Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets • Hacker News Board

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#101

Post by IggleSniggle » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:26 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #27

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP but I can believe it - where I work the main business is consultancy style work but to support that work there's custom generic software developed to sell/license to clients as part of a value add and there's dozens of internal tooling to support delivery teams. We have developers that will move between all 3 of those areas depending on their current allocation to client work.

Sounds awesome! Thanks for illuminating me. How are these different work streams prioritized? At first glance seems like the last category would suffer unless someone was "on the bench".

In a smaller company it's not hard for "invisible" (like CI) contributions to be actually seen and noticed by both leadership and by the people you work with every day. And on the other hand, if you're a dev working on product and getting work done is a lot harder than it should be, you've got a strong incentive to pause product work and focus on "maintenance" work.

When almost a quarter of the company (15 devs) can both see and feel your contribution to make their lives easier and more productive, you've got a pretty strong political position even if you aren't directly producing product. This is true even if you produce, say, an internal dashboard: you're known as the one dev who took time out to help the 20 sales people sell better (or whatever); you know their names, and they know yours.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#102

Post by paxys » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

No company I have ever worked for has had growth engineering salaries come out of the marketing budget. And there's no such thing as a "maintenance" budget either. It is all simply R&D/engineering. Sure the expectations are very different depending on your team/role, but that's not a budget thing, and depends on how the company tracks its goals.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#103

Post by anticorporate » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

Kudos wrote: post #80

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s a nonsensical model. Every department is ideally responsible for both revenues and costs. If you can’t measure it, it is a problem of your KPIs. So the KPIs may be cost-oriented (and thus badly aligned), it doesn’t make the department itself a cost center.

Which department are you talking about? If your department doesn't drive revenue, then the business leaders will see it as a cost center. It doesn't matter if you disagree with that perspective unless you can change their minds. How have you done that in the past, or hypothetically how do you think that might work?

This has been my experience as well.

It doesn't matter how many presentations and case studies and financial models you build, whether you're a cost center or not is basically entirely determined by what a few people in the c-suite believe. This became blatantly clear over the past year or so of layoffs, when the same people who nodded and thanked teams for showing them how they generate revenue for the business immediately turned around and put them on the chopping block.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#104

Post by dangus » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

lazyasciiart wrote: post #50

austin-cheney wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of e…

Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!

I think this example is way more common than the situation your parent commenter described. Most corporations don’t seem to be identifiably strategic about layoffs. They don’t make a coherent plan until the shit hits the fan and the board dictates that a certain percentage must go.

I’ve been laid off three times and not once was my layoff a result of a coherent strategy or reflective of my utility/value to the team.

The first time, I was an accounting mistake. The company quite literally hired me and numerous other contractors by accident. The bean counters in corporate simply weren’t talking to each other and hiring managers somehow got their reqs through.

The second time, I along with my new hire cohort was laid off a month after my start date. I’m not even sure how a company is so disorganized that they can go from approving new hires to laying off those same new hires within a time period that couldn’t have been longer than 3 months.

The third time was similar except that it took place in a slightly longer timespan, still less than a year. Company management handled growth immaturely and irresponsibly, choosing to bulk hire then lay off the cohort rather than growing more conservatively. Paying 5 employees for almost a year could have paid for one employee for over 3 years, no layoff necessary.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#105

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:37 PM UTC

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…

To simplify, you always always always want to be working in bullet point 2, if at all possible.

In the other two, you are a cost to be minimized or eliminated. Only if you are working on one of the companies core products are you an asset bringing revenue into the company.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#106

Post by gtirloni » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:38 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #84

gtirloni wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same situation at a different company, except they kept telling us "we made sure this won't keep happening". Of course few people believed and we lost many good engineers that simply left because they couldn't have a major source of income coming from such unstable place. I like to believe executives know their workforce will shrink more than the layoff numbers. They must know this. They also must know it will be har…

>They must know this. They also must know it will be harder to hire new people. They know this, right? Please someone tell me so. What time horizon are you thinking? People will forget '22/'23 layoffs very quickly. This is especially true if you made it through these last years, the market picks up and you want to move.

I have no doubt people will forget in time (But anyone looking for a job ought to do due dilligence when things pick up again and at least set the correct expectations about how long their relationship with the company could last if the market turns bad again.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#107

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

michael_leachim wrote: post #60

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…

What category is Amazon? (the marketplace). It looks like a third category (company sells something else, but it has a software component supporting it). I am asking because I am working in a company with similar business model and I am trying to figure out what category does my work belong to. thank you. EDIT: fix msg

Over the years, Amazon has gone more and more in the direction of the software being the product.

As an immense e-commerce site, the software enabling all the sales was the key differentiator to the competition.

Then they brought in external sellers, making the e-commerce platform more directly a product.

Then of course they started selling the infrastructure directly as a product, as AWS. Which of course relies on software to automate the provisioning, operation, and monitoring of those computing resources.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#108

Post by gtirloni » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

maxrecursion wrote: post #83

gtirloni wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think better relationship with middle managers and maybe leave with the CTO if it made sense (it didn't, in my case). I was too focused on doing things and assumed the CTO was taking care of "winning the hearts" of middle managers. He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved. So yeah, I think I should have "managed up" so this initiative wasn't tied to the specific…

>>"He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved." I work at a very large organization where the top is too scared to give any direction whatsoever, so it's middle managers and their lower staff henchman, that battle it out over major decisions with politics and schemes to get their preferred stuff implemented. It's more terrible than you can imagine, I never seen a mor…

I'm on the same page. The problem in this case was a very hands-free approach to management that suddenly changed to top-down when the chaos produced almost daily outages. So the very relaxed environment now had to somehow have rigorous engineering practices... mandated from the top.

Reminds me of holacracy and how companies picked up the pieces after that fad went away.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#109

Post by jonfw » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #105

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…

To simplify, you always always always want to be working in bullet point 2, if at all possible. In the other two, you are a cost to be minimized or eliminated. Only if you are working on one of the companies core products are you an asset bringing revenue into the company.

With #1- you are the product

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#110

Post by vanderZwan » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

nijave wrote: post #64

vanderZwan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you seriously suggest that banks outsource the maintenance of the mainframes that process their money transfers? If so I'd like to see a source, because the only articles I have read about on this topic (e.g. [0]) tell me the exact opposite: it's all in-house the risks are too high. For larger banks it's practically a national security risk. Maybe the software they use is from abroad (usually ancient IBM shit), bu…

They don't "out source", they in-source by opening technology hubs in cheaper locations.

Again, I would like to see a source. I'm not saying you're wrong. Maybe you're talking about small banks in the US or something, of which I know basically nothing. I am thinking of examples like Nordea, the bank in the article I linked, which has a market share of around 20% in Sweden[0] and handles the government's bank accounts. Especially that last part makes me extremely skeptical that the Swedish government would be OK with handing over the keys to their economic kingdom to cheap digital labor abroad so a company might save some money.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordea#History