Comment by gregfjohnson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregfjohnson | Hacker News Reader

A person close to me works at a law firm. She was feeling a bit stagnant, so she connected with a recruiter. She got a very solid offer with a significant pay bump. She gave her two weeks' notice to her firm, including appointments with the partners. One of the partners asked her for a half hour. They came back with a massive pay raise, and a promotion to partner if she would stay. She was in a state of shock, but then informed the other firm that she was staying at her current firm.

By way of contrast, an engineering firm I am familiar with had an employee who had been there six years, and knew the company's very complex product inside and out, every nook and cranny. He was one of the only people who had such deep understanding of the system that he could fix any issues that might come up, hardware, firmware, software, everything. He gave his two weeks' notice, and then went to a different job. He's a very talented guy, who would command a very attractive offer, but his talent to the current company is vastly greater than his generic value on the market, because of his detailed knowledge of the product. Although he diligently documented his knowledge, the company was still left in a jam after his departure. It would have been great if the company had fought for him the way the law firm fought for the other individual described above.

“but his talent to the current company is vastly greater than his generic value on the market”

This has always been one of my fears. I would not want to become indispensable for a no name company while paying the price of being average to the market.

The point is that the market is willing to pay more, which seems counterintuitive since the employee should be much more valuable to their current employer. But, this does seem to happen with some frequency.

What prevents engineering firms from acting like law firms?

Management perceives people to be more replaceable than they are. Years of working in, or being the architect of, the company's core product will make you a true expert in it.

But, from the company perspective, your value is based on the 'market rate' for your generically defined skills and experience.

This is precisely the reason for management; when priorities are internally competitive.

engineers either have patent quotas or are blue collar as far as any Enterprise is concerned.

do you have patent quotas at your position? if not they are counting the days to replace you with a machine, someone overseas, a script, AI. depending on the decade.

Why is a lawyer position irreplaceable, but an engineering/blue collar one is not?

Not trying to be spiteful or angry, just geniunely curious about the business logic and psychology behind that kind of decision making. Isn't every job replaceable?

I think the reason is not that lawyers are irreplaceable, to the contrary perhaps. The reason is most likely that law firms are always led by lawyers, while that's rarely true for firms where most engineers work (or for most other professions). Typcially, law firms can only be owned by lawyers due to regulatory constraints (the UK, Australia being a notable, but not particularly successful exception). While this rule restricts the possible size, scalability, efficiency and profitability of law firms compared to many other sectors, it can ensure a certain degree of independence (insulation) of the management from extra-professional influences. Like "Das Kapital" trying to change the way the firm works to achieve better returns in the next 5 years. That leads to law firm management and owners being composed mostly of people who have previously worked in that exact field and PROBABLY being better at judging the worker's worth in terms of potential revenue he/she may earn, the client trust they have and the chance that they may transfer that to another firm... Maybe law firms also have less of an illusion about what is valuable in their law firm as opposed to those companies relying on engineers who have or believe they have some special moat outside their people (technology, source code, inventory etc.). No professional law firm would have any illusions that their lawyers are special - perhaps outside trial lawyers and some very special field of litigation, the firm just needs burnout resistant cannon-fodder with the capacity to run for at least ten years, so they may acquire the sufficient experience, plus a number of bland human skills and patience in coping with other human beings. There never was a genuine myth of the "10x lawyer", that's something that only ChatGPT invents. (Sidenote: I wouldn't call an engineering job blue collar as long as you work in an office - WFH, we are all collarless workers now.)

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for explaining!

Two main reasons;

1) Power/Politics - This is basically Human Nature at work and institutionalized as Management/Leadership/etc to put themselves at the top. A lot of it is BS (see the books by https://jeffreypfeffer.com/) but unfortunately only the enlightened in the industry have woken up to this. It is also the case that in these domains many of the objectives are intangible/subjective and difficult to measure thus allowing the actors to create an illusion of "Importance".

2) Nature of Engineering - The output of any Engineering activity has a well-defined boundary. This makes it more tangible/manageable/measurable and reason about. All the main costs are paid upfront and once gizmo-x/software-y is done the recurring costs are generally pretty low. This gives the illusion that the Engineer is now not worth his pay compared to his current output and hence replaceable/dispensable based on bean counter calculations. It also doesn't help that Engineers do a pretty good job so that a product/software once released and accepted in the market is generally very stable and not in much need of rework. This is the reason "Planned Obsolescence", "Subscription Model" etc. were invented by the Industry.

a lawyer very much can, but 1. there's no machine or script capable of replacing one yet, and 2. they are half sales people with their own client lists.

Well...

Because the Industry thinks that Management/Marketing/Sales are the important "leaders" and Engineering is just mere "foot soldiers" and hence replaceable/dispensable as needed. The above is justified as "Business needs", "Investor returns", "Profit next quarter" etc.

