at a certain level you're not paying people for their work but to keep their knowledge hostage.
Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
101–110 of 218 posts
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#102The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.
Their system is already built, a slight tweak might increase the revenue by $100 million a year, paying for all the salaries. The top engineers don't need to sit down and code 9-5. Plus, this is also a Hail Mary strategy, every "Google" in China is aiming for their business.
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#103And yet the company still can't afford walls.
I know a HN trope is to be anti-open-office but maybe it's better to be imitating the guys valued at 20B than the guys valued at 200k. We need a "Show me the code" équivalent for claims about business. "Show me the money" If open offices were a big factor, I'd expect private office startups to out-compete.
"Show me the money" is biased toward the status quo. If your litmus test for smart policy or decision-making "is everyone else who is successful doing it?", you will always lag behind the best.
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#104There is a big difference from being paid in USD and being paid in the equivalent of USD in Yuan. Ever try to get 1 million USD equivalent of Yuan out of China before?
If these engineers are Chinese (which they are) and live in China they don't need to get it out of China.
You could say the same about people living in Venezuela, Ukraine and Russia. I would assume most (at least as a store of value) would prefer not to hold their local currency.
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked as a contractor for a while at a company that was pretty much entirely great developers, but they had one guy who had more experience than nearly everybody else put together (he was in his 50s, and had worked on all sorts of cool things in his career), who was also more productive than anyone else. The founders of the company knew he was their top producer, and so they gave him whatever he wanted (within the…
> [...] were also bug contributors. It's also worth nothing [...] I think you have a couple of typos here. Probably you meant to say "big contributors" and "worth noting".
Swipe keyboard perhaps?
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
At $3M a year taxes become a more significant worry.
The relative amount of taxes paid doesn't really change anymore once you've reached six figures. On the other hand, the absolute amount still increases, which makes it more reasonable to spend significant money on tax accountants. So, if anything, taxes should become less of a worry, because you can more easily let really good professionals take care of it. But yes, I'm aware most people won't look at it rationally.
If you're an employee, you generally can't optimise much. Perhaps you can take some basic deductions, but that's in.
If you take two people earning $1M a year, the employee will in most jurisdictions (both relative and absolute) pay significantly more in taxes than the self employed person.
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's solved from a technical point of view. You might want to find ways to optimize it form non-technical aspects, such as, how to get more users, how to write better titles, etc. But there's nothing that is technically challenging about it.
Both of your examples, more users and better titles, can absolutely be technical improvements. Both of them could be, for example, improved by using machine learning to attract more users by appealing on an individual level and doing things like optimizing titles for the individual and pushing those individualized results out. I'm sure there are even more technological advancements that can be made - and I suspect th…
I think using AI to make clickbaity titles is still sigh-worthy.
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a HN trope is to be anti-open-office but maybe it's better to be imitating the guys valued at 20B than the guys valued at 200k. We need a "Show me the code" équivalent for claims about business. "Show me the money" If open offices were a big factor, I'd expect private office startups to out-compete.
"Show me the money" is biased toward the status quo. If your litmus test for smart policy or decision-making "is everyone else who is successful doing it?", you will always lag behind the best.
That's true, and I can't think of a good alternative.
But there's a clear problem on HN where people who don't run businesses and don't know how to pontificate on things like this citing nebulous results on productivity.
If open-offices are so remarkably detrimental, then I await the disrupting startup that blows the rest of the industry out of the water by using private offices.
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#109The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.
I personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH. I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion. Sure, at times it ca…
Of course it's an enjoyable setting for you.
Your team "won't disturb unless necessary", but you have no problem disturbing them whenever you want to have "a quick discussion".
Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market
#110The thing that surprises me is that, after paying these engineers seven figures, they're still sticking them in open plan offices (as far as I can tell from the photos). Though I do know some people who can work effectively in that environment, it would be interesting to compare ever-so-slightly-cheaper engineers + a less-distracted work environment.
I would be interested in knowing if better developers are more improved by having their own office above average developers or if they can handle the distraction more.
IBM did some tests and they found about a 15% improvement and this was across the board so no change between average and high performers