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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

#61

Post by nerdponx »

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.

When the associate data scientists are making $100-150k, and the product/graphic designers are lucky to be getting $80k, that's pretty fucking top-heavy and absurd.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#63

Post by Judgmentality »

barry-cotter wrote: post #52
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…

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 excep…

> except perhaps finance it pays far, far better.

I hear this a lot, but I've never seen it. I know plenty of people in tech making the better part of $1 MM a year at FAANG, and a few who even breach that. Most people I know in finance never break $500k.

So how much do people make in finance?

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#65

Post by ausbah »

kemiller wrote: post #50

I think he's got it exactly wrong — the reason we have seen a lot of "non-tech tech" companies is that software still fundamentally kinda sucks. We have become so used to it we don't always notice, but software is a fragile nightmare to work with. It's like trying to build skyscrapers with tinkertoys, and it's a miracle we can do as much as we do. Software needs a leap; AI/ML might be the start of it, not sure yet.

why does it fundamentally suck? anything specific in mind?

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#66

Post by lolinder »

> Innovation happens in fields where our ideas are limited by our means to pursue them. Software is no longer such a field, our brightest minds should be going elsewhere.

I feel like the author has an overly one-dimensional definition of both innovation and what it means for someone to be one of "our brightest minds".

There are two different goods and two different talents at play here. The first is taking an idea that already has been had and making it possible. The second is inventing new ideas. Both are goods, but each requires very different talents.

Biotechnology desperately needs people who, given a great idea, can break technological barriers and enable it. If we accept that software is bottlenecked by ideas, then software desperately needs people who can radically change paradigms. "Our greatest minds" consist of both types of people.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#67

Post by pvarangot »

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 looked into biotech before I jumped into an aerospace startup a few career moves ago. Did some consulting and everything to test the waters, which was compensated "ok" but like half of the hourly rate of doing something even shittier for Google or Facebook.

Besides the top heavy compensation problem, the other problem I had with biotech is that everything is swamped in patents, NDAs, secret patents, secret NDAs and in the US there's also a lot of spooky secret government bullshit. I worked on information security so I'm not that scared of three letter agencies, but in my short time dealing with biotech they were actually not letting me do my job, which had never happened before.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#68

Post by 908B64B197 »

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.

> 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.

You'll never pay it completely but if you can afford a mortgage you'll build equity into it and probably be able to resell it at a profit.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#69

Post by fridif »

_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…

I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself?

Porting it to java will speed it up a few x,

and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#70

Post by XorNot »

giantg2 wrote: post #41

Do you want to know the real "problem"? It takes a long time to develop biotech, test it, approve it, market it, and make money. There is also a limited market (ie the people sick with that condition, specifically in rich countries). The reason tech companies make money, grow/iterate, pay more, is because they are in a field that does not require the same oversight and moral safety obligations (maybe they should to a…

This also is pretty much why finance pays well: the correlation of employee salary to company profit is as direct as it will ever be.
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