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I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

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Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#101

Post by hiram112 »

This is a good article, and the same thing could be said with regard to offshoring, H1Bs, etc.

Very profitable companies have gotten away for years with the tired argument of not enough talent. It is easy for engineers to fall for the line, since it pushes our egos in the right way: only really talented people can do what we do.

The truth is, tech companies are spoiled. They all want the top 5%, but don't want to pay the premium. And they've found that since they can't always get these 5% for cheap, they might as well get the bottom 50% for a discount via H1B indentured servants.

I like software engineering a lot. But the older I get, the more I know that it is a dead end, and I'm preparing my pivot. Not because there isn't a demand for software, but simply because the tech field is full of naive and professionally weak workers that allow the whole industry to be exploited far more than other professions.

Globalization, offshoring, etc. is not something that can be easily countered. Even lawyers, journalists, and nurses - typically very politically savvy professionals - have not been able to counter it 100%.

But tech workers are really at the bottom of the barrel as we not only lose to offshoring, but also allow ourselves to be arbitraged and later replaced by foreign workers in our own countries (from what I've seen, Western Europe is catching up with the US with its 'blau karte' and other schemes).

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#102

Post by grinnbearit »

wott wrote: post #97
grinnbearit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finance isn't evil; day trading, investment banking, venture capital are all sharing information with the world and trying to move money to places where its more valuable. There is a case to be made about "negative externalities"[1] but talking about the whole of finance as unnecessary is throwing out the baby with the bath water. [1] costs that aren't borne by the producer

Valuable for what?

Valuable for satisfying human desires

The theory is that people spend money on what they desire, and so companies that generate more money satisfy more human values.

You will always find outliers and exceptions (caused by negative externalities usually), but this is true in general.

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#103

Post by gaius »

cel1ne wrote: post #64
flexie wrote: post #56

I think it's mostly supply and demand, timing and where you live. But those are the factors we rarely talk about. Instead, people complain they are not compensated enough relative to the importance of their work, their intelligence, the hours put in, their title or the length of their education or the risk they take. If people were paid according to the importance of their jobs, I would argue that plumbers, sewage wo…

I would add "police" to the list of critically important yet comically underpaid professions.

Well there is a paradox at work here. You need to pay any sort official enough that they aren't desperate for bribes, but not so much that you attract people into the job motivated by personal enrichment. Read "Systems of Survival" by Jane Jacobs for a good study of this.

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#104

Post by etatoby »

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #16
marssaxman wrote: post #6

It's really quite simple: you assume it's all worthless, because that's how it starts and that's how it generally ends. Even if it were going to be worth something, you'd have been better off taking the money up front and investing it however you wanted in the meantime. But it doesn't really matter, because you have no control over this anyway. All you have to do is decide whether the salary is high enough; the rest…

This is really wrong. You can very well assume that it's worthless. If you do, chances are you will not do your research on things like early exercise and 83(b) filing (whether, for example, you work at a company that even allows things like that). Then, in the very small chance that your equity is actually worth something, you will be kicking yourself really hard because if you'd only prepared, you could've been pay…

> you will be kicking yourself really hard because if you'd only prepared, you could've been paying LTCG... AMT... illiquid stock... IRS... CA FTB... ACME... Road Runner...

Look, I won't be kicking myself neither hard not soft, because I made a conscious decision to study and become proficient in another field.

You finance people work under the assumption that everybody cares—or should care—about the underlying concepts of your field, not to mention the details such as jargon and acronyms, just because we have to use money to conduct our daily life. That's demonstrably false.

It would be like assuming everybody who uses a smartphone should care and become proficient on TCP, signals, sockets, PIDs, scheduler priorities, and what not. In a word, foolish.

Considering the stock options you're given basically worthless, unless fortuitously proven otherwise, and making your employment decisions based on salary alone (and other non-monetary factors) is a valid strategy, because it allows you to avoid having to invest time into studying and understanding all those foreign concepts. Since time is a finite resource, choosing how to spend it while still having your butt covered is great advice.

On the other hand, if you are a founder of have otherwise invested a considerable amount of time and energy into those shares, it would be foolish not to seek professional advice on their management, as the article rightly points out.

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#106

Post by billmalarky »

flexie wrote: post #56

I think it's mostly supply and demand, timing and where you live. But those are the factors we rarely talk about. Instead, people complain they are not compensated enough relative to the importance of their work, their intelligence, the hours put in, their title or the length of their education or the risk they take. If people were paid according to the importance of their jobs, I would argue that plumbers, sewage wo…

> What about the risk of work injuries faced by construction workers every day. That's real risk.

I hear you, but the negative health effects of working insane hours developing in a high stress "start-up" environment for many years should not be understated.

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#107

Post by ihsw »

Honestly what's wrong with just paying people a lot of cash? Why the swindling with securities?

Because that's all it is -- look at a 10 year timespan between two developers, one making cash and one making cash+options, and you will see a difference in how much they take home.

Stock options are all smoke and mirrors, nine times out of ten.

I'm all for giving people more financial opportunities that integrate with their lifestyle and risk tolerance but come on, people are being ripped off on the promise of "options" and gauging how much "faith" someone has in a company. Screw faith, just give me cold hard cash!

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#108

Post by vacri »

aub3bhat wrote: post #25
vacri wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That all sounds like a fancy way of saying "playing the lottery".

Thats like saying programming is fancy way of saying "banging fingers on keyboard".

Let me paraphrase the parent:

"fiscal gibberish, fiscal gibberish, Then, in the very small chance that your equity is actually worth something [sic], fiscal gibberish, fiscal gibberish"

Sounds almost like the definition of a lottery to me.

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#109

Post by jazzyk »

flexie wrote: post #56

I think it's mostly supply and demand, timing and where you live. But those are the factors we rarely talk about. Instead, people complain they are not compensated enough relative to the importance of their work, their intelligence, the hours put in, their title or the length of their education or the risk they take. If people were paid according to the importance of their jobs, I would argue that plumbers, sewage wo…

>I would argue that plumbers, sewage workers and farmers should be paid higher than programmers.

Self-employed plumbers are paid higher than programmers. Every plumber I reached out to quoted $130/hr and they are all booked for weeks in advance.

Re: I Don’t Care How Well You Code, Understand Your Compensation

#110

Post by jacques_chester »

flexie wrote: post #56

I think it's mostly supply and demand, timing and where you live. But those are the factors we rarely talk about. Instead, people complain they are not compensated enough relative to the importance of their work, their intelligence, the hours put in, their title or the length of their education or the risk they take. If people were paid according to the importance of their jobs, I would argue that plumbers, sewage wo…

Hayek's short 'Social' or Distributive Justice [0] neatly shows the disconnection between value and virtue, and that no market system rewards them in lockstep.

And that no such system can function if you try to force it to reward them in lockstep.

[0] Either as a chapter in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty or as a standalone essay in The Essence of Hayek.

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