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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

I remember this one time as a dev, I went through this entire interview process and they offered me 30k a year. I was literally laughing so hard I fell on the floor -- I thought it was a joke. Turns out this was the first dev position the company ever had that wasn't contractors.

I ended up working with them as a part-time consultant to actually find their first few devs. Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.

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I had something very similar happen a lot of years ago when I was consulting and a client in a bank I'd worked with had asked me what it would take for me to consider joining them full-time.

When I told them they stared dumb-founded at me and said "but that's more than I make". We didn't talk about it again, as I don't know where you'd start explaining how capitalism works to a manager in a bank.

When I was in a similar situation I declined. (I was going to offer to contract, but then an absurdly low offer came in via email.)

It turned into a series of email flames from an "entrepreneur" that involved references to Frodo and the Ring.

Needless to say, the company burned out super-fast. The guy running the company didn't realize that he has to pay market rate in order to attract talent; and if he can't pay market rate, he has to reset what he's trying to do in order to meet his budget.

I had a guy literally laugh me off the call in my last search.

He kept pressing me for a salary number and I gave him one below market rate, well below what I ended up getting on another offer.

To top it off, he went on some dumbass rant about government handouts, "no one wants to work anymore", etc. Dodged a bullet there I guess!

> He kept pressing me for a salary number and I gave him one below market rate

Were you trying to get hired? If so, why would you do that?

I think any response would be fine as the employer is responsible for the offer. There's really no point asking me how much I would like to be compensated (the answer is always $1b) when the real question is how much are you willing to offer in return for my services.

Some employers ask this at the start. Then, you'll go through $x interview rounds.

If you say 100 quatloos, then go through 3 rounds of interviews, discussions, and they offer your 100 quatloos, you'd be an asshat to complain about salary.

And the employer would have every reason to think you're a dumbass.

Note that refusing to answer is fine, but being entirely dishonest (a random number, eg "any response"), would make me believe you are utterly untrustworthy.

>Note that refusing to answer is fine

I was required to put a "desired salary" in an application form. It was a required field. I wonder if the employer sorts by lowest?

Just put in an obviously fake number like 9999999999. It will be understood as you declining to answer

Not everyone is in a situation where they believe they can get an offer at "market rate"

Ideology doesn’t trump salary, metaphor included.

So, Google is free. They were hiring for a very expensive employee class and doing 0 research? I find that hard to believe. I think they knew what a dev would cost and were hoping to be hire from the left side of the salary curve.

I've also been in a few interviews where the company was being evasive about the salary range. In every case it was below market and the hiring manager was just too embarrassed or too scammy to state it. Hoping they would hire someone desperate enough (ie "exposure").

Have you ever met business owners? They're not all that smart

In fact intelligence is negatively correlated with success in business. It’s all grit and a certain irrational headstrongness that’s needed

Sounds false. Do you have any citations for this claim?

Only beyond a certain point.

Once someone gets to Bill Gates level intelligence, I would agree any additional steps beyond that probably negatively correlates with grit and 'a certain irrational headstrongness' to a sizable amount, so much so that it noticeably reduces chances of business success.

I think most successful business owners are above average intelligence, but they’re also frequently really blinkered - they know a lot about something but almost nothing about a lot of other stuff, if it hasn’t come up in their path. It’s such a noticeable lopsidedness that I almost wonder if it’s a kind of prerequisite for being so foolish as to start a business.

The main criteria for becoming a business owner is access to capital not ability and by there are more small businesses then large concerns. Furthermore actually smart people aren't generally blinkered intelligence is by definition generalizable.

Your confusing reasonably trained in a narrow area with intelligence.

> intelligence is by definition generalizable.

How do you define intelligence?

I like this definition

"A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do"

I don't know where you live, but in most Western countries the capital required to become a business owner (i.e. start a legal business entity) is within reach of most people.

Unless we are talking about the money to file the paperwork to instantiate such an entity this just isn't true at least in the US.

Lets examine the parameters. In order to start a new business one has to be able to cover startup costs and live on your savings. Lets look at average savings as a starting point.

https://www.zippia.com/advice/american-savings-statistics/ About 33% have 10,000+ and 42% have less than 1000.

Even 10k is really very little in truth just a little runway until you can either acquire additional funding or crash and burn.

