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Comment by dave2000 | Hacker News Reader

dave2000·

I think you're going to get perfectly good developers for $150,000. Are you going to get twice as good ones if you pay twice that, or just greedy ones? Have transparency and let someone else pay the darlings. You'll still get your work done.

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This exact "greed" rhetoric is what helps businesses keep dev salaries down. You don't get greedy people for that much, you get smart business people (they know their worth and charge for it).

I do not understand devs who justify low salaries this way.

Why make 50% of your potential?

Exactly. If you are just greedy then programming is not the right field. Much more reliable to make a boatload of cash through other means if that's all you care about.

I think you're misunderstanding what he is saying.

I'm not justifying low salaries; i'm saying that $155,000 is plenty.

"plenty" by what metric? It seems to be less than market rate (for good experienced developers). What other metric should we use?

What do I have to sacrifice to earn 100% more money? There's a lot more money in doing harm than doing good, and I will gladly take less money to do good.

In this case, you maybe don't have to sacrifice much at all. There are plenty of good reasons to go work at a large software organization, e.g. stability, and most startups will work you harder for less tangible benefit.

Some people may be willing to take less pay in order to have more control/freedom in a small startup, rather than just being a cog in the machine at Google or Microsoft.

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