Everyone exchanges their time for money, if you work a job that's entirely unfulfilling you're trading happiness too. It's an exchange that no one wins.
The company might still win in that exchange, since they get the labor they paid for anyway. Whether you are happy or not is only important insomuch as it alters your productivity. Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.
I'm not saying big companies deeply care about you as a person, but their interests are at least partially aligned with yours on this. Happier employees are more engaged, work harder, work longer hours. In many cases the things that make employees "happier" are a lot cheaper for employers than increasing someone's salary by x%.
> Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking everyone posting on HN comes from a similar background. I work for a non-profit who go to great lengths to make the workplace comfortable.
Don't get me wrong, I think that's great and I'm happy you have a nice workplace. My comments were in the greater context of the thread, which is about working for FAANG companies.
Not at all. They pay what it would cost to replace you. If someone accepted to do the same job for cheaper (or free), they'd take it, regardless of the value it generates.
Salary is correlated with market demand and alternatives, both for the company and the employee.
For example, I know engineers who are some of the most valuable people in the company, and some engineers who are borderline useless. You can be borderline useless but good at self promotion / good at negotiation and be paid a lot more than very valuable eng. fwiw, I'm on the business side of the house, but used to be an engineer. So I think primarily in terms of business value.
Or think of CSMs. They get paid a lot less, on average, than engineers. Are they less valuable / do they create less value? It's quite hard to make that argument: No CSMs, no customers and no upsells.
I agree salary is correlated with demand, but I also believe there's a reason for that demand.
CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact.
If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.
I have worked in b2b selling to enterprise or midmarket for my whole career, so individual customers are generally noticeable amounts of revenue. And our lowest end customers have CLVs in the 250k+ range. So that obviously influences my view of whether CSMs have org-wide impact.
I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.
If half of all software engineers suddenly died, the remaining software engineers would be able to negotiate higher salaries. But they wouldn't be adding any more value to any given company than they were previously. Conversely, if a spaceship landed with 10 million highly capable software engineers, we'd all be on minimum wage. It doesn't matter how much value you generate. If there are hundreds of other people who could do your job equally well, then you won't be able to negotiate a good salary.
But it's cute that serfs under the yoke of capitalist exploitation think that they are being paid in proportion to the value they generate!
They pay because you wouldn't bring them value if they didn't pay. Otherwise Facebook would be paying the developers of every open source project that they use.
Not value, money. Every job centers around money because we're working for businesses. "Value" is just a side effect (and not a necessary one at that).
Some people find making money meaningful and fulfilling, many of us don't.
My job brings me opportunities of scale that I'm unlikely to find elsewhere, and I genuinely enjoy the challenges, but I'd work on something else if they didn't pay me to do it.
It's not that it's not fun, but fun doesn't pay the bills. If it didn't _have_ to pay the bills, I'd probably still develop software but with a very different focus.
