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by curun1r 4106 days ago
> the SV software industry has taken a unique stance that experience is actually a liability

I see this viewpoint often, but it always seems to be from people who either haven't used their time wisely or otherwise don't want to change their role. There's a bizarre belief that they should be paid more for the same type/amount of work. Apart from a few situations, the marginal value of very good code over simply adequate code is very small...it's not enough to justify the marginal salary of a very senior coder over a junior coder. And yet people believe that since they've got 20+ years of experience, they should be paid significantly more than someone with 2+ years.

Meanwhile, those that have used their time wisely and moved from engineer into architects or other leadership positions are both older and very well compensated. We realize that we can guide a team of junior engineers to produce something that's good enough to meet the needs of the business. It's not as good as it would be if I wrote every line of code myself or with a team of engineers with 20+ years experience each, but I know that none of it is a disaster and it was written for a fraction of the cost. My salary/comp has more than kept pace with my expenses as they've grown, but only because my contribution to the organization has grown similarly. I could have never grown that contribution if I'd stayed in a role where I was primarily responsible for writing code.

1 comments

You're correct that the marginal value of great code vs. good code is...marginal, MOST of the time. But I think the 1% cases are where the big (200k+) comp packages are for ICs. Stuff like perf optimizations at big scale, 1% adwords CTR improvements, optimizing JS runtimes, etc.

I agree that for most organizations management is the highest-leverage (ergo, highest-paid) path.

A better way to frame the problem is to think about the organization's economics and how your contribution fits into it. Figure out the 2-3 key metrics for success at the org and figure out whether you can move those, and if so, how. And realize that in a lot of job roles, you won't move the key metrics, and won't be paid as such.