Who Benefits When Salary Info Is Public? | Hacker News Reader

Who Benefits When Salary Info Is Public?

nytimes.com

10 pointsdonohoe13 comments

Here's the thing: there exist 2x, 3x, even 10x developers. They won't get 2x, 3x, or 10x the comp of an average developer, but they'll get 20%, 30%, even 100% more. The firm is much better off, of course. The 3x developer is leaving money on the table, but they enjoy the respect of colleagues and managers. It just feels good when people need you and you deliver.

But once the 3x developer's salary that's 30% higher than the average becomes public, you can be sure there'll be some grumbling. The 3x is somewhat subjective, while the 30% is very objective. A lot of people don't have the visibility to appreciate that the 3x guy deliver 3x more. For them, they are just a guy who codes just like them, and, maybe even leaves earlier in the evening then them.

I don’t get this thing with “10x developers”. Why are all these really good programmers working on things which are evidently way too easy for them? Their skills really need to be soaked up in more productive ways rather than having them be paid a huge amount for sandbagging.

If anything, transparency around salary ranges might help with this problem. If a transparent salary range reduces the amount of outliers, then those developers who would have been overpaid to do something too easy will be incentivized to find something harder and more interesting to work on.

And if salary ranges have a long-term chilling effect on salaries, that’s even better. Maybe some of those 10x programmers will change careers and become doctors, scientists, (real) engineers, or whatever else, and do something actually useful for society, instead of just building websites.

10x doesn't have to mean that they do particular/regular things in 1/10 the time (or even effort). In my experience the best way to be 10x is to on average/overall avoid wasting time on 9 out of 10 things that won't bear fruit or alternatively head in a direction that saves 9/10 future re-alignment work which no-one will know because it never presents itself. This can be applied at any level, so there could be 10x Senior Staff devs, idk may meet one some day.

It probably does like you say to some extent mean that they should have a different title, but sometimes that title doesn't exist in a particular company.

I also don’t get this.

If there are so many developers wasting their time taking themselves up the garden path working on useless tasks, why isn’t management doing its job?

Just seems weird to have this myth of the 10x developer when it’s clear that there’s no such thing: someone is either overqualified, or an organization just has really bad management.

I wouldn't describe those 9/10 things as useless--only as a less effective path for finding something better. If the definition of 1x is average, then there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure I've made lots of those 9/10 things during my career to get to where I am now. And now I try to share my thought processes and learnings to shorten the time it takes others to doing less of those 9/10 things as well as continue learning how to make better bets.

I don't know why software development has to be clamped to less than an order of magnitude difference, or why there's such a stigma to it. In other areas like sports or chess/go etc, it's very clear that orders of magnitude exist and there's nothing wrong with that. Everyone can still play, enjoy, get better up to wherever they aspire and put effort into or physical limits allow--no shame.

The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you think everyone in a team/company is responsible for a roughly equal share of the output, which is not remotely the case. Good developers aren’t sandbagging, they’re carrying a disproportionate amount of their teams’ output. Or they’re doing solo or in pairs what would take entire teams of average contributors. Harder problems will magnify, not compress, the differences between individuals, as while ~everyone can build websites to some degree, not everyone can make a positive contribution of any size to the most hardcore problems.

You said it yourself: they're carrying a disproportionate amount of their team's output. If the amount is disproportionate, something is screwed up. I suppose they might not be sandbagging. They could be overqualified and simply not realize that they're capable of doing harder work. Or it could be a breakdown in management.

My hope is simply that salaries being transparent will have a regularizing effect on the wildly disparate salaries between careers. Either software engineer salaries should come down or other salaries should come up. Other careers and professions which are (IMO) more valuable to society are experiencing brain drain because of this discrepancy.

Careers like medicine, science, and nonprofits reject the overwhelming majority of job seekers and brutalize their workers precisely because they are extremely oversupplied with labor.

We should be doing possible to divert talent away from these fields until there is a tenured professorship for every PhD candidate, medical residents get 8-hour workdays, unpaid internships disappear, etc.

If you train as a nurse or a physician's assistant, you will have no trouble getting a job and won't have to go through all the rigmarole associated with becoming a doctor. This is not to say that the AMA isn't a cartel and the situation couldn't be improved. But fixing the situation would likely result in lower salaries for doctors... which would require med school to be cheaper... bit of a Catch-22.

Science is oversupplied with labor, but there is absolutely no need for every PhD candidate to have a tenured professorship waiting for them. Better would be to actually fund the sciences by pumping money into national labs while simultaneously creating real teaching stream options at universities and colleges. Could also create more opportunities for people to have careers as research scientists at universities. Hopefully at the same time the number of people languishing in postdocs can be reduced. Ultimately, I don't think the current model of "do it all" professor who is expected to be a rockstar researcher, teacher, and salesperson all at once makes any sense.

Also, curious that you didn't mention K-12 teachers.

At any rate, I strongly disagree that pulling people away from these careers to build websites will have the kind of positive effect you believe it will. The only way to effect these kinds of changes is through labor organizing. And this will only happen if people are in these jobs because they want to be, or because they're a good option among many.

In general these public salaries are not average over the whole company (which would be very heavily skewed by the executives’s salaries), but for a title or department. With that in mind, wouldn’t it make more sense to give the Nx engineer a different title to reflect that they are, in fact, more productive? As you move higher up you are expected to have more impact, which is what the Nx engineer should have.

No. Titles correspond to job descriptions - nature of responsibilities, scope of influence and impact. Presiding over a 300-person project is a different job from presiding over a 5-person project is a different job from completing assigned tasks in that project. All can be done well or badly. But doing one well or badly doesn’t turn it into another.

https://archive.is/yDVZ4

The people. There are a lot of people that are basically workaholics and they are paid the same or less than the others.

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