Hacker News Reader

I believe an engineer deserves whatever salary they can get. I try not to compare my salary with others; in the end we're all enabling huge salaries for upper management and CEO's, huge profits for shareholders. If someone makes $150K, $200K, that's awesome.

It's possible though, I found, to keep my midwest upbringing unspoilt in Silicon Valley. I ate out only once a week with the whole family, never took Uber, never owned a Tesla (owned a used minivan though).

After 26 years though I quit, sold the house, and moved with the wife (now empty nesters) back to the midwest.

Now I miss the excellent Asian food.

why did you move back? I'm also from midwest, the move here was already hard enough frankly I think I'm just going to stay put for some time

Well, I stayed put for 27 years. Raised a family and emptied the nest there. It made moving back to the midwest easier.

It was a pain, but it is part of my retirement strategy — downsize periodically. (Obviously moving from California to Nebraska was the biggest gain in that regard.)

I know, the food is so good here and hard to give up. It's the biggest thing we notice when visiting home.

> One time I asked a web dev friend of mine what he thought of Kubernetes and he didn't even know what it was. This was just a couple years ago. I was shocked at little he knew and how much he got paid.

Not be a good heuristic. Maybe they're in a job where they don't have to use Kubernetes.

Like, I know compiler developers who have no need to bother with Kubernetes.

> But does a C student web dev who kinda doesn't give a shit really deserve 150$k/year?

In college they might have struggled; some people just don't work that well in a classroom environment. That doesn't necessarily mean they're idiots. Or maybe they improved afterwards.

Just because somebody got an A in classroom tests doesn't necessarily mean they should be the most-compensated.

The real world is complex.

>But does a C student web dev who kinda doesn't give a shit really deserve 150$k/year? I assure you, he does not. Not while there are far more qualified people all over the globe who will do that job for half.

Buckle up, friend: there are individuals more qualified than you who will do your job for half what you get. They could probably make the exact same argument you've just made, about you. "Deserving wealth" is an idea we have right before the veil comes off and we realise this whole thing is a big joke. Forget "should", accept "is".

> Buckle up, friend: there are individuals more qualified than you who will do your job for half what you get.

I wouldn't be so sure. You have no idea what my job is, how competent I am, nor what I get paid.

In some sense I agree that the sort of life some people lead isn't appealing, and arguably vapid, particularly in Silicon Valley.

But, complaining about someone who didn't give a shit about grades ultimately succeeding is really kind of a caricature of "Straight A Student" mentality. "I deserve it more" they cry about people who never bothered spending more energy than they needed to on something nobody should care about at all, let alone after graduation. It seems like you're needlessly harbouring resentment based on pretty a pretty shallow and superficial view in one person's life, or perhaps unwillingness to adopt that sort of lifestyle and make a big jump.

In some ways I also wish I could bring in the big tech bucks, and I make decent money occasionally, but I'm not casting aspersions on people who do, I just recognize that they are either more clever than me, or chose a specific regimented path that I simply haven't and am unwilling to.

I'd add that the people who tend to jave the easiest jobs doing the best in school have stable family lives of academicly driven or relatively rich parents; not always, but often. I don't think those people deserve higher salaries than anyone else, and I don't think spontaneously becoming great at grades should be life's only equalizer.

Your paradigm of who is “deserving” of wealth and who isn’t is somewhat weird. I don’t think being a “C grade student” means that this individual cannot make contributions of value. Many people that don’t do very well in school find a lot of success outside of it.

Agreed. 'Deserving' a salary is internalised BS from corporations. The job market is: you sell your labour, companies buy it. Everything else exists to muddy the waters. Attempting to import moral judgements into the world of business is foolish.

The reality is that GP's C grade student friend has just done a better job of selling their labour than GP. GP could go do the same if they wished.

such a shame that a focus must be placed on selling oneself. everyone has two responsibilities in that model. their job and their career.

those who think the work is more important than the selling will wind up questioning why others more willing to ignore the job for the career are advancing in the career without advancing in the job.

someone will rush in to defend the virtues of this system. go ahead, your third job starts below the line here.

It's called realism, something doesn't have to be virtuous to be true.

> He also had saved very little money, as it was all going to taking Uber to and from work and eating out every meal.

This is critical to understanding one’s pay. It’s a little bit like a london software worker thinking they earn more than an east european worker, just because on paper they earn more. While the london worker barely rents a flat the east european worker owns two.

Similarly the sillicon valley worker earning three times more than you, but pissing away their money on a uber and a rent, is actually earning far less than you. Many in software are financially illiterate and dont grasp the difference between pay on paper and pay factoring in the cost of living.

Sometimes I read nonsense in comment sections on places like teamblind where people say sv companies "hire the best and brightest", then I remember some PRs I reviewed the other day where the authors had no fucking clue what they were doing and I think to myself "best and brightest"

Sounds like your beef is with specialization, big tech companies don’t use k8s, don’t burden their web devs with devops and the aforementioned devs delegate food and transit to professionals who do it better than them.

I don’t think a web dev being unaware of Kubernetes is that rare, especially if we’re talking about a front end dev. Particularly in large companies jobs are very tightly segmented, the dev might just be given the URL for the backend API and not be expected to know much more about it than that.

> He also had saved very little money, as it was all going to taking Uber to and from work and eating out every meal.

Sounds like he did not earn that much if just Uber and eating out alone could consume significant amount.

> web dev friend of mine what he thought of Kubernetes and he didn't even know what it was

I bet they could ask you about foundational architecture and technologies for building user experiences and you won't know anything about it either

If I had to guess, they wouldn't be able to do that either haha. There's lots of folks in these companies who don't have too much skill apart from knowing how to play that company's system - which is a skill for sure, just not like the one you describe.

A friend called me the other day asking about someone I knew who had solid pedigree in this sense and I had to share that I never knew him to be good at anything but people change, could've matured and skilled up, but I don't remember that being his nature.

Well, my buddy had already scheduled the first interview and so we decided to see how it would go. Sure enough, it was exactly the disaster predicted. The poor engineer he sent to talk to this guy hahaha.