Very early on in my career, I had a few good mentors who all told me the same piece of advice - tech (IT, programming, QA, etc) are __cost centers__ to most businesses. No matter how valuable you are, your pay is not going to scale the same way no matter how good your performance reviews are. I’m very thankful for that advice because I was never shocked when raises were low or when finding out that new, lower leveled coworkers had higher starting salaries than me. My default mindset is that I’m fungible to the business. Work hard but also expect to fight to prove your worth. This is generally good advice in any career but I think it’s a must in tech.

Well, yeah, and generally you need to seek new employment regularly, because your current company is counting on you not recognizing your worth, whereas other companies will have to make competitive offers in order to win you over.

But it wasn't like this in the beginning of the Industrial/Knowledge revolution. Engineers/Scientists were valued and founded companies with Engineering at its core with Management/Marketing/Sales/etc. playing their proper ancillary roles. It was much later that the system was manipulated to place Management on a pedestal (undeserved) citing market/financial reasons. And Engineers have allowed this to happen, take root and persist to this day.

We need to change the above status-quo.

However; the important point we need to be aware of is that in the current Economic/Financial System many events and their payoffs are no longer linear and that is what companies are trying to optimize for. The best explanation of this is Nassim Taleb's Mediocristan (non-scalable) vs Extremistan (scalable) dichotomy. This video Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails—what they don’t teach you in STAT 101 is a very nice overview of the essential points : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcqt49dXtm8

> What prevents engineering firms from acting like law firms?

I wonder if it's harder to associate an employee's skill level with company profit.

If most lawyer companies have established hourly billing rates for each employee, then the owners can more clearly see an employee's true value to the company?

and yet for software consulting firms, this billing hours are also done the same. Yet, you don't see the same level of compensation raises unlike with law firms.

I think it's true that Engineering is just mere "foot soldiers" and hence replaceable/dispensable as needed (as mentioned in another sibling comment here).

The fact that (in theory) the computers are doing all the work.

In theory, this would become some type of exploitable game theory.

Send out offer letters to companies most indispensable people, just to jack up your competitors labor costs. Arms race. Eventual mutually assured destruction.

Companies did engage in the reverse of this, to keep salaries down.

That is capitalism.

The fraudulent offer letters notwithstanding, I think insiders would see this as an opportunity for Moneyball rather than a risk of unraveling in confusion.

Moneyball as in an optimization technique when roles are static. Obviously this is generic because static data of any value inevitably ends up in a spreadsheet. Otherwise, I’m not sure game theory holds together here.

in a law firm, the lawyers are partners or very important people to the firm even if they're not partners.

i.e they're not cogs in a wheel that can be replaced by 'management'.

in as much engineers here, would like to believe otherwise -- most engineers at most firms are treated as replaceable / disposable resources.

All attorneys that work for law firms have billable hours. Only agencies and consultancies have billable hours for engineers.

It’s easier to say “we will lose $X if this person leaves” or “$Y will be at risk if they leave due to personal relationships” than it is to quantify an engineer’s revenue impact to the company.

Hence the common cost center assumption.

Partners at law firms know that the money comes from the lawyers, and they (probably) know who the rising stars are.

Managers at engineering firms too often think that the money comes from the wisdom of the managers and the hustle of the marketers, not from the work of the engineers.

This may be because partners at law firms are lawyers, but upper managers at engineering firms often are not engineers.

People may hate this, but people leaving is valuable to companies as a whole.

Lawyers typically specialize and they work off the same body of work everywhere (the same set of laws). Having worked for 10 law firms doesn’t mean that they know something current employees don’t.

Tech isn’t like that. Everywhere is different, many of us touch multiple specializations, the body of knowledge we need is always shifting. An engineer that has worked 10 places very likely does know things your current employees don’t, like different tools.

Losing an engineer is bad for the individual business, but engineers moving around is good for businesses in general.

I think engineers tend to overestimate the value they bring. _Most_ companies make money from business deals that are written and signed into contracts, sometimes those deals involve automating stuff, that's where software engineers are useful. If a company loses some rock-star engineer, the automations they worked on don't break immediately, there's some time for other engineers to figure out how it works. If something cannot be delivered in a timely manner according to the contract because engineering branch got weaker after a rock-star left, companies either have to pay some fraction as fines or may agree on deadline extensions, however the contracts have been signed, the money are flowing, all the holes will be plugged eventually by other engineers.

Anecdotally, I have been recently approached by someone who was very eager for me to consult them on the product they were going to build. After a few hours of talking I quickly realized that they don't really need to build anything complex. In fact, my advise was to only focus on the core functions which are very simple and leave the majority of actual work to be done manually by a much cheaper secretary-type role until the product got enough traction to actually benefit from automation.

They actually do.

I had and accepted counter-offer myself and know quite a few people who were in such position.

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