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Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

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Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#11

Post by mooreds »

zerr wrote: post #9
mooreds wrote: post #3

In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…

> * Is your company selling a software product (product company) In the B2B world it is common to have a complex enough product that needs training services and tech support as well. Some vendors also add exams/certifications on top of it.

That's fair, I was painting with a broad brush.

Once you get to a certain size of consulting company, you may also have an r&d department or someone responsible for building common libraries or knowledge repositories, for example.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#13

Post by Guid_NewGuid »

Maybe someone who knows more about this stuff can enlighten me. From what I've heard there are actually only 2, opex and capex.

If I recall correctly capex is better for the business because of how it gets treated in the accounting stuff. This naturally gives rise to the feature factory style work of a lot of dev jobs. Some reason like they can record capex spend as an asset with depreciation. Is this true?

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#14

Post by Mashimo »

All 3 actually. Depending on what task I work on.

Sometimes the customers want a specific feature, sometimes we have an idea that we want to develop in the hopes of selling it later, and sometimes you need to work on maintenance. Which also gets paid by customers in our case.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#15

Post by Scarblac »

mooreds wrote: post #3

In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…

Or a combination. I'm in a pretty small company (about 80 people total, 15 devs) and worked on all three of those last year.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#16

Post by mooreds »

Scarblac wrote: post #15
mooreds wrote: post #3

In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…

Or a combination. I'm in a pretty small company (about 80 people total, 15 devs) and worked on all three of those last year.

I'm a bit confused. You worked as a consultant selling hours, one a software product sold for a price and also on an internal enablement tool for the same company?

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#17

Post by lifestyleguru »

DeathArrow wrote: post #4

What if you are one of the only few who know how to maintain a Cobol system for a bank? Aren't you very valuable?

People get overly excited by some "last man standing" success stories of a COBOL developer based in US of A. My only encounter with COBOL developer was a freshly graduated girl based in post Communist country, her earnings were something around 25k EUR annually. I pointed out that her career might be something of a dead end but she was more like "a job is a job". Oh, and they were using some dinosaur version control as well.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#18

Post by vsnf »

thiago_fm wrote: post #8

It doesn't matter where you work at, when layoffs come, the executives will care about location, timezones, desire on finishing the current project you are working on, (maybe) performance etc. There are too many criteria and no clear pointer on what is safe and what isn't. Being part of a layoff and also watching other colleagues coming from other Big Tech companies share their experiences, you'd see people laid off…

The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#19

Post by a1o »

> Maintenance is always on the chopping block

I wonder if someone or someplace figured a way to make software maintenance and support to be better valued. It's like, it's reasonably easy to market and sell internally the start of a project and consume from some internal investment (CapEx like) budget to make it, but once you have done all of that was in scope, you delivered, it's a lot harder to keep it going at the same steam and get budget for the continuous maintenance (OpEx like). Also, why it's so hard to get promotions or market work in good maintenance.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#20

Post by zer00eyz »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #13

Maybe someone who knows more about this stuff can enlighten me. From what I've heard there are actually only 2, opex and capex. If I recall correctly capex is better for the business because of how it gets treated in the accounting stuff. This naturally gives rise to the feature factory style work of a lot of dev jobs. Some reason like they can record capex spend as an asset with depreciation. Is this true?

This is close, there is more nuance to it, and a lot of it is going to be specific to your org.

If you work in office, and there are accountants there go make friends. They are just another flavor of nerd, so you're gonna get along with them, and they have insights into the company that you will never get outside of the C level.

IF you dont KNOW the answers to accounting questions, take some classes. Candidly this is a function of every business that engineers should be aware of! The projects that cost money upfront (OPEX) and can provably reduce recurring costs (CAPEX) can be HUGE wins for all involved.

There is a story about how Dr's in the US have no idea what a procured costs, and that many non us ones do. Though the example is about insurance, I think the lack of awareness of costs is pervasive in more places. Do you know your AWS spend? Do you know the per customer cost/spend (is that individual or organization).... These numbers start to matter in a value engineering situation.

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