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Comment by netdevnet | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if comparing salary potentials coming from two different socio-economic periods is useful or likely to mislead.

Tech and people versed in it were not common (to people outside tech) and so the high salaries would reflect that. Now is not the case. It was always going to be temporary. As people become acquainted with tech people, the magic vanishes, you see the code behind the pixels. At the same time, tech people themselves did cause this by making tech easier to understand and manipulate.

It's like a magician, the first few times, it is enticing and mysterious but after a while it becomes ordinary. Tech wizards are just like that.

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People with wizard-like skills are out there but typically can't command the salaries they used to.

Todays SWEs tend to know far less about how computers operate and how protocols work than in the old days.

The reality is that thanks to those tech wizards, most companies don't need tech wizards to build tech products and most tech workers don't need to know anywhere near as much as you would need to back in the days.

The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks itself while letting big companies extract max value out of it and contribute nothing or extremely little to the open source world.

Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo.

Tech wizards wrote their fate on code, compiled it and served it to the market. This is the result

> Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo.

To be fair, he does not come across as the kind of person you would want to work with, no matter what kind of software he is able to produce. Once hired, others actually have to work with him in such companies. In fact, Apple did end up hiring him soon after said rejection but quickly determined he wasn't a good fit there either. No wizard is worth having by your side if they make your life miserable.

How bad could he have been? According to the parent, his software is used daily by that company. At the very least, they could have just hired him full-time and then stuck him in a remote cubicle by himself, reporting to one manager who just keeps tabs on him, and told him to basically just keep working on that, and if he has spare time, think of other convenient projects to work on that customers might like.

Perhaps they could have, but why? What would be gained in hiring him to sit there and do nothing just because in the past he wrote some code that a company happened to find useful?

I thought the consensus was that he was extremely skilled, and he's obviously proven himself at making very useful tools for that system. Why not hire such talent and put it to some use? Not all positions need to have a lot of team interaction.

Why? Why hire him when you can just as easily hire someone else with all the same skills and a more suitable personality?

You don't know someone else has the same skills and can perform. Lots of new hires don't work out (for technical skill reasons) even after passing the interviews; they're always a gamble.

Well, we know that the person in question has a low likelihood of working out. As before, other companies, like Apple, tried but were unable to make it work. As his personality demonstrates, and as the testing at Google concluded, he is unlikely to be a good fit for such organizations.

Sure, there is a slim chance that Google could have found the right fit for him in the end with the right accommodations[1], but why take the risk[2] when there are others lined up that are far less risky?

Of course there are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds...

[1] That would have to be invented. Now you are also relying on the implementer at Google, which brings great risk on the employer getting things right even if the worker somehow magically came risk-free.

[2] Especially when the tests designed to try and estimate that risk raised red flags.

>Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily.

Why does this surprise you? Google didn’t even employ the chefs that made the food consumed by the employees daily either.

Just because you made a thing that was useful doesn’t mean you have the skills that Google is looking for.

Homebrew was very useful because Mac osx didn’t have a good package ecosystem for one-liner installs. The tech behind it though wasn’t particularly unique or groundbreaking. So the author’s skill here was finding a market with unmet demand for a free package manager. That’s not what Google was looking for.

Identifying unmet demand is probably the most valuable skill any Googler can have, it already has enormous engineering talent. It's the difference between GMail or Android (or Search, obv), vs throwing away hundreds of millions on Google Glass or Google+

Engineers don’t pick products anymore. That died a long time ago

Yeah most of Google's successful products are acquisitions, not homegrown.

Kind of the point - the engineers rejected the guy because (in their perception) he wasn't good enough at leetcode or some esoteric language feature or whatever - meanwhile they were blind to the fact that he possessed a skill that was far more valuable to the company, which they themselves had no ability to recognize or evaluate.

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