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

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

#41

Post by benreesman » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:50 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…

Without remarking on the whole 50x thing, I do think it’s worth pointing out that lots of software people don’t work on web development or CRUD apps very often.

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

#42

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:52 AM UTC

> “In software, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; Maybe even 100:1.” Steve Jobs

> If you’re a software engineer, you would probably agree with what Steve Jobs said.

I am and I don't. I've yet to see even a 10x engineer. I've seen people who are more than 10x within a very narrow domain, but when you include the whole system and all their responsibilities, no one comes close to 10x.

SW development is not just coding. The other aspects of it are harder to scale in performance. Amdahl's Law is very relevant here.

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

#43

Post by knowtheworld » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:52 AM UTC

caseysoftware wrote: post #23

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.

I thought most stock options are worth like x% of your base salary. They usually can boost the total salary on a certain level but not a crazy amount?

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

#44

Post by jldugger » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:53 AM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #19

nayuki wrote: post #17

Paul Graham wrote an long essay decades ago that basically says if you want to be paid what you're worth, then work in the context of a small company. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

I feel like in 2021, it's the reverse now. If you want to be screwed out of money, go work for a startup.

It was probably also this way back in 2004.

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

#45

Post by jldugger » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

rossriley wrote: post #38

G4BB3R wrote: post #9

Because that is a myth. If that existed, you could build an entire startup with a single developer.

WhatsApp for instance sold for $19 Billion and when it was acquired had an engineering team of just 35.

And I think Instagram had like 12.

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

#46

Post by vishnugupta » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

caseysoftware wrote: post #23

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.

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

In theory, yes. However if you look at Google and FB a lion's share of their revenue is through ads. Yet they employ thousands of engineers and pay them extremely handsomly to chase all sorts of projects and moonshots most of which are inconsequential.

My favourite hypothesis is that they keep the smartest engineers hand-cuffed in gold and ask them to dig-a-hole-fill-a-hole just so that they don't go somewhere else to build a competing product. They succeed by and large. In India for instance a small/medium startup has no chance in hell to match Google's total comp, let alone other perks. Not only is cash and RSU handsome but also they get yearly RSU refreshers. The kind of money Google pays just blows my mind.

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

#47

Post by knowtheworld » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 5:58 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.

The difference is a sports team has at most 30 team members but a company can have 1000+ engineers, which makes everything tangled together

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

#48

Post by knowtheworld » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 6:01 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #24

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

I think "N"x is just a hypothetical number. It can be 1x - 50x depending on the individual

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

#49

Post by knowtheworld » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

nayuki wrote: post #17

Paul Graham wrote an long essay decades ago that basically says if you want to be paid what you're worth, then work in the context of a small company. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

I read this article before and I think this might apply to a 5-10 person startup. An engineer’s ability might be easily measured there. But the problem is startups at that scale usually don't have that much money to pay engineers. That’s probably why you see the reverse.

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

#50

Post by knowtheworld » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

sxp wrote: post #7

https://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…

Around 5% of MLB players can get $20M a year, which is around 5x to the average. But I am not sure there are 5% of engineers at the Bay Area can more than $1M