I noticed Avi didn't mention how much "pay and benefits" he's receiving. It's not often one gets to observe outstandingly tone-deaf execs prattle on, so read it as the gem it is. "We just received $230MM in funding, which I'm going to shovel as much as I can into my personal accounts, but the rest of y'all need to take a pay cut. BTW, we're hiring!"
Yeah, as a CEO I find it gross. I don't make the most at my company by a long shot - I own stock, which carries more risk, but I chose to take this path. If the company is over budget I'm the first to take a pay cut, I would never try to extract that from my employees before I did so with my own funds.
The reason developers are paid a lot is because they're worth a lot. That's it.
IMO If you're a CEO that's what you sign up for. If you can't handle that, find another job.
> I know I saved companies millions of dollars but only got $100k/yr doing it.
Let's use an arbitrary 1m saving.
If you saved a company (me) a million dollars, you just made 10% (aka 100K). That's a pretty good commission. If you got health care, retirement contributions and anything else on top of that, you have made an exceptional commission.
Because I gather you mention saving you mean on sunk costs. The second year you earn 100K, and if you don't save me money you have now made 20% commission and only saved me 800K (1m - 100K - 100k). And so on and so on, or you need to keep saving me 1m a year and there is a point where my costs will reach $0 and your salary will outpace that, increasing my costs.
This obviously is a very linear representation where you're not adding extra value, nor am I incurring any additional cost/losses by employing you. Cost savings are reflected once in my bottom line but your salary is reflected every year in my in operating costs.
However if you made me an extra 1m a year revenue (and my costs stayed the same), I would make 900K from you every year, and you make 10%. But if my costs increased then that 900K revenue is much smaller, let's say my revenue increased 900K but my costs increased 100K, you make around 12%. Now we are talking about profit.
If I provide 1M of value to the company, why would it not be ridiculously bad to get 10% of that value for myself? You call it a "commission" as if this was a salesman getting a cut of the cost of the product they sold, but a salesperson selling a $1M product is not providing $1M to the company - the $1M is split between the salesperson, people building the product, marketing etc.
On the other hand, an investor who gives the company $1M normally expects to get more than 100% of that back (with some risks, of course). Or would you say that an investment where you pay $1M to get $100K back is a good investment?
> If I provide 1M of value to the company, why would it not be ridiculously bad to get 10% of that value for myself?
If you generate 1m of profit, I don't think 10% is that bad. If you generate 1m of revenue then 10% is pretty good depending on operational costs. If you're talking about 1m of saving 10% is not bad. That 10% is paid in a salary.
> You call it a "commission" as if this was a salesman getting a cut of the cost of the product they sold
You can call it whatever you want, salary, bonus, commission etc. I use the word commission because it is easy to relate the concept, if you generate 4m for example what is your worth, and it is probably easier to count that as a percentage.
But fell free to use whatever nomenclature you want.
> but a salesperson selling a $1M product is not providing $1M to the company
If you are not producing sales or a product which is sold, or reducing costs just how are you adding 1m of value. By this I mean tangible value, value which you can be paid for. Because that is what we are actually talking about monetary value being added somewhere.
> On the other hand, an investor who gives the company $1M normally expects to get more than 100% of that back (with some risks, of course). Or would you say that an investment where you pay $1M to get $100K back is a good investment?
Why would I ever say investing 1m to get 100k back is a good investment, getting 1.1m back might be a good investment depending on risk though, sticking 1m in a bank I am unlikely to get that rate of return for example. But I don't understand this part at all.
> If you are not producing sales or a product which is sold, or reducing costs just how are you adding 1m of value. By this I mean tangible value, value which you can be paid for. Because that is what we are actually talking about monetary value being added somewhere.
The precise mechanism isn't that important, but if it helps, imagine the following artifical scenario: a small startup buys 2 1000$ computers and hires a programmer and a salesperson, for 10k$ a month each. The programmer produces an app in 6 months, and the salesperson sells it for $3M. The two together have brought the company $3M in worth, minus $130k that they cost. Exactly how much esch contributed to the $2.8M is harder to say, but certainly each only contributed a portion of the $2.8M - even though the salesperson actually caused the revenue to flow in, they are not solely responsible; and neither is the programmer, even though they single-handedly created the product.
> Why would I ever say investing 1m to get 100k back is a good investment, getting 1.1m back might be a good investment depending on risk though, sticking 1m in a bank I am unlikely to get that rate of return for example. But I don't understand this part at all.
Well, a worker who, through their time and expertise, is adding $1M to the company's value is almost precisely equivalent to the investor investing $1M. However, you believe that the worker should get back 10% of what they invested, while the investor should get back 110% of what they invested. Do you see the double standard?
> The two together have brought the company $3M in worth, minus $130k that they cost. Exactly how much esch contributed to the $2.8M is harder to say, but certainly each only contributed a portion of the $2.8M - even though the salesperson actually caused the revenue to flow in, they are not solely responsible; and neither is the programmer, even though they single-handedly created the product.
This would be a rare occurrence, but let's run with it. I don't think anywhere I have alluded to anything which could be considered as making such judgement on whom is worth more but rather the idea that businesses are systems with many actors.
But I think we are running around the obvious question, out of $2.8m, and ignoring any other costs and expenses like taxes for example (21% in the US), how much should the programmer get paid, how much should the sales person be paid?
If I had a company and I had 1 person sewing t-shirts which sold for $5, and another person sewing the same amount of t-shirts, same skill level, same quality of work but they were supreme t-shirts selling for $38. Should I pay the second work many times more, since they make me 7+ times more doing the same job. I don't think the market would say I would. Unless you have a unique skill or go beyond the level of the second employee, the rate would be the same. Even your software selling for 3m is set by the market, you cannot stick a price on it and say it is worth 50m and it's worth 50m.
The same argument goes for developers, it's a generic pool of skilled workers. While there maybe an argument for paying a high profit generating developer more, the majority of developers are likely to be the lower end. Maybe some people just get lucky, for example it is probably easier generating 1m of revenue working at Facebook (developer A), than it would be working at a small boutique development firm (developer B), developer A being no different than developer B, should developer A get paid more just because of the opportunity they have.
> Well, a worker who, through their time and expertise, is adding $1M to the company's value is almost precisely equivalent to the investor investing $1M. However, you believe that the worker should get back 10% of what they invested, while the investor should get back 110% of what they invested. Do you see the double standard?
There is no double standard, and they are not equivalent. The employee earns a salary, the invest earns via capital gains (excluding cases of dividends and profit shares). An investor can lose everything, while an employee gets paid.
If you think an employee == investor then you should not expect a salary at all, you getting paid depends on whether the company makes a profit and if there are capital gains to be had.
I think you should consider that employees are more like businesses, you are selling you product/services (aka skills) to a customer.
> Cost savings are reflected once in my bottom line
Recurring costs and savings of the same are very real things, and there is a ton of money to be saved by streamlining this for many businesses that have grown without pruning and/or streamlining their internal systems.
