
Most SF programmers are overpaid - dotBen
http://random.david.ulevitch.com/post/732963757/can-you-elaborate-on-your-assertion-that-most-sf
======
aaronbrethorst
Bad title.

The key piece of the argument is: _"I get frustrated when an inexperienced
candidate looks at a 200 person company against my 25 person company, says
they will pay $10K more and takes that job because I won’t match their offer.
That’s frustrating, because I know, as many others do, that the basis for the
decision is wrong. I can’t say if it’s right or wrong, but it’s certainly
being made based on bad metrics."_

That sounds a lot more like 'inexperienced developers are accepting jobs to
get a little more money while I'm offering them a lot more equity.'

To make a rather cynical counter-argument, one might say that these
inexperienced candidates are actually being quite savvy, and taking a much
more sure bet (a very well-financed company that's offering more money _right
now_ ) instead of taking the riskier one that they think has worse odds of
panning out.

~~~
davidu
Yes, it's a bad title, I just made a comment down below on the post about
that. I'm adding a note at the top.

My real beef is that inexperienced candidates make their decisions based on
incomplete understanding of the metrics and not knowing the metrics that
really matter.

As to your counter-point, empirical evidence argues against that. $150K/yr
today that lasts six months is worse than $100K/yr that lasts a year (and
often the delta is much smaller). People also often forget that usually one
month of not taking home a paycheck is greater than the delta between offers.
But as with everything, ymmv.

~~~
starkfist
A higher salary is always better for the employee unless the company is going
to have a liquidity event in 18 months. Personal cashflow is a pretty good
metric. What other metric matters?

~~~
davidu
If this is what you think, you have not worked long enough to know you are
wrong.

Read this: <http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html>

Lots of people have that environment but then get compensated a lot more to
deal with it (unlike EA).

Go ask folks you know who have been in the workforce for a decade, they will
most assuredly tell you that the different between $100K and $110K is $0. Even
the difference between $100K and like $140K is still fairly marginal when you
compare it to the other things you may or may not be giving up. I mention a
bunch of those things to consider in my post.

~~~
davidu
I'm replying to this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459940>

Why do you work at a startup then? You could make so much more money at a
bigger and more established company.

~~~
davidu
I'm replying to this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459955>

I would always encourage someone being offered 3x their salary to take that.
You'd be stupid not to take that, almost everything else being equal.

I'm talking about the people who see a $10K difference and think it's material
in the scheme of things. If you're only focus is money, then fine, an extra
$833 before taxes per month might move the needle. For the vast majority of
people, that's not a sound way to make decisions on where you spend the
majority of your time.

ps, no clue why news.yc won't let me reply this deep in the thread, some limit
or something. Maybe because I'm OP.

~~~
starkfist
You have to click on the link to the post to do the reply. There is a
ratelimit on deeply nested comments.

$833 * 12 is almost $10K a year, it isn't trivial, especially if you have
student loan payments to make. I just think all web startups offer about the
same thing these days: free beverages! a web site! work 10 hours a day and
LOVE IT! we are cool guys with t-shirts! we all work packed into a rented loft
in soma! .25% of the company! you can use emacs or vi, we don't care! pick
your tools! experience! foosball! you aren't working at microsoft!

It all sort of merges together. So the only thing you can really compete with
is the coolness of your project and the pay. If people are choosing higher pay
elsewhere, maybe your project isn't really that cool.

------
sliverstorm
So if these candidates are so unsophisticated and misunderstand, do you really
want to hire them anyway?

Maybe you should highlight in the interview process (if you do an interview
with them) the potential in regards to equity, so on and so forth?

~~~
davidu
A great engineer is not expected to know how their impact on a 25 person
company will be different than a 200 person company. Moreover a great engineer
may not yet know that not having that impact may be a really important loss to
them.

I'd still want to hire than engineer though. But when they decline, I'd rather
them not tell me it's because the other offer was $10K higher. I'd rather they
tell me they see more room for personal growth, more interesting technology,
etc. There are reasons to decline, and that's okay -- but $10K is a really
stupid one.