Lets inject some reality. Half of America has basically nothing. Another 25% would have to sink the majority of their accumulated wealth eg home equity into such an endeavor with a 50 50 chance of existing in 5 years. They COULD do it but it would be both scary and dangerous and half of them would end up ruined. It's like saying I could climb Everest.

I could scrape up the funds for the plane ticket and its possible I might survive the trip but anyone saying "most people could climb Everest" would be talking nonsense.

“and live on your savings.” << this is an obvious strawman.

There are plenty of ways to start a business without instantly giving up other employment.

To be quite frank this is mostly bullshit. Few people in the majority could live on less than full time hours or successfully launch a new endeavor on less. The counter examples mostly involve the "business" of owning things. For example owning the house someone else lives in especially if the day to day affairs are managed by a property manager, or investing in an endeavor wherein the majority of the work is done by those slightly less privileged wherein the "work" is effectively giving direction to secure your investment.

-“To be quite frank this mostly bullshit”

-some ramble about how it’s all too hard

Excellent debating style right there!

You dismissed the meat of the argument. People have finite amounts of time and money. In present context households are already running full tilt usually with 2 full time workers just to stay in one spot with too little in reserve to even cover ordinary disasters. It is this surplus of time and money that creates the opportunity for exciting things to happen like starting a small businesses.

Increasing costs and inequality rob us of the future surpluses that would be produced by such endeavors. Should we want to enrich our society it isn't sufficient to pretend opportunity exists we just endeavor to actually support it.

"You dismissed" - what, by calling it mostly bullshit?

The rest of your response is similar to your previous rambles about how it's all too hard, despite the countless examples, a mere google search away, of people who have started and run businesses in Western countries without instantly starving to death, or whatever your mostly-bullshit argument is.

So say you are liquid for 1000 bucks with average credit and a 50 hour a week time commitment to working and commuting to earn just enough to get by.

This or worse is about half the country

You need expertise, time, and money to start a business. The majority of people lack not one but all 3.

This is probably why only 9% own an established business. Indeed jp Morgan says that future business owners on average start out substantially wealthier.

https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-busin...

Which supports my assertion that the majority are ill positioned to start a business.

Money buys time, money buys relevant expertise in, wealth makes risk tenable because failure doesn't mean homelessness, money and financial health in fact buys access to borrowed money.

Everyone could just do what only 9% of people do is an incredibly privileged thing to say it's like Zuckerberg saying anyone can have a website or bolt saying anyone can run.

It's insulting.

Your glass is half empty. There are businesses you can start for under $1000, you may not personally be aware of them, but they exist (the business I own was started with much less than this amount in 2016 & has delivered decent returns with part-time hours since, no particular skills other than basic English & hard work required). Obviously you will need to spend time over your nominated 50 hour a week time commitment, why is this impossible? If you want to build wealth you need to put in the time. I don't recall claiming any of this was easy.

I guess some elements of capitalism need people with your defeatist outlook, to be lifelong wage slaves.

The glass is what it is. To be defeatist is to commit yourself to failure. I have no such ambition or shall I say lack thereof. To be a realist is to properly understand the world as it is and plan accordingly. If one wants to actually succeed then this is infinitely more valuable that fake optimism.

There are a lot of as you put it "wage slave" businesses which have 45 people making barely enough to live 4 folks making 20% more in semi-supervisory positions working 60 hours a week with lots of unpaid overtime effectively making less per hour than the grunts and 1 guy making a decent living.

You can accurately say that any of the guys could in theory move up but the logic breaks down trying to apply it to the group as a whole with one position essentially worth having anyone COULD move up but EVERYONE never could.

Society is essentially so constructed in the large. We can't all sell each other financial products. If we want society to function we will have to have a whole lot of people who are modestly compensated and I don't just mean french fry cooks. There are a lot of positions that are both challenging and necessary that really aren't paid that much. These people aren't all stupid losers and they aren't all too stupid to be business tycoons. They fit into the slots that society made and if we want people to move up we ought to do a better job at creating such slots and allocating resources to them.

Bemoaning the fact that people haven't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps is basically useless.

What business did you start?

No, I’m saying that smart people can be blinkered, that knowledge is distinct from intelligence, and successful businesspeople are sometimes lacking in general knowledge, sometimes startlingly so.

