[benreesman]

This is sort of well-articulated and someone thought about it a lot. The salaries seem fine, as long as there’s 1MM in liquid equity to go with the L7 one like Google does.

But it doesn’t seem to address the real issue (to which I also don’t have a final answer): the jock/nerd thing is still playing out.

If, as I believe is mostly true, A16 is pretty on the money with the software eats the world thing: hackers “should” today and inevitably will be the highest paid people possibly excepting the best salesperson.

If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day, anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring.

COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.

It’s going to be a painful, but ultimately necessary transition where everyone whose math stopped at calc has their TC stop at 150-200k, and that money/seniority/prestige goes to the only truly irreplaceable people, again with the notable exception of the sales guy.

[heurisko]

> tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.

Why do you leave out class analysis? This has far more relevance than arguably either height or race.

White working class boys, at least in the UK, are the demographic least likely to go to university.

The story is likely to be the same in other countries. If you're working class, you're not going to be the intake for an MBA.

[benreesman]

I agree, I was using talk white guy as a shorthand for rich kid with several other attributes.

Being a tall white guy myself I thought it would get me less crucified.

[sockpuppet69]

That’s incredibly racist.

[benreesman]

Me acknowledging that I’m squarely in the demographic that needs to be very aware of how easy it is to attribute success to hard work rather than privilege makes me any kind of prejudiced?

I’ve got the same tribalism firmware as any other homo sapien, and I’ve probably said some xenophobic shit in my life without even realizing it.

But I try hard to make my way on my code rather than being 6’4”, a lean 230 and conventionally handsome, I think that’s a lame way to make a living no matter what it pays, unless one is a professional athlete or a model or something. I’d probably need to tweak my body fat percentage by as much as 10% to have the same superficial stats as an NFL half back, but I’d rather embrace my inner nerd, which feels more natural.

If you want to read about it, we’ll I post under my real name and Chaos Monkeys won a bunch of awards a few years ago.

[usaar333]

Class analysis isn't that relevant in the workspace. At least in the US, your perceived class changes with economics, so there's not much class differential in meetings.

All said, I don't intuitively buy the idea of Zoom radically changing opportunities. At least as a short engineer, I've sensed zero difference, but then again, I never thought of my height as an actual handicap with regard to my job (studies on initial impressions be damned as the initial impression isn't that relevant once you've built up reputation).

[throwaway2037]

I work in finance. I have the seen the same situation play out with salespeople. As risk taking at large investment banks has fallen dramatically since 2008 regulatory reforms, the value of sales people has only risen. The "alpha" sales person seems to have no ceiling. Ideally, this sales person is working in a product area that does not increase balance sheet risk... holy moly... they are worth more than weight in gold. They bring big new accounts that trade like crazy, but balance sheet (and risk) does not balloon.

And now to offer a small criticism of your post: I prefer to say "conventionally attractive" over "tall white guys", because that would be more inclusive. Yes, really, I have seen very successful women who present just shy of pornstars-in-real-life and absolutely clean-up by selling to drooling old (dumb) white, male, portfolio managers. The sooner all of this is replaced by passive investment, the better for all customers -- but not big banks(!). After all, as the saying goes: "Where are the customers yachts?"

[benreesman]

I can’t find any fault with your post, I think any confusion is due to an error in judgement on my part that dissing my own demographic as a euphemism for people who, uh, historically got more recognition for less work was a reasonably diplomatic thing to do.

Silver lining: your comment added insight to the conversation even if it was a response to clumsiness on my part.

[aphexairlines]

If you truly believe this, then please reconsider. The tech industry doesn't reward people for technically challenging work. Consider how many large companies were/are built on what you'd consider to be terrible technology choices.

Don't expect an "ultimately necessary transition" because it'll likely go in the opposite direction.

[benreesman]

Please reconsider because I’ll do myself a disservice? Or please reconsider because I won’t take 1% of the marginal revenue I generate and we can’t have that kind of thinking going around?

[aphexairlines]

Reconsider because you'll do yourself a disservice by expecting the world to work that way. You don't want to be surprised and upset when your employer rewards someone for introducing more bureaucracy instead of some technically challenging work you delivered.

[benreesman]

How about I worry about whether or not my haphazardly self-medicated anxiety disorder keeps me around the p90 in comp in a bad/typical year instead of the p99 when I have my shit together, and you worry about whether or not the wage fixing scandal with the big lawsuit involving all the big names might be an example of structural suppression of engineer wages?

[humanrebar]

> COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.

Being tall probably matters less, sure.

I do find that ability to communicate in writing with English-speaking audiences is much more important than it used to be. Technical communication and persuasion that used to happen in hallways and on whiteboards is now happening in discussion threads, written code reviews, design papers, etc. In some cases, I expect people that some people that used to struggle now benefit from the ability to communicate more deliberately or without a verbal accent.

