

What the Average Person Doesn't Understand About High Paying Jobs - PakG1
http://www.pakg1.net/2010/11/what-average-person-doesnt-understand.html

======
djhworld
It's articles like this that perpetuate the acceptance of unpaid overtime.
Bosses lap in the luxury of getting their peons to work over their contracted
hours for free because it's considered to be normal in the culture of the
company, any employee who leaves at 5:30 is seen to be not pulling their
weight in what's essentially a very masculine trait (people comparing their
hours of work to others as a gauge of how hard they work.)

Unpaid overtime is nothing to show off about, I find it quite frankly
abhorrent that he's actively showing off about it

~~~
_delirium
Some of that culture develops pretty early, I think. Certainly by undergrad
there seems to be a culture at many engineering schools where it's a point of
pride to put in lots of hours. Sort of part of the "hardcoreness" to brag
about 16-hour coding binges, weeks of sleep deprivation, etc.

On the other hand, there's also a culture, possibly smaller, of doing the
opposite: making it a point of pride to _not_ put in lots of hours, while
still doing top-quality work. That culture emphasizes a different kind of
hardcoreness, sort of the hackerly virtuoso who can bang out an A-quality
semester project in a single day of in-the-zone wizardry.

I definitely notice that among adult engineers as well, at least as far as
attitudes go (not sure how much variance there is in actual hours worked).
There's the person who brags about how much they work and sees 9-5ers as
slackers; versus the person who sees 60-hour weeks as a kind of failure, and
instead brags about the time he fixed a huge problem in 3 hours and left work
in time for happy hour.

~~~
djhworld
I think it's a bit different when you're a student though, when you're a
student, your renumeration package in terms of money is £0 at that moment in
time (or -£9000+ when you consider tuition fees) and the only compensation you
will get is a piece of paper detailing the results of your efforts. So the
motivation isn't money, it's more like "I have to finish this project or I
won't be able to graduate"

I suppose you could argue that I'm contradicting my original point, after all
those who work the hardest will get the top grade in the class is directly
comparable to those who work the hardest will get the most money.

But I think it's largely subjective, if you work 12 hours in a day, what
percentage of those 12 hours are productive? For me I find that I tend to burn
out after a while and my productivity becomes jaded and leaves me vulnerable
to making silly coding errors or not seeing the bigger picture.

~~~
BerislavLopac
I'm sure you meant remuneration... ;)

------
ivanstojic
I would strongly disagree with the author about the following:

    
    
       Frankly, looking at most people I know who want to
       work for big companies but don't, these people aren't
       cut out for big companies.
    

Having spent about three years working for a large software company that is
actually horrible at software, I can firmly say the following: size does not
matter. A lot of the old-school large companies moved sideways into software
and don't really have the competence to deliver good projects.

Also, since when do the large companies value creativity?

~~~
xiaoma
I think it really depends on what "big company" means. The author was likely
talking about big _software_ companies that recruit the best, such as Google,
Facebook or Apple. Your comment makes me think of big companies that do
software badly on the side, such as banks or telecoms.

edit: I see you said software companies. Maybe I have been brainwashed by
their HR materials and those companies employees aren't so special.

~~~
_delirium
Even apart from banks and telecoms that mainly do other stuff, there are a
whole range of companies whose businesses are largely software which don't
have technically-focused cultures. SAP is sort of a canonical example. Then
there's the whole shadow world of large consulting firms, outsourcing firms,
defense and aerospace contractors, etc.

------
mml
This article strikes me as being written by a kid.

------
deathflute
I understand what the author is trying to say, but I find the language very
confusing. To say that, you need to be creative and intelligent to be able to
deal with crap sounds correct in theory, but in practice it is the worst use
of these skills. To deal with crap, you have to basically "suck it up" and
swallow you pride. Thats it! Ultimately if that is a large part of what it
takes to succeed at your job, then you are basically adding a lot of noise to
both your career and the success of your company.

------
kljensen
If the author worked in a start up, he'd have written a more succinct article.

------
kunjaan
"Especially at Google, where a bottom 1% employee would likely be considered a
top 1% employee at any smaller company."

What?

~~~
RK
I think stats where not the strong point of the article...

A top 1% (US) athlete might make it to college, but would still have little
chance of becoming a professional. A top %1 musician would probably make a lot
closer to $0 than $1M.

