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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

Employment is a poor proposition. Typically employees make poor money in comparison to what kind of profit they generate, that especially applies to IT.

Anyone with a talent, should rather seek to incorporate and sell their services at fair price.

Unfortunately in some countries, big corporations managed to lobby governments to put a stop to that.

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The problem with that option is it involves many skills other than the primary tech-focused skill. Sales, marketing, accounting, negotiation, support, etc. Many technical people don't really want to handle those job functions, even if they happen to be decently good at them.

Certainly you can hire people to do those functions, but you need to have a decently well-established reputation and enough work and income before you're able to hire those people.

Employment does give you a trade off there: less money in exchange for someone else handling the "overhead".

Yeah, it is just another example of specialisation/divison of labour.

If you consider large employers as labor brokers, it makes more sense that someone accepts the reduction in potential earnings for easier access to labor demand.

Massive “it depends” on that

> Typically employees make poor money in comparison to what kind of profit they generate

I think it’s the opposite - developers are overvalued.

I understand where that sentiment comes from, especially looking at the slew of mid-sized companies that have never turned a profit despite paying multiple hundred K TCs, but if you look at the profits of the giants, it paints a different picture. The labor of thousands of very highly compensated engineers is still a drop in the bucket of the revenue generated by their labor. Alphabet seemingly employs somewhere between 20-40 thousand engineers, and it is their labor that produced all (?) of their revenue generating products. Spreading last year's revenue (~$282B) across their engineering staff would yield a revenue in the ballpark of $9M per engineer.

We all know that their engineers are paid well, but that's still potentially more than an order of magnitude off of the value they generate. Of course, there are many other expenses to running their business, but to claim that broadly developers are overvalued when one of the most prolific employers of developers is generating 10x+ the revenue of what they spend on them, is likely no more than only occasionally correct.

That raises an interesting question. If developers are toiling equally hard at company A and company B, on similar products, but company A currently had a dominant market position over company B thanks to network effects - are the developers at company A in any way responsible for its outsize gains and therefore due millions of dollars in TC?

Why are you leaving out all the other essential people that go towards that revenue figure?

Alphabet has at least twice those numbers.

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