[xyzelement]

I think it's pretty hard to get a sense of what is out there unless you work across a wide variety of companies.

I've been blessed to mainly work in companies that had very high engineering bars (finance, faang) but I spent two years at a scale up and the difference in engineers was crazy. Senior engineers who, when faced with an outage just threw up their hands and said "we dunno".

And this was still a place that was large enough and tried to have a bar. I can only imagine the next tiers down (eg, where do people who can't cut it at these places go?)

I don't know how much of this is 'innate' caliber vs benefit of working along others who has high expectations and taught you (vs not)

[iamflimflam1]

Someone expressed this very well to me.

Top tier companies pick up the faang rejects. Middle tier get the top tier rejects. Bottom tier get the rejects from the middle tier.

“We get what’s left. Sometimes we get lucky and get someone who’s fallen through the cracks”

Personally I’m not a massive fan of the faang recruitment techniques and I think there’s a lot of fantastic senior engineers who want to do interesting work without jumping through ridiculous hoops. The main issue is usually just being able to pay sufficiently well to attract them in the first place. It’s a tough argument with the exec team to get a salary through that can sometimes be double or triple the companies median.

[neon_electro]

Shouldn't it be clear that if you're paying a software engineer $150K, the employer is getting $300-500k in value from their labor?

[iamflimflam1]

A BDR who may be instrumental in bringing in multi-million dollar contracts might be paid minimum wage.

There's no obvious correlation between high pay and value delivered.