[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.