Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#21

Post by RussianCow » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

ianlevesque wrote: post #3

They 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.

That has less to do with the engineers themselves and much more to do with the benefit that those companies get from those engineers. Someone making minor UI changes at Google might provide a 5% increase in ad clicks in certain situations, which earns Google millions in additional revenue. Even though the bar for that kind of work may not be very high, most companies simply don’t get that much benefit from a single engineer, even a 50x-er.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#22

Post by bb88 » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

What strikes me as odd is that SaaS companies want to sell subscriptions to software. But they pay employees a one time fee (in the form of a salary often) for code that may run for 5 years or more in production.

If the company fires the engineer, the engineer doesn't gain any further profit from the code he wrote.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#23

Post by caseysoftware » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

They are, it's called stock options.

The challenge is that to successfully cash out, ALL the pieces of the company have to work together and effectively to some degree.

It's the single best demonstration that company/product success is a team effort.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#24

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:15 AM UTC

when did it go from 10X to 50X? Has there been a recent influx of -5X engineers?

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#25

Post by cracker_jacks » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:16 AM UTC

People are overcomplicating this. It's simply because there is no market to create price discovery. Most of your price is established the day you start, well before you've proven yourself to be a '50x engineer'. And no one outside the org knows you're a '50x engineer', so there's no competition trying to hire you away. I am surprised the author of this article missed this despite making the analogy to sports athletes who have constant price discovery because their stats/accomplishments are public. It is in the company's advantage to prevent this price discovery and ideally not have a '50x engineer' be aware of how financially significant their contribution is, definitely not make competitors aware.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#26

Post by bb88 » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

In the contract world, it's a lot easier.

Your value is 10% of the worth of the total value you're creating or somewhere between $100 to $200/hr, maybe even as high as $400/hr for rare skills.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#27

Post by Exmoor » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

legulere wrote: post #11

mdale wrote: post #6

Professional 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 ch…

In sports in a game the better team will win and the worse team will lose. In economy the better company will win and the worse company will also win, just a little bit less.

Or the better team lose by a lot, but catch up slightly over time to the worse team because the worse team was better 20 years ago.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#28

Post by knowtheworld » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:29 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #12

There's another reason, too -- which is that a "50x engineer" will very rarely be 50x on most development tasks. Your 50x engineer may be able to build a highly performant and complex algorithm by themselves, truly in a week where other engineers might take a year. But 99% of programming isn't that. It's CRUD apps and configuration files and debugging browser quirks and hunting down race conditions etc. Your "50x eng…

This is an interesting point! I do agree with you that "they mostly don't have genius-level work to give them" is one of the reasons why this happens.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#29

Post by natch » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:29 AM UTC

1) Sometimes they do.

2) Sometimes 10x or 50x or whatever Nx is not really what it's thought to be.

I've had to deal with the aftermath of some "10x" engineers and it's not always pretty. Now you can say that this just means we aren't measuring properly, and the person wasn't really 10x (more like -100x in fact, that minus before the 100, in case you missed it, is for "negative" as in negative 100x) but there are still people around thinking this person was 10x, because they still think highly of the elaborate and tightly integrated ongoing catastrophic disaster fountains he planted in the code base.

But then... yes there are some real 10x engineers. Again this is misunderstood though. I think many people can be 10x (or 50x) engineers, depending on circumstance. It's not always about the person. It's the right context plus the right person.

Re: Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

#30

Post by carapace » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #2

Idk 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.

What blows my mind is that people seem to forget that time when the tech companies were caught literally conspiring to cap salaries for devs.

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

It goes on and on. This is just Pando's reporting: https://pando.com/tag/techtopus/