> I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned.
A few years back, on this board, 996 was something people made fun of when it was reported that some Chinese companies did it [1].
And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? That the issue with working on saturdays is daily standup? What happened in these years for such a change to happen?!
It’s better to look at what didn’t happen: unionization.
Americans often remind me of Steve Jobs trying to cure cancer using diets & acupuncture. You know what the solutions are, you just don’t like them.
Until recently American engineers made a lot of money at comparatively cushy jobs. A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.
Not just that, but the union would likely end up capping their salary much lower so the wealth can be spread around. How hard is the 10x engineer on the team going to work when the compensation is the same regardless? This is where people end up working multiple jobs, if they can keep up with their peers only working one day per week.
Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?
Over here the purpose of unions is to: Provide a strong enough legal response and guidance to deter companies from trying shady shit, pay better unemployment fees than the government and provide training/networking. They also negotiate collectively with the employers on behalf of everyone for things like paid sick leave, paid vacations etc.
I pay a flat fee every month because the union I'm in has always had relatively low unemployment, for others it's usually a percentage of their monthly gross salary (usually around 10-50€).
In what scenario would capping people's salary be good for the workers?
>Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?
No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades. All trades there have publicly documented salary bands based on education and YoE per job, where the negotiations starting point for a wage for a position must not be below the minimum threshold but also can't exceed a certain upper threshold. In some cases, the company can decide to place you outside the union agreed tariff/band range to give you a higher wage, but then you might be exempt from some strict union rules like 35h/week working hours and such.
And they cap the top end of the salary bands because the yearly budget for wage increases is a fixed pie for most companies, and so to have money left to give entry level workers the great wage increases as mandated for by unions, they need to cap the increases to the top wages to prevent bleeding/bankruptcy. Do you think all European companies have unlimited money to give all their workers X% wage increases?
This is how it works in Austria.
In Finland we have salary bands for some jobs, but it's usually just the minimum. Some have a maximum, but there are always "personal bonuses" the employer can give on top of that. But these are usually "old" professions like teachers, nurses, factory workers.
For IT jobs I haven't seen an official salary band anywhere and there basically is no union mandated maximum and the minimum is mostly a suggestion.
We also get universally negotiated percentage raises every now and then, but it's like 1-2%. Personal raises are on top of that and can be a LOT more.
The maximum cap sounds just stupid. When you hit the limit, why would you do anything past the absolute minimum to stay at that level?
> The maximum cap sounds just stupid.
Conceptually unions are a democracy and people are selfish. Why should I let some other worker make 10x what I do when I can instead have them make 1x and spread out the other 9x around including to me?
This "spread it around" sounds like some trickle down ecodomics madness to me =)
If the company can't pay more to a high performer they surely won't just give thast money to the average folks. It'll just go to C-staff bonuses and conference trips to exotic countries.
(Provided that the average performers are above the union minimum already)
> This "spread it around" sounds like some trickle down ecodomics madness to me =)
Trickle-down would be giving him the full 10x salary, then by his own choice he'd be doing something with it that benefited everyone else.
Forcing it by spreading it around instead of paying him is more like socialism or communism.
>Forcing it by spreading it around instead of paying him is more like socialism or communism.
THat's how a lot of companies in Austria apply wage increases per union mandates. Take a budget and spread it around so that workers bicker amongst themselves for not receiving what they think they deserve.
In here the unions negotiate a flat percentage raise for everyone, usually 0-2% "index raises" they call them.
All others are performance based and determined by the employer.
The likely two outcomes are -- 1) the upper limit of salary band for everyone in the same role is raised high enough or 2) the high performing person is leaving to a place that pays it with a band or without.
You realize this sounds like you being selfish? You’re taking merit out of the equation, looking to take from others, so that you get more.
> No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades.
This is how it often works even without unions. Everywhere I worked there were salary ranges you can't go out of without changing the role, and I was never in a union.
The minimum wage thing in France is true but it's so low for developers that it doesn't play any role in salary négociation.
Never seen any upper threshold except just what the company décides.
By law people with the same job and same qualification etc in a company must earn the same thing but that's theory more than practice, except maybe large companies.
Also being in an union or not does not change anything.