For most software businesses, it is more lucrative to spend resources increasing revenue, but at some point decreasing costs becomes worth it. For non-software businesses, the “some point” is usually right now.
> Recurring costs and savings of the same are very real things, and there is a ton of money to be saved by streamlining this for many businesses that have grown without pruning and/or streamlining their internal systems.
Yes, streamlining can save a great deal of money, and consultants and businesses are making good money offering such services. But they are only represented once generally in financials of a company, unless that cost is reduced over time.
> For most software businesses, it is more lucrative to spend resources increasing revenue, but at some point decreasing costs becomes worth it. For non-software businesses, the “some point” is usually right now.
In general this is correct, but there are situations where cost savings aren't worth it. We see this play out with the idea of Linux vs Windows quite often, the reduction in cost switching to Linux is over shadowed by other issues such as training etc. Switching accounting systems, service providers etc might just not be worth the cost reduction.
The opposite is also often true. Especially in tech, where we build things computers do ever afterwards. If my team implements a feature that generates $5M per year, and gets $500k that first year (10%), the expectation is that they don’t just sit back and maintain the feature ever after. They’re expected to maintain it while implementing the next $5M/year feature. By the end of year two, for the cost of $1M, they’ve given you $15M plus $10M/year going into the future. Of course it’s not that simple, because maintenance costs are crazy and nothing lasts forever, but the idea holds.
If you imagine the ongoing revenue to be worth 10x today, that 10% commission is just 1%.
I think it is very admirable for a company to pay profit sharing, and at the very least pay bonuses for good work. But that is because I am an employee :)
I just don't think profit sharing is realistic in the majority of situations for many reasons, and people over value their own worth. There's like a bias, if I generate multiple of millions for a company, then I must be highly skilled. That may be the case but sometimes it is the business itself which provides the environmental factors for that to be possible.
> The second year you earn 100K, and if you don't save me money you have now made 20% commission and only saved me 800K (1m - 100K - 100k).
I disagree. Savings is a competitive advantage usually dropping your costs, time to market, and increasing profits, or efficiency, even if you don't reflect that on the books. Managers could ask employees to do more things as opposed to reducing the labor costs (layoffs), e.g.
Also since it's software, those savings typically compound. E.g: so I save tedium in accounting for $1M in the first year. It's so successful that you expand my efforts to other parts of your company. The next year you still have $1M + whatever I have added. Or $2M+ over the course of 2 years.
If you decide to go with a external package and pay a recurring licensing cost -- which is pretty common in the software industry, then you'd be paying maybe 10% of whatever you save per year. One software package we were looking at was $6M/annum. That's roughly 30 engineers being paid $200k for a year to come up with an alternative. We're using 5 engineers to do the same thing for less.
While it's hard to gauge true costs, paying my team $1M to save you $6M in recurring costs seems like a bargain, and something that's hard to argue against. In fact $2M might not be a bad number either depending upon how management sees it.
> If you decide to go with a external package and pay a recurring licensing cost -- which is pretty common in the software industry, then you'd be paying maybe 10% of whatever you save per year. One software package we were looking at was $6M/annum. That's roughly 30 engineers being paid $200k for a year to come up with an alternative. We're using 5 engineers to do the same thing for less.
Ok fair enough, now lets say I am an Accountant and I work out that I can increase profits even further by hiring 5 people offshore for 30K a year. I am paying now $150K to save $6m. You cannot deny me the accountant, the same opportunity to earn from cost reductions if you profit from it, that would not be in the theme of rewarding people for giving an advantage to a company.
If you look at both situation, mine is more efficient based on cost.
But most all you're playing an unfair advantage. You say the following: (* caveat lets say fair market value is 100k per developer)
> That's roughly 30 engineers being paid $200k
What happens if there are only 5 developers working for that company too, and working on the same profit-reward model as you are working on, they are getting paid 400K a year each because they are making the company $4m. So what's their true value, if they are being paid 400K and they can be replaced by your team for 200K it seems that they are being over paid 200K. Your way of justifying your 2x pay is that you decreased cost, their justification of being paid 4x is that they increased profits, but you're doing the same job, aren't they worth more than you are.
I the accountant see a business opportunity, and start a company the same as the 3rd party software company. I know that developers like you work on a profit-reward model of 20%. So your job did get outsource, but you were getting paid 200K to save the company a part of the 6m before that. I reduce the cost of the software by 50% to 3m, I offer you and your team 100K base salary and 20% of profits (2.5m for ease, 3m - 5x developers @ 100k), so would you take the job for 150k, a 25% reduction in pay for doing the same job based on the same model?
Here's the final point, how much do you pay a cleaner, they are a cost they don't produce profit.
Plus it costs a lot more than salary to employ an engineer. You also need to pay hosting and operating costs for the product, office and technology support costs, support personnel costs (hiring, HR, procurement, secretarial, finance, payroll), business insurance. All of that needs to be amortized across the 'front line' costs. The cost of employing someone is generally about double what you actually pay them and can be a lot more.
To be fair, someone else made a bug that cost that much. I don't think you want to be in the business of getting a say 20% of revenue from big fixes, but also get 20% of revenue from bug creation? Or hey maybe you do, you could try to get that in your next contract.
Yes they do, their commission drops. Which could be something like 50% of base pay.
Imagine if as a dev you want to make 100k.. so instead you make 50k guaranteed (base pay), but then bonuses based on how many JIRAs you close. Hit your bug target make 100k. Get stuck on a nasty one? Opps, only 90k.
Managers have been pretty much in control of the narrative about what's happening underneath them when relaying to up the chain, and therefore they could overstate their own self importance -- when really it was the people under them that came up with the ideas, found the savings, made the efficiency gains happen... etc etc. (There are many managers that are good, but there are a god awful lot that are bad.)
So now in 2021, people have figured out they like having their own private bathroom, and a 43" monitor on their desk (because the company won't pay for it), and not doing the brutal commutes anymore.
The reality of the employee's true monetary value in a company is becoming starker and starker by the day.
Let's say someone in accounting is responsible for combing through invoices, extrapolating data from them, and entering those extrapolations into a spreadsheet, perhaps with some calculations.
That someone is earning $75,000/year (not including benefits and other costs) to do this job. $75,000/year is the market rate for someone experienced enough to do this correctly, and since this is accounting, outsourcing this would be difficult because of US tax law.
This task consumes approx. 10 of their 40 hours/week. There are 261 working days in the 2021 fiscal year. This means that this $75,000/year person costs the company $288/day. Of that $288, it costs $231/day to do this particular task. $231/day * 261 days = $60,291.
You come along. You discover this madness and write a script to do it. You are paid $150,000/year (not fully loaded). Since you're subject to capital-A Agile, you do this in the very little downtime you get between playing stories.
You write the script (with no tests, because you ain't getting time for that) in six hours, or about 3/4 of a day. Since you cost $575/day ($150,000/261 days), this work "cost" the company $431.
However, the script does what the person in accounting did in 30 seconds and does so completely automatically.
In essence, the company "paid" $431 to automate what cost them $60,291 to get done.
_Per person_.
