Hacker News Reader

Comment by dartharva | Hacker News Reader

Huh, I thought engineers' pay scale would be a lot higher than program managers, business analysts, administrators, consultants and the like. It isn't. At all.

View on HN

Why in the name of all that is unholy would you ever think that?

The people in charge of pay and hiring will never, ever, ever set things up such that they're considered less important or are paid less.

> The people in charge of pay and hiring will never, ever, ever set things up such that they're considered less important or are paid less.

HR and accounting get paid less than engineers in every country on earth

HR and accounting don't hire and pay you, they're just the ones that fill out the paperwork. Isn't this obvious.

Those are the boots on the ground. The people in charge are those they listed, i.e, program managers, business analysts, administrators, consultants...

HR and accounting are not in charge of pay and hiring. They are involved, but management is in charge and sets the rules.

I have seen cases where I made more than my boss (the difference was a few hundred/year), but it wasn't long before they promoted my boss so that wasn't the case. (I'm convinced that it was only allowed to happen just long enough to say it was possible and then when nobody was looking they promoted him to ensure it doesn't become a pattern)

HR is definitely in charge of pay structure , at least where I have managed. You could argue with them, but it was a monumental effort to get them to do a market study, and they still wouldn't drop degree requirements for some of our best candidates.

I only had a tiny bit of freedom within a pay band.

Sure, but you can jump to a different pay band. If they want to keep you they will do it.

Management is in charge of this, if it is hard to jump bands it is because management wants it to be hard.

> accounting get paid less than engineers in every country on earth

Not in Argentina

Developer layoffs are always projected as huge savings in expenditure. It probably gives the impression that developers' pay is higher compared to other employees.

Compared to other employees in customer service, tech support, marketing, accounting, I'd imagine engineers are quite expensive.

There are more developers than managers, like you would hopefully expect.

That isn't true in at least two other industries: Finance and sports.

At investment banks, it's quite possible for a star trader or I-banker to be paid more than the CEO.

An NFL head coach is almost certainly paid less than the starting QB, and possibly other positions. The general manager is paid far less than many players.

> Why in the name of all that is unholy would you ever think that?

Seen it many times where engineers are making more than their managers. I had jobs where there was no real difference between my pay and my direct manager's.

There were fewer programmers for each programmer's role than managers for each manager's. Not sure if it still applies though.

Upper management yes but level for level engineers are paid more than biz roles at most other tech companies, FAANG. The only other people who possibly make more is sales (performance based)

I don’t think I saw anywhere in the article about Msft pay for program managers and the other positions you mention. Curious about these numbers, can u share?

Welcome to the middle management timeline!

You get paid to do magic. Flipping millions of bits in a particular arrangement that others find valuable and will pay you for.

Part of your "pay package" is that you get to be purely creative, making machines that do things out of literal thin air.

None of those other people get to do that.

the others get to boss people around and make them do their bidding. they clearly enjoy it. why would they need to be paid more for it?

It is possible that programmers are taking less money than their worth due to the fact that our jobs are basically fun, but that’s an exploitation rather than a feature.

Also because many of us hate looking for a new job (which may mean moving despite efforts to work from home).

As a person doing that exact thing right now, I 100% sympathize with the hate there. It's awful. It's like being single, except your survival depends on it.

Paradoxically, I'd prefer 60% onsite/40% remote due to being a bit ADD.

No one sets pay rates. Pay for labor in a free market economy is determined purely by supply and demand. So literally the entire concept of "paid less than their worth" is nonsense, because the economy is what is evaluating "the worth". Here's a simple question, how would you prove that someone is "being paid less than their 'worth'"? I can fantasize any figure for my "true worth" and make noise about being paid less than it; it's just as meaningless.

It also occurred to me that the movement to make most IT jobs 100% remote depresses pay which would normally be based on local standard of living (much higher in cities)

May have been true of the 2000s. But the 2010s and 2020s, not much “fun” to be had cleaning up the shit architecture of 2000s; and getting rid of “legacy” tech (ie, mainframe).

It’s a grind, m8. Companies today just acquire their competition, “trim the fat”, pump the stock. There hasn’t been any new innovation in this industry in a long time.

Same shit. Different day

I actually wouldn't mind refactoring old code, but I'm weird like that

You can't have it both ways.

If you insist people get the same pay no matter how enjoyable the job is, then you're implying people should get the same pay for jobs that make people feel like shit.

IMHO, the latter is really exploitation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com