Same in Germany. That's why usually Max Mustermann (55) get's a better compensation for doing bare minimum than you for doing more work.
But in case of layoffs you will be kicked out first and he would be kicked out the last and with a far better severance package.
In Austria, salary is absolutely NOT capped by collective agreements. At a certain cap salaries are just not valorized anymore, that's all.
We here live in an eco-social free-market economy, where a company can pay an employee however much they want. In union terms, the collective agreements only regulates the minimum an employer has to do.
Most unions in the US seem to have pretty strict rules about titles, who does what, and how much each role gets paid. It's not unreasonable to expect it'd happen with software developers, too.
That said, I always point to the NFL Players Association as one that seems to be able to provide value to highly and diversely paid talent apparently without kneecapping their high performers. Though it's not something I've researched deeply.
Seeing the wage difference in Europe and the UK even for enterprise developers let alone those who work for major (mostly American based ) tech companies, is not a rousing endorsement for unions for developers
Thats an extremely simplistic view of things? All else is equal? Why do you think that is a product of unions?
When your fascists get done with you, if there's anything left, you'll deeply wish you had spent that wage difference to get rid of them. Inequality is very corrosive to society. Europe had to learn that lesson the hard way too.
While I support mostly liberal causes - I consider myself a liberal not a leftists - like an increased social safety net, universal healthcare etc, unions are just a bridge too far.
But me personally, at 51, I have said before that I plan to go by the Ben Kenobi strategy. When things get too bad, my wife and I will just become hermits somewhere and when the evil empire comes looking for us just give up and die.
We are seriously looking at “Plan B” countries to live in after retirement and are planning to spend 6 weeks in one of those countries starting next month. I work remotely.
How is an increased social safety net a liberal policy? Most liberal parties in Europe want to lower taxes / social-security payments. (see FDP, NEOS, etc.)
Those are considered left policies in the US.
lol good luck. Both of those are way harder than paying union dues.
And there's no guarantee the empire won't find you wherever you go. War is an excellent counter to inequality, it works much better than progressive taxation or collective bargaining.
It’s a lot easier when you make 3x the comp of the average developer in the EU and I am not even in BigTech (anymore).
I can absolutely guarantee you that the average enterprise CRUD developer living in a 2nd tier US city is better off than a developer in the EU. Let alone the top 10-20% working in BigTech or equivalent.
Have you factored in healthcare costs, welfare (if you ever need that), childcare/kindergarten costs, benefit of living in a safe society, sick leave, holiday, worker protection, better work/life balance etc when you say better off?
The empire will find you wherever you go. https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying...
>Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing?
Huh? If you have a collective agreement, all the compensation ranges are written down there. You get level 11 comp contract and your manager puts you at 85% of the scale, then the union decides the scale goes from say 85k to 95k. The next time the agreement is renegotiated, the scale gets bumped to 90k to 100k and you can't get past 100k until you promoted to the next function with a different comp level in a contract.
That's excluding pager duty hazard pay, may the God allmerciful steer your path away from it.
Unions are more about making the job conditions better than about maximizing the comp. Want to grind, go full 996 and sleep at work to afford that fancy house in Las Vegas.
So it is an american thing. It seems like your unions do a lot of weird stuff, and then you just accept it as its an universal rule.
Employers already have salary caps and comp ranges. They're called the "pay band" at most companies. You can head over to levels.fyi to look at most of them.
I think the truth is that there really isn't 10xers, and that's more or less a propaganda technique to get people to crab bucket each other.
Of course everyone likes to think they're santa's special engineer, so they don't need hurdles like protections and a level playing field. But, simultaneously, the industry has been doing everything in its power to make engineers as fungible as possible. The "wet dream" is to make engineers practically assembly line workers - you can just plop some rando in at any time, and it'll probably be fine. You can see this with the extreme turnover in a lot of the industry.
These concepts are in almost perfection contradiction, but they both have the same goal: to convince you and me that the status quo is desirable for each of us personally.
There are those who can provide 10x output in certain kinds of problems. Either due to experience or however their minds work. If their output is as a tech lead then even a 2x can provide an overall 10x increase through second order impact via their team. There are also those who provide 0.5x and 0.1x output on a wide range of problems.
