Fellow engineers: your (loose) money comes from overcapitalized companies fighting for talent that can multiply their investor's bets or, at least, their investor's hopes.
Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
61–70 of 153 posts
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, to continue your analogy - if you're asking me advice on how to make ends meet, then it absolutely is my business to chide you for the expensive lattes you buy daily. The point discussed in the article is very valid: you need to be perceived as "delivering value" - otherwise, your compensation will suffer. That's the whole reason why you earn well working in finance - not because "only the smartest make it there…
I encourage you to read the original question that the author of this post is ranting about, where the question asker who's being chided in this post makes literally exactly the observation you make in your second paragraph : https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/7mgp1m/h... The author of that post does understand these trade-offs and is asking the best way to maximize wrt his constraints. So this artic…
No, the author of that post mimics an understanding of tradeoffs (proof[1]). As such, it is perfectly reasonable to chide him/her for it. Also he/she does not make the same observation that I made, "theoretically technical excellence directly translates into profits" is not even close to what I claimed.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/7mgp1m/h...
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked for the companies considered "the best" in our industry with Glassdoor rating >4.5 at various stages of their lifecycle. This was happening everywhere, with singular pockets of progressive parts of company that were immune to that. At worse companies you can directly observe sexual or financial relations between managers and subordinates and resulting quick path to success as well, demoralizing the rest. Tec…
Glassdoor is fascinating for all the wrong reasons. I've now worked in charity/community, private sector, and government, for big, small and medium. During my last switch (from private back to government), i noticed what I'll call the "reverse glass door" effect while browsing their profiles. It was weak but it was there. That is to say, if i had to take all the employers, consultancies and corporations I've had to d…
There could also be selection bias in who you talk to based on GlassDoor ratings: if a company has a good reputation in the industry but you just weren't feeling the connection at the interview, you might be tempted to override your feelings because "everybody else likes them, so maybe there's something wrong with me".
This is a commonly-observed effect in hiring (where oftentimes candidates who get one bad interview score or who have unconventional backgrounds do better in eventual job performance, because for them to get hired despite that obvious failing, there had to be a strong subconscious fit) and in romantic relationships (where people end up marrying people who hold commonly-desired traits - wealthy, sociable, beautiful, talented, high social status, a particular race, etc. - but then end up unfulfilled because their desire to end up with "an X partner" made them overlook people who lack that characteristic but would've been a better overall fit).
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> getting 99% of the profits? Profits by definition are calculated after labor costs are deducted, so employees get 0% of the profits in salary. However, take a look at your company's accounts and see how much of the gross revenue is paid out as wages and salary. It'll be a big chunk. There's your share.
Who drives the better cars, has better vacations, and better real-estate?
sales and c-suite
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that in the context of a large firm, the author is wrong. An accountant serves two roles in a company. One is to produce a correct set of books for the investors and the tax man. The other is to determine the value to the business of things the business is spending money on. I.e. to determine the value produced by the engineers. They may get it wrong, as at some level it is indeterminate, but the more correct they…
> This calculated value determines, for example, what they're willing to offer you in salary. It doesn't. This is mostly a binary thing of whether the company can afford to pay an employee a bit above his market value or not, if we are talking about engineers of course. Such employee cannot actually get paid proportionally to the value he brings to the company.
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 rational for you to find the employer that values your work the most when you're searching for a job, because they'll be willing to pay the most.
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#66This is very simple.
You pay me to write code.
It’s not my job to make you a profit and I can’t guarantee you one. That’s why I’m the coder and you’re the executive. I write the code you tell me to. If you find you can’t make money from my code the way you thought, give better instructions next time.
I write code for money. If you don’t have money, I will not write you code.
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#67Real-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…
Can’t agree more. OP argument only holds if “value” is an absolute and objective concept and if everyone in the company is measured by it. It just does not work like that. It’s a simple maximization problem. If your ideal is science and engineering and good code then your value will only be recognized by people who share the same ideal and these people are usually not the one distributing money. If your ideal is maki…
> Can’t agree more. OP argument only holds if “value” is an absolute and objective concept and if everyone in the company is measured by it.
OP's argument is not a "true or false" proposition. It's a model, and as such it has some degree of correspondence with reality. That correspondence may be low or it may be high.
I think it is a useful model. It has a high degree of correspondence to what I see at one of the big internet tech companies where I work. People similarly situated would be well advised to consider this model when deciding how to spend their time, at least if their goals involve getting paid more.
If this doesn't match your experience, consider that this may simply be that your firm does not work the same way as the author's. It doesn't make you or the author wrong; you're just looking at different things.
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#68This is really dishonest and disrespectful to people. Most companies are dictatorships, where all of the profits that come from maximizing value to customers do not go to employees. Employees have absolutely no say in it whatsoever and in fact are paid for their time for the sole purpose of not sharing profits with them.
True but they also get to not share in any losses.
Depending on the company, management and situation - you are the first to experience the loss in the form of being replaced with a younger, more naive candidate or an outsourced dev shop that can keep the product long enough for management to get another round of funding or find themselves an exit that minimizes their losses.
To not share in the losses you need to make yourself essential and irreplaceable, which is more and more difficult since a lot of the popular frameworks and cloud services that make developer/devops jobs easier also make them an easily replaceable part.
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#69I completely endorse the suggestion that engineers should learn to understand this concept. If you learn one thing in your career, it should be this. One of the differences between working at BigCorp versus working at SmallCo or VentureCo is that in the smaller companies the relationship is much easier to trace out. Dan Warmenhoven (when he was CEO of Network Appliance) had a wonderful way to very clearly explaining…
When I was at Google their compensation system tended to unfairly bias toward people delivering features and I and others argued for recognition of people that made delivering those features possible (which finally came about in 2009).
Interesting. I started at Google as a SWE in 2009 and I did not see any of this. I left in 2011 so I don't know how the situation is today.
However when I worked there it was obvious that when promotion cycle came everyone was first to claim they "put feature X into Y", even if they were just the ones doing the wiring, not the ones implementing the actual thing.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that promotions were (probably still are) in the hands of "promotion committees" (which most often did not have a damn clue about your product or team and who contributed what in reality) and not in the hands of your boss. As a result I saw promotions biased towards the most shameless liars and self-promoters.
Re: Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
#70Real-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…
If you're doing work-for-hire, the company implicitly owns whatever it is you achieve and was paid for. If you want to own it, start your own company!
True.
Founding a company is the only way to shape your own success.