Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
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Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
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Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#2Idk have you ever considered because the boss wants to minimize costs and paying engineers 50x (or even 2x or w/e) isn't the norm in the industry so they don't? Chalking it up to "it's hard to evaluate" seems to be missing common sense.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#3They kinda do though. This is how FAANG retains their best. It's not professional athlete level but there's a reason talent still goes there.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#4Because companies don't adhere to the labour theory of value. Companies pay as little as they have to, to keep enough workers.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#5Idk have you ever considered because the boss wants to minimize costs and paying engineers 50x (or even 2x or w/e) isn't the norm in the industry so they don't? Chalking it up to "it's hard to evaluate" seems to be missing common sense.
The article alludes to this but maybe doesn’t point it out clearly enough: they can only minimize cost in this way _because_ it’s hard to evaluate - otherwise the engineers in question would just work somewhere else where their value would immediately be recognized.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#6Professional sports salaries benefits from a game with well defined rules winners and losers systems of measurement around scoring points.
A company has a bunch of other stuff that had to be in solid alignment to "win". Engineers have to be working on the correct problems to begin with to add exponentially more value.
It's not as simple as "crushing" the sprint points assigned rather chosing the problem set ... If chosing the problem set then it's leadership or founders which can be rewarded at 50x.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#7https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ covers this to some extent. There is a pretty wide distribution to SWE salaries. SWEs who really want those 10x salaries can aggressively pursue high salaries and get 10x the median SWE salary if they hit T7-9 at a FAANG: https://www.levels.fyi/
> For example, one of the top MLB pitchers, Stephen Strasburg, received $38M in 2019, while the average salary in MLB was $4.3M.
This isn't the right comparison. If Strasburg is the number #1 baseball player in the world, it makes sense for him to max 10x the median MLB player who would be the ~500th best baseball player in the world. I'm sure the #1 best paid programmer in the world easily makes 10x - 1,000,000x the median programmer when you account startup equity.
And people who aggressively jump between FAANGs at high levels can get $1M+ offers and counteroffers.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#8More engineers than you think are making a million or two, it’s just not really talked about.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#9Because that is a myth. If that existed, you could build an entire startup with a single developer.
Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?
#10Idk have you ever considered because the boss wants to minimize costs and paying engineers 50x (or even 2x or w/e) isn't the norm in the industry so they don't? Chalking it up to "it's hard to evaluate" seems to be missing common sense.
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