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Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
21–30 of 265 posts
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a combination. I'm in a pretty small company (about 80 people total, 15 devs) and worked on all three of those last year.
I'm a bit confused. You worked as a consultant selling hours, one a software product sold for a price and also on an internal enablement tool for the same company?
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.
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#23> Maintenance is always on the chopping block I wonder if someone or someplace figured a way to make software maintenance and support to be better valued. It's like, it's reasonably easy to market and sell internally the start of a project and consume from some internal investment (CapEx like) budget to make it, but once you have done all of that was in scope, you delivered, it's a lot harder to keep it going at the…
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Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#24It doesn't matter where you work at, when layoffs come, the executives will care about location, timezones, desire on finishing the current project you are working on, (maybe) performance etc. There are too many criteria and no clear pointer on what is safe and what isn't. Being part of a layoff and also watching other colleagues coming from other Big Tech companies share their experiences, you'd see people laid off…
The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.
It's different security. Like in game of thrones in that scenario you're as safe as your boss is, which will depend on the evolving politics. Even founders get housted sometimes, but I'd agree that I'd choose your scenario over others.
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#25It doesn't matter where you work at, when layoffs come, the executives will care about location, timezones, desire on finishing the current project you are working on, (maybe) performance etc. There are too many criteria and no clear pointer on what is safe and what isn't. Being part of a layoff and also watching other colleagues coming from other Big Tech companies share their experiences, you'd see people laid off…
The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.
Because no manager would layoff him selfs even if his position and project is obviously unnecessary. In other words only above people can layoff below people :)
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a combination. I'm in a pretty small company (about 80 people total, 15 devs) and worked on all three of those last year.
I'm a bit confused. You worked as a consultant selling hours, one a software product sold for a price and also on an internal enablement tool for the same company?
I’ve done this myself, too. We were building a WhatsApp-based support ticket system, that was the product; for large customers, we’d build chat bots (glorified decision trees) on hourly billing; and internally, we’d have an integrated CRM system and messaging API that other systems would rely on. Over the course of two years, I worked on all three.
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bit confused. You worked as a consultant selling hours, one a software product sold for a price and also on an internal enablement tool for the same company?
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".
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#28What if you are one of the only few who know how to maintain a Cobol system for a bank? Aren't you very valuable?
There's nothing particularly difficult about Cobol, it can be learned, and with enough effort, all the undocumented existing code can be understood and reverse-engineered enough to be able to make changes. It's not pleasant work, but it's doable. If there was value in it, salaries/consulting rates would reflect it and people would be queuing up to learn it and make good money. That isn't happening, so it seems like C…
There was a comment on HN a while back to the effect that the well-known stories of COBOL devs being dragged out of retirement to earn massive consulting payments was a myth. They were actually being paid good, but not extremely good, rates for their knowledge of the business logic embedded in old code-bases. The implementation language was largely irrelevant.
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#29The article cleverly groups the budget in three categories:
- A first one that develops a product that creates a value for the company in the present(sales/marketing).
- A second one that develops a product that will possibly create value for the company in the future(research/development).
- And the last one that develops a product that created value for the company in the past and now has only to be maintained(maintenance).
Honestly I think that this division is a bit tautological. Everybody in the industry knows that maintenance project are bad and only are worth it if you're making a good money working in them. Now in practice the hypothetical division between sales/marketing and research/development that the author proposes is pretty blurry and in my opinion doesn't do a great service in categorizing the activity of a developer.
Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.
It's different security. Like in game of thrones in that scenario you're as safe as your boss is, which will depend on the evolving politics. Even founders get housted sometimes, but I'd agree that I'd choose your scenario over others.
I can totally attest to that. I once worked for a company where the CTO that was 3-4 levels above hired me directly and I reported to him. It felt very empowering and motivating because I was working on what he considered a critical area for the day-to-day of the company. Once he was gone, I suddenly was a huge problem to all the middle managers that disagreed with the CTO.
If you happen to be in that situation, better to watch Game of Thrones (which I did only for entertainment not for work-related reasons). Ignore politics (like I did) at your own peril.