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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

As a total newbie I saved my company a quarter million dollars in Oracle licensing in a single afternoon by rewriting a PL/SQL function. That change was a few lines of SQL. Seniors don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.

Salary is driven by market conditions and nothing else. It is not an approximation of merit or even delivered value.

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This is laughably false. The highly-paid, experienced seniors produce so much more value than juniors that it's not even in the same ballpark. It's also usually the kind of value that juniors don't even notice, because it's not measured in lines of code.

A good junior will write a hundred lines of code in a day. A good senior will delete a hundred because they realize the user dictated a solution instead of detailing their problem, asked them, and figured out that they can solve that problem by changing a config variable somewhere.

Yes, but they don't get paid as many times as junior engs compared to how many more times value they bring.

Violent agree on variance in value produced. Violent disagree on that junior, senior or other titles or roles have such strong correlations. For very simple reasons: we can’t measure value, and we absolutely can’t measure value within a performance review cycle.

The most devastating value destruction (aside from the rare intern deleting the prod db) that I’ve seen consistently is with senior/rockstars who introduce new tech, takes credit, moves on. There’s a reason for the term resume driven development. Think about what a negative force multiplier can do for an org.

I don't know, I think where I work we have a pretty good idea for the value each person brings. I don't know how much they're paid, but I do know how good each person is (including whether they tend to complicate things, to use exciting technologies, etc).

Maybe it varies per company.

> I don't know how much they're paid

But that’s the entire point you’re missing. The pay is not proportional to contribution or technical skill. It’s proportional to market forces and negotiation skill.

I know what level each of our people is, and levels are compensated fairly evenly. The fact that I don't know exact numbers doesn't mean I don't have a proxy.

How does violent agree/disagree work? Like after you conclude you agree/disagree to this internet text, do you then proceed to scream out on your balcony that which you agree with / smash up your apartment in rage, respectively?

> Think about what a negative force multiplier can do for an org.

Negative force multipliers are easily remedied: just make sure you have an even number of them.

This totally happened on my first team.

We had a guy who would argue about everything that knew the CTO so we had to tolerate him.

Then we hired a second one and they just argued with each other all the time and the rest of the team could finally make progress.

It was awesome.

I have a feeling I was hired to be this second guy and I really just want to hang up my gloves, man

Thank you for your service

It's true, not "laughably false". I've seen with my own eyes the most effective developer in a company being paid in the bottom quartile, as well as a vice versa case.

In the former case, we basically had to demand management raise his salary to the low end of his market value, over the cause of six months, until they finally gave in. It was just so disgusting to us we couldn't let it go.

The reason comes down to a skill bias - it's a different skill set to navigate other people into getting yourself a good salary, versus navigating the ins and outs of coding. The skills don't overlap, so time spent on one detracts from another.

In the end he finally got the message we kept ramming in to his head, applied to work at a brand-name tech company, and instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.

This stuff is the norm. I've been a manager having eyes on salaries while also having eyes on people's performance (although unfortunately not much of a lever on the former), and rest assured it is often a very jarring experience. Like "that person should be let go immediately / that person should job hop immediately".

> instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.

So it's not true, then?

The GP claims this is universally true. All I need to do is post a counterexample, and I did. Yes, there are shitty companies that try to keep salaries as low as possible, not realizing that that will lose them their best people. Don't work for those!

> This is laughably false. The highly-paid, experienced seniors produce so much more value than juniors that it's not even in the same ballpark. It's also usually the kind of value that juniors don't even notice, because it's not measured in lines of code.

This particular case sounds like someone got incorrectly hired as a junior. Maybe they didn't have enough "real world" corporate experience and that is why they weren't offered a senior position?

I was fresh out of college. But it’s not like that was an isolated incident or that other juniors don’t also have good ideas.

My view as a burgeoning senior dev is that the "senior" bit is generally less about coding and more about domain knowledge.

Understanding the business processes of your industry, how to solicit feedback from and interact with end users, how to explain things to management/sell on ideas.

If you put a junior dev in front of a panel of executives and ask them to explain requirements for a project odds are quite high they will info dump tech mumbo-jumbo. A senior should be able to explain risks, benefits, timelines, and impacted areas of the business in a manner that non technical people can easily grok.

For me, "senior" just counts the amount of time they've been doing something. If someone isn't very good at something after putting ten thousand hours into it, they just might work at microsoft.

>> they will info dump tech mumbo-jumbo

I'm mid-level engineer. Honestly, several staff+ engineers may not be spitting tech mumbo-jumbo, but they do dump all other kind of BS. Political BS, "tactical tornados"[1]. May not necessarily mean they were good at engineering, but just good with people skills. Obviously, not everyone is like that, but I would say many are.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394287#:~:text=The%20....

If it will be BS, it should be understandable BS.

Statistically speaking a senior (more experienced) engineer is more likely to consistently deliver time saving results, while a junior is more likely to occasionally do it, if ever.

Proving it’s not a one time thing is what pushes you in the salary and seniority ranking.

Senior engineers have less opportunity to write time consumingly careful code because they get paid so much. Much easier to throw new great hardware at it.

Senior engineers have less time to write code period.

And this is what saves the day.

Code is a liability.

The corporate structures that reward people who prove especially good at building the product with more meetings and less time building the product are perhaps not optimal in their deployment of resources.

Maximising the fraction of the product built by people who don't know what they're doing would however explain the emergent properties of modern software.

Senior engineers can write time-consuming, careful code efficiently. This is why they are seniors.

Not a monopoly, but a majority. Many juniors who do have that potential don't ever get put in such a situation.

Junior/senior isn't necessarily about skill level; I'm sure many can find a senior with 1YOE ten times over. It's about trust both in technical and sociopolitical navigation through the job. That's only really gained with time and experience (and yes, isn't perfect. Hence, the aforementioned 1x10 senior. Still "trusted" more than a 1 year junior).

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