That's where the real savings comes from. Tech can scale so much more efficiently than people can. If this task needed 10 people worth $75,000/year to accomplish, it would have still "cost" the company $431 to automate what is now a $600,000 annual job!
If you were an entrepreneur selling this as a solution, you would probably sell this to the company at, say, $100/month. ($9.99/mo would be too low, and you do have to charge a "throat to choke" premium). That's $1,200/year of super sticky recurring revenue that you can sell to multiple companies with minor refactoring (because big companies generally don't abandon things, especially not things this cheap). Not a bad return on something that took six hours to write!
If you were working for this CEO, you would get scolded by a PM for working on an item that didn't have a story, which would percolate up to a negative mark on your yearly review that shunts your chance at a raise. Sure, you'll still get your 5% bonus of $7,500...but your six hour BS project literally saved the company over $59,000! PER PERSON!
See why what this CEO said is incredibly insulting?
What I find interesting, is that instead of taking that savings directly (by firing accounting employees), managers will just increase the load on accounting now that they are more efficient.
And when reporting those same efficiencies up, many managers will take the credit for any efficiency gain, rather than give credit to the employees that made the gain happen.
That is precisely why the managerial class see themselves as so important. They generally view employees as exchangeable livestock in a sense, with managers being in charge of choosing the right stock and seeing that each cattle is optimizing production.
And just as you don't pay your cattle much (food, benefits) but you do pay a good herder, similarly you shouldn't pay your employees nearly as much as the manager.
I actually wonder how many people might be employed by FAANG companies on high salaries just to deny their competitor from getting access to that person's skills. If I am Google, it is in my best interest to hire as many skilled people in AI for example to deny Facebook from accessing those skills.
But yes, I can see what you are saying that employers drive the demand which puts the value on developers. Kind of like my wife and multiple other people in the world putting a price on a LV handbag, without the demand the LV is probably not worth more than a few hundred dollars.
For another example, here's the president of the Seattle Mariners bragging to a rotary club meeting about how their team's payroll was as low as it gets, how they get more than they deserve out of their TV deal, how they brazenly manipulate young players' in their minor-league teams to avoid starting the clock on their service contracts (basically the baseball equivalent of "my startup is offering stock options to justify low salaries, but we're going to dilute/fundraise at higher liquidation preference/prevent them from reaching the exercise price/terminate the employees before they vest so they don't cost us anything!"). He says that a particular veteran player and team leader is expensive, so they're going to fire him at the end of the season, another player from Japan doesn't speak English well and he wants to get rid of his interpreter. He brags that there's not enough parking, so he can get away with charging $30, $40, $50 to park in his tiny little parking garage, and he makes his employees park on the other side of town in a bad neighborhood.
It's one thing to observe that people may rationalize the decisions that benefit themselves personally. Sure, it would be unexpected for the CEO to decide "We don't pay our employees enough", but you'd like to have a veneer of justification for the cut. You can imagine their subconscious pushing them towards the conclusion that they're incentivized to reach. It's another to hear them literally say the quiet part out loud.
Interesting. Just saw this headline in the local newspaper the other day: "New president of business operations Catie Griggs wants Mariners to be ‘most progressive team’ in MLB".
Nintendo ruined the Mariners. They took over a decent team and drove it into the ground. By the time they sold the team in 2016 the team was one of the worst. But hey, they sell a lot of those virtual ads!
At a recent all-hands about hiring, and wages for existing/future employees, my CEO blatantly said “we look around at the market and set wages based on the going rate”. Something totally innocuous to someone with his background. Weirdly revealing to many employees at a rapidly advancing startup without much background in finance: the company as a whole doesn’t even consider output when setting wages.
There seems to be a contingent of people floating around the internet with the idea that wages are "output minus," or more commonly that prices are "cost plus," and then getting all righteously indignant when they aren't.
That is now how a market economy works! I mean, you can't usually sell for less than cost or pay more than productivity over the long term, but sometimes you do (loss leaders, R&D investments), and you can definitely do the reverse.
Well, you're right. I'm not in disagreement with the way in which dispassionate markets are understood to behave. I'm in disagreement that such a dispassionate job market is any sort of ideal that ought to be embraced by the average joe -- and that we've largely accepted it as if it were (or at least as if it were "good enough").
Let's say I go to a potluck and bring store-bought cookies as my contribution. My friends say "come on, wallacoloo, we all worked our butts off preparing good food for you: we deserve better from you." I reply, "well then, find a new friend who's willing to make better food for you and show them to me. Once you show me that such a man exists, I'll contribute to you as much as he would."
It's an absurd scenario. It's insulting. That's not any type of relationship we should aim for. But suddenly, once you introduce enough indirection (money, specialization, larger-sized groups), I'm supposed to think that making every such interaction into an adversarial one is somehow proper.
Having a potluck on my calendar stresses me the hell out, for exactly that reason.
And leaders know it. That's why the cultivate the potluck mindset when they want to work you to the bone. Everything demands 110% all the time when it's for the sake of your buddies. Of course you'll work Saturday, Sunday, after dinner until midnight. What, are your TV shows more important than your fellows' needs for your labor? You wouldn't want to let your friends down.
A little indirection, a little surplus, a little breathing room, is sometimes what makes life worth living. And if I'm feeling more or less ambitious, I can pick a different point on the effort:reward curve. I value that optionality. I don't want to be socially pressured into making the same contribution as everyone else all the time, and I definitely don't want to be pressured into working at my own redline all the time. Sometimes you just microwave some Ramen.
I disagree. The difference is friendship vs commerce.
Your employer-employee relationship is commercial, so it's reasonable of the CEO to think of your salary as market-driven, just as it is reasonable of you to leave when the market rate rises above what you're paid. It's business, you shouldn't take it personally.
OTOH, the potluck is among friends. You're expected to have your friends' best interests in mind and to enjoy being around them, so it's not surprising that they'd be offended if they spent hours cooking and you just ran to the store and bought a cheap salad or some cookies.
> It's business, you shouldn't take it personally.
I don't want that distinction. I am a person. Why should I want to pretend otherwise?
What you're saying is similar to the "work/life balance" trope. My work is a part of my life, just as are friends, food, physical health, and the environment around me. I don't want to drive these things apart. I love it when the food part of my life overlaps with the friends part (social eating). I love it when the environmental part overlaps with the personal health part (outdoor exercise). Yet people speak of work as if it uniquely ought to be an exception. As if work is a thing you do only in order to allow you to do other things. HN is home to enough enthusiasts and tinkerers and people who actually enjoy creating things. Why drive this wedge between my desire to create and my personhood?
O'rly? Uber did it all over the world. AirBnB did it for a long time. Back in time, Microsoft did it by letting people copy its software and go unpunished.
That's one of the reasons companies seek investment: to undermine competition by dumping prices and getting market share.
Everyone does it to a degree when they're buying a service or a product. It's the market that dictates the price, unless the company's lifeline depends to a high degree on a particular employee and his non transferrable knowledge and skills that are specific to the company.
child comment I was replying to was deleted so adding this to this parent comment:
Likewise I've met plenty of engineers that are not profitably replaceable.
