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Be in a field where tech is the limit

mathiaskirkbonde.substack.com

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Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#51

Post by plandis »

sho_hn wrote: post #37
d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #23

I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay

I'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a competitive pressure in the job market - while also being balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, s…

Even with the higher cost of living in SF/NYC/Seattle, tech pay at FAANG is pretty high. Senior software positions are pretty much start at $300k/yr across all of those companies. Plus these companies generally have excellent healthcare plans and good vacation policies.

At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#52

Post by barry-cotter »

sho_hn wrote: post #37
d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #23

I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay

I'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a competitive pressure in the job market - while also being balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, s…

No, even after any attempt to account for healthcare, pension and education the US will still look vastly better off. Unfortunately we don’t have figures on average individual consumption but by household Hong Kong consumes about $1,000 more a year than the US and the next closest is Switzerland, consuming about $10,000 a year less[1].

Generally the US pays better and at the top of any field you care to mention except perhaps finance it pays far, far better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#53

Post by zuhayeer »

Software engineering is becoming a base layer for all fields. Meaning there will be a lot more cross disciplinary software engineers extending a wide range of companies and industries including biotech, agriculture, space, etc.

As such it isn't mutually exclusive to be a software engineer while working in a field where tech is the limit. (But even so in my opinion, software itself is still just getting its bearings)

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#55

Post by [deleted] »

d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #23

I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay

[deleted]

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#56

Post by sho_hn »

plandis wrote: post #51
sho_hn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a competitive pressure in the job market - while also being balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, s…

Even with the higher cost of living in SF/NYC/Seattle, tech pay at FAANG is pretty high. Senior software positions are pretty much start at $300k/yr across all of those companies. Plus these companies generally have excellent healthcare plans and good vacation policies. At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.

Sounds like it! :-)

I have a Senior Principal position and make products you've probably read about on Ars/Verge type sites recently, at an established tech company in Berlin - for about half of those 300k. And it's not a bad deal for the region.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#57

Post by planet-and-halo »

_Wintermute wrote: post #44
d3ntb3ev1l wrote: post #23

I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay

I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be linked up to any equipment or processes. HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit…

This bums me out so much. I would love to work on medical research and I love data pipelines, so something like bioinformatics R/Python seems ideal to me, but I make significantly more than that as the manager of a software team in an enterprise environment so it's never going to happen unless I somehow get to the point where I don't have to care about money.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#58

Post by paxys »

Every single superficial website or app released today is built on layers upon layers of incredible continuous advances in the software world. Just in the past decade the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, data warehousing/analytics, distributed systems, real-time communication, geo syncing of data and computation, mobile/embedded development, chipsets, compilers all evolved beyond recognition.

"Ideas" were and still are largely worthless. They are absolutely not the bottleneck in software today. There are a billion implementation-level problems that are still unsolved, and there will always be new ones.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#59

Post by conformist »

This seems to be largely a matter of taste? A field where ideas are the limits can be great for somebody who wants their success to be driven and measured by ... their ideas?

Sure, it can be frustrating to be banging your head against the same wall as everybody else, but there are people that thrive in such a setting. The most extreme example might be pure mathematicians.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#60

Post by whymauri »

Fields where tech is the limit are fields that don't care about tech. As result, working as a software or tech IC in these fields is a grind. Never again -- no thanks!

Like, I've heard senior leadership at a 'computation-focused' biotech company outright call engineers 'bad people' only to quickly correct this to 'bad at being people', which is so much better!

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