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Comment by babyent | Hacker News Reader

What if I told you..

Most of the actual groundwork has already been laid by passionate, actual engineers.

Today big tech is just a place people go to make money, and they don’t necessarily care about long term vision.

Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types who have little “passion” for engineering or computers. Zero imagination and outside the box thinking. Just rote memorization to get in and then getting PIP’d or laid off to go do the same at the other big corps. TC or GTFO types.

Better luck at startups that are the Google’s of yesteryear.

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I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock!

But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.

In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.

But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.

> may not have had a basis in reality.

I believe there is a lot of reality. As well as they gave a lot of brilliant co-workers which seems to have made it a great place to spin ideas. Also from stories too leader ship was at least open to listen to criticism in "thanks God it's Friday" meetings.

While from observing some friends the promotion play was always tough as well. If you wanted to be promoted you always had to use your 20% time "wisely" which for some meant to still work on the main project. For other to strategically work on a side project they could use for the promotion panel.

Today's Google seem to be fully focused on numbers, where a lot of the spirit is gone. Back in the days when I visited some friends working for Google we went to Google for breakfast or met at Google for dinner as it was just a good place to hangout. (Which motivated people to stay at Google for more than their regular hours) Nowadays it seem to be more of a workplace.

I lament the "more wood, fewer arrows" tgif, the weird Android guy (Rubin) having too much power, and the Emerald Sea (Gundotra) project for shifting Google to what it has become today

How do you feel about Sundar?

I've been on the outside since Sundar became CEO. I felt positive about him initially but have soured in recent years. I thought his background with Chrome was a great asset for setting company direction but lately it feels like the goal is to alienate consumers.

20-30 years ago when you graduated if you wanted to get paid you targeted banks, accountancies or consultancies.

Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.

I've always used the analogy of 90's Wall Street to explain the Tech industry behind the curtains. Our 2008 moment will be when society realizes AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy.

We had a brief window in the mid 2010s when folks started to throw rocks at the tech buses where I thought people were starting to realize it. Around Bernie's presidential run - which makes sense because he preached wealth inequality. But somehow during COVID tech slithered back into everybody's good graces.

* I don't condone people throwing rocks at the buses for both the humanitarian reasons and the fact that few if any executive or social changes could result from that behavior. But it struck me as a microcosm of the prevailing sentiment towards technology workers.

Tech provided some means to stay connected during that time, so it’s not surprising. People felt even more disconnected initially and extroverts were not getting their needs met as easily. However I think the added exposure to algorithmic feeds caused an acceleration of social decay and a growing disenchantment with social media in some camps.

> AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy.

Refreshing to hear that stated so clearly.

On your general point, I don't know if I feel the same optimism at this stage, much as I'd love to be proven wrong. Populations seem to never tire of jumping from one tech fairy tale to the next.

Developers seem to never tire of burying their head in the sand either, and I sometimes wonder if the two are correlated.

Why do you think this recent AI push will be the straw that breaks the camel's back? What if the camel just keeps plodding along?

What should individual developers do?

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring...

That's a good start ^^. It was true before Trump too, but it's still better late than never

> AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy.

Is that inherent to the technology, or is that just inherent to the way we've chosen to organize society? Really, any technological paradigm shift going back to the industrial revolution has mainly served to enrich a small few people and families, but that's not some immutable property of technology. Like you say, it's a tool. We've chosen (or allowed) it to be wielded toward one end rather than another. I can smash my neighbor's head in with a hammer, or I can build a home with it.

At one point in the United States, there was political will to update our social structures so that the fruits of technological and economic progress did not go disproportionately to one class of society (think early 20th century trust busting, or the New Deal coming out of the Great Depression). I'm afraid we find ourselves with a similar set of problems, yet the political will to create some other reality beyond further wealth concentration seems to be limited.

Fundamentally and writ large, tech makes us more efficient. Efficient means doing more with less labor. Which is good because it is deflationary: things get cheaper over time from tech advances, and without any tech we would all be subsistence farmers.

But it also means that yes, tech intrinsically enables capital to do more with less labor, thereby shifting the balance of power towards capital and empowering those with more capital.

