Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from • Hacker News Board

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#141

Post by agentultra » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #133

agentultra wrote: post #94

I sometimes wonder if the vulgarity of capitalism forces us to think this way. You don't see lawyers, doctors, or capital-P engineers thinking this way. They have to think about the state of the art and practicing their craft with the utmost attention to detail. Anything less would be unprofessional. And yet we programmers hear this story time and again: you don't matter, your craft doesn't matter: _all_ that matters…

"I sometimes wonder if the vulgarity of capitalism forces us to think this way. You don't see lawyers, doctors, or capital-P engineers thinking this way. They have to think about the state of the art and practicing their craft with the utmost attention to detail. Anything less would be unprofessional." That's ridiculous. Of course they think this way. How many doctors are working in a hospital doing the latest surgic…

How many doctors are still practicing after one malpractice lawsuit? 2? 5?

You have to be insured to practice. There's a professional organization that licenses you to practice. These are the social structures we put in place to limit the damage done by the various forces of the world that would tempt a doctor to be anything but faithful to the practice including profit.

A hospital may ask a doctor it hired to "cut corners," but the doctor should refuse and if the hospital tries to fire them and get away with it anyway... the hospital should pay for that.

What I meant by the last line of my comment is that we have a vested interest in producing more software, not less, and I don't think cost is the problem. Although there are people with a vested interest in the status quo who would see the expense of insured, professional software engineers as being unbearable to their interests... not necessarily because such practices would harm the public good and their reliance on technology.

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#142

Post by bitL » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #139

bitL wrote: post #9

Real-world: - you increase value; your bosses team up with each other and claim the credit; you might even get booed for some minor deficiencies whereas they will be boasting about their achievements - you are generous and do non-AGPL based open-source; parasites are waiting in the open, incorporate your code to their commercial offering, never paying you anything; your bonus will be rude complaints about bugs in you…

My conclusion: grow veggies at home, make solar concentrators and PV panels then learn to paint.

With progressing automation and cryptocurrency acceptance based on PoW you soon well might be able to sustain yourself alone comfortably ;-)

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#143

Post by dreamfactored » Mon, Jan 22, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #102

dreamfactored wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just says you didn't figure out the system but happened to 'luck out' one time. If you learn where the value is, you will know how to get recognition for any value you add (e.g. who values it and who's attention to bring it to that you are boosting it). In the case that the company is dysfunctional and doesn't promote value creators you will also get an earlier heads-up this way.

But you need quite a bit of luck just to start gaining exposure to these kinds of opportunities. That single 'luck out' event means everything; after the first major windfall or breakthrough, your experiences are distorted and they have little practical value for the average person. The bigger the windfall/breakthrough, the more true this is. It's pretty easy to see where the 'value' is... Being exposed to people who…

It's very surprising how rare it is for employees to find out exactly how money flows into and through their organisation. I suspect developers are the worst here. But when you think about it, it's basic common sense to understand what pays your rent and how your relative value figures in that system. And if you think of a company as a system, an automated machine for generating revenue, it starts to become hard to resist having a good nose around the contraption with a screwdriver.

That oddball dev who started hanging out with the sales and marketing people, forwards strategy and innovation articles to management, and started churning out powerpoints is the one who knows what's up. It's not just 'playing politics', it's developing deeper and wider situational awareness of the company and the market. It's stacking the odds in your favour and it's even more effective when so few do it.

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#144

Post by ap3 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 12:23 AM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #115

WalterBright wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money paid to employees is deducted from the profits (or more precisely, profits are what is left after expenses and labor costs are paid). So your salary is your share of the profits in any pragmatic sense. This isn't MBA level stuff, any basic accounting course will explain it. In fact, I recommend anyone who cares about this sort of thing to learn basic accounting principles - it is simple, and highly useful k…

I think his point is engineers typically no longer get profit sharing bonuses while managers typically do. The author was suggesting to get paid more, find more value to create. This isn't even close to linear like it is with managers because of the lack of profit sharing to engineers. I would argue that in most organizations, the culmination of engineering talent creates way more value than the manager, with rare ex…

They most likely would not want you to leave the company on that salary to value creation ratio.

Can you create 3M value on 100k salary at any company or just this one though?

If you can demonstrate that return others would be willing to pay more for your services.

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#145

Post by ap3 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #105

throwawayjava wrote: post #7

> This is why I struggle with scenarios where people discuss pay and work without considering value. Counter-point: firms exist. If I'm the one figuring out how to create value, why the hell are the C suite, middle managers, and investors getting 99% of the profits? So no, in the context of a large firm, it's definitely NOT an engineer's job to figure out how their skills align with market demand. And that's the whol…

> As an engineer, you might actually be better off ignoring engineering-value alignment because you might be better off simply executing well within a well-oiled machine. This is generally the approach for maximizing cash compensation, in lieu of being a highly sought after programmer by Google et al. That and jumping from jobs every 2 years for 20-40% pay increase. By Value, I think OP is talking about value in the…

How mant times can you get the 20-40% salary increases ? Very soon you will hit the band ceiling

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#146

Post by billf1953 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:09 AM UTC

bitL wrote: post #9

Real-world: - you increase value; your bosses team up with each other and claim the credit; you might even get booed for some minor deficiencies whereas they will be boasting about their achievements - you are generous and do non-AGPL based open-source; parasites are waiting in the open, incorporate your code to their commercial offering, never paying you anything; your bonus will be rude complaints about bugs in you…

The real issue is that the converse statement is rarely true. Providing less value to your customers is a way to be paid more. Obviously as the entire thread points out, the outcomes are probabilistic in nature and certain job titles have low ceilings on wages as do certain companies.

