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Comment by systemf_omega | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to be a star programmer, fame isn't the only form of leverage.

If you're in demand, and you're good at what you do, the road is paved for you. Top companies have already set the bar.

Them: we offer 250k-350k

Me: I don't consider anything below 500

The answers I get vary. Some tell me to politely fvck off. Some tell me they need to discuss with leadership. Some just go for it because they know how hard it is to fill that role.

The justification is simple: why would I take a job with you if I can land an HFT gig at twice the pay?

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> You don't have to be a star programmer

> 250k-350k

> land an HFT gig

Respectfully, your perspective may be a bit skewed? OP's context was "us rank-and-file employee number 12887's".

Many people working in these companies are as rank-and-file as it gets. Non existent public profile, no open source contributions, no flashy portfolio.

Not really in the same category as Carmack

That's fair! I had interpreted OP's post more along the lines of, well, workers who aren't that in-demand or that high up the pay scale - I think it's fair to say 300k salaries and HFT gigs are out of consideration for most of us.

You had me until HFT...

Doesn't have to be finance. AI can pay just as well. Tech too depending on seniority.

The proliferation of AI and LLMs has completely obliterated leverage.

Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.

Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.

That's what bottom-tier companies always tell me. Last decade it used to be outsourcing. I was getting low balled left and right with phrases like "I can pay a guy from Asia a lot less for the same work".

Now it's LLMs. Same old.

Except now it’s for real.

Outsourcing was and is real too. It had and still does have tradeoffs.

LLM’s have similar if not worse trade offs imo.

LLMs have the massive advantage of low latency. If you have a team on the other side of the clock, you get one cycle a day.

With an LLM, you get a cycle every 2-15 minutes. And LLMs are improving faster than outsourcing companies’ employees.

Latency - yes

LLM’s are also much better at faking it in remarkably unpredictable ways, and are hitting diminishing returns (or even backsliding) on improvements.

And LLM’s can’t actually do anything without humans structuring everything and doing stuff on it’s behalf.

This is situational - as a strong engineer I have more leverage than ever to demand ever more eye watering compensation.

Weaker engineers and junior engineers are in more the situation you describe. This is tough and I feel for these folks but it is possible for many people to become stronger engineers if they choose to put in the work.

I'd encourage you to not take on a feeling of hopelessness here.

I agree with you to an extent. I was recently laid off (start up out of money) along with the rest of the engineering team. So I’m going through loops. The hardest part of the process for me is getting past the initial recruiter. Once I get past whatever “wall” they’ve put in place, I do pretty well. So I wonder how many recruiters now are using AI to screen applicants? Given the hundreds (thousands?) of applications, probably some of them.

Anecdotally - I’ve been through 2 technical screens where they asked me to use an AI prompt to solve a problem. For one, it was a pretty trivial problem (running an hmac over some values) so I just solved it directly. They asked why I didn’t use AI, and I told them honestly that I’ve done something like this hundreds of times, why would I use a prompt for it? Didn’t make it to the next round. Now it’s totally possible that I didn’t make it because of something else. And maybe those were outliers, but it seems like I’ll need to brush up on prompting…

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