Almost every SWE is replaceable, but many it makes no sense to replace and that usually correlates with their tenure working on a particular system.
I myself have several years of knowledge I've accumulated working in a specific problem space at the company. It would take a new hire minimum 2-3 years if not more to accumulate the specialized knowledge I have. So if I were to leave tomorrow over pay, they would have to hire a replacement at the market rate (salary and a 4 year equity grant). That replacement would be far less productive than me for minimum 2 years, so they pay out 4 years of equity now to see equal productivity 2 years from now and if they continue the same pay strategy, that new hire will leave after 4 years of equity has vested. They basically get 2 years of productivity 2 years from now for the price of 4 years of equity today. It's just stupid to play chicken with salary when there are considerable opportunities costs for doing so and you're essentially paying double for half.
It's not just me either. I see it with folks across the board at the company. The only ones I consider relatively fungible are those that team hop every 1 to 1.5 years.
He was at the time the CEO of a very big UK Jewelry group made a speech where he said.
"We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap."
I'm normally not super pro-union, but when I see stuff like this I think the employees need to get together and squeeze the fuck out of their employers.
I think aside from the hypocrisy and poor taste of the specific sentiment expressed, the other thing that I find telling is that Golan's instinct was that management at competing companies should collectively agree to drive down wages. His perspective is centered not around competition between his company and others, but about management at all companies against a group of workers. And for those in the US, perhaps this idea of companies colluding to keep down wages recalls the non-poaching deal among many US tech giants from several years ago.
I suspect the exception here was voicing this in a relatively public way, where at least normally executives would have the sense to do this quietly.
There are also those of us who bill out engineering talent hourly who are more than happy to help drive up salaries across the board as it increases the hourly rates my clients will pay. I can absorb the salary increase simply by raising the price, and my clients will pay it because their HR couldn’t hire engineering talent even when it was available.
If he were actually "calling" executives in other companies to get them to agree to lower wages and benefits, that would be illegal activity in the US. Companies are not allowed to conspire to fix wages.
How can you regulate conspiring? It would seem to me that people have the right to private channels of communication, and free speech over said communication. They could do it over Signal and nobody would know nor have records.
You can regulate conspiring. There are tons of laws for this already, either within antitrust, criminal law, etc.
The challenge is proving the conspiring happened. If a CEO specifically admits to calling companies and conspiring, then, well, there's the evidence.
EDIT:
Case in point from 2014 -- "Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed to pay a total of $324 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to hold down salaries in Silicon Valley..."[1]
What's interesting to me is I thought at first that maybe the only reason this won was because California is one of the few states where non-competes are illegal (this being a form of de-facto non-compete.) Then I read the link and saw that even the Feds (US DOJ) found their practices worth investigating and acting on.
Still, it's weird to think about it. I live in a state where my First Senior role in 2015 paid less than the Cali mandated wage for a basic 'Software Engineer' at the time.
Why is conspiracy the issue? Murder and unreasonably low wages sounds like the actual crime to me. Regulate that instead of regulating a chat over dinner.
You seem to be wondering why the act of conspiracy to commit a crime is itself a crime on top of the crime you conspired to commit.
The reason is the Mafia. They stuck around for such a long time in part because the bosses never committed any crimes themselves, and were often careful to never even directly order anyone else to commit crimes. Nonetheless, they were in charge, and it was quite well understood by the rest of the conspirators exactly what they wanted. But it was effectively impossible for law enforcement to stop them, and that meant there was no way to stop the actual crimes because the supply of lower-level people willing to commit them for sufficient compensation was effectively infinite.
We finally managed to bring them down in part by making conspiracy to commit crime itself be a crime. This was called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO and was passed in the US in 1970. From that point forward, it has been a crime to influence others to commit crimes, and enhanced sentencing is available in cases where this is done as part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.
Well, define "unreasonably low wages", in isolation, in the legal sense. You can't, really, at least not beyond talking about minimum wage for hourly workers (which is obviously not what we're talking about here).
In this case the wages were "unreasonable" because they were lower than they would have been without the collusion. If there hadn't been collusion, but the companies independently came to the same numbers on wages, they would not have been unreasonable, by definition.
The purpose of these laws is to protect workers from people who have a lot more economic and employment power than the workers. That's why it's "collusion to lower wages" and not just "lowering wages". The latter is (generally) legal as long as it's not accompanied by the former.
You go inspect the life of an delivery driver. If they are struggling to pay rent, eat healthy, or get a reasonable amount of legally-mandated family time and sleep because they are having to work excess hours, their wages are too low. Have a judge mandate an increase in their wages by some value. PID feedback loop on that legally-mandated bonus until their lifestyle becomes acceptable.
Do this for a random sample of people and establish a per-county minimum wage.
If the judge doesn't understand how to deal with a simple feedback loop, fire them and replace them with an engineer. A backend engineer who has to regularly deal with actually solving problems around allocating resources and making sure processes don't die is probably a perfect fit.
You can chat all you want with your friends over coffee about stealing stuff and although it's psychologically messed up, there's nothing legally wrong about that. It's when you actually steal that you've committed a crime. Same thing.
Taking the tech wage collusion example, the wages themselves were still very high (we're talking about Google and Apple salaries here) but the collusion to keep them from being higher was still a crime.
Tech CEOs can talk about whatever they want. The talking isn't the crime it's the act. They could talk in theory about colluding, it becomes illegal when they DO it. I'm not sure how else to explain it.
Covering your tracks when committing a crime doesn't make it not a crime. At best it makes you harder to catch.
In this case he posted publicly so was obviously not trying to cover his tracks. I've no idea whether he is doing anything illegal under Israeli law though.
That's if you believe it to be a crime. The law isn't always right. Communication is an unalienable right. The flow of information is not something that should be regulated.
Giving unreasonably low wages should be the crime, not conspiring.
> That's if you believe it to be a crime. The law isn't always right.
Sure, but until that law is challenged in court and found to be unconstitutional (or whatever process is present in whatever country), or until that law is repealed, it is the law, and if you break it, you risk consequences.
> Communication is an unalienable right. The flow of information is not something that should be regulated.
That's really just your opinion. I do happen to mostly agree with you, but I don't see how this has much to do with the issue at hand. If you talk about doing something illegal (and especially if you then go and do that thing), and leave behind evidence of that conspiracy for law enforcement to find, you'll be punished for it.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you have freedom from the consequences of that speech.
> Giving unreasonably low wages should be the crime, not conspiring.
Stop focusing on the word "unreasonable". Whether or not the wages are "unreasonable" is a matter of opinion in this sort of case, and really doesn't matter. The thing that is illegal is colluding to lower wages, where, without the collusion, wages would have been higher.
I am happy to live in a country where a bunch of billionaire CEOs aren't allowed to sit in a room together and decide to artificially lower the market rate for their employees' services.
