it doesn't seem that widespread.

That's just in SV/NYC. Average is a bit lower, range is like 180k-300k in the US. Glassdoor has stats you can find here https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/principal-devops-engineer...

Is a person who is looking for more than just money from their job necessarily a sucker?

Comp packages inclusive of benefits, but I also think that there is a point of self respect that just because you're doing something you love you shouldn't get taken for a ride at the end of the day. That's why the entire game development industry has such low pay compared to business developer counterparts. Those developers have been taken advantage of excessively.

IMO, jobs where you have some other incentives (moral or otherwise) should still pay market and expect some competition for thier roles because they're highly desirable not just because of some idealistic stance. At the end of the day, ideals aren't going to pay the bills.

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