411–420 of 547 posts
I give it a 50/50 chance they are still alive in 10 years! Having so many clowns running the company for the last 10 years is likely to destroy them forever. Tech Industry is very unforgiving of stupid ...
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I just have trouble wrapping my head around how someone can be that valuable. I'll never even hit $75/hr (excluding inflation).
It's not unheard of to give people who were party to the creation of some critical thing the company does pay that simply can't be matched elsewhere in order to make them stick around. Usually you pair it with a fancy title like "global architect" or some other mumbo jumbo like that. Pretty much any time you hear about someone making 500k+ without being personally responsible for the success or failure of a heck of a…
Sorry for grammar. On mobile but wanted to quickly contribute.
I was incredibly lucky in my last role. Something I don't think I'll ever be able to match again.
When I joined the company as a sysadmin there were 30 staff, and they really liked the work I did and eventually they put me on this innovation incentive scheme that basically said "If you keep delivering innovative solutions and driving the technology direction in the way that you are, we will pay you a bonus of 1.5% of the profit made from e-commerce sales every 4"
At the time sales profit from e-commerce channels was about 250k for each period, so a very nice $3500~ bonus every 4 months.
When I left the company ~15 years later:
- 5000+ staff
- Had moved into a role managing a large team of sysadmins and was responsible for the technical innovation strategy/direction of the business overall.
- Same CEO and and my original "IT manager" was now the CTO who I still reported into.
- They kept me on the same bonus scheme for my whole time at the company.
- By the time I left online sales profit for each 4 month period was $50,000,000.
Right place, right time, right people.
:-)
I gave up a lot for that job and worked damn hard though. I let it consume me and ended up very unhealthy.
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I'm in the same boat. The way some people here talk about making $200/hour makes me think how out of touch some HN'ers are with the average worker.
$200/hour rate is median for developers with in demand skills. Many companies will gladly pay this and higher rates to fill positions with qualified candidates. Software engineering and development field is extremely difficult. There are many opportunities in this field, because there are so few candidates that can do the work. HN is self selected group of people with experience in the field. But they are actually ve…
$200/hr in the UK would put you in the top 1% of earners.
They've probably lost[1] few months ago their most talented chips engineer, Jim Keller[2]. Ironically, Jim suggested to outsource the manufacturing of their chips, what the new CEO just did [3]. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) [3] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319301-report-intel-wi...
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We can write whatever story we want in between the details we were told... Maybe the salesman was secretly an FSB agent. Maybe he was an alien. Maybe he was Superman's alter-ego. It's not really conducive to communication to fill in the blanks like that, even though any person in someone else's work story could be one of Them walking among us... ;)
Or maybe he employed more run-of-the-mill unsavoury techniques like low-level bribery (gifts, expensive wine-and-dine), plenty of shmoozing and the like. These techniques are not exactly useless in getting new business; however, most modern workplace rulebooks will consider them illegal/unethical.
Just want to call out that the multi-million dollar salespeople I know wine and dine their spouses and friends far more lavishly than their clients. The people being sold to, similarly, aren’t alien to fine dining. For two people who enjoy that (versus a baseball game), it can be a genuine way to bond far from bribery. Gifts, on the other hand, yes.
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I've been approached by headhunters for contract work at Intel. They want all kinds of machine learning knowledge & experience and the pay is.... $45/hr. I kid you not. I just sort of laugh and tell them that that's about 1/3 of market rate for that kind of thing.
I am 100% in the same boat. Had a recruiter reach out to me who wanted me to leave my more than comfortable six figure SV job to do cutting edge contract work in machine learning as a lead engineer for about $50/hour. I was so amused I actually spent the time listening to their pitch and eventually told them that anything less than $200/hour wouldn't even cover my current pay + benefits. Let me know if you can do bet…
I’m well established in my career (and I don’t have SV costs of living to be fair) - but anywhere even in the galaxy of $200 an hour would be life-changing for me.
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Reading all comments grilling MBAs in HN is one of my guilty pleasures. I think I need to collect them all and put them in one place.
I worked at a startup that was acquired by an unsexy behemoth. It was not covered in TechCrunch. We had a sales guy who easily cleared over $1MM in salary and bonuses, several times the CEO and founders, because he went above and beyond, closing $15MM of new business a year. When the MBA consultants and salespeople from the acquirer found out, they couldn’t believe he made that much — all while they personally manage…
>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
>Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
This is an encouraging move. My secondhand understanding was that Intel was losing top talent due to pressure to pay closer to median industry compensation. Top engineers recognized they were underpaid and left the company. I've been part of a similar downhill slide at a smaller company in the billion dollar revenue range. To be blunt, once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more…
>> once the [mediocre] MBAs start realizing that the engineers are getting paid more than they are, the pressure to reduce engineering compensation is strong These 'useless MBAs' 'only engineers are worthy beings' generalisations on HN are getting seriously tiring. A lot of people have both backgrounds fyi. There's bad Apples in every profession.
"MBA" is being used here as a shorthand for a professional management class who don't have any other skills, I don't think it means explicitly the qualification. And because they don't have any specific non-management skills, they think they can manage anything, which makes them mediocre managers at anything they do (at best).
In other words MBA has become a label for such people because the programmes appear to promote that worldview. But of course you can get people who have an MBA and who could also do their teams work, there's no rule that says you can't. And the discussion would probably not apply to those people.
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I genuinely feel bad for talented people that get suckered into deals like this. Obviously some do if recruiters try and do this.
Some people don't care so much about the money. I'm barely over the six figure mark in the bay area. I could probably make a lot more money somewhere else, but I wouldn't get to do anything nearly as interesting as my current work.