Engineers, come get your $250K salary | Hacker News Reader

Engineers, come get your $250K salary

cnet.com

33 pointsamduser297 comments

The fine print:

> Not every Weeby engineer will earn the million dollars. Weeby will subject everyone to monthly performance reviews, and managers will make quick decisions, either granting the next $10,000 raise or offering feedback about needed improvement. Some will be terminated but given a "healthy severance" of at least $20,000, plus references.

This structure sounds like a recipe for stress, low morale and high turnover. And why in the world would the company promise references to employees it had to fire for not meeting expectations? "John is a great programmer. He made it to $150,000/year in annual compensation before we determined that he wasn't worth $160,000/year and had to terminate him. He's a steal if you pay him less than $140,000/year!"

I'm mixed about this. On one hand, $250k/yr seems like it should be a bit above market rate for the value engineers provide their companies. Even mediocre engineers provide far more value than the typical market rate. Market rate for mediocre or even slightly below average talent should be much closer to the mid-$150k range than it is. Good or excellent engineers should already have base compensation around the high $100k/low $200k range anyway.

That said, this company is a game company at its core, and I would expect these salaries and perks to come at quite a high price in other terms (particularly work-life balance).

Can't say I agree that "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" should be compensated in the "mid-$150k range" (is that a way of saying $155k?), so close to excellent engineers. This seems to misunderstand how market rate is determined (especially relative to equity compensation), conflate "market rate" and "the value engineers provide their companies," or defend high compensation for mediocre performance. The logic is flawed regardless, as "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" will actually provide the company with negative value, costing the software team and the company much more than they offer.

I meant the "mid-$100k" range, as in around $150k/yr. I understand how market rate is determined. Frequently it's determined by companies' explicit collusion or other means, and almost never by an honest appraisal of the value an engineer actually provides. I was expressing the opinion that the model is flawed, and that market rate should be much higher than it currently is, across the board. That is to say, good to excellent engineers should be in the $200k-$300k/yr or more (base--not all in) range, and average (+/-) should be around the $150k/yr (base) range. At 33% above the "mediocre" range I suggest, $200k/yr isn't "so close" to good at all.

Also, the enormous quantity of applications, products, and services with very poor code backing them is a very strong indicator that "mediocre or even slightly below average talent" not only does not provide negative value, but just the opposite. Software companies these days have a lot of revenue, driven by sales of a software product that engineers get very little (relatively speaking) compensation for.

Isn't increasing pay like this just part of how the market rate adjusts? In this case it seems a bit extreme but it seems obvious that if a company is having a tough time attracting talent they should pay more.

This reads like a press release, and not like real reporting ...

> Weeby.com's Michael Carter

.co

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