591–600 of 785 posts
Employer: We are willing to make an offer to you. We will offer a base pay of $125k.
Employee: what? I am already making $150k with my current employer.
Employer: Oh..we can't ask your current salary..so we just threw a number at the lower end to see if you would accept.
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In order for this to happen programmers have to: (1) Stop shaming each other for being "greedy" when they actually ask for what they merit. I can't tell you how many times on HN and elsewhere I've run into extremely defeatist attitude about this implying that we should be happy just to have jobs in the field. As long as these folks are around shaming fellow engineers for asking for more money they will drag everyone…
These things aren't mutually exclusive. If it takes 10 devs 3 months to ship a Java EE app that requires 2 full time SREs to keep running, vs. 2 devs, 3 months and a part time SRE to ship something built with ShinyNewTech, then you better believe that's delivering business value. ShinyNewTech bites people when they aren't intentional about introducing it and haven't done an accurate cost/benefit analysis. If you've d…
JavaEE programmers might be a legitimate concern though ;-)
I suspect this law may backfire. It's hard enough determining what a prospective employee may be worth to a company, and the salary history is used as a proxy. Take that out of play, and the risk is higher in hiring the candidate. Higher risk means lower pay offers, not higher.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2795795
This happens because many employers assume blacks have a criminal record, and asking the question tends to exonerate those who do not, rather than penalize those who do. The default assumption means that things can't get worse if the question is asked, but they can get better.
This law only banned asking the question, not running a background check. But employers don't even get that far, because they presumably do not want to pay for a background check on an applicant they assume has a criminal record.
Of course, this law was intended to have the opposite of its actual effect.
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> Salary is nowhere near close to the value an engineer adds to the company, so most likely there is no shortage. I think it is more likely that the marginal value added by an engineer to a company is much less than you think it is. If Google currently earns an average of ~$2m per engineer that does not imply that they will earn an additional $2m upon hiring another engineer. In fact I'm confident they could fire at…
>In fact I'm confident they could fire at least 500 engineers tomorrow without negatively impacting their profit at all That makes no sense. If they can lose a significant chunk of their engineering team "without negatively impacting their profit at all" then why did they hire them in the first place. If your assertion is true, they must have significantly overestimated their staffing needs. If they did, it's likely…
Everything I've seen points to a real shortage and desperation on the part of the employers: interns making six figures with free Manhattan penthouses, nonstop recruiter spam, 22-year-olds negotiating stock packages on their 8 fulltime offers before they finish school, fresh grads buying Teslas with signing bonuses before their first day of work, countless job listings that never ever go away, $10k+ referral bonuses, websites where employers apply to you...
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You are exaggerating NYC income taxes. At $200k, your effective income tax rate if you file single, including FICA, is 33%, not 40% [0]. Heck, your marginal tax rate isn't even 40%, and all those numbers are without taking a 401k tax deduction. People get this crazy idea that $200k isn't rich in NYC or SF. It is very, very rich, even for the area. COL adjustment for rent and groceries shaves off $15-30k, but it doesn…
> Heck, your marginal tax rate isn't even 40% That's wrong. The marginal tax for even a $50,000/year earner in NYC is over 42% . Source: http://arjun-menon.github.io/taxes-in-nyc/?income=50,000
It's kind of outrageous, marginal tax rates going down for high earners, but there we are.
But thanks for pointing out that I had the wrong zip code, so I missed NYC income tax, which is 3.65% marginal, bringing average tax rates at 200k to 36%, not 33% (albeit with zero deductions and exemptions, which obviously isn't reasonable, you'll deduct state income tax at the very least and shave off 1.4% immediately).
Your link is in error, it treats Social Security tax as continuing past $118k.
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That's why labor policy is so important. The guy digging proverbial ditches does indeed deserve more, but the market has been distorted by large corporations who lobby for lax enforcement of immigration law. On the other end of the spectrum engineers and programmers probably deserve more but the market has been distorted by large corporations who have lobbied for massive numbers of H1Bs or colluded with each other to…
> The guy digging proverbial ditches does indeed deserve more How do you know? Do you have some kind of special formula to determine what people deserve to be paid? Otherwise, it's just subjective.
I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very large tech cos to "garage" startups. Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the av…
What about the linesmen who provide the power for your computers? What about the road workers who make it possible for you to get to work? What about the African miners who dig up the rare earths for your components to run your computer? What about the guys soldering all this crap together? I bet you'd say the road worker creates hardly any value, but in reality the economy just ceases to function without roads. Or s…
The wealth that the GP is talking about is the incremental wealth created by the engineers under consideration. They're taking publicly available things and putting them together in a new way to create something more valuable than the cost of parts and labour.
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> Salary is nowhere near close to the value an engineer adds to the company, so most likely there is no shortage. I think it is more likely that the marginal value added by an engineer to a company is much less than you think it is. If Google currently earns an average of ~$2m per engineer that does not imply that they will earn an additional $2m upon hiring another engineer. In fact I'm confident they could fire at…
..because the engineers have created things that the company can continue to profit off. They're not factory workers, they don't need to be there on the day-to-day to add that value, so it's a little disingenuous to suggest the impact would be seen "tomorrow". Still not having those engineers 6, 12, 24 months down the line might not look so happy, though.
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Compared to say being a surgeon? or a lawer some one on here mentioned that a transplant surgeon can make over $15M.
I work in software myself but come on, it's fair to say that being a surgeon is way less trivial and far riskier than being a programmer.