------
robryan
So people on a fixed yearly amount are getting paid for a 40 hour work week,
then expected to work 60 just to keep their jobs? Doesn't seem like a good
deal to me...

~~~
phjohnst
Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid
to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."

In the UK your employer cannot force you to work more than 48 hours a week,
but written into my contract was a clause waiving that maximum. I dont think
I've ever worked less than 60 hours a week. The weeks where you work 80+
hours, you just try not to think about the hourly rate...

~~~
ph0rque
_Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid
to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."_

At my previous company, the assumption was, "You're getting paid to get X work
done, and if you can finish it in 40 hours/week, then we need to keep adding
to X until it takes you 60 hours/week to get it done." How is that different
than "You're getting paid to do N hours of work per week", with N > 60?

~~~
rdtsc
That's the farcical part of it. You are getting payed to get X done. Then can
you go home after you do X if you did in 30 hours? Can you just tell your
boss: you tasked me with doing X, it is done. I am taking a half Thursday and
Friday off?

Of course not. That will be met with a look of disbelief and shock. They will
probably quickly assign your another thing Y that takes another 40 hours to
complete so now you have 10 hours to complete the new 40 hour job.

Because there is no payed overtime everyone is relying bonuses. And guess what
happens with bonuses? "Sorry this was a tough year so we had to reduce bonuses
this year, but thanks for your great work".

------
iliketosleep
for getting into large corporates, it's mainly a matter of fitting into a
particular mold. to climb up the ladder it then comes down to people skills
and politics.

the ones who don't fit the mold and want to get in definitely need to be
creative (though such people may get bored very quickly at most big
corporates).

~~~
wazoox
Amen. Actually what I've learnt from people working in big corps (be it
banking, pharma, IBM, whatever) bureaucracy and politics reign supreme. I'm
absolutely sure that they don't fare any better than the most despised
government bodies, actually. So much for the free-market legend.

~~~
mdda
Internal corporate politics don't contradict the ideas of free markets. It's
just that there's complex signalling going on (which an outsider can't be
privy to) that erects barriers to entry.

These barriers are beneficial to the individuals, but don't help the
corporation - a typical Agency Problem. Same thing with government : a huge
corporation with monopolistic rights, and no profit motive.

~~~
Benjo
>Internal corporate politics don't contradict the ideas of free markets.

I don't follow. Are you claiming that internally most big corporations could
be considering free markets?

Low barriers to entry are pretty essential to free markets. High barriers
discourage competition and encourage monopolies. See Microsoft, AT&T, Google.

"Free market" is a relative term, but it would be hard to describe the
internal workings of most companies that way.

~~~
mdda
When I read the GPs complaint about free markets, I took it to mean that this
situation was proof that free market ideas are invalid. To counter this, I was
trying to say that people themselves (through creating barriers) are
deliberately undermining the free market idea.

Now I see that it can be read to imply that the US (the land of free markets)
isn't really so competitive after all (hence the 'legend'). True enough.

------
chrisbennet
This is a quote from a cover letter I actually sent to a company I was
interested in: "On the other hand, if your company is using unlicensed
software and .NET 1.1 instead of buying the current tools _or is managed so
poorly that the employees have to work a lot of overtime_ , well - we probably
wouldn’t be a good match."

------
lkozma
Something's fishy here: everyone comments that it is a crappy article, still
it has 54 upvotes.

~~~
minsight
It's possible that there is no overlap between the set of upvoters and the set
of bitchers. There are dozens of people on the internet.

------
lgleason
This guy must be living in one of those areas of China with massive pollution.
Lead poisoning would explain this kind of delusional logic.

------
dropkick
If you want to work hard, feel appreciated, and have opportunity, start or
join a startup.

From my experience working at Microsoft, the author sounds clueless. Large
companies will eat your soul because they like the souls of naive young
developers who think they can get ahead by being smart and working hard at
large companies.

------
known
"Eventually, being a top guy in the corporate world is too bureaucratic,
political, and constraining. One might even argue dehumanizing. But the
average person on the outside looking in wouldn't understand this."

------
bhoung
I was wondering what kind of response this article would get. It had seemed to
me that opinions that tend towards pointing out the ugly truth (or approximate
this) are not really appreciated here. I suspect it's because of the general
level of optimism required to be productive rather than stuck in a negative
stupor. My appraisal is that the comments here are mixed but generally not
appreciative of the article. What is surprising is that the submission was
upvoted, and the criticisms of the opinion in the article were also upvoted.