It seems to work pretty well in practice: testimony from other participants in the conspiracies, technical evidence (just because E2E-encrypted messaging exists doesn't mean it's the sole choice of people conspiring to commit crimes), ...
> people have the right to private channels of communication
This is an intuitively appealing idea (and something I think I personally agree with) but doesn't seem to be totally settled. But let's assume it is:
> [People have the right to] free speech over said communication
Well, no: free speech isn't absolute. That's why people are generally in favor of laws against plotting murders.
This would require conspiring as such a scale that it would be impossible not to leak. It could even be a prisoner’s dilemma since you would have to conspire with lots of your competitors, someone could have interest into leaking the conspiracy.
The smart company goes along with the conspiracy but records everything and then they rat and turn over the evidence. They screw employees and their competitors and get exempted from the fine. In theory, they could collect a portion of the fines that their competition pays as whistleblower comp.
Sure, but if the competition finds out they did this, they could then band together to destroy this "smart company's" business. Which also might be illegal, but by the time the wheels of justice turn, it might be too late for that business.
> "I'm calling all Israeli CEOs specifically in hi-tech to stop the hiring madness before the bubble explodes," Golan wrote. "This new generation of young engineers needs proper guidance, and we need to be responsible to teach them career fundamentals. Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad. We are hurting our young generation as well as our own market and country by the fact we keep raising salaries and offering crazy illogical benefits."
Translation:
> "Engineers are bodies. We must reinforce that only those that command many bodies through a strictly hierarchical organization are deserving of being highly compensated. These are fundamentals. We must not erode them."
Also:
> Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad
I've long thought that developers don't realize how much value they really have. If they're in the right place, they're wickedly underpaid for the value they create.
I was tech and product leader of a company that just IPOed. When I joined the site was so slow and key features were not functional. The site was built by contractors and had a conversion rate of 2.8%. With of a team of 15, we rebuilt the frontend and reduced page rendering time to under 1 second with a SPA and page optimizations. Conversion rate skyrocketed to 7% accelerating annual revenue from $50m to $400m over a few years. The value each engineer contributed was hundreds of millions in value to the company.
I also did the same with another company that had a failing subscription platform built by cheap foreign contractors. Built a talented team and a real platform and that company also successfully exited for 10 figures. You get what you pay for.
Developers, just like almost everyone else, are not paid according to the value they create but according to the market. It doesn’t matter if you create $1M/month, if somebody else is willing to do it for $5000 that’s what you’re getting.
Again, they're paid for value they create. Don't equate quality of software with the value of that software.
A simple example: a crappy $500 beater may have immense value because it gets me to work every day, even if the door is held closed by a coat hanger and I have plastic sheet taped over the missing back window.
Employees tend to get paid on the basis of supply and demand in the labor market.
The value you create just puts a ceiling on the equilibrium pay.
Simple thought experiment. I have a button that creates a million dollars anytime it's pressed. How much should/do I need to pay for somebody to sit there and press it all day? In fact you can probably pay minimum wage because low skill work and easy to find people.
That being said, as an employee you can leverage the unique value you provide into higher pay, assuming you're able to persuade your employer. E.g. imagine you could press the button twice as fast as anybody else... Suddenly you're in a strong position to negotiate for a million dollars per press.
But the value you provide has to be unique relative to the labor market. Looking at unique value, and ability to convince others of that unique value, is more relevant than the absolute value you create.
most of the value they create is raising the company's stock by simply existing. Whether they are valueable to other people is another thing, for one, if the value they created to other companies was comparable, there wouldn't be such extreme inequality in valuations of tech vs rest of the economy
> The employees are bad! bad employees! how dare you ask for good middle class wages! how dare you! Shame on you!
I'm all for solid wages and better benefits, but let's be honest, a college grad who makes $100k to start is not a middle class wage.
Edit: I should clarify, I'm not saying a new grad _shouldn't_ make that. I'm saying it is not a middle class wage for a someone just entering the market.
Then buy a nice with with a decent commute, enough room for 2 kids with good public education, a car, and a lawn on that one 100k income... And any health issues that happen to strike you. Because thats what the american middle class was sold on.
Did you mean this as in, 100k is not quite middle class, or 100k is over your bar for middle class? Here in Seattle, I make around that with 1 yr exp and certainly don't feel secure or comfortable with it.
You don't feel secure because you're spending a large percentage of it. If your life choices were such that you were banking 2k/mo of your salary, you would probably feel quite secure. That would certainly involve other sacrifices, and I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong. Just that it's a choice. Comfort vs convenience vs security vs whatever other factor.
It's probably safe to assume that the largest reason the parent doesn't feel financially secure is because of the cost of housing.
So, sure, the parent could make a different choice, and move to a lower cost of living area, but then they'd be making significantly less, and might still not feel particularly financially secure.
Even now, with many companies realizing that remote work is ok, and planning to allow some form of it permanently, many also plan to change (lower) people's salaries based on where they end up deciding to live, even if they do the exact same work.
"The whole of the USA" isn't a good metric to use since wages vary a lot between areas. What matters to your "middle class-ness" is the median wage in your particular area. And it's quite a bit higher than $65k in some areas.
Consider that the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development considers residents of San Francisco to be "low income" if they make under $82,200 as an individual or $117,400 as a family of four as of 2018[0]. Those numbers are 80% of median income, which means in SF for an individual the median income was about $103k. You said, "if you can earn 100k in your first year you're upper middle at minimum", but, alas, no: if you made $100k in 2018 in San Francisco, you were barely even middle-middle class.
Also consider that making the median wage in your area may still not allow you financial security. We're defining "middle class" here in relation to median wage, which may not be a universal definition. I would expect it has more to do with the median resident's purchasing power.
> The problem, Golan explained, was that tech companies are offering wages and benefits that were too generous and, he claimed, would hurt employees in the long run.
Spoken like a multi-millionaire. Eff right off.
I had a former boss who latched onto some article about how £X was the optimal amount of money to earn for happiness and you shouldn't want more, and started loudly declaiming this amongst staff one lunchtime. Needless to say I wasn't too impressed with him either.
I don't know whether these people are tone deaf to begin with or whether something about the money makes them so but, if I ever "make it", remind me not to behave like this.
This is going to be amusing, because of Israel's internal politics. It's embarrassing for Israel. Israel has a Government department[1] which tries to stop, spin, or de-emphasize embarrassments like this. The last big embarrassment they faced was the binary options scam, which had grown at peak to be 40% of Israel's financial sector.
On this one, the meme is starting to roll.
Globes, Israel's main business newspaper, picked this up.[2] They interviewed the guy, and have more info than the Vice article. He's in San Francisco, and lives in Silicon Valley, not Israel. Which means this may attract the attention of US antitrust regulators, who are much more active now than under previous administrations. Remember the Apple-Google-Intel-Adobe-Pixar-Lucasfilm conspiracy.[3]
Complaint to Israel competition authority [4](Hebrew) [5] (translated).
Anti-Semitic rant about this.[6] That's the sort of thing that gets the ADL and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy going, because it started with something someone in Israel really did, and worse, talked about in public.
