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Is it hate? Or is it just shock? Tech does have a crazy variance in salary for people who are doing, broadly at least, the same jobs. I don’t see any hate here

Is it hate? Or is it just shock? Tech does have a crazy variance in salary for people who are doing, broadly at least, the same jobs. I don’t see any hate here. Just surprise.

throwayay4929 8d ago
The jobs are massively not the same. It's like saying the IT guy that's in charge of reimaging PCs at your municipal office is broadly doing the same job as the couple that built this lan house. There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
- itake 8d ago
  Probably some confusion here. IT (outside of the USA) typically means Software Engineer, but in the USA the context is as you described. I don’t know where they are located, but they might be talking about what you would call software engineering.
- afavour 8d ago
  There is plenty of crossover. e.g. look at the salaries of an engineer at Netflix vs one at ABC/Disney that works on their streaming platform. Netflix is operating at a higher technical level, no doubt. But the salaries can be something like 5x higher. Maybe all industries are like that but I’m not sure they are.
  - ryandrake 8d ago
    It's the same shock/objection that's expressed at CEO salaries: Do we really think the engineer at Netflix who makes $1M/yr is really 10X more productive or adding 10X more value than the engineer at NoNameCo who makes $100k/yr? Or are people simply paid what each company is willing to pay them, without some kind of full-industry merit-based leveling system? In my view, pay has long since totally divorced from productivity and more closely tracks random chance of what company you ended up in, and who acquired who.
- goosejuice 8d ago
  > There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job. I'd love to see some data on this though I don't know how you'd measure it. I suspect a high percentage of west coast FAANG level jobs are low impact but also low complexity. I do figure people work more hours though. With scale comes new problems but also a lot of infrastructure and support around it. It's pretty silly to use IT guy when there's loads of software devs working on complex stuff for critical infrastructure making less than 200k.

Is it hate? Or is it just shock? Tech does have a crazy variance in salary for people who are doing, broadly at least, the same jobs. I don’t see any hate here. Just surprise.

throwayay4929 8d ago

The jobs are massively not the same. It's like saying the IT guy that's in charge of reimaging PCs at your municipal office is broadly doing the same job as the couple that built this lan house. There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.

itake 8d ago
Probably some confusion here. IT (outside of the USA) typically means Software Engineer, but in the USA the context is as you described. I don’t know where they are located, but they might be talking about what you would call software engineering.
afavour 8d ago
There is plenty of crossover. e.g. look at the salaries of an engineer at Netflix vs one at ABC/Disney that works on their streaming platform. Netflix is operating at a higher technical level, no doubt. But the salaries can be something like 5x higher. Maybe all industries are like that but I’m not sure they are.
- ryandrake 8d ago
  It's the same shock/objection that's expressed at CEO salaries: Do we really think the engineer at Netflix who makes $1M/yr is really 10X more productive or adding 10X more value than the engineer at NoNameCo who makes $100k/yr? Or are people simply paid what each company is willing to pay them, without some kind of full-industry merit-based leveling system? In my view, pay has long since totally divorced from productivity and more closely tracks random chance of what company you ended up in, and who acquired who.
goosejuice 8d ago
> There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job. I'd love to see some data on this though I don't know how you'd measure it. I suspect a high percentage of west coast FAANG level jobs are low impact but also low complexity. I do figure people work more hours though. With scale comes new problems but also a lot of infrastructure and support around it. It's pretty silly to use IT guy when there's loads of software devs working on complex stuff for critical infrastructure making less than 200k.