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Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

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Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#61

Post by gtirloni »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #50
austin-cheney wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of e…

Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!

Same situation at a different company, except they kept telling us "we made sure this won't keep happening". Of course few people believed and we lost many good engineers that simply left because they couldn't have a major source of income coming from such unstable place.

I like to believe executives know their workforce will shrink more than the layoff numbers. They must know this. They also must know it will be harder to hire new people. They know this, right? Please someone tell me so.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#62

Post by nijave »

ponector wrote: post #41
georgyo wrote: post #38

I don't understand our modern tech culture of saying maintenance is the last on the list; always getting chopped and cut; never getting a decent budget. In 20 years and several different companies I have always heard this but never agreed with it. Sure, the company wants new features to market, but the company also wants things to freaking work. During layoffs and hiring freezes I have seen SRE type orgs fair better…

Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business. Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features. From the developer's point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.

You can sell security, support, and compliance and those tend to be tightly related to maintenance. A product hard to maintain becomes a nightmare for any recurring task, security, support and compliance all being examples.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#63

Post by strikelaserclaw »

michael_leachim wrote: post #60
mooreds wrote: post #3

In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…

What category is Amazon? (the marketplace). It looks like a third category (company sells something else, but it has a software component supporting it). I am asking because I am working in a company with similar business model and I am trying to figure out what category does my work belong to. thank you. EDIT: fix msg

I think there is nuance here, even within a product company, not all software is equal. There's software to support core business (think ads in Google) and there's probably software to support internal dashboards (also in Google), I'm sure engineers working in ads in Google have much more leverage than those working in making dashboards for ops or some internal ticketing system. Conversely, I'm sure the companies we traditionally think software is just needed to support the core business also have software lines which generate income or is critical to their core business.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#64

Post by nijave »

vanderZwan wrote: post #33
w4tty wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Because COBOL maintenance is outsourced to the third world.

Do you seriously suggest that banks outsource the maintenance of the mainframes that process their money transfers? If so I'd like to see a source, because the only articles I have read about on this topic (e.g. [0]) tell me the exact opposite: it's all in-house the risks are too high. For larger banks it's practically a national security risk. Maybe the software they use is from abroad (usually ancient IBM shit), bu…

They don't "out source", they in-source by opening technology hubs in cheaper locations.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#66

Post by Steven-Clarke »

Re: (US) Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 174

"The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted more than five years ago, but certain changes under the legislation are only now coming into focus as taxpayers prepare their 2022 tax returns. In particular, there are significant changes as to the deductibility of certain research and experimentation expenses, as well as the ability to utilize net operating loss (NOL) carryforwards. These changes may result in greater tax liabilities for companies and may also affect certain qualified small business stock eligibility requirements".

ref/ https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2023/2023-04-28-startups...

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#68

Post by apwell23 »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #48
lp4vn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already worked for companies where there were management changes at a crazy pace, I'm not sure that all of them got promoted and I have the impression that some of them might have been fired as well. I don't want to start a flame war but it's much easier to replace a manager than a technical person, a technical job is boring and most people don't want to do it while management relies more on soft skills, something…

Most people don't want to do technical jobs? That's not my experience at all. We've had vacant management positions for months because nobody wants to do that role. We'd get no volunteers internally and only a handful of suitable candidates would apply from outside.

trick is to hire women into technical positions and fast track them into management. My company uses this strategy and almost 90% of low/mid management and admin are women.

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#69

Post by apwell23 »

vsnf wrote: post #18
thiago_fm wrote: post #8

It doesn't matter where you work at, when layoffs come, the executives will care about location, timezones, desire on finishing the current project you are working on, (maybe) performance etc. There are too many criteria and no clear pointer on what is safe and what isn't. Being part of a layoff and also watching other colleagues coming from other Big Tech companies share their experiences, you'd see people laid off…

The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.

> The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes

Last layoff at my company was predominantly of middle managagers and very few line workers. Even meta layoff was "the flattening".

surprised by your comment. Is there any data supporting this?

Re: Software engineering salaries come from one of three budgets

#70

Post by SamuelAdams »

I really like this, but patio11’s blog does a nice job as well. He breaks it down into cost centers and profit centers, and argues why you really want to be attached to a profit center.

Lots of other good stuff in here if you haven’t read it.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

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