Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix • Hacker News Board

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#261

Post by whatshisface » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

mhaberl wrote: post #226

whatshisface wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google is willing to pay $200k over your current employer for you, your employer is paying you $200k under your market rate.

You can view this issue from another standpoint. Imagine some market where 10 companies sell bread and it costs $5. And lets assume that the costs are $4 and $1 is profit. Then comes a company that makes its money on selling water and it is doing very well. It comes to a bread market and starts selling bread for $3. The competition is quickly destroyed and the bread prices rise. Edit: as a sibling comment mentioned:…

Google buys labor using the proceeds from the stuff they assign the labor to do. Their money does not come from a second market unrelated to programmers. Even if you flipped buyers and sellers your analogy would be inapplicable.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#262

Post by madrox » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

I don't care how you put it, but the fact is that people leave. I led an engineering team I was quite proud of, and days came that I had to let top engineers go. Everyone has growth arcs, and they had opportunities to seize their dream jobs working on things they'd never get to otherwise. I was proud to have felt like a stepping stone on the way to their dreams, even though it screwed the business temporarily. I learned a lot of what this article is trying to say. Calling it a bus sounds like a one in a million disaster to prepare for. Getting hired by Netflix is far more likely but just as impactful.

This is written to business leaders, but I feel like if phrased differently would sound familiar and accepted by HN. Namely, don't adopt esoteric technologies no one else knows. Document production process. Never let mission critical operations exist solely in your lead engineer's head.

The fact is that it's never a good time for your best people to leave, but that's inevitable on a long enough timeline. It's the duty of business leaders to be prepared for that so they don't have to resort to dirty tactics to convince them to stay.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#263

Post by dijit » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

sjburt wrote: post #129

thomascgalvin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. In the vast majority of cases, I agree. If someone is working at CompuTech for $100K per year, and gets an offer from TechuComp for $110K per year, that's market forces working in favor of the developer. This is a good thing. But there is the possibility for entities the…

I really fail to see the distinction. If someone is willing to pay 600k for something, then the value of that thing on the market is 600k. That is what a market is.

I'd agree.

but as a contrapoint; in capitalism there's a trend of selling a product or service substantially below market rate as a way of gaining significant adoption, once you have significant adoption- you raise the price as best you can.

This is called: undercut, corner and squeeze.

Often this results in monopoly positions or at least significant leads which are hard to overcome. (Uber, is a famous example).

Obviously this is only possible with significant financial capital, which google have.

I can see how the undercutting analogy has synergies with overpaying for talent. It's worth making a loss on hiring me if it means that someone else doesn't get the (lesser) value of me.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#264

Post by notJim » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

bogdanu wrote: post #191

JPKab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that hits me is the "$500k+/year in the valley". Is this really a thing? Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado? Even factoring in my stock grants, I'm nowhere close to that number.

Ha, tell me about it, I just got from a remote company an offer of 2.2k eur/month as a PHP developer. The drawbacks of being a PHP guy I guess.

I was making ~$200k as a PHP developer, not sure what this has to do with it.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#265

Post by JackFr » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #239

JackFr wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have special knowledge of the contracts signed, you really can't say that. It's likely the second company was well aware of the restriction. And it seems like the OP felt he was wronged more than the second party.

If the companies had a contractual agreement that their recruiting agency would block each other's employees from applying, that sounds like a non-poaching agreement of the sort that Apple and Google were fined hundreds of millions for.

I'm pretty sure they weren't fined. I believe they were sued and settled with no admission of wrongdoing.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#266

Post by game_the0ry » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #171

game_the0ry wrote: post #23

I agree with the author's point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That's how labor economic works - it's a market. Investment bank and management consulting figure…

Not all companies need $500k engineers or can afford them. An optimization at Netflix that improves performance by 1% may save them millions of dollars. The same optimization at a medium-size company may only save them a few thousand. Also, it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants. The latter two are directly making money for the firm.

> Also, it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants. The latter two are directly making money for the firm.

Yes, it is difficult, but possible.

Here's quick and dirty analysis - consider Sears, Walmart, and Amazon:

- Amazon pays its engineers near top of market - $1.5T market cap.

- Walmart has a pretty good engineering culture. They acquired a tech company to start Walmart Labs for data science stuff and they even have popular open source software (Hapi.js) - they're the largest company by revenue and $370B market cap.

- Ever been to Sears.com? Me neither - largest retailer in 1980 to bankrupt in 2018, stock price at $0.23 and $94M market cap.

I deduce that investment in software engineers == higher stock price.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#267

Post by codegeek » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #218

codegeek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that FAANGs have the ability to overpay in many cases and still acquire talent which skews market wages. A FAANG can possibly pay 200K to an average developer who would otherwise may be make 120K in a regular company. So now the developer thinks they are worth 200K everywhere.

What makes you think they are overpaying? If they offered less the employee would go to a competitor, and the company gets more value from the employee than they do from $200K/y.

True that Google itself sees value in paying 200K and they need to do that to attract the best talent compared to their competitors. But google has so much money that it almost makes it difficult for the little guys who could pay a good salary but not the inflated ones like google. I am not convinced that suddenly "market rate" is decided by FAANgs. No FAANG existed before 2004 (some did but weren't as powerful back then) and there were plenty of good developers/programmers even then.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#268

Post by ghaff » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

ISL wrote: post #194

nhumrich wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correlary is that McDonalds could offer free burgers for a year, they have enough money to handle the cost. They could do it just so that other business cant stay affloat. This doesn't mean that the market price of a McDonalds burger is $0

It does if McDonalds decides that it wishes to dump burgers. The ask price would fall to $0. The market will correct very quickly, as competitors will immediately head over to McDonalds to purchase $\infty$ burgers at $0, killing MCD dead in seconds. The moment McDonalds applies a purchase limit (Free burgers! Limit 5 per customer), the burgers have non-zero cost, as they require a person's time in order to purchase.…

McDonald's (among many other places--especially those with many lower income customers) certainly do have loss leaders. I don't eat at McDonald's but I assume something like the $1 $2 $3 menu functions as something to get people in the door after which they or their friends may buy high-priced/margin items as well.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#269

Post by mh8h » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #176

benrbray wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google is willing to pay 200k above market rate to hire an employee from a competitor, chances are part of the "value" of that employee is that they will no longer be working for someone else. Yes, literally speaking, it's "worth it" to Google, or they wouldn't do it. Being so large, Google can throw advertising money on their self-driving car division, no problem. They can take a loss for 5-10 years, no problem.…

> If Google is willing to pay 200k above market rate This is not possible according to the usual definition of "market rate". If Google is willing to pay X, that is the market rate.

That's assuming that the thing Google is buying is a commodity, and its value is the same to all parties.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#270

Post by vosper » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

setr wrote: post #228

sjburt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really fail to see the distinction. If someone is willing to pay 600k for something, then the value of that thing on the market is 600k. That is what a market is.

Im not sure thats a useful model -- google would be in this case bringing in money from one market (eg ad revenue) to overprice in another market (self driving r&d) If walmart takes its surplus capital and decides to sell toilet paper at a loss, to run everyone else out of business (till they're the last man standing), I'm not sure its correct to say that the market value of TP has reduced during that time period. Wa…

> it hasn't actually changed the market value, except temporarily, in whats effectively a hack

All market values are temporary. Walmart absolutely has changed the market value in this scenario. It might be anticompetitive in the Walmart example, but in the case of one company paying their staff better than another I don't think the company paying less and complaining about it is going to get much sympathy :)