What ‘we decide’ to do with that is another largely unrelated matter.

Those big anti-capital actions took bold class-betrayals from the inside. Notably Teddy Roosevelt (born with a silver spoon but wished he’d been in a log cabin) going after Standard Oil after taking their money for the campaign.

I simply was talking about the talent.

Nevertheless the "parasite" "no societal value" reputation of Banking remains. I would suggest however, that doing M&A is less parasitic and has greater social value than any ad-tech.

I loathe ads as a consumer. But I can’t agree they’re parasitic. If I put myself in the shoes of a small business selling something I created, a well targeted IG ad can keep me alive where I’d have no chance against a company that can make (traditionally) a TV, Print, or billboard ad.

I do support the notion that tech monopolies have killed a lot of the software industry dynamism by subsidizing anti competitive products. Like Android being free where Windows Mobile needed to make revenue from OEMs.

I've only been reading HN for about six years, and a member for less than that. Has this anti-tech view always been around? I'm not commenting if it is founded or unfounded, it is just surprising to see it so prevalent on what seems like it should be a place for tech people to hang out and discuss tech ideas.

My perception is that there's always been some dissonance between loving tech intrinsically for itself vs. the Silicon Valley venture capitalist business model. Conflating tech with its dominant business model enables the paradox where a person deeply in love with tech can also be anti-tech.

Your post reminded me of circa-2017 when I emerged from the subway station, wearing my Facebook shirt (which was a normal thing to do for years) but now noticed the sneers of hatred and disgust from people on the street. They’d look at my chest, recognize, then look in my eyes and nonverbally insult me.

That was the end of techy swag wearing for me.

I mean even today, if you really want to make a ton of money in software, you're still targeting finance stuff. Not banks, but like HRT or similar.

People really over exaggerate how much a rank-and-file software IC actually makes at these companies. Yea, they make a decent amount, but they're not casually making $2M bonuses like the investment banker types over at Goldman Sachs are, unless they are those rare outlier high-level employees. A lot of it might be stock, too, so their "good year" comp might be 3X to 4X their "bad year" comp.

People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Or they point to those salary sharing sites where people self-report their best salary + highest possible bonus + equity as if every year was 2021, and think of them as representative.

People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much.

Every single employee, no. But the average L5 really does make over $300k in total compensation. Yes some of that is stock, but the companies are now stable enough so that doesn't cause a ton of variation.

I’ll be that guy, but $300k pre-tax at current cost of life is not an insane number at all.

I both agree that $300k household income is roughly the bottom edge to support a Fussellian upper-middle lifestyle these days (and that edge is retreating upwards fast…), but also notice that it’s about 94th percentile for US household income.

Household. A married couple both making that are 98th percentile.

Sure but less than 8% of Americans live in the top 10 most expensive cities.

In what percentile of your social class do you sit with $300k? Probably not very high.

"Of your social class"? That comparison doesn't make much sense. If you are at the bottom of your social class, you picked the wrong class to compare yourself with. Of course I'm at the bottom of all millionaires, but that's because I barely have a 7-figure net worth and have a weird self image.

Said like a 1990's banker / a 2020's tech worker.

That’s silly. As a high-income FAANG engineer living in the heart of SF, I was easily able to save more than 70% of my money.

What was your rent though?

I was not at FAANG, but a unicorn startup back in mid to late 2010s, and I was making 150-180k in that time, but not in SF.

Rent back then for a 2br was like $2400.. Today, that same apartment goes for $4900.

I am pretty sure the base for the same level today is probably more like 170-200k, but literally everything has also become doubly expensive.

Also if you're in SF you either need to allocate another 300-400 a month for parking, or sell your car. I was paying 130 per month for my garage parking spot (again, not in SF), and when I moved to SF some time ago I sold my car because it was going to cost me a lot to use my car.

And unlike FANG, where you can either hold and double every 3-4 years if lucky, or sell immediately with taxes, I walked away with 10x or more..

Rent was (and is) around $4000 for 3br, shared between 2 people. (And this was not an unusual price to see during our apartment hunt a few years ago.) If you're paying $4900 for 2br in the city, my impression is that it's either a brand new development or in a posh area like Pac Heights.