I think it is necessary for being really successful in most fields that you neglect a lot of other stuff. I've had to deal with quite a few successful scientists, and it is striking how otherwise very intelligent people can show an almost shocking naiveté in regards to, e.g., politics (outside faculty, I might have to add).

My take is that business owners are bottlenecked on their capacity to take in information. If they could integrate more knowledge about what’s going on in their business, they would be able to make better decisions. And they know it. So there’s a very high opportunity cost spending that cognitive effort researching random things online.

You simply don’t get to put all your focus on making your business succeed without being a bit “blinkered”. That’s what focus means.

> So, Google is free. They were hiring for a very expensive employee class and doing 0 research?

Some services vary in price by huge amounts.

Use Google to research how much it costs to have a company logo professionally designed, and you'll find you can spend anything from $5 (remote fiverr designer slaps your name on a stock template) to $5,000,000 (fancy ad agency rebrand for a fortune 500 company)

So I can see how someone could accidentally make an insultingly low offer for some services, despite having tried to research beforehand.

A former coworker got hired as a young company's DBA. They were more-or-less in the manufacturing space but with an internet sales channel. They had set up cubicles on the factory floor, with a "break room" on the floor consisting of a couple of vending machines with picnic tables. He wasn't getting anything done, what with the constant noise of pneumatic equipment and beeping of fork-lift trucks, plus the constant sweating from not having air conditioning.

He gave notice after a week, and one of the founders took him aside and asked why. Turned out he was their third DBA in a couple of months and they didn't understand why they were all leaving on such short notice. He was pretty gentle in letting them know...

>Turns out this was the first dev position the company ever had that wasn't contractors.

The most upsetting part of this is they were most certainly paying insane prices for that contractor, and probably weren't even offering you half of that. Businesses are so comfortable at padding another business's pockets with obscene mark up, but utterly refuse to let even a little of that money go to the "workers"

You actually fell on the floor? Were you in their office?

He may have been standing, and his knees gave out. It's worth considering alternative interpretations.

Or maybe he was in a dunk tank and he was so bowled over that he swung his arm out triggering the latch but someone forgot to fill it with water.

Another likely scenario!

Perhaps a bit less likely, but we'll allow it.

Yes! I literally fell out of the chair, which made it even more hilarious.

Yep, must have been hilarious. Thanks.

> Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.

Uh, those that stormed out did it right after the salary piece, and they didn't put it together?

The typical mind fallacy: amongst other things, unless it was done deliberately, it's really really hard to guess why you've upset someone, especially when they're so upset they don't talk to you any more.

Nah, if they stormed out right after you told them the salary, it's pretty obvious.

It sounds more like an example of 'cultural density' -- not wanting to realize or acknowledge something that's at odds with what your local culture desires (in this case, the desire to pay as little as possible).

This was the highest paid position in the company (30k a year) and a salary (which only their managers were paid in a salary). They thought they were offering a really good salary, not realizing it was FAR below market rate. They still hired engineers at below market rate (~60k) but I helped them find some really smart junior engineers who could maintain the existing code; and warned them that these engineers would likely leave in the next year or two, max.

They were able to become fairly profitable with full-time engineers, eventually, and ended up paying above market rate, last I heard.

What? Was everyone else at the company living in their car and relying on the food bank to feed themselves? Or was this in some strange ultra-low-CoL environment?

It was long ago, maybe 2009ish? Developer salaries were actually going down, IIRC, during this time. Likely due to companies exactly like this one and pivoting to more digital solutions. 100+k was very rare outside of SV. Adjusted for inflation, 30k is roughly equal to about 40-50k in todays dollars.

This reminds me of an interview I had @ Wikimedia (Wikipedia) a decade+ ago. They offered less than half what I was earning at a startup.

Is that surprising given that Wikimedia is ostensibly a non-profit and was in a much different financial position a decade+ ago?

For what it’s worth I do believe that wikimedia could allocate more of the dollars they have to their “core competencies”

Startups aren't exactly known for good salaries, I expected a comparable salary just without the option grants.

Non-profit doesn't mean bad salaries. I can say that because I work for a non-profit and I can compare my salary with many salaries in the industry through my union.

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