[pjc50]

Tournament wages theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

This seems to happen whenever there's (a) direct competition (b) the value provided by the winner is very scalable (media, sports, software) and (c) most importantly, it can't be substituted by splitting the job among more people.

So footballers follow this model because you can only have 11 people on the pitch - there's no amount of low-wage non-first-worlders you can replace Ronaldo with. Megastars follow this model; if you want to see Taylor Swift, that doesn't substitute cleanly with Ariana Grande or your local bar band.

And software engineers follow this to some extent because splitting problems up is in itself the difficult bit.

[username223]

Maybe that works for Levandowski-level celebrity engineers. There are, maybe, a few thousand pro football players in the world, and a few hundred on the top teams. (For comparison, there are 450 players in the NBA.) The tech behemoths each have tens of thousands of employees, so most engineers are a commodity.

[nerdponx]

You can't typically replace a 150k/yr engineer with two 75k/yr engineers.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Software engineers follow for the same reason as footballers or doctors.

In football, there's only a market for the best. Nobody likes a loser.

It's the same in health. There's no market for mediocre or bad doctors.

Similarly, there's not really a market for software that doesn't work. Writing novel software that solves real problems isn't yet trivial. So there's not a huge market for bad software engineers. And there isn't yet a big enough supply of good ones to meet demand.

See why Google doesn't just lower their bar to hire more candidates. It wouldn't do them any good.

[throwawaymath]

> Similarly, there's not really a market for software that doesn't work.

Not sure you and I are in the same market, friend.

Engineers and doctors are highly commoditized compared to professional athletes and celebrity entertainers. We produce a fundamentally fungible good.

If you can pay the market rate, you can find a replacement engineer to work your software. If Taylor Swift's concert is sold out, you cannot see Taylor Swift. If Aaron Rodgers dies, there are how many quarterbacks in the world capable of replacing him?

These are categorically different things with categorically different market dynamics. Approximately no software engineers (or doctors) have a personal brand, nor an objectively superior skillset.

[BurningFrog]

This is quite confused reasoning. Sports are by definition zero sum games. There can only be one world champion etc.

No such mechanism exist for doctors or software engineers. They get rewarded for the value they create, and there can in principle be any number of them, as long as they create additional value.

[pjc50]

The market valuation of unicorns also assumes there can be only one "world champion" in each market, with high margins. In the medium term either one of Uber or Lyft has to win or investors have to accept big writedowns.

(Doctors are different, they're not scalable and can only treat whoever's in front of them)

[BurningFrog]

Or one could acquire the other.

[pjc50]

Few markets have a market for "bad" employees, surely? What matters in the tournament situation is that the number #2 employee isn't as good as the #1 employee, regardless of what absolute quality level we're talking about.

[scarejunba]

There are things with low differentiation. Average day care is fine. Average janitorial services are okay. Average checkout operator is okay.

No one needs the exceptional janitor.

Fwiw though, I think there's lots of room for the mediocre software engineer. Enough work requires little to no skill. I've done some of it myself b

[throwawayjava]

> Fwiw though, I think there's lots of room for the mediocre software engineer. Enough work requires little to no skill. I've done some of it myself b

Unlike janitors or checkout operators, software work can be outsourced. Outsourcing doesn't make sense for high-skill software engineering for two reasons. First, actually writing the code is only a small part of the job. And second, even when it comes to writing the code, there's still a real quality difference between top US candidates and top international candidates [1].

But software work that requires "little to no skill" is exactly the sort of thing you can successfully outsource.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-computer-science-...

[arsenico]

> In football, there's only a market for the best. Nobody likes a loser.

Would totally disagree - given the number of football competitions [1], it is obvious that there's a market for anybody who wants to and can kick ball.

Same for software engineers - there are 23 millions of those in 2018 [2] and abundance of body shops, government jobs ("good enough for government work") and various engineering support functions says the opposite of what you're saying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_football_c...

[2] https://evansdata.com/reports/viewRelease.php?reportID=9

[newshorts]

Google does hire lower bar candidates, they are called vendor contractors.