I don't have a car, but I feel like that's one of the biggest privileges of living in the city. Maybe the calculus changes if you have kids, though.

Well there you go. Sharing it makes it simpler but also not very ideal unless you’re a really young person or single and don’t mind sharing.

I have cats so I need my own place and they need their own spaces :3

Getting rid of the car has been an awesome change though.

I’m so cheap now it’s crazy. Only spend money on food and cat stuff haha.

If I wanted to go for a studio or 1br, I think I'd be able to get a good one for $2500-$3000 in SF. Either way, it's only around 15% of a $300k salary after tax. There should be no CoL issues at all with a FAANG salary.

Yeah not denying that. Of course anyone single or without too many responsibilities can “survive” even on 100k. I’m not talking about that, because we get older and it doesn’t scale. my friend is a staff engineer who makes 240k plus stock.

He has a child on the way. His wife also works. Their rent is 7k a month (home in a good school district - important to us Asians) because they aren’t going to share an apartment and have means to live in a bigger space. They could rent a house for 4k and risk getting shot in Oakland, or live closer to work and have a decent home for their family.

He is always complaining about finances because he spends like 10k a month on just living. If he buys a home, it’s like 2 million at least for something decent in a good area.

I think Bay Area is mad expensive. You really need to make a lucky break to thrive here. Most people sell their vested stock immediately, so those guys who made millions etc are few and far in between because they held for a while.

At Meta and L5, probably over $400k or $450k for the average eng.

I think it's true both ways:

A lot of people assume it's like finance money, but it's not.

And on the flip side there's a lot of people coming from normal company or startup land, and assume that the $400k + average performing L5 is a myth, when that's pretty typical for big tech.

And I definitely agree with sibling here: $300k or $400k is good money, but in a place where the median house costs $1.5 million or something insane like the parts of the bay area that have a <45 minute commute, it doesn't go as far as you'd think. And it's incredibly risky, because now you're tied to always getting that level of comp for decades or you'll get evicted. (And while $400k + L5 Meta comp may be typical at Meta, it's not exactly trivial to maintain, or nearly as relaxing as a software gig you can do at other companies)

That's the avg initial comp package but the stock had a pretty nice run so a lot of people are making 600k++.

Why do need to make $400k a year "for decades" to pay a $1.5M home down to a level at which a significant income change doesn't evict you? With some napkin math, let's say down payment was $200k, so you have $1.3M loan, and if you pay down $100k a year then after just 8 years you are down to a mortgage of $500k. Still a lot of money, but won't get you evicted if you make less, and while on $400k a year and with a spouse that has income too, you shouldbe able to reach that even earlier.

At a 7% interest rate, your math isn't reasonable. You’re mostly paying interest. The situation in the Bay is way more insane than people realize.

That's a lot of handwavey assumptions about how much you can pay off per year / month; where's that $100K pay down coming from? How much is the interest pay? What other expenses are there?

That’s the part that I never understood: taking actions to tie yourself to needing that money every year. It’s a trap. I watched a friend convinced they were set with their FAANG job buy in the Bay recently just to be laid off. You can’t trust this industry.

Another thing, is the number of engineers at HRT is not that many, and the number making > 600k is probably less than 2000. A miniscule amount

Definitely true, yes. And it's insanely competitive to get in, and at some of the shops (e.g. Citadel), your work life balance has a giant lead weight on one end of the balance beam, with a vacuum attached that is actively sucking things from the other side down the ramp.

    > but they're not casually making $2M bonuses like the investment banker types over at Goldman Sachs are

These days, a junior MD in Goldman IB is probably close to 1M USD in total comp (base + bonus). You need to be many years into MD to get paid 2M USD total comp (or have a single, wildly lucky, outlier year). And it takes 20 solid years of outperformance (and soul crushing hours) to get there. The days of "young MDs" in IB divisions is basically over.

I started reading chapter 1 of American Psycho last night. The characters are all M&A Wall St types in the mid 80s. Their personalities and obsessions and materialism strike me as EXACTLY what the 20-somethings I knew in San Francisco mid-2010s were like.