> If their output is as a tech lead then even a 2x can provide an overall 10x increase through second order impact via their team.
This is something the 10x mythology tends to leave out: there are a vanishingly few people who are significantly above the 90th percentile in terms of individual productivity but if the discussion shifted to team dynamics, that’s where you can actually see really big gains by helping a larger group be more productive.
I think its also that few companies have a way to allow a 10x individual productivity engineer to focus on just the things they are 10x as good at. It's almost never everything. Once you add in meetings, politics, proposals, perf ladder requirements, mentoring, code reviews, etc. the result is a regression to the mean.
10x came from actual measurements a few decades ago, getting people to implement the same project and seeing what the result was. The two parts missing from the modern usage of the term: the measurement was within a given team (not overall), and it was a comparison of best and worst, not best and average.
10x came from the 80s, so already fairly different in key ways (internet documentation, CI, platform and tool maturity, etc.), and the methodology is challenging because you don’t have easy comparisons between complex real projects without tons of confounds and trying to measure artificial challenges runs into different but also significant challenges selecting the candidates and ensuring that the work is representative.
There are definitely people who are more or less productive but I think we’re very prone to focus on the individual while ignoring the environment they’re working in, as well as the question about broadly applicable that result is.
There aren't 10x ers, but there are definetly 0.15xers
Couldn't unions just follow actors' guilds and the like where there are no salary caps?
When we're looking to the actors guilds for direction, you know the future of our industry might be in trouble.
It's not your choice. It's the choice of the average union member.
I find it hard to believe workers would vote for a union to lower or cap their wages. That feels like a total straw man.
In my experience unions suck when they overemphasize fairness over real world practicalities (see almost anything seniority based). They don't have to be that way.
There is a large pay disparity. Why wouldn't someone at the 50th percentile vote to have those at the 95th get lower salaries so the 50th percentile goes up a bit?
That’s not how unions work negotiations work, and the younger worker getting paid less is 100% thinking that they’ll be the senior guy some day.
"Senior". Looks like you've already made it a tenure and not output based pay system. Which I think proves exactly what people don't like about unions or those who push for them.
In an output based system the number of high level people is relatively small and terminal level is far from the top level. It doesn't take much for people to realize that there's little chance of them becoming an L8 so why shouldn't an L8 get paid less? Moreover in my experience people have little insight into the value those at higher levels provide so will consider them dead weight.
You’re welcome to try to get the entire industry to stop referring to junior and senior developers, engineers, etc. but most people know that experience is a distinguishing characteristic. The other huge mistake you’re making is assuming that compensation is based on performance in non-union shops. It certainly can be but almost everyone will collect counter examples as they get more career experience.
I would suggest considering who stands to benefit the most from the belief that high-performers don’t need unions, and whether the same companies which have been found guilty of wage-suppression would be above funding amplification for that sentiment. Tech workers gave up a ton of bargaining power for decades and while we certainly aren’t badly paid it’s worth remembering how, say, that settlement with Apple, Google, et al. didn’t fully make up the difference, not to mention the number of former high-fliers who hit things like the ageism wall long before they wanted to retire. In an uneven market with a huge imbalance in data visibility and negotiating power, unilateral disarmament by the weaker side doesn’t seem like the winning strategy.
It's both really and that's why the scale is capped.
Union shops still have compensation levels. If your pay is defined as 85% of a scale L8 and the collective agreement says it gets increased by 2 and half percentage points each year, you will eventually reach 100% and will just sit there and still make 10k less than L9. The scale itself is adjusted yearly.
>Not just that, but the union would likely end up capping their salary much lower so the wealth can be spread around
My union have never done that, why would it?
What you are saying is that companies would want to pay theor employees more money, but they can’t because of unions.
Sorry, hard sell.
> companies would want to pay theor employees more money, but they can’t because of unions
Well, inkind-of sort-of makes sense. It happens that companies would like to spread the salary increase budget as they please, while unions tend to request that the lowest salaries get a larger share.
That's right, no more "10xers" working 80 hr weeks making those who can't or won't look unproductive.
Reminder that unions don't have to do anything about salary.