> Israel-based Anyvision’s previous largest stint in the public eye came when Microsoft pulled its investments from the company last year after reports (which AnyVision denied) that the company’s AI was used to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank.
I guess high salaries paid by funded startups offset the risk that the company will flame out in 3-5 years combined with scarcity of developer talent - which in itself is driven by lots of VC money sloshing around. When the money dries up, salaries will deflate. However, money will remain cheap while govts are printing it so liberally. Software isn't so much eating the world, it is eating mountains and mountains of cash.
There's two choices right now: wait for salaries to go down and look at an other startup gain market share for the same idea you had or bite the bullet.
Especially with SaaS, there's no reason why a single startup can't completely own a niche. Scaling is a matter of architecting code correctly (higher quality engineers will do that) and adding extra resources in AWS.
Basically what I wanted to say. There is definitely a bubble in tech salaries, people are getting paid salaries that in comparison to other fields have no relation to the aptitude, education, and personal sacrifice needed to do the work.
Will the bubble pop? I don't know. I thought it would pop long ago, but the flow of VC money into tech firms doesn't seem to be abating, and the consumer appetite for the dreck created by the FAANG companies is likewise.
> people are getting paid salaries that in comparison to other fields have no relation to the aptitude, education, and personal sacrifice needed to do the work.
None of these things matter. It's supply and demand, simple as that. And value created. Instagram had millions of users and 14 employees.
Basically, ride the wave while it lasts. And that CEO should suck it up and pay market rates, why else did he raise all that VC money?? To spend it on swanky offices and aws compute?
All the people I talk to in the Tel Aviv scene are glad they are able to pay these salaries. They choose to hire people from Israel because they believe they have strategic value for their companies and that on-site communication is vital for their success. Many companies in Israel hire remote workers as well. There is room for everybody.
Worth mentioning all the major news outlets in Israel regularly broadcast items about huge exists and IPOs of Israeli companies and ads for hiring tech workers are aired in prime time and plastered all around town
Just to play devil's advocate, the argument here is that programming is largely commoditized nowadays. A given programmer might build a thing that makes the company $10M, but if there are 1000 other people who could also build that thing then really the value isn't so much in the building of that thing, but in the company structure providing the opportunity to build that thing that has a value of $10M.
I think this might be a more interesting argument to engage with than the one people seem to be responding to in this thread.
I would argue it's the C-suite execs that are overpaid. Their decisions are meant to be at a high-level, impesonal and focused on the finaincial well-being of the corporation. ironically that would make their work very easy to automate with AI. In other words... a robot could do his job.
Money is falling from the sky on even the most trivial idea in someone's head, so by definition nobody can be getting too much pay. SV and american tech is crazy overvalued compared to the whole rest of the world, i don't know if this will end up good or bad.
This guy is talking about Israeli tech companies, and he s right, israel can't print unlimited money the way the US can and can't afford to sustain a bubble
> "I'm calling all Israeli CEOs specifically in hi-tech to stop the hiring madness before the bubble explodes," Golan wrote.
I can't help to think that a rich Jewish man whining that employees are paid too much and suggesting wage-fixing as a solution won't help fighting stereotypes...
> "This new generation of young engineers needs proper guidance, and we need to be responsible to teach them career fundamentals. Many of my CEO colleagues [are] already looking or exploring to outsource dev services abroad. We are hurting our young generation as well as our own market and country by the fact we keep raising salaries and offering crazy illogical benefits."
My experience with outsourcing is that projects ends up getting in-sourced eventually (and often it's a complete re-write). But hey, if they want to burn their investor's money like that, good for them. It's a winner's take all market out here and those who will outbid for 10x devs will get to market better and faster.
Maybe CEOs get paid too much for the value they bring? If my company’s head said this, it would be an indication to leave because clearly they don’t value what you bring to the table.
Absolutely. Tech workers are just about the most entitled profession out there for actual value creation. The problem is feature and framework churn introducing unecessary complexity into the development process. Once software development managers get a handle on churn and the work process is standardised work can be increasingly completed by lower skill workers for less pay with no loss of functionality.
But so far, for the last 20 years or so the industry has been more interested in the latest bullshitly.js framework every couple months.
Tl. dr. over investment leads to wage inflation without substaintial functional improvements turning raw materials into in demand products.
There’s just a lack of supply for the work at hand. Someday it might slow down and salaries will lower, but for now that is just a priority mechanism that ensures the highest rewarding businesses can acquire workers first.
I've been thinking about this for a while... and I am really starting to believe that management is the subsection of the workforce being most overpaid these days.
To be fair most middle management isn’t as well compensated as software developers are. A director at a Fortune 500 is pulling down $200-250k, which is equivalent to about an E6 at big Internet natives.
That said, to those who create the value go the spoils, so it’s not at all wrong. The middle managers just get a little frustrated and wish they were still software devs.
I don't think there are any staff software engineers at those companies in the US earning in that range.
At the first 2 companies, that is slightly above the total comp for a new grad.
For Spotify and Twilio, some Senior Engineers may earn in that range, but unlikely that any staff do.
Netflix only hires senior(+) SWE, and is well known for making offers at the top of the market, which is well above $250k.
Tonedeaf and will surely backfire. However, churn is a real problem for overfunded companies participating in an overheated market segment. It'll work itself out eventually.
He has a point – which is that with remote work proving feasible and high salary expectations on the coasts, a lot of companies will be looking for talent elsewhere – either in the middle of the country, or on the same timezones outside of the country.
He's not saying much though, because salary / benefits expectations and what a company is willing to offer are all part of the free market dance, which takes some time before it reaches a "final" state.
A company that will reduce salaries tomorrow will find itself in a difficult position – difficult to find new people, maybe bad publicity etc. But over time (years, a decade?), salaries will likely normalize due to companies hiring cheaper developers piecemeal.
Not all tech jobs are equal, and while some engineers will always be able to charge a premium, others won't. Similarly with good managers, PMs etc.
There's a couple layers of economics involved here. There's supply/demand for employees/jobs. Fewer employees and more jobs mean higher wages. But there's also ROI. If you can sell a year of an engineer's work for $1M, the difference between $50k in comp and $100k in comp looks pretty minor compared to having them to produce that value and not.
A company that will reduce CEO salaries tomorrow will find itself in a difficult position – difficult to find new CEOs, maybe bad publicity etc. But over time (years, a decade?), salaries will likely normalize due to companies hiring cheaper CEOs piecemeal.
Here’s an anecdote from a job I had in Atlanta at an inside sales for Microsoft job: It was an awful, horrible place to work, with major churn and deception, but management never understood why we complained, after-all, we got free snacks, soda, and Chik Fil A on Wednesday’s…
Depends on the circumstance. Skype office in Tallinn had free food because it was an efficient way to feed the mass of geeks in that part of town at the time (10+ years ago).
It's the market. Not everyone can be an engineer, the demand for engineers / tech specialists is growing, ergo it's a seller's market. If you can't afford it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
There is a bank in Russia that had almost the same message -- it's a bubble, we don't want to support it, in 5 years nobody will be able to afford an SWE, we should do whatever we can to avert the tragedy.
