Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#391

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 2:05 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #338

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are their glassdoor salaries accurate? 58000 kr/mo for senior developers? You could find similar jobs in Warsaw with half the cost of living.

Are jobs where developers make $7k per month that common in Poland, though?

Not as common as I presume they are in Sweden - nowadays most job contracts for individual contributors without significant seniority or additional duties fall short of that (~6k gross or around 8k cost for employer), although with covid they are seen more frequently. I was mostly surprised to see Spotify in particular not paying more.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#392

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #389

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deny your premise. All those companies can and already do leverage software engineering talent for the same multipliers or orders of magnitude impact on revenue that tech companies get out of it. They are just using rent seeking opportunities to disingenuously pay uncompetitive salaries and reap surplus for executive pay. Either those companies will get better management and leaders who successfully rebuild the bus…

On what basis can you claim that other companies can leverage engineers to make as much profit as Google/Facebook/Apple? Those are some of the most profitable companies in the world. It's true that companies might have to adapt or fold, but many business models will not be able to adapt to produce the kind of leverage a global advertising duopoly can.

No, I never said other companies make as much profit. I said other companies experience the same multiples or order of magnitude impact effect from software engineers that tech companies experience.

Ultimately your business’s total revenue is a function of external demand for what you sell. Within that limit, some employees have a big impact on realizing that revenue, some have a small impact. What they are really worth to you is their share of contribution of revenue by that impact.

What I have said is that virtually all companies employing software engineers experience this impact from software engineering in similar ways (meaning the engineers’ value is much closer to their direct impact on revenue than some lower “market rate” wage floor).

It’s frustrating that you are misinterpreting this as me saying other companies earn the same profits, in absolute dollar terms, as tech companies. Because I never said that at all - and more importantly, that does not need to be true for my earlier statements to be correct.

A company doesn’t have to make the same profit as FAANG to justify that the fair value of one of their software engineers according to their revenue contributions within the company’s (much lower than FAANG) profits is already at a FAANG salary level (which they already have the ability to pay).

Remote work just takes away the greedy rent seeking mechanism (local “cost of living wage” excuses) that had been used to artificially suppress what should have been a FAANG-level wage (paid out of the current revenue) all along, based on the way the company leverages software engineers for their contribution to existing, current profits - not any hypothetical ability to generate future FAANG level revenue per employee.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#393

Post by IshKebab » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

senko wrote: post #29

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs). US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

> while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

It's not in the UK. I'm not sure which countries you are thinking of.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#394

Post by piva00 » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

machiaweliczny wrote: post #284

burntoutfire wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I myself have a CS degree from a Polish university that's regularly in top1-top3 of the rankings. I don't think it means that much. We've had a fair share of people who didn't enjoy the work that much and did bare minimum. On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of people from lower ranked universities who didn't graduate in CS (but, for example in Maths or Physics) who are very strong contributors. The truth is t…

I also don't think degree means much but anyone with some curiosity gets one here as it's free, so it's still good estimate. Even if you add all outliers, physics and math students then you get max 3x my estimation. > Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed. Those people are above my lvl and I estimate them to be max 30 per year.

You are only looking at university graduates. This, by far, doesn't tell you the picture in the job market.

I have worked for the past 17 years with a lot of brilliant engineers, some of them didn't even have a university degree, some had from a crappy uni just because they needed a diploma for a job, and others never touched CS and graduated in Biology or Statistics. You can't measure who is at your level or not just by university graduation stats, it's completely biased to your definition of what's a software engineer at your level: someone who graduated from a university considered at the same level or better than yours for research. That's all your metric tells, not how many people per year in Poland can develop/engineer the same feature set or product as you do, with the same time. And that's nigh impossible to measure or even estimate, there's no data available for that estimation.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#395

Post by ubercow13 » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #392

ubercow13 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what basis can you claim that other companies can leverage engineers to make as much profit as Google/Facebook/Apple? Those are some of the most profitable companies in the world. It's true that companies might have to adapt or fold, but many business models will not be able to adapt to produce the kind of leverage a global advertising duopoly can.

No, I never said other companies make as much profit. I said other companies experience the same multiples or order of magnitude impact effect from software engineers that tech companies experience. Ultimately your business’s total revenue is a function of external demand for what you sell. Within that limit, some employees have a big impact on realizing that revenue, some have a small impact. What they are really wo…

>(which they already have the ability to pay).