I'd love a tech union that simply says:
Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate.
This ensures everyone shares in the burden of off-hours work. If off-hours work is happening often, then engineers are going to be spending a lot of time away on PTO, and if the company pressures them to not take the PTO, then the company is going to be paying them a lot. Let's align incentives, I don't want to work on off-hours emergencies, and the company doesn't want me to either.
No mention of pay anywhere. Unions can do a lot of good without ever touching pay.
Unions aren't about what you want them to be about but what the average member wants them to be about. More or less.
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>Reminder that unions don't have to do anything about salary.
The union is the party that negotiates my annual salary increases that are not performance related. They will however not negotiate it up to FANG level because it's not FANG and I'm not in US. I will also get mostly the same comp as the guys on the left and on the right even if they aren't really bright (I'm not either).
>Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate.
why not 100x? why work off hours anyway?
I had a job in twenty-nine When everything was going fine I knew the pace was pretty fast But thought that it would always last
When organizers came to town I'd always sneer and turn them down I thought the boss was my best friend He'd stick by me to the end
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ain't got a word to say He chiseled down my pay Then took my job away "Boom" went the boom one day It made a noise that way I wish I had been wise Next time I'll organize
Again see Steve. Something can look like a good position and still rapidly deteriorate.
This one wasn’t that rapid either, you had plenty of warning. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier.
Engineers were the privileged class. They were part of the group occupy wall street wanted to bring down. Not hard to guess why they didn't want that.
Privileged is too generic of a word that does not accurately describe the cohorts. There is the capital class. Occupy was after the Capital class but im not sure if they accurately zeroed in on that. Its been too long since then.
Engineers were never part of that class. They work for a living while capital owns assets that work for them.
Engineers were part of the "Intellectual Elite" class that made good money but were super socially progressive. (Think putting BLM signs in their yards while at the same time pricing out the people they claim to help).
They ended up becoming a lot of the Elizabeth Warren cohort after being the Hillary and Obama cohorts(before it fractured into part Bernie part MAGA with the rest going to Hillary).
Extremely socially progressive but don't you dare touch economics.
Having talked to Occupy Wall Street people at the time I don't think many on the ground differentiated as much as you think they did. I used a generic word because from my experience that is how they saw the world. I got told I deserved to have everything I own set on fire for saying I spent $100 on a nice dinner once. That was on the more extreme side but the sentiment seemed to not differentiate.
They basically hated on anyone making more than a livable wage at the time ($60k).
It is possible they were mistaken. The extreme voices get magnified at these things, I'd guess.
Maybe it is an attempt to slow the shift in the Overton window?
You missed what I said in my first paragraph. Occupy was after the capital class but they did not express it well. Looking back, a common criticism was that the movement was leaderless and thus unorganized. It was the early days of a new generation (Millennials) getting a first taste of the coming disaster their lives were going to be.
The last time there was really a movement like that was the 1999 WTO protests...more than a decade separated from Occupy and it being a pivotal moment for Gen X to realize the same lessons millennials learned in Occupy.
Since Occupy, a movement consisting of many of the same people who were disorganized in 2011 started to learn the ropes and become organized, first in the realignment of Labor (SEIU starting a "Fight for 15$" in 2012/2013), then the emergence of BLM in 2013(Yes they started back in 2013) as a result of death of Eric Garner and the Ferguson rallies among other events, to finally Sanders running in 2015 and the emergence of a semi organized movement combining various progressives groups (economic & social progressives).
This led to the whole saga in 2016 which there is plenty of youtube documentaries about to the wave election in 2018 (of which there is an amazing netflix movie about) to the showdown in 2020 between Bernie and Biden, to winding up wandering the political woods for years after Biden managed to hold on to now finally electing Mamdani as a Democratic Socialist in the largest city and the financial capital where Occupy started. From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years. Amazing!
> Occupy was after the capital class
White washing history doesn't change the reality of what the people actually making up the movement wanted. Not what the self-elected spokespeople who had no actual power since there were no leaders said to make it all sound less threatening.
> From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years.
Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)
I don't even know what argument you are even trying to make anymore. Occupy had demands, they were not clear. I explained one reason why.
>Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)
Where did I assume that? Mamdani was elected with an amazing margin bringing out people who had given up on voting and many who had never felt to vote before. Essentially he began his term with a strong mandate. This is while everyone clearly knew he was a Democratic Socialist. He didn't become a dictator, the actual overton window of what is considered mainstream has shifted in just 15 years. Thats whats extraordinary.
I would say more precisely, engineers are closer to the managerial or capital wielding class; usually the adversary of the union.
They are closer but they are not part of the class so does it really matter how close they are? Engineer still has to trade their time for wealth in the form of work. Capital class has assets that work for them.
To me the only question is if there's a hypothetical revolution who will end up swinging in the wind by their neck and I have no doubt many engineers working for big tech would have been in that group. There's always nice rhetoric and focused rhetoric to not make too many enemies but the people on the ground differentiate a lot less and have in every revolution.
By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.
Again, they are not part of the capital class. They were lucky to come across a special moment in time where there was a paradigm shift bringing with it enormous wealth and the capital class did not part with some of their wealth out of charity but out of greed because they realized that in order to capture this new found fountain of wealth they needed engineers...at least for the time being.
This allowed one generation (maybe two) to live a dignified solid upper middle class life but since the beginning there has always been a push to eliminate them.
Things such as low/no code, "learn to code", bootcamps, and now AI are attempts to destroy this avenue for people to rise above anything more than just worker class.
> By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of.
"Working class" isn't an adjective+noun that refers to anyone who works, it's a compound noun that specifically refers to physical labor. Knowledge workers of any sort are not part of it, despite both using the word "work".
From Wikipedia:
"The working class is a group of people in a social hierarchy, typically defined by earning wages or salaries through their ability to work. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most common definitions of "working class" in use in the United States limit its membership to workers who hold blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, or whose income is insufficiently high to place them in the middle class, or both. However, socialists define "working class" to include all workers who fall into the category of requiring income from wage labour to subsist; thus, this definition can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class
Since I am referring to a hypothetical in the future, let me be more clear: I believe software developers will be relegated to blue collar or worse roles given enough time because it is in the interest of the capital class to find a way to make this happen. I gave examples in my prior comment.
> Again, they are not part of the capital class.
I vaguely remember reading something recently, probably by Branko Milanović, about how there is a class of workers in the tech sector who earn so much money that they are gradually starting to become capitalists. When you have so much money left over that you can start putting your capital to work for you, you cross that very line. I don't mean a home savings plan or ETFs or anything like that, but if you have seven figures and can skim off returns that you could live well on, then you're definitely no longer working class.
It’s so depressing how right you are
Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists. Will coders be a part of that or will that skill set go the way of carpenter? Remains to be seen. But there is still other roles in tech that could take the place of coders (infrastructure, security etc.).
Also remains to be seen how long this process will take. Could take a decade or two but hopefully it will happen. Its just so nice to see little wins like a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani getting elected in the finance capital of America. It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.
>Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists.
Good luck fighting offshoring.
> It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.
That means nothing. I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road.
>Good luck fighting offshoring.
I always wondered why they don't try tariffs on this? American companies that produce overseas get tariffed regardless of origin. It changes incentives and forces production closer to areas of consumption. I suspect we are going to get there eventually, leadership needs to become more left progressive like Mamdani.
>That means nothing. I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road.
His ideas were not that radical. The fast and free busses came on the heel of a successful pilot they did with one line in each borough so its not like they are starting from scratch. They have an existing model and data from that trial to build on top of.
The grocery stores consist of one store in each borough. That is not an impossible task and it does not risk really affecting bodegas since the majority of income from most bodegas are lotto tickets and cigarettes/vapes.
Universal child care...well that have already passed this in his first week.
> that have already passed this in his first week.
It's always easy to pass laws to give people free stuff and it works well initially ... until you run out of money of course. That's how Venezuelan leadership also got popular. Who doesn't want more free stuff? It's how elections are won is most of Eastern/Southern Europe too. Until the bill is due and the next generation has to pay.