Maybe 30-40 years ago it was finance, but by 1996 with the Netscape IPO, it was clear to anyone coming out of school (as I was then) that tech was the future and finance was already old and tired after 15 years of dominance.

There was a mad rush between mid-1997 and mid-2001 to get into tech, then the dot-com bust happened, but that only lasted about 2 years before things ramped up again. That was 20 years ago.

Suggesting that the first decade of the web didn't flip the bit from finance to tech is ahistorical.

Their timeline sounds right to me. The dot com bubble was about big dreams but ended up with far less reality when stock options crashed to nothing. There was a finance bubble after the internet bubble and you could make a lot more money as a quant.

The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.

Tech only started attracting real attention starting in 2008 when finance imploded. I remember very well that nerds/geeks were still considered weird outcasts back then. After the financial meltdown, tech really exploded and offered a much better lifestyle than finance, and thus became more accepted in American society.

I still think it was different in the early 2000s, even after the dot com bubble.

"Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet.

Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list.

You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.

Not exactly true, big tech did exist it was just different players. Sun was a strong player, as they were pushing Java, that was very popular in the enterprise world. Intel was considered a place that did a lot of interesting innovation. IBM/Oracle style players.

I think the big difference was that big tech was mostly on enterprise. The big shift to consumer focused big tech made a lot of the big tech more intersting place to work

> Google was a startup nobody heard of

This is not true in the early 2000s - I remember people at school (UK) using Google in the late 90s.

People forget that "the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed".

I also discovered Google in 1999, and then worked there a decade later. I remember listening to the earnings calls around 2011-2012, and my coworkers would express disbelief in the questions that financial analysts would ask, because they totally missed the key drivers of our business performance. "It's simple," someone older and wiser told me, "they assume that the Internet is tapped out, no more people are going to go online, and so the only possible driver of higher revenue is higher cost per click." In reality, search queries increased 4x between 2009-2012. Large numbers of people were still discovering the Internet for the first time in the early 2010s. Hell, large numbers of people are still discovering the Internet for the first time now - Google still has a "next billion users" initiative (largely focused on India and South/Southeast Asia), and only about 35% of the world population are Internet users.

For us in Portugal, it was tech used by banks, finance, insurances, telecomunications.

If you wanted to be on the bleeding edge, you would be applying to mobile phone operators like TMN, Vodafone, Optimus, and then code over a remote telnet connection to HP-UX 11 server.

Regarding finance: Sure, M&A + IPO makes the lion's share of money for an investment banking (IB) division, but this overlooks the markets division (trading). From 1995 to 2007, the year-on-year growth in profits was simply astonishing for FICC (fixed income, credit, commodities). Part of that growth was due to increased borrowing (and, hence, leverage), and part was an increase in investable dollars, chasing returns. IB needs hardly any tech, but markets needs endless amounts of it. Also, it is intentional that I didn't mention equities trading in my previous paragraph; it didn't become such a giant profit center for global investment banks until after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, due to new rules for risk limits.

Because that’s what tech companies want today. They don’t want hackers and shit, they want corporate automatons who will code for scraps.

Wasn’t that my point? Innovation is mostly dead there, and it makes sense why people who want to build feel like they need to leave.

Innovation is alive and thriving outside of FANG. And honestly after my experience I don’t get why anyone would work there.

Join a series A-C unicorn track startup and stay like 5 years til IPO. Your vested shares will 10-30x and gg.

Or to rephrase, they want reliable, stable developers to actually keep things running instead of impatient people always chasing the next cool thing.

> Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types

What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.

I have a lot of friends who went to elite schools (top 5-10 in the world) for CS and some of them have gotten PIP’d or laid off.

It’s not that hard to do well academically. Especially for kumon types.

There’s builder types (rare af) and there’s worker types (plenty aka literally everyone else).

And getting into tech isn’t hard. A principal staff or something like that? Impressive. Senior or staff is not that impressive anymore. Personally I prefer to work with people way, way smarter than me.

I’ve worked with ex-FANG people and they’re robots. They came in after IPO and made me quit lol.

What if I told you that ...

in 1992?

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