[thrown_22]

Tall poppy syndrome is terrible.

I've seen places which will rather hire 10 developers getting paid $80k a year than two developers getting paid $400k a year. You get what you pay for. The number of managers who will not hire someone getting paid more than them is astonishing.

[mrjin]

Why that is surprising? Mediocre people in leadership for sure will hire people worse than themselves for obvious reasons:

1. Much less likely to challenge them.

2. Numbers look much better.

3. When things went south, there would be someone to blame.

[3np]

More commonly,

4. They are not great at assessing and contextualizing skill and experience

[thrown_22]

Because I've seen it even in places where the guy doing the hiring was the major share holder. He flat out told me that no one would pay a salary like what I was asking. It went downhill from there and he didn't take it well when I told him I was making more than that now and I figured this was going to be a relaxing year to wind down from my current position, hence why I was asking for less.

[legostormtroopr]

$80k is not a bad salary and I struggle to think of any Australian dev salary that is close to $400k.

Additionally, with good leadership 10 x $80k would almost certainly outperform 2 x $400k developers.

[ekidd]

Trading systems are complex distributed systems. They need extremely high reliability and low latency, on enormous transaction volume.

There are lots of complex failure modes in a system like this, and minimizing them is an advanced skill. The learning curve for a competent generalist senior engineer to get good at these kinds of problems is significant. Designing and implementing a national securities exchange is a big deal.

This is a place where you want either experienced developers who have worked on other stock exchanges, or at least FAANG engineers who've worked on systems with analogous challenges. This is not a place you want to skimp on salary.

[thrown_22]

You want HFT experts because this is the definition of an HFT system. Those salaries even in Australia start at $200k for a junior developer and go upwards quite quickly.

Of course OP thinks that $80k is a good salary for a developer so that ought to tell you how competent she is.

[mimon]

$80k was my starting salary in Sydney, as a grad, almost 15 years ago. It is not even close to competitive in today's market.

[gonzo41]

It's the ASX, in Sydney. 80K is not nearly enough for that work.

[__d]

Plenty of $400k+ salaries in fintech in Sydney ...

[thrown_22]

Go get those tall poppies.