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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> no company could pay 5 million dollar or so for an average 20 years of experience.

Uh, they seem to find that money just fine for execs, who are not even the ones keeping servers up, so to speak...

This is a really important point that is always missing in these threads - execs at most companies (even at FAANG, but esp outside) make massive multiples of their average engineer.

5.000.000 for a single exec means 50.000 for each of the 100 "average engineers" working in their department. You can overcompensate execs because there fewer of them than engineers.

In this example, how much are these average engineers making? Usually, even at FAANG, less than 10% of them will command a 500k peak-SV salary. So for the rest, 50k each is a sizeable amount of money. In my experience, this is 2x the average yearly bonus.

But also because the exec has more power. More power over budgets, over the company, a closer relationship with the people who decide their salary, etc. We just have power over the tech, which may be vital, but it's not power we leverage very hard.

While it may seem that way a lead engineer has more actual ability to swing outcomes than an executive. I can save or loose my company millions in a month but my exec can’t even get us 1-2 people without 3 months of paperwork. He can’t allocate more than 5k in capital without months of review. And he works 60-80hrs a week requesting status. It’s a total joke that he Gets paid 3-4x what engineers do

Was that an executive or a middle manager? It sounds like the latter. But you're absolutely right that it's weird that the people who's job it is to enable engineers, get paid more than the engineers who do the actual work.

You can’t tell the difference but he gets executive pay and title

I've said this before on HN: for a while I thought that execs were overpaid (generally, it is true!) until I worked with some founders and owners of companies who really did bring 10x or 100x the value I did to the company.

It doesn't mean they did 10x the work, but they definitely brought the value.

Exceptions don’t prove a rule. There are engineers who are also similarly valuable - and they get paid well. But exec/manager/admin pay is always inflated, regardless of that value. I say this from personal experience and insight into salaries at various kinds of companies, FAANG included.

I'm not saying you're wrong.

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