Of course when the inside stories came out -- the bank's software department turned out to be a horrible sweatshop drowning in technical debt.
I genuinely don't understand concern about workers being paid too much. I get that a particular company may not be possible with the current compensation standards and that's frustrating, but if you are in the position of having raised hundreds of millions on a particular business plan then you're in a position to possibly make money in the current compensation environment. Like, you can always start a fast food franchise if you want reliable profit off low-wage workers?
If your business can make money, it seems like it would be great to pay everyone as much as possible while still making money. Like, the best way to keep a good thing going to to keep everyone happy (including investors so ofc save some of the pie for them). It just seems like, if you want to keep doing the thing you built the business to do, you wanna minimize risk on the important parts and working hard to pay your knowledge workers less seems like it would undermine that?
I guess it's also a classic observation that capitalists are all about "everyone wins under capitalism" until they see a way for someone else to win less.
I don't begrudge anyone for earning as much as he can or paying employees well. I am just surprised the bubble hasn't popped again, like it did in 2000. The time is coming. Inflation is reducing the spending power of the average consumer and tech gadgets and gizmos will be one of the first things on the cutting block of the middle-class family budget.
I would argue it's the C-suite execs that are overpaid. Their decisions are high-level, impesonal and focused on the finaincial well-being of the corporation. Ironically that would make their work very easy to automate with AI. In other words... a robot could do his job.
What a disingenuous PoS. Honestly, fuck this clown and the horse he rode in on. Anyone telling you that giving you a smaller slice of the pie is for your own benefit is getting one over on you.
The best hot take I have heard on this subject is that engineers are not paid too much. Everyone, including eng, is underpaid WRT rising revenues and exec comp. Of course the pushback comes from CEOs because they are hoarding revenue. I hire. I know it sucks and is hard and you have to pay an arm and a leg to do it. But do you know how much a fucking house goes for these days? Do you know how long it takes to save for a downpayment on $150k? Get the fuck out of here "helping the younger generation" by stagnating salaries.
I'm sorry, I will do better to follow these guidelines and I apologize for violating them.
I do have to say -- I have to question why this comment deserves a personal censure from staff. I read a lot questionable stuff in these comment sections and this is the first time I can recall seeing a personal response like this. I mean I'm talking railing against feminism as a concept and proposing eugenicist solutions to "crime in SF". I guess I must be seeing the comments before the mod team steps in and of course I will make sure to flag them in the future. I appreciate the work you do and of course am not questioning your personal integrity.
The answer is randomness. We don't come close to reading or even seeing all the posts here—there are far too many. Basically, it's the same boring reason as why cops don't pull over every speeder. Of course it always feels like you're the one being singled out when you do get cited (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) - but this is an illusion, and so is the feeling that the mods are against you.
So when you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. And yes, you can definitely help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
“When NBC News first approached AnyVision for an interview, CEO Eylon Etshtein denied any knowledge of "Google Ayosh," threatened to sue NBC News and said that AnyVision was the “most ethical company known to man.” He disputed that the West Bank was “occupied” and questioned the motivation of the NBC News inquiry, suggesting the reporter must have been funded by a Palestinian activist group.”
You know he is full of it because tech jobs salary is wide spectrum, if he wants to pay low price and his work is simple enough he can pick a outsourcing company which will give him the lowest price for that work.
What this clown is complaining is he wants complex work done at low price while wanting his company to get to PE 15-30x so they can get out of it as millionaires/billionaires.
I'm personally pissed I went Mechanical Engineering at this point. Original plan was to go Mechanical Engineering bachelor's and Electrical Engineering masters.
In the end, the pay for both of those careers is kinda complete shit for what you do to get the degree, unless you manage to happily completely bullshit yourself through everything and don't let it weigh on your conscience.
SWE is... arguably easier than both Mech E and Elec E in my mind, and the option for remote work has always been much, much higher. And the starting pay is... about 2.5x more, at a minimum, to begin with - and if you want to be a dick, and know how to interview FAANG and the like, you can hop company to company, do basically nothing and make that pay for 4-6 months before you're found out. And not to mention the benefits...
I can't understand why there's not more of an outrage. It's insane. I simply can't tell any high schooler that an engineering degree outside of SWE, and maybe a highly focused aerospace degree, is worth it for the foreseeable future.
You're assuming that value is measured only in dollars. But surely, someone who is more interested in solving mechanical engineering problems than programming would be happier with a mechanical engineering job than a programming job, even if the salary is lower.
You're assuming that the degree has anything to do with the work. The vast majority of things I've been paid to do in the course of my life have had little to do with the subjects of my degrees. That said, because I have a bachelor's in English and master's in Math Education and Fiction Writing (two separate degrees, not one weird interdisciplinary one), there are fields that I cannot hope to break into. No one will hire me to be their chemist or auto mechanic with my credentials. Programming is probably the easiest field for someone with no paper credentials to get into out of all the highly paid careers.
>But surely, someone who is more interested in solving mechanical engineering problems than programming
And this is why I went the way that I did. Unfortunately, I'm from what's practically extreme poverty in the U.S., I'm sure a large amount of Mech and Elec EE's (or engineers in general) aren't exactly from upper class wealth...
And, guess what. I'm young, the planet is on fire and only getting worse, and it's beyond obvious that nothing is going to change that within my lifetime. That's a singular of many issues. The only way to insulate yourself from a lifetime of suffering from this is by money, and lots of it. Definitely not with what even senior ME's or EE's make.
To imagine a young student would choose to go one route because it's fun or their passion instead of a route that will somewhat secure their future at this point is asinine, and it's going to completely fuck industry over (as if it's not already) when there's a lack of capable engineers in other disciplines than SWE
And the way things are going with everything becoming subscription including the recent push to normalize the idea of everyone becoming permanent renters, the actual cost of a middle-class living is outpacing wages for pretty much everyone that makes below SWE-equivalent salaries. The squeezing of the middle class is just slowly ratcheting up a few percent every year.
If you're young enough a good Mech eng is much better preparation for the nasty world you reasonably can fear is around the corner 30 to 40 years from now.
100%. My wife works in a lab with masters level ME's that make less than half of what I do as a self taught engineer with a liberal arts BA. It's insanity. SpaceX salary data is awesome for this -- on average the SWEs are the highest compensated when the other engineers are doing actual rocket science.
I went SWE and I'm p**ed that Mechanical Engineering pays 2.5 less. It destroys the know-how basis of this country, if not the world. Might as well call it the Tech Disease, modeling upon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease.
SWE is one of the most difficult professions at the highest levels. If it's so simple, then the ready supply of SWE should depress wages but that is clearly not happening.
While SWE may be a very difficult and brain intensive profession at the highest level, so are so many other technical/STEM fields. Yet curiously it's SWE that gets the big bucks, not the other fields.
The issue is that 99% of senior other engineering professions top out at like, $160-$175k at most.
You can be fresh out of college, go to an absolutely entry level junior SWE job, and make $250k.
