Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 184 posts

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#151

Post by hayst4ck »

tqi wrote: post #60
PeterStuer wrote: post #34

"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. I…

What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a commodity?

A job is a commodity if your manager knows how to do your job right now.

There is a subtlety. Your manager might be able to do your job, with time, but if they haven't spent time understanding the same data you have or the greater context of what you are doing, then they won't be able to come to the same conclusions you do.

Therefore your manager must trust your judgement because they do not have sufficient data to make the judgements you make yourself. This necessary deference is what prevents commoditization. Judgement is also unequal, being informed by experience and quality, further denying commoditization because all engineering decisions are not equal.

The corollary is also clear. If a manager thinks they know better than you and treats you like a commodity, then you are forced into performing a job in a dogmatic rather than analytical or informed way. You may be asked to do things that don't make sense or are even directly counter to the organizations goals because they don't know things you know.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#152

Post by cdavid »

Hjack wrote: post #135
cdavid wrote: post #53

This article makes the naive assumption that "what is making money" is an objective thing. Once a company reaches a certain size, basically once it has a financial planning department w/ different VPs owning their PnL, who is making money increasingly becomes a social construct. "how to get promoted" by spakhm is much more closer to how a large, successful org works IMO: https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promo…

But still there are objective metrics by which you can track which products are making money and which are not. You can do ALL the financial manipulation to an extent, but everyone above bragging VPs/Directors know which product lines are making money yoy

Say you are meta. You know that a big stream of revenue is ads. You are an engineer working for one of the myriad ML model around feeds, ads click prediction, whatever. Those ML models are in production, and cost a lot of money to maintain / operate. How much you are a cost center or a money maker will depend on a lot of non objective choices.

The essential issue is attribution, which fundamentally requires some choices about how money is actually made. Even when everybody is in good faith, there are reasonable ways to agree. And people are rarely in good faith around those things.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#153

Post by mkoubaa »

pc86 wrote: post #141
mkoubaa wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the point; It's not about the importance It's about specialized knowledge. To the owners of the business, making sure the business doesn't fail to deliver is existentially important. Web developers are fungible. The guy who designed the carefully tuned graph database that runs on a custom Linux kernel with a custom tuned filesystem is not. If this sort of thing is critical to your business succeeding, that…

My point is 90% of companies have no specialized knowledge whatsoever and are staffed almost entirely by web developers. How many companies have an in-house tuned graph database? How many companies have custom Linux kernels? How many companies have custom filesystems?

90% of companies don't need to think too deeply about compensation, then.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#154

Post by poincaredisk »

woah wrote: post #137
poincaredisk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want to feel like a cog in a heartless money making machine, all of it.

It is not the responsibility of the rest of society to pay you a handsome salary for a programming hobby. If your code isn't generating enough value that someone wants to pay for it, it's about as useful as model trains.

I never said it is. I responded to the question about "what's sad about it", and having idealistic ideas about the IT is common among newer/fresh programmers. And (almost?) nobody wants to feel like a replaceable money making pawn, most[1] people in IT value self-realisation at least a bit. And some successfully gaslight themselves into believing that their backend work on their ad-sponsored e-commerce CRUD is somehow making the world a better place.

Having said that, "value" doesn't have to be measured in euros. I personally work in a semi-governmental institution, and the main focus of my team is reducing the amount of cybercrime in my country. I still need to provide that value to earn good money, but I enjoy that more than working to make investors rich (there's nothing wrong with that though, and it usually pays better).

[1] anecdotal, among my social groups, I don't really have hard data about this.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#155

Post by Hjack »

cdavid wrote: post #152
Hjack wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still there are objective metrics by which you can track which products are making money and which are not. You can do ALL the financial manipulation to an extent, but everyone above bragging VPs/Directors know which product lines are making money yoy

Say you are meta. You know that a big stream of revenue is ads. You are an engineer working for one of the myriad ML model around feeds, ads click prediction, whatever. Those ML models are in production, and cost a lot of money to maintain / operate. How much you are a cost center or a money maker will depend on a lot of non objective choices. The essential issue is attribution, which fundamentally requires some choi…

Ads are still bread and butter for Meta. The first to go will be the folks who are in vogue bcoz of cultural reasons, eg. diversity, green, etc. I would even go the extent of saying that a lot of open source maintainers will also be axed, the day Meta stops making ad money and fights for survival. The issue of `attribution` is to be decided at last, when anyway the house is partially burned and the company is fighting for survival. I am talking about the initial phase, where a lot of engineers work on teams that make no monetary/value sense for company and are there, bcoz manager/CEO don't care or are kind(mostly former).