------
cherenkov
There is something wrong about "buying" loyalty. Call me old-fashioned but the
reason you want someone in the company is because they want to contribute. How
can you "generate" contribution from someone who wants to "leave?"
Fundamentally it is wrong, and values outlast everything.
[http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/12/when-
google...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/12/when-google-gets-
into-a-bidding-war-for-its-own-talent/)

~~~
araneae
Well, if that were the case, people wouldn't need to get paid at all!

Salaries track two things:

Supply: If something is unpleasant, dangerous, or illegal there will be fewer
people who will do it. Construction workers, drug dealers and prostitutes can
make some decent cash.

Demand: If you are awesome and your skills are in demand, companies will pay
more to keep you. This is why a high-class prostitute can make quite a bit
more than a street walker, despite the danger of street-walking that should
limit the supply.

So yes, if working at your job is pleasant, you can pay your employees less.
But if your employees are in high demand, you can't pay them _that_ much less
because the whole point of work is that you're exchanging how annoyed you are
to have to be there for cash.

~~~
bhickey
Ah, but drug dealers and prostitutes don't necessarily make good money!
Stephen Levitt (Freakonomics) has some papers on this subject:

<http://www.streetgangs.com/academic/gangfinance.pdf>
<http://economics.uchicago.edu/pdf/Prostitution%205.pdf>

~~~
araneae
That's not news. Like I pointed out, supply AND demand are important. If you
are 50 year-old cracked out prostitute with missing teeth, you're not in high
demand. They lower the average income quite a bit.

And yeah, illegality and danger does limit the supply, but unfortunately not
as much as it should. That's because these illegal jobs aren't competing with
careers in computer science; they're competing with jobs at McD's. All they
have to do is outpay that and the risk of getting caught, which is sadly not
much.

------
mcantor
I am a well-compensated developer at a Fortune 500 company, who has to be
meticulous about limiting his unpaid overtime, and _I_ felt condescended to by
this post. Who is this guy!?

------
peterwwillis
What the average person _should_ understand about high paying jobs is: it's
bullshit. One guy gets paid half what another guy gets for doing the same job.
You can analyze it any way you want, you can compare markets and the critical
nature of the job crossed with the experience and yadda yadda. It's bullshit.

Many of us have worked with people making tons of money and they just don't
seem to have a clue... That's because they're good at bullshitting. The pointy
haired boss, the brainless engineer, or my favorite, the government employee
who gets mid-6 figures for re-filing someone else's paperwork.

What the average person doesn't understand is they can easily get the high
paying job if they can bullshit well enough. And we all suffer because people
like this keep getting hired and we have to deal with their bullshit. Why some
companies have great hiring practices and others are a joke, and they pay
virtually the same, I have no idea. But if you can bullshit, there's a high-
paying job waiting for you somewhere.

------
betageek
Great article, most if this rings very true to my experience in one of the
large old skool web businesses. It's a shame the rest of these comments choose
to moan, IMO your just telling it like it is, not making a value judgement.

------
PakG1
The recent $6 million payout to a Google employee to keep her from running to
Facebook has got me thinking a bit about what people think about jobs and
compensation. Here are my thoughts! :)

------
pedanticfreak
I am still not sure what the author means by 'big company.' I have worked at
Fortune 100 companies and the intelligence of the IT staff is nothing to brag
about from a technical standpoint. In fact most 'big companies' are political
quicksand for high throughput individuals.

That said, economies of scale are a wonder to behold. When you think of how
little each person outputs per day yet how much money the corporation still
makes and how much each executive still skims. It makes me think there must be
brilliance somewhere in the organization chart to make it all work.

~~~
oz
This has always struck me as well: given so much inefficiency, waste and
corruption, how do they still survive? On a macro level, given human
irrationality, such as our well-documented cognitive biases, how does the
world continue to 'work'?

~~~
yters
Yeah, I've wondered this too. How do so many incompetent people create so much
value? Yet, with the recent economic trouble, it's a bit less mysterious. They
don't.

------
theoden
"So all things considered, is she really worth $6 million? If she's a top 1%
engineer, and a scarce female top 1% engineer at that, why not?"

Imagine if she was not only female, but a black, lesbian female. Why, she'd be
worth billions!

~~~
mdda
Not sure I'm buying the idea that gender has much to do with this. I'm sure
Google could instead find an additional 10 female programmers for $100k each -
thus changing the averages without having to overpay this one employee.

Looking at organizations in general, the pay structure is definitely not a
Normal distribution (which people might intuitively believe it should be). If
the average there is $100k, the bunch of people earning more than $500k are in
a different class altogether.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>I'm sure Google could instead find an additional 10 female programmers for
$100k each - thus changing the averages without having to overpay this one
employee.