I don't know that white versus non-white maps to excellent writing skills as such. Partly because I'm never sure what folks mean by "white" in these contexts.

[benreesman]

Yeah, I’m personally a bit conflicted that English, especially written English is such a key skill. I once spoke a little French, and enjoyed it immensely, but there’s no money in it so it atrophied almost out of existence.

Mandarin seems to be a pretty credible candidate for a “must know” business language, but even there that’s climbing up hill at least a little.

[pc86]

Why are you conflicted about this? There has to be a lingua franca for business, the internet, etc. (not necessarily the same language). Historically speaking, it makes sense how English would bubble up as this language. Why should that cause guilt or conflict?

[benreesman]

Oh I just mean it doesn’t seem “fair” that other people have to work hard to be understood in the lingua franca, and I grew up in a household where it was spoken. Opinions will differ on whether I can construct a pleasant sentence from an aesthetic point of view, but I got “this line of code looks to be where the big is” for “free”.

[loudmax]

It's not just sales, it's figuring what to sell, and when to pivot. It's all well to have a solid tech stack but the market changes and companies need to see changes coming and adapt. Having the most optimized compiler isn't going to help if you're trying to sell something nobody wants.

Even tech companies don't just depend on elite programmers plus an exceptional sales guy. You need good design, good customer service, good marketing, and so on. Yes, there's a lot of bullshit in those fields (not that programming is free of it), but there's real value there too when executed correctly.

[rr808]

> If you worked successfully on an optimizing compiler all day, anything that an MBA teaches is borderline boring.

Optimizing compiler is a great example of a niche that a few guys should be in that really shouldn't be paid well. The big bucks earned at Google/FB aren't earned because they have better compilers or low level libraries, its because of the business strategies they have.

[humanrebar]

On the other hand, increasing performance by 0.5% at their scale is big savings. Certain kinds of optimizations can save over 10% in runtime performance, easily. That means less compute, less engineering time spent optimizing with other approaches, snappier performance compared to the competition, and so on.

Yeah, pay the "business" person better who decided, wisely, to fund these kinds of projects. But in my experience, it's a lot easier to find a strategic thinker who can understand my previous paragraph than it is to find an engineer who can accomplish it. It's especially hard to find engineers who can see that opportunity, explain it well enough to get funded, and bootstrap the project until it shows enough promise to justify itself.

You're not wrong, though, that network effects and so on are a much bigger determinant in competitive advantage at a large scale. But "business strategies" can and do include ideas like "don't buy extra data centers".

[benreesman]

1% on HHVM is a number I can’t say more about than no one would believe it.

[JonChesterfield]

Compilers are why we can write in C++ instead of assembly. The related fields of interpreters and language runtimes are why we can write in Python.

The optimising part makes languages that are faster to develop in run fast enough that they can actually be used to build useful things.

Bugs introduced in that stack are horrendous to run down, easy to introduce and broad in fallout.

Rather a lot of our modern tech world is built on compilers. It's a great example of where compromising on engineering capability scatters costs and breakage all the way through the system.

[bluGill]

While you are not wrong, it isn't the full picture. For most projects we don't need more language/compiler performance. Most web sights are served with a handful of servers, likely shared servers on AWS or something (so that you can get full data center failure redundancy - which is probably overkill). The total cost to run the servers isn't all that much on the bottom line and so you shouldn't pay more for compiler optimization.

Of course google, facebook, and other large companies should be paying for optimization as it will pay off, but the vast majority of systems don't run at that scale. For most optimization is about ensuring response time is acceptable, and that is generally more about optimizing your code not your compiler.

[benreesman]

Its not even that you’re wrong in any meaningful way that makes this endlessly looping class of argument get under my skin.

I think it’s maybe more like: we need an HN where it’s unanimous that the computer side of optimization is life-and-death, and an HN where winning and losing is about other things, any language or database or algorithm is fine: we’re playing a different game that pays off just as much if not more.

People routinely make more money than they can carry on like node.js or whatever, it’s not a “better”/“worse” thing. But some people are looking for edge on gritty nuts and bolts of computing stuff, and some people are laughing all the way to the bank on this whole other category of thing that I can’t even do justice to in summary.

Trying to weld together an unspoken (except by idiots like me) consensus on how to stack rank these very different activities just seems to piss everyone off.

[JonChesterfield]

This only works because you already have access to an optimising compiler and high level language implementations, likely both available for free, because other people and organisations have already paid for them to exist.

[pc86]

Nobody said they're not important.

[draugadrotten]

Try building FB or Google without technology, and then you come back and say that the business strategy is all you need.

[rr808]

Sure but that isn't what I said. Big data, cloud services smart tech people definitely needs to be paid as much as the smart business people. Compilers, meh.

[benreesman]

You’ve got a point, which is that kickass compiler people often love PL so much that they’ll do it at a deep discount.

I’ve found this on average to more true of “niche” languages: Julia, Haskell, etc.

C++ compiler people much less often fuck around on their comp.

