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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

>> "In the Bay Area, there are many companies where the most junior engineering tier earns more than $100k a year"

It's important not to forget cost of living in that area is abnormally high.

How could we forget, every time someone mentions a salary in the bay area people leap to mention how expensive it is there.

Watch out, you might lose all your karma for interrupting the Bay Area self flagellation. Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here.

The high dev salaries there make the Bay Area even more of a dead end than it would otherwise be for the people who are stuck in service jobs for life, such as making food when the devs eat out.

Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here.

Programmer salaries are not "insane". A half-decent programmer is worth $500,000 to the business and costs about $100,000. A good one is worth over $3 million, and only costs about $150,000.

Programmers are actually incredibly fucking cheap right now, if you know what to do with the talent.

If that were true, why wouldn't some startup pay the best programmers it could find $2,000,000 a year and put everyone else out of business?

If you look at it funny, YC itself is doing this. Funding isn't salary, but if you look at it in terms of expected value they're pretty much handing gobs of money to those they think can do the right kind things with computers.

Because nobody yet has figured out how to turn programmers into simple machines where you shove money from one end and get even more money from the other end. You need to actually give those programmers something to do and sell the results and make profit on it. Programmers don't do that, that's a different profession. One that can be extremely lucrative if done right, but so far has not submitted to any automation.

This is basically the startup business model - get a bunch of guys together, split equity, write something cool, get aquihired for a few million apiece.

The reason it has to be done with equity instead of salary is because there's a principal-agent problem with salary. People collect their salary regardless of whether their contributions actually are worth a few million. And so they have every incentive to sit on their butt - or at least, not take any risks and just do what got them the initial salary grant - in the meantime.

Startups tend not to have that kind of money. Big companies do, but how can they be sure who's the best?

One answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring

Acqui-hiring: buying mediocre talent at a panic price because your middle management filter is so broken that you can't spot talent at the bottom. (Granted, after a long enough spell of dysfunction, you won't have much talent at the bottom either.)

... google.

Assessing the talent is hard. People who have the ability to assess that talent (which is different from the talent itself, also uncommon) are rare, people who have the money or organizational position necessary to pay significant numbers of programmer salaries are rare, and the intersection of those two sets, even in a world with almost 7 billion people, is vanishingly small.

The talent is rarer than the capital, and the capital often isn't owned by the decision-makers (VC) but the people who control the capital are the ones who get more arrogant. Why? Because capital is easy to demonstrate, and talent is hard to prove. It's especially hard to prove talent without breaking social protocol, which is the real advantage of pedigree. Everyone knows that there are plenty of sharp people without pedigree, but proving you're one of them requires being extremely assertive. Professionally, it's often better to be presumed intelligent and thereby be able to optimize for social polish alone.

If you know what to do is key. Unfortunately, most businesses cannot properly utilize a decent programmer, never mind a good one.

The average mid-size company is a monument to bureaucracy, ruled by mediocrity and incompetence.

If you don't want to be in commuting hell, then it costs about $4k+/month for a house to raise a family in. To buy a house close to your work will also cost over $1.3 million.

If you willing to go over the bridge, then your paying $2k/month

It depends on where you live in the Bay Area. If you avoid San Francisco and the peninsula then housing I'd about the same as the rest of California.

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