Eh? This is really sad - do Google really have to choose candidates that
aren't the best in order to keep a particular balance of sexes. Is that
company wide, department wide, etc..

I'd have thought a progressive company, like Google appear to be, would employ
the best person for the job and do away with irrelevant discrimination.

~~~
mdda
Agreed - that's why I'm not buying the idea that the gender of the employee
had anything to do with the amount of the pay.

------
ahoyhere
If you're amazing at what you do, and good at selling it, you can get a high-
paying job without a lot of the extra bullshit. In short: earn your pay.

People who truly earn their pay are rare. For some reason, almost everyone is
concerned with what they're "worth" (what they can get) but never stop to
think where that worth comes from. It's not just about how much people will
pay, but about how much value you create.

If you don't actually create enough value, then things like being the guy who
stays late and blah de blah will matter. If you create the value, but nobody
knows, it's your own fault. And if you create tremendous value, and people
know it, and you are still expected to sit up and be a good little doggy,
you're working for the wrong people, because a good business leader should be
able to do the math where Your Value Y is Your Salary X * Some Good Multiplier
-- and behave accordingly.

Because if you create that kind of value, _they_ will have to hold on to _you_
instead of vice versa.

Yet again, the balance of power is paradoxical: if you create great value, you
hold the power, even if everyone else walks around thinking the employer is
the one with the power.

------
mgkimsal
"That $6 million offer isn't something that Google would give everyone. It
would have to be a really elite employee, although rumors say that this time
it has to do with the employee being a female engineer. Even if her gender was
the catalyst for such a high offer, we can safely presume that if she weren't
worth it, she wouldn't be getting the money."

\------------

How do you determine "if she weren't worth it"? Assuming this person has been
at the company for a while, she's now only _worth_ something like this
relative to the value of Facebook having her on staff. The value the person is
bringing to Google was never close to $6m, otherwise she would have already
been getting that (or close to it). The $6m value to Google is in keeping
whatever she knows away from Facebook.

Also, FWIW, these huge payouts to a few Googlers are primarily stock payouts,
not cash. Is this $6m deal just a cash payment? $6m/year salary? This person
probably has some very strategic knowledge which Google simply doesn't want
Facebook to have.

~~~
PakG1
Probably true, a huge amount of game theory there that no doubt contributed to
the scenario. But just because she wasn't worth $6m when she joined, it
doesn't mean that she's not worth $6m now. Almost nobody (maybe 1 in a
billion, and that's if you include professional athletes) is worth $6 million
if they're only just starting out. But after establishing an amazing track
record, that's when a lot of people are able to cash in. I think it may be
naive if we attribute the dollar amount to only what knowledge she can bring
to Facebook, and disregard whatever merit she can bring herself to the table.
When was the last time you heard of someone being paid millions to just shut
up and do paperwork in the basement mail room? I think that stuff is just for
spy novels, no?

~~~
sanswork
I know of a few cases(I can think of 3 off the top of my head) where people
are paid a few million to "shut up and do paperwork"(or not do so). All
involving very high level people who are planning on leaving a company and
that company not wanting them to go work for a competitor so they get a fat
cheque and a contract saying they won't work for a year or 2.

~~~
PakG1
An executive, OK. But a non-senior engineer?

~~~
piaw
Having assisted in negotiating a couple of those multi-million dollar offers,
that is absolutely correct. Most of those offers aren't going to "successful
senior people." They're going to people who were repeatedly passed over for
promotions despite doing great work (i.e., people who fail to manage their
careers properly).

~~~
AlexC04
I've read this a few times and am trying to parse exactly what you mean.

The million dollar offers tend to go to people who keep their head down and
quietly work hard, possibly doing less-than-glamorous work (As opposed to the
big-shot high flying 'executive' who get their photo in the company
newsletter)?

That seems counter-intuitive to me - but - maybe it's because the "company
newsletter types" are already getting the recognition and compensation they
deserve? Or at the very least get the opportunity to discuss those factors
more often?

~~~
piaw
That's because those are the people most likely to apply to another job! The
people I know getting the big packages aren't waiting to be "noticed." That's
not likely to happen since they weren't recognized where they were. They took
a proactive approach and shopped around for a new job.

Only then were their contributions recognized internally and the big offers
were required to keep them as they were already pissed off.

Trust me, it's not the fast track people who are getting the giant paydays
right now. Those people are sitting pretty and already have substantial awards
and wouldn't bother interviewing elsewhere.

