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Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

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Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#81
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way the app works is that as you scroll you see more ads interspersed between headlines/topics. You click on one and you can comment and then go back to scrolling. Or maybe you're done with that topic group and you switch to another. More scrolling. 20 sounds fine to me. If it helps, think of the way people sit on hacker news or reddit waiting for the next story to come out, navigating down to comment, and then b…

But is that popular four-letter sports site in US or China? Typically, ad CPMs follow income levels/disposable incomes in the country/area the user is from. The quality of data the advertiser has about the specific user is also important. For example, since a lot of the tracking is illegal in Germany, even though incomes are similar to US, the CPMs are lower because US has more highly cookied/tracked users with highe…

So I did some googling and here's their price sheet:

http://toutiao.toproi.cn/kanli/kanli.html

They charge 4-6RMB for the "precision auction" and 0.15-0.3RMB per click, which are only a little lower. These ads are small and only at the tops of certain sections. This suggests a price about half of western prices.

They have "guaranteed delivery" at 160RMB CPM (about $18 CPM).

Oh, and btw: I know more than one person who uses 300+ frequency in Germany, so while yes, tracking helps a marketing manager justify spend in the US, the lack of tracking also helps marketing managers justify spend in Germany.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#82

The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.

I would be interested in knowing if better developers are more improved by having their own office above average developers or if they can handle the distraction more.

I think a lot of people value having other people around and in their sight, even freelancers leave their home office and head to coworking spaces and claim productivity gains. Personally I think the office per person idea is overrated, however I've worked in many places where the draw backs of open office hit sometimes. I think the best combo is open office, with hot private offices, and with the extra space, sleep rooms, relax rooms, big working table rooms, even put hipster stuff like a standing desk area in maybe etc.. Oh and if an employees ask for NC headphones just buy them! Also if someone really in the zone on something that distractions could be problematic be okay if Fred say's do you mind if I work from home today on this problem.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#83

The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.

I worked as a contractor for a while at a company that was pretty much entirely great developers, but they had one guy who had more experience than nearly everybody else put together (he was in his 50s, and had worked on all sorts of cool things in his career), who was also more productive than anyone else. The founders of the company knew he was their top producer, and so they gave him whatever he wanted (within the bounds of budget, etc.).

What he wanted most was a private office, and he got it, despite no one else in the company having one (it was kind of smallish and closet like, but he had a door that closed, and that made him happy). I always suspected that was a big part of why he was so productive compared to everyone else; though the huge amount of experience and his seeming disinterest in anything but churning out code (all of his hobbies also involved code to some degree, and he was always way out front on various trends in software development) were also big contributors. It's also worth nothing that he didn't put in long hours. When it was crunch time in the office, he wouldn't be one of the people there on the weekend. Paradoxically, I think that's another contributing factor to his high productivity.

So, yeah, I've often wondered whether Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc. has internal metrics about this. Google is infamously an open plan office, Microsoft has offices, facebook is mixed (I think?). Surely, these companies who keep gigabytes of data about everybody on the planet has some idea about the relative productivity of offices vs. open plans.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#84

There is a big difference from being paid in USD and being paid in the equivalent of USD in Yuan. Ever try to get 1 million USD equivalent of Yuan out of China before?

If these engineers are Chinese (which they are) and live in China they don't need to get it out of China.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#85

This is fairly coming financial technology except less base and more bonus. I've seen plenty of $500-800k base with 4x bonus (and more especially if you are close to the money or on the front desk). I think it is very healthy. It creates tiers in the profession because some developers are that much better. Being good glueing together frameworks isn't going to command that salary.

You mean quant? Or what exactly you mean with 500-800k base and 4x bonus?

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested in knowing if better developers are more improved by having their own office above average developers or if they can handle the distraction more.

I think a lot of people value having other people around and in their sight, even freelancers leave their home office and head to coworking spaces and claim productivity gains. Personally I think the office per person idea is overrated, however I've worked in many places where the draw backs of open office hit sometimes. I think the best combo is open office, with hot private offices, and with the extra space, sleep…

I second this.

I worked at a university for a few years, and lots of people were jealous of my private office in a distant building, but I just found it socially isolating. That said, I did get a lot done.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#88
post #34
post #32

Is there an English language equivalent of Toutiao? If not, why?

TouTiao is a literal translation of Headline. (头)Tou = Head; (条)Tiao = Line

条 is a measure word for things that are long (rivers / snakes / pants), but it's not the word for line. The character most closely related to the concept is 线 xian, and 线 is indeed the word for "line" in many senses. In other senses, you find words of more than one syllable.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#89

The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.

Some people prefer them. We used to have small open offices available. They'd seat six to ten people comfortably. If the employee wasn't okay with that, there were smaller offices with room for one or two people. Depending on which facility you were at, there were larger workspaces available that also worked for meetings and our HQ also had a larger conference room space.

It worked for us. Not everyone enjoys working in close proximity to other people and technologically creative people are sometimes introverts or have behaviors that aren't social normatives.

I'm not sure why companies are forcing people into open office plans. Unless things have drastically changed, real estate isn't a very high percentage of overhead. This might be different in SV, but it's not just being done in SV.

I'd also expect the increased productivity of happy workers to mitigate the increased real estate costs.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't give advertising that much credit. An equal amount of money is spent on lost elections too.

> An equal amount of money is spent on lost elections too. That's false. There's a pretty strong correlation between outspending and winning elections. The losing side usually spent less. In aggregate, much more money is spent winning elections than losing them. eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/04/th...

> There's a pretty strong correlation between outspending and winning elections. The losing side usually spent less. In aggregate, much more money is spent winning elections than losing them.

A lot of money is wasted on lost elections. I did say "equal", but my point was a lot of advertising dollars fail.

Barney Frank: "If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...

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