I guess I just find it questionable that all or most companies can increase engineer salaries to FAANG levels and remain profitable. I am pretty sure this is not the case for my last employer, for example, looking at their recent earnings report. Remote hiring might push up wages in most places but there could still end up being a bi-modal distribution of wages, between high-leverage companies and low-leverage ones, as long as there aren't enough jobs for every engineer at highly profitable companies. It's already like that in some cities.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#396

Post by smabie » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

88840-8855 wrote: post #244

nassycheezy wrote: post #231

Please take note that Spotify pays sub-market salaries for these cities. The reason being that they do not offer RSUs but instead public stock options without any discount. - Typical FAANG compensation: X base pay + Y RSUs + Z signing bonus - Spotify: X base pay + Y stock options (public, so equivalent to you purchasing stocks really) + no signing bonus

This is ridiculous. I find well paid devs super arrogant. Some of them made 150k, 200k, 250k - while other people, also qualified, make salaries that are not enough to start a family and have a decent life.

250k is about median, I wouldn't consider it well paid.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#397

Post by ownagefool » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #215

ownagefool wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about London and the UK generally is the real money was historically in contracting. I reckon I was hitting the 6x. The perm market here has always been silly.

How much were you hitting? I haven’t seen contracts that go that high, I’m on 140K base + car allowance now (8K), in total I make around 220-215K cash w/ bonuses. employer pension is about another 20K or so a year. IR35 made contracting complicated but even before that I’ve never seen anything that gets you to SV levels of total comp.

1500 a day. Depends on the exchange rate at the time and how many days you wanna work, but it was over $500k at the time. Obviously you can earn similar or more as a high level in FANNG and the initital grant in the US is a lot better. 800-1000 is a lot more typical.

Your salary is pretty hot though. I traded in contracting to be a CTO on a lot less than you are, but I got some lottery ticket stocks and will probably see us through an IPO, so feels like that's worth something.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#398

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #395

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I never said other companies make as much profit. I said other companies experience the same multiples or order of magnitude impact effect from software engineers that tech companies experience. Ultimately your business’s total revenue is a function of external demand for what you sell. Within that limit, some employees have a big impact on realizing that revenue, some have a small impact. What they are really wo…

>(which they already have the ability to pay). I guess I just find it questionable that all or most companies can increase engineer salaries to FAANG levels and remain profitable. I am pretty sure this is not the case for my last employer, for example, looking at their recent earnings report. Remote hiring might push up wages in most places but there could still end up being a bi-modal distribution of wages, between…

That doesn’t seem related to this discussion though. Whether a given business can afford to pay it or not is a reflection of customer demand for that product or service combined with good or bad executive leadership.

If the competitive wage rises but a company can’t afford it, that’s not the worker’s problem to accept a bad wage to help the company. That’s the company’s problem to hire better leadership or cut executive pay in favor of employee pay or get acquired / raise funding or go out of business. None of that changes the reality of competitive wages.

At the root it sounds like your question is more about aggregate market allocation of labor. But why should workers accept inefficient allocation at worse wages? That just seems like an aggregate market expression of “these businesses are unwanted by society” - the same happens to 90% of startups all the time.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#399

Post by PoignardAzur » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #113

_-___________-_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in many EU countries, I've never once had salary quoted or discussed after tax.

In France there is employee taxes and employer taxes. You discuss before employee taxes, but after employer taxes (which is about 50% of the salary before employee taxes). If you're on a French payroll the amount is written on your payslip, but most people don't even notice it. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if it's an employer tax or an employee tax, the employer spends some amount of money and the e…

Yeah, I wish they'd get rid of that distinction. It's just pointless obfuscation.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#400

Post by moneywoes » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

2W2 wrote: post #290

nly wrote: post #20

Make hay while the sun shines. A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. Market forces will soon close these opportunities. My limited experience tells me people aren't prepared for homogenization of salaries across geographies: South East England, outside London: 1x London: 2x New York: 3x San Francisco: 6x On making hay: A friend of mine is currently…

I already only do 10 hours of work per week in this pandemic WFH. No one seems to notice. I’m L6 at google. Why not double down and get two “full time” jobs. I’ve heard from my friend in BoA that he works less than 1 hour per day. TC: 800k

Do you know not do any scrum or project management?