As a barber, you can only cut one person's hair at a time. Regardless of your customer service, this will limit your impact and compensation. Own a chain of barbershop and you'll impact more people and be compensated accordingly.

This thread seems to dedicated to the annoying cap on individual contribution in a team game.

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#147

Post by karmakaze » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

I completely endorse the suggestion that engineers should learn to understand this concept. If you learn one thing in your career, it should be this. One of the differences between working at BigCorp versus working at SmallCo or VentureCo is that in the smaller companies the relationship is much easier to trace out. Dan Warmenhoven (when he was CEO of Network Appliance) had a wonderful way to very clearly explaining…

> In basketball, there’s a metric they started tracking in recent years called on-off splits. Simply, it’s meant to capture how much better your team is with a given player on or off the court. I love this metric because it’s an attempt to measure an individual’s impact on a team’s performance with an acknowledgement that individual statistics can’t paint the full picture.

Also found that 'on-off splits' metric so resounding.

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#148

Post by balls187 » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

ap3 wrote: post #145

balls187 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an engineer, you might actually be better off ignoring engineering-value alignment because you might be better off simply executing well within a well-oiled machine. This is generally the approach for maximizing cash compensation, in lieu of being a highly sought after programmer by Google et al. That and jumping from jobs every 2 years for 20-40% pay increase. By Value, I think OP is talking about value in the…

How mant times can you get the 20-40% salary increases ? Very soon you will hit the band ceiling

> How mant times can you get the 20-40% salary increases ? Very soon you will hit the band ceiling

It would require taking on more responsibility, and moving up in roles.

Two points of clarification:

* This is in high demand markets.

* Pay = salary and bonus.

I'm not advocating job hopping, but if you purely want to maximize your income, you'll get a bigger increase taking a promotion at a new company (where you have more leverage to negotiate) then you will at your current company.

Me personally--I live by the cheat-code from WC2 -- All that glitters is not gold.

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#149

Post by barrkel » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #65

zzzcpan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This calculated value determines, for example, what they're willing to offer you in salary. It doesn't. This is mostly a binary thing of whether the company can afford to pay an employee a bit above his market value or not, if we are talking about engineers of course. Such employee cannot actually get paid proportionally to the value he brings to the company.

If they can't afford to pay your market value, you should leave and go work for a company that can. That's how you set your "market value" - go out on the market and see what price you get. If you can't get a higher offer, than your current salary is your market value. How much value the engineer brings in (to a given employer) is basically the ceiling on bids that employer will make. It's completely economically rat…

This isn't quite right. Engineers are normally more valuable the longer they've worked in a job, because codebases take longer to understand, business domains need familiarizing, etc. Engineers aren't normally a commodity; the best offer you'll get on the open market will normally underestimate your value to your current company by some distance.

Getting a competing offer is still the way to get leverage for better compensation, although the downsides of accepting a counter-offer are fairly well documented.

On the topic further up the thread about profit: engineers are paid based approximately on replacement cost, but profits are created based on market opportunity and scarcity. A company can create an offering that's hard to reproduce (a monopoly) - harder than most individual engineers' skills are to reproduce - and the excess profits are effectively windfall profits until the market corrects and competition sprouts up. Thus a company can charge closer to the value it adds to the customer, rather than closer to its cost base. Ideally an engineer would try to do the same thing: charge based on the value he or she adds, rather than how much he or she can make elsewhere.

And bringing it back around, companies can eventually get a windfall cost saving / profit from long-serving engineers. Because of accumulated knowledge, they can become such a good fit for the company that the company can pay them substantially more than the market rate, but nowhere near how much value they add, simply because they know that they're the only customer: monopsony, the inverse of the monopoly situation. To extract more value in this situation, you need to bring non-monetary aspects to the negotiating table. My preferred one is ownership: not autonomy, but actual capital interest in my output.

Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from

#150

Post by burntsushi » Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

doesnt_know wrote: post #128

burntsushi wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use BSD type license and others exploit it like it was intended to, don't complain. Uh. No. This is only valid if you interpret laws and ethics as one in the same. Maybe you do. That's fine. But not everyone does.

This type of reasoning is completely out of place in the context of a developer having full control of the license they release their own code under. There are literally hundreds of different software licenses. You can just pick the exact one that matches your ethical world view. There is no reason to pick one that doesn't reflect your intent, then being a passive aggressive asshole about it when others follow the li…

First of all, I never said anything about being a "passive aggressive asshole."

Second of all, you didn't even respond to specific point I made. You just repeated the GP's argument with extra force. You didn't even explore the notion of what happens if your ethics are different from what laws prescribe. For example, if you think that others should not plagiarize your work but simultaneously believe that monopoly copyright enforced by a third party (usually governments) should also not happen, then you're stuck. You can choose a license that permits others to plagiarize while simultaneously being ethically opposed to the act of plagiarism because you disagree with using laws to enforce your moral opposition to plagiarism.