Hacker News Reader

Comment by LetBinding | Hacker News Reader

Only for fungible types of workers. Programmers, software engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, etc aren't like farm or construction laborers. These skills aren't commodities.

View on HN

That's exactly how Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and most other big companies view software engineers. Engineers go through standard interview process (3-5 technical interviews, 1 behaviour interview) and then companies assume that everyone above the hiring bar can be assigned to pretty much any project at the company. Companies use this process because it works - engineers are mostly fungible.

The above is not true for exceptional talent (Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, etc). I will vote in heartbeat for visas for people with total comp >$300k. If you are truly that valuable, you should be paid more than average Sr. Software Engineer at Google.

Considering how Apple and Google tried to fix the salaries of software engineers to stay low, maybe even that isn't an option in big companies.

That's not how management sees talent like programmers and engineers. Management sees them like another commodity labor resource.

Specifically, they all fall under "Human Resources". While I suspect some issues even for CEOs might fall under HR, I also suspect that large company CEOs may also have unique employment contracts not available to the myriad software engineers at the same company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com