[Hermitian909]

They are, and it's reflected in the compensation. I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google.

It also exists in a much more banal state lower down the ladder. I have friends who landed in the low end of the developer market. They literally cannot do most of the work I do. They don't understand DB isolation levels, they don't have the skills to design systems around eventual consistency, they are not familiar with basic distributed system problems like clock drift, etc. I'm not even an infrastructure engineer, this is just stuff I and my coworkers need to get through our days to ship product code.

Could my friends do this stuff? If they applied themselves, sure! But they're not going to. It's also not enough to learn on the job. We occasionally hire someone who doesn't actually have the skillset and they usually flounder.

[quadcore]

I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google.

Just to confirm, does that person code all day there? (real question)

[Hermitian909]

...sometimes? One of the lessons I learned from him about that level of impact is that it means the structure of your day is dictated mostly by the problem you're currently focused on. So one quarter he might spend all his time interviewing. Next quarter he might spend most of his time profiling and reading code. The quarter after he might be coding.

Next to that is a constant overhead of talks with leadership and supporting other engineering efforts throughout the company through things like doc review, chats, pairing, etc.

What he doesn't generally do is "productionize" features - code is generally exploratory in nature or fixes a serious bug (or class of bugs).

[Solvency]

Moreover, what is he coding. Because there is zero chance in hell Google is getting a multiple of that cost back in value from him. The value for them is that he's not working for a competitor. That's it.

[Hermitian909]

> Because there is zero chance in hell Google is getting a multiple of that cost back in value from him.

I have seen engineers at companies 1/1000 the size of Google generate $4 million in differentiated costs savings (definitely would not have happened without them). It seems plausible to me that someone could generate 10x that at Google.

[quadcore]

I did generate millions in differentiated costs - multiple times. Are you looking for a badass programmer? Im based in Europe but can do remote work for whatever time zone (almost any stack). Email in bio.

[kortilla]

I don’t think you understand Google’s scale. Someone making kernel improvements for the whole fleet could easily generate >$10 mil in savings.

[eschneider]

If you're the sort of person who makes the team around you 2X more productive, then sure, they're getting that money back. Christ, a great engineer can make that back for a company by delivering zero code, if he can keep a team of 20 productively getting the _right_ stuff done.

[Dudester230602]

> DB isolation levels

Hmm, does come up every now and then.

> eventual consistency

Have seen these event-based maintenance nightmares, trying to steer clear wherever I can.

> clock drift

Never met a developer who would at least hear about some other developer for whom that would possibly ever matter.

[horns4lyfe]

If it’s not enough to learn on the job, how did you and your coworkers learn? Do you only hire grad students with specific focus?

[manicennui]

While there might be cases where it truly is reflected in one's compensation, most of the time it is more like less than double what others make. And they'll be promoted to the point where they waste all of their time in meetings.

[esafak]

Was he paid for his superior productivity, or for special skills?

[hospitalJail]

Why not both?

I know a dude who got a nice package from a pizza company to be CTO + lead programmer. I think he has a few people under him, but the bigger deal was that he could get a percentage of the $ saved.

He worked all day and night to get LLMs to take orders, in a month 40% of their orders are taken through the LLM. For a company with 100s of stores, this is a huge cost saving.

Guy knows how to program, he knows technology, and he knew the domain from a previous job.

[ryandrake]

I think at that insane level, they pay is no longer scaling linearly with the person's skills or productivity. $10M is on the order of 100X a normal developer salary. Is this person _really_ 100X as productive? At these levels, salary de-couples from raw skill and starts to depend more on culture checkbox things like charisma, connections, celebrity, and ability to bullshit/smoothtalk. Kind of like CEO salary. Nobody thinks the CEO is actually 8000x more productive than a normal employee. The CEO is in his position because he has the "right" pedigree and the "right" network, went to the "right" school, talks the "right" way, has the "right" ivy league mannerisms, goes to the "right" polo clubs.

You and I and probably half of HN could do the job of "CEO of a mid-size tech company." We don't, not because of lack of ability, but because we don't tick those culture/personality/background checkboxes.

You're not going to leetcode-grind or PhD your way into a $10M software engineering job.

[kortilla]

Salary isn’t really coupled to skill at all beyond meeting some basic bar to get the job. You’re not gonna have a great career if you think the leetcode problems you can solve are how you ladder up.

> The CEO is in his position because he has the "right" pedigree and the "right" network, went to the "right" school, talks the "right" way, has the "right" ivy league mannerisms, goes to the "right" polo clubs.

None of this is true. The CEO is either significantly compensated because it’s her company (majority ownership) or because the board likes the direction the ship is being steered and wants to make sure she doesn’t leave to steer another ship.

> You and I and probably half of HN could do the job of "CEO of a mid-size tech company." We don't, not because of lack of ability, but because we don't tick those culture/personality/background checkboxes.

What is it you think the CEO does? Half of HN absolutely could not run a 2000 employee firm they are intimately familiar with, let alone an arbitrary one.

> You're not going to leetcode-grind or PhD

Leetcode no, phd yes. The fact that you put them side by side pretty strongly indicates you don’t know what compensation is tied to.Leetcode skills provide limited value to a company. A PhD with a track record of leading ML publications absolutely can put you up there.

Compensation is about what value they think they can get out of you and how much competition there is for you.

Don’t sit around telling yourself execs have trivial jobs. It just makes you look ignorant. Spend some time looking at what each brings to the table for that specific company. Barring nepotism or corruption, there is usually something significant there.

[jononomo]

I'm no rockstar, but I've worked with people who were 1/100th as productive as me for sure. There are some real morons out there with software engineering jobs.

[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

> he could get a percentage of the $ saved

I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I think I (and most other decent engineers) can probably point to tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in savings generated over the course of a single career.

As far as I can tell, it gets frittered away by empire-builders who take that $ and spin up new teams for nonsense. Kicking back a % to the engineers who harvested all the savings seems like a much better model.

[jjav]

> > he could get a percentage of the $ saved

> I'd take that deal in a heartbeat.

Same! That would be a very exciting and lucrative role. Unfortunately it's basically the opposite of what the industry does today. I think we've all seen the six-figures per month AWS bills to power infrastructure for a workload that could be comfortably hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

If the industry ever goes back to caring about efficiency and cost, sign me up.

[Hermitian909]

Not to be facetious, what's the difference?

At the high end of the white collar market you're paid to deliver impact and your pay is determined by the quantity of the impact and how differentiated it is (no big bonuses for the guy who presses the "print a million dollars" button).

[esafak]

It's easier to prove you have a special skill. They pay you more because they can't hire a replacement. In the other case, you have to prove how much better you really are. Of course, the trouble with specialization is that the skills take time to acquire and can be commoditized or become obsolete with a paradigm shift. A more risky proposition in tech than, say, medicine.

[Hermitian909]

> They pay you more because they can't hire a replacement

Sounds like the skills aren't very differentiated. IME it's quite rare for a business to miss differentiation in business impact in an order of magnitude.

Going to your earlier question, the candidate in question has many skills but is not overly specialized. He commands that price because he can point at the right place in the stack and say "There's $10 million in savings here" when everyone else misses it or "Changing the architecture in this way lets us ship 6 months faster" and he is able to do this repeatedly.