~~~
tpz

      A great engineer is not expected to know how their impact 
      on a 25 person company will be different than a 200
      person company. Moreover a great engineer may not yet
      know that not having that impact may be a really
      important loss to them.

A great engineer had bloody well know how their impact will be different, and
they'd damn well know how that difference will affect them. Whatever kind of
engineer you are referring to is most certainly not _great_ and, worse, they
are the kind you should strive to weed _out_ of your hiring process before
they end up getting hired and creating a lot of grief for both themselves and
the company. Among other things, they have a strong tendency to bring to the
table solutions that are mismatched in scale, complexity, delivery style, etc.
relative to what would serve the company best.

(your 10k point is entirely valid, of course.)

~~~
mkelly
I couldn't agree more. An embryo can afford to be good at engineering and have
no understanding of the context, but anyone who's really excellent must
understand how what they do fits into everything else.

------
chrisbennet
@Davidu, I understand your frustration but youth will always insist on
learning some things "the hard way" - didn't we?

When _you_ are hiring an experienced developer, do you ask what they were
making at their last job? Of course you don't, that would be hypocritical.

However, other employers _do_ ask what your previous salary was so they
obviously place some value on salary as a metric. It's only reasonable for
inexperienced candidates to go for the larger salary because they know it will
be used as metric that will effect their income for many years to come.

~~~
davidu
That's a really interesting point.

I sometimes do ask what people were making, but you're right, it doesn't
matter. I already know what I want to offer.

------
maigret
On a side note, I like how the referenced blog almost masks the user names in
the comments. Sorry for the off-topic ;)

------
strlen
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. When I was being made an offer at my
present company, I very specifically told them not to use a higher salary to
incense me: I wanted to make a decision based on factors that compound over
time. These factors are quality of peers, challenge of work, autonomy: all of
these translating to "will I do work that I find fulfilling, will I learn
something at this job that will make me more useful myself to future
employers, my profession of Computer Science/Software Engineering and society
as a whole". I don't mean "will I learn a shiny new technology X", but rather
will I learn new concepts (from work itself, from interacting with people
smarter than me and with different skill sets) that change the way I approach
existing problems and allow to me approach new ones. Unfortunately, many
start-ups are (justifiably) high on the former (no legacy constraints, chances
to use better tools) but low on the latter.

Other factors are often also a combination of these: working hours is a
function of autonomy and ability to work from home (or come in and leave at
times when there's no traffic) can mitigate a bad commute.

Under no circumstances, however, do I say engineers should be underpaid: the
salary shouldn't impose a burden, it should allow you to (when living within
your means) save towards retirement (without counting on winning the IPO
sweepstakes), towards your family, towards (if you're inclined that way) a
mortgage (1). However, pretty much every offer I've had matched those criteria
very well. Decisions had to be made by other parameters.

Shares are a very complex topic: while it's important that employees be a
share holder (tying your own financial success to the company's), the number
of options, the strike price and even the stated equity percentage are often
meaningless when stated _without a context_. There's different kinds of
liquidity, there's reverse splits, follow on funding rounds, different types
of stock, different vesting agreements. Just because someone told you "you
have 0.25% of the company stock", it doesn't imply that you'll be a
millionaire if they sell at a $400 mm valuation.

Work is where you're spending the majority of your waking hours. While an
eager recruiter may tell you "what's the worry, just spend two years here and
then we'll have an exit and you'll be rich!", it's a _tremendous_ decision
(especially if you're enthusiastic and passionate about your field of work, as
most on HN are) that can't be boiled down to any single number.

(1) One exception here is for fresh graduates. Public, prestigious technology
companies do _occasionally_ [edit: added occasionally, per a comment] underpay
them (much more so, in practice, than funded startups: there are established
procedures and formulas for determining salaries) and the pay off (in terms of
skills learned, confidence gained, exposure to smart and experienced
colleagues) is often worth it if you pick the right team and the right
project.

~~~
joshu
reverse spluts suck.

~~~
strlen
fixed

