The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage • Hacker News Board

Re: The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage

#121

Post by jacalata » Mon, Mar 24, 2014, 6:31 AM UTC

jshen wrote: post #105

jacalata wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're asking people to apply for a job without telling them how much you will pay, and you think that this lack of information shouldn't affect whether they apply? Salary sensitive potential hires might be ruling themselves out at the application stage: for instance my assumption (as a software engineer) would be that if I have no idea what your salary offer will be, then it will be shit - if it's going to be dec…

Show me a company that advertises it publicly.

1. http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffe...

2. glassdoor.com

3. my network of people who work at various companies and will tell me what they make.

I'm assuming that you are a small company that doesn't actually show up in either of 2 or 3.

Re: The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage

#122

Post by lifeisstillgood » Mon, Mar 24, 2014, 7:56 AM UTC

jedanbik wrote: post #84

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

brilliant - except the implication that liberal arts should be all we need by now

Rather than an all or nothing proposition, I saw this quote as an elegant framing of what the liberal arts are: nice-to-haves in the wake of ought-to-haves in the wake of die-or-haves. In the popular discourse, we aren't always afforded that sense of perspective.

Agreed

Re: The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage

#123

Post by edanm » Mon, Mar 24, 2014, 8:12 AM UTC

fredophile wrote: post #114

edanm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"CEOs at large companies make a tonne of money. This is usually justified by saying that they are more skilled than the average CEO but this kind of skill is also hard to quantify. Why does this argument work for CEO pay but not programmer pay?" Because it's much easier to measure performance of CEO's, at least artificially. If Google does well, then you (supposedly) know that Larry Page is doing well. That's how the…

|Because it's much easier to measure performance of CEO's, at least artificially. If Google does well, then you (supposedly) know that Larry Page is doing well." Originally I wrote a much longer reply but after re-reading it it came across as much more anti CEO compensation than I intended. I don't view short term market movements as an accurate reflection of company or CEO performance. If you willing to use easy to…

You raise interesting points. I'm honestly not knowledgeable enough to tell you if it makes sense to judge a CEO by the short-term, or even long-term, performance of their company. I don't think anyone really knows just how much is the correlation there.

What is clear is that, assuming CEO's do affect the value of a company significantly, they'll tend to affect it much more than even the best programmers, especially at a company the size of Google. That's just an issue of leverage. So a (possibly semi-broken) method of judging whether you made billions for the company will still spit out compensations of millions.

As for startups, I was talking specifically about the founders, not employees. And yes, I agree that startup's succeeding, at least on the Whatsapp scale, is very similar to a lottery. But smaller startups/consultancies can make much more money for the programmers who start them, who have skills that the market cares about more than just programming well.

Re: The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage

#124

Post by hueving » Mon, Mar 24, 2014, 5:36 PM UTC

azth wrote: post #75

hueving wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>virtually no supposed 5x or 10x programmer makes even 2x more. If people are really 5x, why on earth don't I see $300-$500k salaries? Small sample size. These types of developers are very few and far between. I worked with one that I keep in touch with and he is making somewhere between 400 and 500k at his current job. His output of good code was pretty amazing to see. He did manage to produce the work of 5 average…

What line of work is he in?

Networking (the Ethernet/IP/TCP kind, not the social kind).