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Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

As top talent who received primarily ‘peanut butter’ raises for many years, I never much minded that. No amount of salary would have made me able to afford housing near work in sfbay, and I cared much more that my employer fire the incompetent (which, for a time, they tended to do) than I minded being paid less to work with a better crew. When I decided to leave, I did so because leadership had shifted so much that they had stopped enforcing competence as a matter of policy. Pay was simply not a factor so long as it covered the basics, and I refused to let it be used as a bribe.

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> No amount of salary would have made me able to afford housing near work

Everyone who sells themselves short also sells everyone else short too by comparable TC.

I was hired IC5 $280k TC at Meta in 2020 with the help of a salary negotiator/coach and had an EDTX IP lawyer do due-diligence and walkthrough with me the hiring document terms. That would just barely qualify me for 50% D/I for the house I grew up in. It'd take a minimum of $470k to afford the house my grandparents bought in 1968 for $30k. And, unlike my parents and grandparents who pulled up the ladder behind them, I wouldn't get CA Prop. 13 like they did. But what's crazy is I could instead live in a car or on a boat for about 6-8 years and then buy an SV house with liquidated proceeds of investments outright.

> I cared much more that my employer fire the incompetent

This is magical thinking and not your problem. I don't understand why you think you're not worth being paid a livable salary.

As an alternative, move somewhere cheaper rather than futility compete with a surplus of rich people and NIMBYs whom prevent development.

> I don't understand why you think you're not worth being paid a livable salary.

I haven’t said that at all. I think I’m worth a two-digit percentage of gross revenue in the executive market and have a track record of strategic prediction, untapped market identification, proven competence at leadership, and the tech chops to working-prototype my own ideas to faster than I can explain and delegate them and to assess and address top-tier engineers trying to slack off under the hood on a formal implementation of same.

But this isn’t a conversation about how I value myself as an executive. This is a conversation about how I value being paid as a worker. Workers don’t get paid enough to be strategic visionaries. Workers can sleep at night and don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath. I like being a worker, I’m an excellent worker, and I stand by my above comments on the topic of peanut butter raises: so long as executives and strategists and workers all receive peanut butter raises without unfair bias towards the formers, they seem perfectly fine to me. When executives get double-digit raises and strategists get paid worker wages, I get offended and angry and find alternate employment or outright change careers.

(Yes, if you’re being paid less than seven or eight figures a year to provide long-term strategic vision and development to your company, you’re probably being cheated out of the wage they’d pay you as strategic consultant to do that same work. Study your written job definition more closely and stop donating unpaid-volunteer work to your employers. If they object, ask them to revise your job description and increase your pay accordingly. This is all bog standard corporate worker stuff that everyone here already knows.)

I was with you until the end.

This is a public forum and thus nothing is ever bog standard because presumably every week new people join with varied to no experience in the ways of the corporate world. Further, much of the software ethos is about being a worker/owner, which rarely comes true and takes some time to realize is incorrect.

Worker could mean IC only, or IC and managers.

Managers could include owners or not.

A worker is worth the least the employer thinks they'll stay for. I've heard one too many new, smart-ass line manager say "oh, I got her/him cheap".

To advocate for oneself as a worker, it requires continuous calibration, documentation of results, and well-timed initiative to expand within degrees of freedom that would be desirable to maximize bottom-line results directly or indirectly.

> Workers can sleep at night don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath.

Boundaries. Those aren't the problems of a worker. It's best to be an excellent worker if one is going to be a worker, but that's still not enough. It also requires communication: advocacy, persuasion, and showcasing results to get the job, keep the job, and then to periodically justify and negotiate more income above the rate of inflation. Below the rate of inflation is a pay cut.

Be exceptionally useful, helpful, and professional.. just don't help managers find ways to pay you less or work yourself out of a job unless you already have a thriving side-hustle. ;) 996 and crash schedules are for the birds.

Well, after all most people would rather live in SF in 2026 than 1968.

would they? height of California Dreaming counter-culture.

now it's a corporate dystopia

> No amount of salary would have made me able to afford housing near work in sfbay

I assure you there are people who live there who can afford to do so because they make enough money. Switching from startup salary to bigco at the same experience level in the same location doubled my comp. A few promotions later and it doubled again. That's when housing started to look affordable.

Isn’t this almost the same? In both cases, it feels unfair that you are paid the same as someone lesser. In your case, the lesser is a -1X developer, and in the article, I guess the 10Xer compares themselves with a 1Xer. I’m at least thinking that a 10Xer wouldn’t mind a similar bump in pay compared to a 7Xer, but somewhere you draw the line as unfair.

In my opinion, management should cull -1Xers, while also trying to reward top talent, even if it has it’s downsides.

It doesn’t feel unfair to be paid unevenly to me? I guess one upside of the whole prosociopath thing is that I don’t feel cheated by that particular circumstance. I feel cheated when someone is given authority without proper skill and experience, to the degree that I suspect other people do about pay, though. A lot more harm is done by assignment of authority to incompetence (in a non-training context, anyways) than is done by decoupling pay and competence.

However: I’m extremely hostile to overall wages as a fraction of revenue being held artificially low to increase the imbalance of payouts in favor of executives and shareholders. I think it’s appropriate to pay executives more because they bear a higher proportion of legal exposure than non-executives; I do not think it’s appropriate how most executives treat workers raises as a “cost center to be minimized” differently from their own pay as a “profit center to be maximized”. Similarly, I think that there’s a solid argument for paying your company’s long-term strategy cross-functional team according to having to bear the long-term responsibility and awareness of risks and so on. You can’t ask a base wage worker to care about your company; that’s a lot to ask, and requires an additional share of payment than just a day job would.

No disagreement about the harmful-when-present workers, though!

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