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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

The point was not that Big Tech wanted more programmers because they would have more job postings.

The point was that Big Tech wanted more competition in the labor market to drive down programmer wages.

As they have demonstrated time and time again, the CFOs at "Big Tech" companies abhor paying programmers what they are worth. They do not care that they make $1 million in profit for your work, they hate that they pay you $300k, and they are willing to do anything (including multiple cases of illegal conspiracy) to pay you less than that.

I think hiring is less bleak here on the east coast.

Software Developers in most of these large companies are underpriced.

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Not sure that I see this as some concerted effort of the man vs normal people looking at the landscape of jobs. Relative to education requirements, tech has been an amazing opportunity for many. Pretty common to see posts on tech forums of humble bragging about high salaries, low effort, or ease of job hopping (for even higher compensation).

Even using $300k as an example of a programmer getting ripped off relative to their worth -few industries afford opportunities to make anywhere near that much money. The median US pay is ~$40k.

The median US pay for a man with a bachelor's degree is ~$90k. Bay Area home prices run 3-4x the US median.

This shouldn't be down voted.

If you ever get a chance to hear the C suite talk to an audience that's not primarily engineers, this is exactly how they think.

Remeber their job for which they get paid more in one year than you will in several life times is to make those numbers go up.

If you were getting paid that much, what wouldn't you be willing to do, say or believe?

Since I too like paying as little as possible for things I purchase and so does literally everyone else, I fail to see the problem here.

This idea that a job is inherently "worth" some amount of money is way off. The entire point of a market economy is that prices are driven by supply and demand. And salaries are just prices.

If more and more people are capable of delivering high quality software, but the demand for it doesn't increase at the same rate, then it should be worth less.

Furthermore, hirers aren't evil people for wanting to pay less, any more than job seekers are evil people for wanting to get paid more, or shoppers are evil people for wanting discounts. The supply side is always going to want higher prices, and the demand side is always going to want lower.

Most of big tech enjoys some degree of monopoly power through network effects, so it's a little disingenuous to wave "It's the market, stupid" in this case.

Quite apart from the fact that in the jobs 'market', one side is forced to participate, else they starve.

Market pressures for thee, but not for me.

Eh, businesses die and starve all the time. Most businesses fail, and competition to hire is brutal.

Big tech are among the top tier businesses. So I don't think it's fair to compare them to average employees. Rule #1 if you want to do well in the market is not to commoditize yourself, and average employees are commodities: people who slot into job titles with almost no differentiation between others competing for the same job title.

It's more accurate to big tech to top tier employees. Your execs, your staff engineers, your top sales talent, your startup founders who get acquired. Just like big tech, these people have a lot of negotiating power, tons of options, sometimes multiple clients, and often a nest egg so they can take time off work and be picky.

I think we can agree that a 'starving' company is not the same as a starving human.

Your other points about differentiation are especially valid, now, but the great mass of people have limited capability there. Should they just starve?

The supply and demand is a convenient myth, skirting a lot of the nuance and artificial factors. If supply and demand did work like the proponents of "simple answers" claim, then every remote software engineer of similar tenure would earn about the same amount anywhere across the globe. That's just one single very simple example, to make my point obvious. There are countless slightly more complex examples too. In fact, it can be made even simpler - let's forget comparing two different engineers, let's pick only one. If one full remote software engineer moves between countries without even changing the job, his compensation may change dramatically, simply because in one country wages are suppressed at X level and in another at Y level. Same hold for any other activities too, not only SWE.

In my amateur opinion, the compensation for each particular job is highly dependent on the historical accidents and unrelated political and economical events, and the rate of quality code (or whatever other end product/service) is a distant secondary factor in that.

I don't disagree that business will always try to drive down labor costs, but this is kind of a weird take given west coast tech companies are the ones that normalized $500k-$1m total comp for the rank and file software engineers with 5-10 years experience. East coast, let alone the rest of the world never even sniffed that until FAANG set the standard.

It's not that there was some conspiracy to get more people into software. Software is fun, pays well and is accessible - no wonder more people wanted (and still want) to get into it.

> It's not that there was some conspiracy to get more people into software. Software is fun, pays well and is accessible - no wonder more people wanted (and still want) to get into it.

Yeah, and also the perception that they were some of the last good jobs left. IIRC, other areas of the middle class have been declining for a long time.

Ehhh they are paying software developers a good deal more than they are worth in any other industry or country.

You’re not going to convince me that $300k is underpriced, that’s doctor/lawyer pay without having to spend 10 years in med school. Dev salaries are a bubble.

A doctor can only see so many patients. A lawyer can only bill so many hours.

A dev can make a product that a billion people use.

Can they? Lots of well-paid devs were laid off in the recent years, where are the products with billions users they have made?

Not every lottery ticket wins.

But every one can.

Yeah, I mean, my comment can be read by billion people. But I don't think I deserve three figures for commenting, at least not until the comment has actually been read by billion people.

Plenty of those developers did indeed work in projects with giant userbases. Layoffs are not about success or failure or how large the userbase is, they're about adjusting expenses and appeasing shareholders.

Yeah, I've seen really strong engineers being laid off. My point is that viewing software engineers as magic money cows is wrong, they don't make money by themselves - and those who do start their own companies and stop being software engineers.

It may not be "by themselves", but they're still a key component of the machine. Without the cows, you don't get any milk, no matter how many milkmen you have to sell it.

Yes, they are components in a machine, and if machine is generating N dollars per second, it doesn't mean that they are generating it. It's also perfectly reasonable to try to find components as cheaply as you can, and don't always go for highest-quality components if it doesn't have a significant effect on how machine is functioning.

Compared to the money that tech companies make, way underpriced.

The reason that companies pay engineers more than in other industries/countries, is that in general companies in other industries/countries don’t make nearly as much as SV companies.

The implicit contract goes as follows: You pay ~50,000 engineers around $400,000/year, and you essentially get a money printer and get to be one of the richest people in the world. Who wouldn’t take that trade?

In general, you can’t do that in any other country or industry.

Big Tech companies make money by extracting value from other parts of economy. Not only developers are normally not the ones creating that value, they are also not the only part of the mechanism that extracts it - sales, marketing and legal are at least as important

I strongly disagree. Big tech got to be big because they made better products than their competitors, at least initially. I don’t think google/Facebook even used to run ads in the early days.

They didn't run ads in the early days, they didn't make any money either

Big tech doesn’t generally make money by selling software.

They make money through monopoly effects on their social networks and ad platforms. They need some devs to build/maintain that platform of course, but devs are not as core to their business as they think they are. The monopoly status is the money printer.

Of course, but how do you become a monopoly? By selling your software, often implicitly through eyeballs and clicks. I disagree that devs aren’t important to this process. You want to make your software as ridiculously low- friction as possible. If making your software 10% faster/smoother/better is going to result in more users, you should be willing to throw as much money (within reason) at that problem as it takes until you have strong network effects.

Once you have a monopoly it becomes less necessary to do anything, which is maybe where we find ourselves today.

How much does the CEO of a hospital make vs say Mark Zuckerberg?

>You’re not going to convince me that $300k is underpriced, that’s doctor/lawyer pay without having to spend 10 years in med school. Dev salaries are a bubble.

How many years of learning at home good developers needs?

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