What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#61

Post by candiodari » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #9

beebmam wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good, in fact. People should be compensated for the value they generate. Why should a fast food worker be compensated equivalently to a doctor or engineer? I do not want to live in a world where that could exist.

They're not paid for the value they generate either. They're paid proportional to the leverage they have to extract money from the business.

In other words, can you run the business into the ground? If yes => $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, if no => $.

The CEO can tank a company (in fact they frequently do)

An engineer certainly has more power than average to sink a company (isn't half the star wars story pretty much this?)

Cleaning personnel does not

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#62

Post by quantified » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #26

pydry wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in proportion to how much value they create. They're paid in proportion to how much unique value they gatekeep. Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. They dream of making us more of a commodity, so that as the chief gatekeepers of the tech economic engine, they get to keep a larger slice of the pie we create.

>Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?

Put another way, wouldn't it have made more sense, social-benefit-wise, to encourage everyone to be nurses, doctors, teachers, or members of another profession that provides direct benefits to humanity? Or flautist or waitstaff or any thing else that benefits people too?

It really was to put the prices down and benefit themselves, not to benefit humanity overall. They would never encourage people to learn mental health providing, physical therapy, exercises for their own health, they don't actually care about those.

A glut of coders only is good for the coders if there is enough overall business to keep them actually employed somehow. Otherwise you have a lot of people who don't spend time coding.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#63

Post by channel_t » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 8:34 PM UTC

This article was somewhat revelatory to me in that I can now see that the source of my frustration with the direction my career has gone in recent years is that I spent much of it cutting my teeth at a SV-style company during the 2010s before it was bought out by traditionalists, and that subsequent companies ended up being more solidly traditional, even if they initially appeared SV-like on the surface. I think I had naively assumed that SV-style was the norm, and the experience of discovering this to not be the case has been a little alienating.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#64

Post by quickthrower2 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 9:26 PM UTC

mattbuilds wrote: post #60

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even comparing traditional sysadmin work — where operations are even more crucial — to software engineering, it’s easy to see that engineers tend to get paid more, get treated better and have more freedom. Obviously there are reasons for this, but it seems to boil down to broad generalizations in how the C-Suite sees your role, and very little in the particularities of the org or employee.

The reason is growth. A sysadmin will make sure the lights stay on and the place doesn’t burn down, but they aren’t creating a new revenue stream. And when all these companies need to grow forever, they need to be creating new things, which developers do and sysadmins don’t.

And that is why platform/devops is safer than the sysadmin. Not only do they help developers create new things, but make it complicated enough that you can't disband their team ... {tongue in cheek, sort of...}

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#65

Post by dave333 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:42 PM UTC

The last startup I worked for as a UI dev the marketing manager wanted me to make a purely cosmetic change to the UI that at the time was quite difficult to do and half jokingly I told her if she insisted, I would quit. She immediately relayed this to the CEO, her husband, sitting across the table "Did you hear what he said?" I was not fired on the spot, but quit shortly afterwards anyway.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#66

Post by fragmede » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #27

fragmede wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bartending at the right bar is a six figure, semi-untaxed salary which is competitive with a jr swe salary.

Not competitive because you still have to account for quality of life, working on site with no remote option, working evenings, nights, and weekends, general riskiness of being around drunk/high people, etc. Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either. Either way, the easiest way to look at it is…

Okay tiger mom. Bartenders don't get fired because they got a cheaper office in Estonia or India to write code. They don't have 9am meetings. Git is an insult you call somebody; What's a JIRA‽ You don't want to work in the nightlife/entertainment industry, which is fine, but it's a $36 billion dollar industry and some people want to do that instead of sitting in front of a screen all day long.

At the end of the day, take home pay is one metric we can actually compare, because different people want different things.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#67

Post by nojvek » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 3:29 AM UTC

nologic01 wrote: post #47

There is only one central difference of "Silicon Valley" type companies with "the Rest of the World". It is the recognition (or not) that we are in an accelerated information processing age where the wiring of information flows in society is upgraded dramatically. While this realization is not new (from Negroponte's Being Digital [1] to the perennial VC cry "software will eat the world") the disruption story is for a…

I don’t think your analogy would not be true for Tesla.

My underlying theory is that software is how we map what is happening in the real world and represent a model of it in computer(s).

Great Software engineers have this amazing ability to represent this and write computations that can reason on top of it for effective decisions.

Whether it’s dashboards, social network, extracting patterns from data, advanced electric cars with autonomy, mobile phones etc.

If you can use the power of computers to do more of what is happening in the human brains to create economic value, then that is a highly leveraged engineer.

Re: What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

#68

Post by jddj » Mon, Sep 18, 2023, 7:19 AM UTC

simonbarker87 wrote: post #32

jddj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, though I'm not sure, that some people prefer the latter environment. Having worked with teams which have preferred to work in as pure a technology environment as could be constructed while still providing value, I think this might be the "product focussed" (or not) distinction that people make about themselves on their CVs.

To me “product focussed” is the situation the article describes, everyone thinks about the product (and therefore the business by extension) Those who don’t like that work environment (so would prefer the latter two of my three dev jobs) would be tech focussed in my book. It’s all semantics though

Yeah, that was the conclusion I reached as well. I might not have made it clear