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

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

#151

Post by mmsimanga » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 9:43 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…

To add to your points. In my opinion, the reason people in corporate companies can behave as you describe is that once corporate companies get moving they are hard to stop. Like a ship. When the company was started it was innovative and found a product that was required by millions of people. These millions of people will continue to use product despite corporate shenanigans happening in different internal teams.

People will continue to use Google to search for pages on the Internet despite all the products Google launches and retires. Millions will send parcels using FedEx no matter what software is used to run it. All manner of corporate games can take place at FedEx i.e. use Oracle or Posgresql. Remove Java, use PHP ... it doesn't matter people will still send their parcels. I know I am over generalizing but the shenanigans make it hard to tie your contribution to revenue.

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

#152

Post by therealdrag0 » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 4:23 AM UTC

alexandercrohde wrote: post #51

If you pretend simple economics is best representation of reality then this blog post is exactly on point, in a perfectly efficient market the value you earn for others is proportional to the profit you get in return and both are proportional to the good you do in the world. Simple economics are not the best representation of reality. For many pride in one's work can matter more than pay, the engineering profession a…

I didn't get the impression the article was arguing for short term over long term value. Just value to customers in general.

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

#153

Post by pdimitar » Tue, Feb 06, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #149

nostrademons wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I am very late here, but...

Can you elaborate your last point? Namely how do you extract more value in the monopsony situation?