There lies the issue.
I would also argue EE is more difficult at the highest than SWE. There's some deeply rooted knowledge, logic, and physics required, whereas in SWE... at the highest levels, you can almost pave your own damn path however you choose to and make things work.
While I’m sure there’s a fresh college grad SWE making $250K first-year somewhere, I’d be shocked if the median were over $150K and surprised if the median was $100K or more in the US.
I'd venture that 90% of folks who are able to get a physical engineering degree and get a job doing engineering work would be able to learn programming well enough to get paid for it.
> SWE is... arguably easier than both Mech E and Elec E in my mind
The studies for ME or EE are hard, but are those jobs harder? SWEs handle ungodly amounts of complexity, trying to build and keep running a system based on poorly documented libraries, shitty third-party services, code that was written a long time ago and no one understands it, backcompat requirements, availability and scalability requiremets etc. etc. There's a ton of stuff to juggle in your mind, whereas an EE or ME can just work on button for a car cockpit or something.
I think you could be a lot more charitable to EEs and MEs.
The EE/ME equivalent of what you're talking about for SWEs is not "work on button for a car cockpit or something" -- it's hardware/software/enclosures for things like space-hardened applications and payloads, industrial and commercial applications, or medical devices. Some of these are hellishly complex systems, others are just hellishly out of date, over-budget, poorly documented, and "shitty third-party [i.e. lowest-bidding contractor] services".
If you want to tell an EE or ME to just go work on buttons for a car cockpit, you might as well go tell an SWE that they can just go write AJAX calls to update HTML elements on a page, or update Wordpress plugins for businesses.
The electrical and mechanical engineering fields have far advanced past "button for a car cockpit" into much more complex domains, just like SWE has advanced far past writing vanilla JS to update HTML elements into things like JS frameworks, containers, (P/I/S)aaS.
I've read about an ME who has spent 6 years designing air ventilation for seats 40-80 in some Boeing plane... Are such jobs rare? They seem much more constrained and with much less moving parts than modern server-side software.
This is the equivalent of saying "I know some SWE whos entire job it is to make bright and shiny buttons on web pages to entice old people to click on them for ad revenue, it's all he does and he makes bank for it"
You don't particularly seem to have the best grasp on the breadth of a career in ME/EE
Furthermore... if you're going to give an example, please don't make it one of the most beauracratic red taped government jobs program. Yes, we all know what happens at Boeing is not exactly contributing much to society nor giving fulfilling jobs at this point. Entry level Google doesn't particularly do so either, but you can start $200k w/great benefits & all you have to do is have enough accreditation to get thru initial resume screening (which is not much) and then have grinded leetcode for a few months.
> SWE is... arguably easier than both Mech E and Elec E in my
> mind
I won't touch on any of the other points, but I'd repeat something I've said to many junior engineers over the years.
I'd agree that the barrier to entry to SWE is probably lower. There's a ton of work where you just need anyone with two hands and a brain to smash their fingers into the keys until someone's idea is realized, but to get to the upper echelon of the field, it's at a minimum on par with any of the other engineering fields out there.
Because programming is meta-applicable (programmers write software that writes software and this recurses indefinitely, whereas good luck building a new type of bridge that can build bridges, let alone recursively) you'd naively expect this to top out really quickly.
But instead you can get a good job doing things the machine could certainly do, and do better, but doesn't yet because nobody yet taught a machine how. It's unclear how long that will last, but it may well be enough that everybody reading HN has retired before it's over. At the beginning of my career printf("This %p is %d a %s bad %n idea\n") didn't produce a compile error. In 2020 the C++ Standard Library specification still didn't say that the equivalent mistake was a compile error (but in 2021 they retrospectively fixed the 2020 standard to say it is), and I'd say this is now the middle of my career.
It's all about timing. Electrical engineers were some of the highest paid and most in-demand engineers from the late 80s to around 2007 or so, due to the explosive growth of quantitative finance and synthetic investment vehicles, and the fact that only physics and EE educations were providing the type of skillset in stochastic process modeling you need to do that kind of thing. Then the bubble burst when global credit markets crashed and it turned out a lot of it was castles being built on sand.
Software engineering is in a similar bubble right now thanks to gigantic influxes of VC cash trying to will future monopolies into existence, or at least convince the public markets at some point they've got a decent shot so they can cash out on exit, by undercutting service prices and overpaying developers to keep them from working anywhere else.
Whether it lasts or also comes crashing down we'll see, but historically, every bubble has tended to burst eventually. It's kind of hard to know in advance what the next one will be, especially as a teenager when you're still in a position to tailor your life's educational and career plans to trying to be inside of it when it happens.
I agree, I studied mechanical and then aerospace engineering. While these are still the kind of problems that interest me the most, on one side I regret not having gone to software. The salary difference is just too large to ignore, as well as the possibilities of full remote working.
Hey, don't think you're alone. I'm currently studying chemical engineering and I share the same feelings with you about low salaries. The thing that keeps me going is maybe I can break into management one day. Also my engineering degree is very fungible.
Go work for one of the CAD or FEA companies and start learning to write software. It will take a few years of effort to make the transition, but then you should be able to move.
>Do you know how long it takes to save for a downpayment on $150k?
Tell me you live in the Bay Area without telling me you live in the Bay Area. Snark aside, unless you have massive debt, live in an expensive metro area (SF, LA, NYC), or a combination of both, if you can't save up a sizeable down payment while earning $150k then that issue is on you.
I live in NJ. I can't afford a house with a $200k+ salary because every house that's even half-way decent is either outside my price range or is bought up in cash above asking price.
If OP is cushioned from reality, you are traveling through a wormhole in another plane of existence entirely. 90+% of people buying homes in NJ are going to have a lower household income than your personal income. Somehow, they make it work.
In that case you need to look harder, our outside your current area. I'm from Jersey, $200k salary should give you lots of options especially in central or south Jersey.
I find it hilarious when people who make twice as much as me talk about how I'm "preaching from that ivory tower". Have you looked at condos? Townhouses? The idea that you are constrained by your salary is ridiculous. You are constrained by supply, nothing else.
I think the point is that there are plenty of generally desirable places to live where you can reasonably make a down payment on $150k/yr. You personally have chosen to rule out those places, for reasons that are good ones for you. That's your choice to make, of course, but you've decided you'll only consider the most expensive places in NJ to live, and many people will not do that.
(But man, have things changed. I grew up in central Jersey in the 80s, and back then no one of any means wanted to live across the Hudson from Manhattan. Nuts to see that now many people are priced out of that area.)
I live in Vancouver, and houses here cost $2 million if you want something approaching decent. The median income here is under $100k. Are you going to tell me this is fine?
+ Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, Miami, Austin, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam...
Pick any large city worldwide, and they are "expensive metro areas" with a high cost of living where if you want a 2 bedroom condo you're looking at 750K, and a house is 1M.
Turns out software multi-nationals paying $150k+ are in the same cities.
So, you do the math, how long does it take to save up for a down payment while paying through the roof on rent?