In my experience.

[benreesman]

To the GP, not the parent (who is dead on), can I watch?

[benreesman]

I agree that there are better examples than LLVM optimization paths. I was making a lame joke about the Mozilla open source documentary: not your bad it was so obscure.

Everything is math now. Google et al played a this-far successful strategy where they made the “know your shit” engineer TC 1MM so the hackers wouldn’t rebel and take the whole cake, like they could.

[cindarin]

You may be right about many things you said, but this comes off as though you've got a complex about something.

[benreesman]

I’ll extend you the benefit of the doubt and assume your intention is to be helpful.

Can you be a little more specific and thus potentially actionable?

[uberduper]

I'm just a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. But I'll give it a shot.

You come off as having an inflated sense of the value you provide while being very bitter that you're not recognized for it. You seem to project the meritocracy playing out in your head on the "inevitable future."

The work you do is no doubt challenging and you seem to find it very rewarding in and of itself. There are presumably few people that choose to do this work, but you need to keep in mind that does not mean there aren't lots of people capable of doing it.

[benreesman]

I mean, if anything I’ve spent more lonely nights with a bottle of Four Roses and some depressing existentialist book on a high rise tower balcony over not finding happiness in absurd pay than for any other reason.

Being overpaid even by the standards of what I outlined in the post tends to provoke a little guilt, in me at least.

Finding no joy in it whatsoever was legitimately depressing. Tyler Durden: “What now dad? I’ve got the degree/job/whatever, what comes next?”

Can’t buy that answer with RSUs. Or at least I never figured out how.

But yeah, the heavy duty hackers / mathematicians, who I am not one of! Are going to fuck everyone else up.

[cindarin]

Unfortunately, I have neither the proper information nor interest to dig into that specifically. My best recommendation is to look into why I might have said that, and decide if you care at all what I thought. If so, take actions to change what things that you have a desire to change.

[benreesman]

Maybe keep it to yourself if the game plan is to half-ass psychoanalyze someone and then bail when asked a follow up question?

[cindarin]

Just because it's obvious to many that you need therapy doesn't mean that any who notice are capable or willing to give it.

[benreesman]

If it’s not obvious to anyone from the recently deceased kid brother thing that therapy is indicated, I’d be curious how.

I’ve been getting therapy since way before that happened, most people could probably benefit from a little mental health checkup now and again.

What did I do to get your knickers so twisted that you’re banging on a recently-bereaved guy with thus far zero productive suggestions?

[benreesman]

I mean, I’m a little edgy about a fairly recent bereavement, but if that’s filtering into my opinions about comp structure then I’m probably pretty bad at my job, and therefore my opinions will trend towards utter irrelevance.

[throw1234651234]

You have never applied math above Calc in your life. Just admit it here. It will be good for your soul.

[benreesman]

Almost all my math is from MIT OCW on YouTube and a bit of 3blue1brown.

I don’t think there’s any shame in that.

What’s your PhD in?

[throw1234651234]

My Bachelors is in finance and stats. I do hope that makes you feel better.

[benreesman]

I’m going to apologize in advance, a little bit to you, but mostly to the community, for what I’m about to say. I still get like this with some frequency, but it’s less and less and that’s on purpose.

I think for a guy who had negligible exposure to literacy, let alone math, I’ve realized a substantial fraction of my mathematical potential. We could split hairs about which parts of the CUDA CNN stack I wrote in PyTorch or which convex optimizations I did that turned up about 700MM/year recurring for Instagram’s shareholders, but that’s kind of missing the point that whoever handed you any kind of document that makes you part of the broader enterprise of knowledge, and curiosity, and rigor fucked up badly.

I’m still an advocate for the idea that there should be universities, and that whatever fraction of the millions of dollars I’ve paid in taxes go to them, but I sincerely hope that you’re as much of an outlier as I think as to why I should stop paying for the part of that I do.

Now here’s the olive branch: I’m a contrarian and often cranky/negative person myself, and if you’re actually hot shit an financial mathematics, well I need to hire about three of those people, and I’ve got a soft spot for cranky contrarians.

Come do a month or two of contract-to-hire for any plausible wage and show me that you can back it up. Or go fuck yourself. That’s as productive of a reply that I’ve got in me right now.

[codechad]

> But it doesn’t seem to address the real issue (to which I also don’t have a final answer): the jock/nerd thing is still playing out.

I think you have some unresolved emotions regarding the "nerd/jock thing".

[benreesman]

I just did the vouch that got you unflagged enough that I can comment. It’s a pissy remark, but I’ve done plenty of that myself, and frankly you’re not completely wrong.

Ive got my knickers a bit twisted that looking like a jock seems to produce more recognition than actually being a nerd. And if I feel like my accomplishments kind of sit in the shadow of my appearance or demographics or whatever, it must be 100x worse for some people, which sucks ass and is kinda depressing.

Code should talk, and bullshit should walk.