Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 218 posts

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#91

Post by j7ake »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #13
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #2

The thing with excessive remuneration with startup’s are, it’s highly unlikely one could switch to a better paying job when the need arises. Update : To people who ask why would someone need another job? There are multitude of reasons, a well funded startup which could pay several times the industry standard - when fails; puts excessively paid employees to compete in the same standarised job market. If you live in th…

Why would you ever need a better paying job afterwards?

Your assumption is that the position is tenured for life, which is not.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#92

Post by kc10 »

ryankupyn wrote: post #64

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 personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH.

I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion.

Sure, at times it can be distracting - I usually put on my headset if my tasks demand uninterrupted attention. My team also understands this and won't disturb unless necessary.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#93

Post by KGIII »

hasenj wrote: post #60
adventured wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more valuable than building a top notch system for delivering news (and everything that tends to go with that) to a billion people? A very large number of engineers were dedicated to building out the radio and television technology platforms over decades. Was it all just to deliver ads? Trivial then right? Well that's what paid for a lot of it. It delivered community, it delivered news, it delivered entertainm…

Delivering news is a solved problem.

It would appear there is no consensus about that.

I'd agree with them, by the way. I don't think we really have that many solved problems. I'd consider that to be hubris and see many things that can be improved on, across the spectrum of ideas and implementations.

In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of much of anything that is a solved problem. Most everything can be improved.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#94

Post by hasenj »

KGIII wrote: post #93
hasenj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delivering news is a solved problem.

It would appear there is no consensus about that. I'd agree with them, by the way. I don't think we really have that many solved problems. I'd consider that to be hubris and see many things that can be improved on, across the spectrum of ideas and implementations. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of much of anything that is a solved problem. Most everything can be improved.

It's solved from a technical point of view.

You might want to find ways to optimize it form non-technical aspects, such as, how to get more users, how to write better titles, etc. But there's nothing that is technically challenging about it.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#95

Post by unkown-unknowns »

SwellJoe wrote: post #83
ryankupyn wrote: post #64

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…

> [...] were also bug contributors. It's also worth nothing [...]

I think you have a couple of typos here. Probably you meant to say "big contributors" and "worth noting".

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#96

Post by KGIII »

hasenj wrote: post #94
KGIII wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would appear there is no consensus about that. I'd agree with them, by the way. I don't think we really have that many solved problems. I'd consider that to be hubris and see many things that can be improved on, across the spectrum of ideas and implementations. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of much of anything that is a solved problem. Most everything can be improved.

It's solved from a technical point of view. You might want to find ways to optimize it form non-technical aspects, such as, how to get more users, how to write better titles, etc. But there's nothing that is technically challenging about it.

Both of your examples, more users and better titles, can absolutely be technical improvements. Both of them could be, for example, improved by using machine learning to attract more users by appealing on an individual level and doing things like optimizing titles for the individual and pushing those individualized results out.

I'm sure there are even more technological advancements that can be made - and I suspect there always will be.

I'm not saying that it is currently ineffective, just that it isn't solved - meaning that there are still solutions to improve efficiency and efficacy. I actually see 'solved problem' as a kind of defeatism.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#97

Post by TeMPOraL »

computerphage wrote: post #80
unityByFreedom wrote: post #56

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...

I think the problem is that elections are this ridiculous zero-sum game that is able to consume ever increasing amount of resources, where almost entire contribution of one party goes to cancel out the contribution of another party.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#98

Post by TeMPOraL »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #21
wmeredith wrote: post #12

Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.

Nobody will ever be happy. If someone says hey I can't pay top of market but we're doing something groundbreaking, they are talked about like they are a bunch of scammers. If someone is paying top salary but doing something mundane, it's "sigh."

Because in a better world, the "top salary" would go to those doing "something groudbreaking". As it is, the pay structures in society are totally inverted compared to social value they provide. In particular, the system is set up to give highest rewards to those who work on scamming other people.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#99

Post by tryingagainbro »

wmeredith wrote: post #12

Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.

Yeah but a $2.5 billion in revenue news aggregator. The revenue makes a bit of a difference, or a lot of it.

>> Toutiao is on pace to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising. It was just valued at more than $20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, roughly the same as Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#100

Post by arjie »

xom wrote: post #59

And yet the company still can't afford walls.

I know a HN trope is to be anti-open-office but maybe it's better to be imitating the guys valued at 20B than the guys valued at 200k.

We need a "Show me the code" équivalent for claims about business. "Show me the money"

If open offices were a big factor, I'd expect private office startups to out-compete.

Post reply on HN