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#156

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

bruce511 wrote: post #128
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you put numbers in there usually? I'm facing an issue at work where an important factor should be done to correct a serious design mistake, but it doesn't get in the way of any feature. It's probably the cause of a lot of loss of development time over the lifetime of the project, but I don physically know how much of a boost will it give to development. I know it will, but I wouldn't feel comfortable without q…

It can be tough, and in some cases measurable numbers are hard to find. That can make prioritization hard. It's worth keeping open the option that "now is not yet the right time". One key way to understand the situation well is to explore both thd upsides and downsides of the issue. Its almost never an obvious decision and being acquainted with all points of view really helps both to figure out what is right, whether…

Indeed, I was the one suggesting to not do the refactor because I couldn't find a reason. Today at standup though, a task that would take 1 hour once the refactor is done, will probably take about 2 days instead, so i'm back thinking about it (the refactor would take longer than 2 days)

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#157

Post by sudoshred »

acedTrex wrote: post #67
tqi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a commodity?

It is, until it isn't. Basically modern tech management is about flying as close to commodified engineering sun as possible without burning up.

I like this. Engineering is not a commodity in general but management “adds value” by ensuring engineers are interchangeable.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#158

Post by cdavid »

Hjack wrote: post #155
cdavid wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you are meta. You know that a big stream of revenue is ads. You are an engineer working for one of the myriad ML model around feeds, ads click prediction, whatever. Those ML models are in production, and cost a lot of money to maintain / operate. How much you are a cost center or a money maker will depend on a lot of non objective choices. The essential issue is attribution, which fundamentally requires some choi…

Ads are still bread and butter for Meta. The first to go will be the folks who are in vogue bcoz of cultural reasons, eg. diversity, green, etc. I would even go the extent of saying that a lot of open source maintainers will also be axed, the day Meta stops making ad money and fights for survival. The issue of `attribution` is to be decided at last, when anyway the house is partially burned and the company is fightin…

Sure, but things like DEI, OSS, are tiny minority in most companies. At least they were in the companies I've worked at.

You mentioned that attribution is to be decided when house is burnt, but that certainly not my observation. Which department is responsible for what revenue is what senior leadership fights over all the time, whether times are good or not.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#159

Post by Anon1096 »

cdavid wrote: post #152
Hjack wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still there are objective metrics by which you can track which products are making money and which are not. You can do ALL the financial manipulation to an extent, but everyone above bragging VPs/Directors know which product lines are making money yoy

Say you are meta. You know that a big stream of revenue is ads. You are an engineer working for one of the myriad ML model around feeds, ads click prediction, whatever. Those ML models are in production, and cost a lot of money to maintain / operate. How much you are a cost center or a money maker will depend on a lot of non objective choices. The essential issue is attribution, which fundamentally requires some choi…

You have chosen a very very poor example in calling out Meta Ads. I can assure you that the entire org has a massive magnifying glass over it with insane amounts of data analysis, every % change in revenue is absolutely attributable to exactly what group brought it about whether it be DC hardware, ML teams, or backend infra. It is the lifeblood of Meta with many billions flowing through it of course it isn't just being cowboy'd with random changes that have undefined impact on yoy revenue.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#160

Post by cdavid »

Anon1096 wrote: post #159
cdavid wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you are meta. You know that a big stream of revenue is ads. You are an engineer working for one of the myriad ML model around feeds, ads click prediction, whatever. Those ML models are in production, and cost a lot of money to maintain / operate. How much you are a cost center or a money maker will depend on a lot of non objective choices. The essential issue is attribution, which fundamentally requires some choi…

You have chosen a very very poor example in calling out Meta Ads. I can assure you that the entire org has a massive magnifying glass over it with insane amounts of data analysis, every % change in revenue is absolutely attributable to exactly what group brought it about whether it be DC hardware, ML teams, or backend infra. It is the lifeblood of Meta with many billions flowing through it of course it isn't just bei…

I am not saying mature companies are "YOLO-ing" this randomly, but that many assumptions are made about how the input metrics trickle back to revenue/profits, and those can change. The attribution exists, but how it is done is far from an objective thing. E.g. how do you translate CTR into revenue ? How do you value an additional user ?

This can also be seen with cost saving. There are numerous examples on HN when people wonder why reducing the cost of something by X millions was not recognized (e.g. https://x.com/danluu/status/802971209176477696). Based on my own experience, most likely explanation is that's because there was no item related to this in the financial planning to be recognized.

Post reply on HN