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Comment by 1letterunixname | Hacker News Reader

I would hazard a guess that principal professional software engineer would make around $350-600k USD. Let's say you need $10 million USD / year to run a fundamental embedded systems team and another $20 for specifics applications on a project. Call it $30 million. Suppose the economic damage of a $2.6 B fine, $ 1 B loss in intangible goodwill, $2 B in lost sales on top of the pandemic, and killing 346 people total say $8 B. That would fund about 5k top industry developers for about 5 years, or 26k person-years of effort. Or, 244k person-years of $9 USD/hr effort. Good luck managing the code quality and project management of such a large project where there is little investment or concern for who's writing code.

TL;DR: Don't competitively incentivize short-term cost savings by strip-mining fundamental capabilities to deliver by throwing human capital to the wind as an interchangeable "fast-food worker" approach.

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Those are SV bubble salaries. Companies that make things don't pay that much.

I used to live outside of Silicon Valley, can confirm that most companies don't pay that much. However, what you didn't say is far more interesting: that it's okay that they don't. That part is the real travesty, that someone would look at a salary and say, "They don't deserve that" rather than, "I deserve that too." The fact is that software engineering isn't about writing code. That bit is quite trivial in any engineers day. What's hard, dare I say what you're paid to do, is to solve problems. Process problems, efficiency problems, resiliency problems, security problems - you're made to answer questions, or develop systems that answer questions to some of the hardest problems corporations have - and you'd ask for anything less?

Boeing most certainly can afford to pay the price especially when human lives are at stake.

No amount of SV salaries wouod have prevented the MAX and MCAS disasters, just saying.

In the real world, programmers and engineers are only a relatively small cohort of the people involved in making something that can be sold. There are 10x more people handling procurement, manufacturing, testing, and a host of other activities. They can't all make 350k and it doesn't stand to reason that the design side should get a disproportionate share.

They paid billions in fines instead.

And lost tens of billions in aircraft groundings, delayed orders and reputation. The only reason the 737Max is still selling is that Airbus can't make A320s and A220s fast enough to satisfy everyone, with a bit more competition Boeing would have been in a really bad position.

Flight software is software for physical objects and is therefore bound by the laws of reality. Recently salaries have been jumping up significantly but they're still way below the low end of that range.

For reference, I'm a Sr aero dev pulling 150k.

And divide that by 2 and you'll have your salary in Europe. :)

Still good enough for a double income household to live a very comfortable life and have a houe of your own. Simply comparng base salaries is stupid.

While I may live in a relative outlier (Norway, with its petro-boosted economy), that sounds like an exaggeration. (Deep sea business, fight for much the same talent as aerospace, senior dev, $95k base and some $35k on top of that in various compensation and bonuses. While well paid, I am probably not in the top quartile nation-wide for my education level and experience)

But yes, the OP is very much right in that companies building actual, physical products don't have the kind of money to burn on engineers that a SV unicorn does...

That income is plenty for me not to have to worry about a thing financially, though. Housing is cheap, transport cheap-ish.

Maybe in Toulouse (Airbus HQ) which is a fairly low cost of living city compared to SV or Seattle, or Paris for that matter, and would allow for a fairly comfortable life.

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