I do agree that the bill has to be paid. I don't what we are going to do with the trillions of dollars of debt as a result of tax cuts for the rich, handouts to countries like Israel and so much more that does not directly help regular people. The US has been a piggybank for all the world to just loot and take advantage of. Given that this is the environment we are in, I am all for providing these breadcrumbs that Mamdani is proposing to regular people.
Sooner or later there will be a reckoning with all the money that has been stolen by the upper class. Without these small programs, that help people that reckoning will come faster but it will come either way.
Except the new perks of New Yorkers voted for, will not come from the pockets of the super wealthy elite, but from debt and taxes paid by working class new yorkers themselves. Mandani won't tax the super wealthy more to pay for it.
Mamdani plans to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers less than they spent on propaganda to try and defeat him but him not taxing the super wealthy at all is not true.
>Mamdani plans to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers
I'm in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp since if all political promises were cookies, i'd be fat.
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Usually lumped in with labor aristocracy along with lawyers and doctors. Can go either way when it pops off.
i disagree. i also disagree that most people developing tech solutions for startups are engineers or are applying an engineering discipline. but i would agree that the majority of people in valley tech firms are closer to the rentier class than they are to working engineers.
>A decent engineer in the US could make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+ engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good position tend to not like rocking the boat.
So... 500k is the normal pay and 2.5mil is the staff+ pay, right? How many people you know actually make that?
SWE rarely earn $100k gross/yr TC in Western European nations. It's closer to $50k~$80k in many cases.
I rounded up a bit for nicer numbers, but it's more like 75-95 than 50-80 this year.
For good companies; there are _quite_ a few companies that underpay and not as many interesting job opportunities. Let's just say "at least 2x~2.5" and move on.
Also, even if you did not mention it, UK is a bit of a special case (English-speaking countries that has thus been attracting quite a lot of international talent (and companies) at least until recently), I wouldn't put it in the same bucket as EU countries.
There is a lot of everything and I got lowballed with 85 today (with three mandatory hebeas corpus days, while the rest of the team is in a different country lol).
I'm not sure where the UK part comes from zo? Nobody upthread mentioned it.
It's higher in Poland lol.
Source?
Levels.fyi puts it at $67k median.
Glassdoor puts it at closer to $40k.
Neither of these are above the levels given above.
I was talking about the good days over the last decade and not now. As someone noted Europe made $50-80k. So around $250-400k. I knew a ton that made that. Basically anyone above junior at a tech company including late stage startups and second tier tech companies. Fully remote in many cases. At Staff+ FAANG if you were there a couple years then your RSUs would very likely push you above $1m and possibly above $2m. I think the most I heard of was someone making $10m/year and being deathly afraid of a layoff. Nowadays its AI companies which if you're lucky enough to get into and know ML will pay $2m+/year as your comp even at merely staff levels. If the bubble doesn't burst before IPOs then I know ICs whose next few generations won't need to work.
If you talk about before AI bullshit started, the numbers kinda make sense actually.
>I think the most I heard of was someone making $10m/year and being deathly afraid of a layoff.
Jeez, some people.
Until recently?
Now it's 20x at the AI labs instead of 5x at FAANG.
Still do
There are unionized engineer jobs in the United States. Every time this conversation comes up people act like we don’t have any unions, but that’s not true. There are unionized engineering jobs.
One of them even tried striking a couple years ago, quite publicly. They ended the strike a couple days later without gaining anything.
I think American engineers know their situation and options better than you think.
Steve Jobs was also an expert at suppressing software engineering wages. Karma has a funny way of coming around.
Exactly how do you think unions would help for tech workers?
Unionization does not happen because it's typically anti-immigrants. It's an unworkable solution, and liking it will magically make it work.
Curious, what do you mean by 'anti-immigrants'?
Former Alibaba employee for a season of my life. I have to be careful with my next sentences because on the internet because it's easy for people to read things in a vacuum and interpret in the worse possible way, so don't do that because thats not how I mean it. The 996 hours are not useful work. It's appearance over productivity.
Yep, if you were to watch what happens at a 996 shop, it's people literally living their at-home life with their fellow employees for most of the time.
Why is this theater kept up?
It's societal. I don't really have a way I can translate it for someone raised in the Western culture.
Counter example:
While westerners would look at 996 with confusion, Chinese would look at Western "intellectual property" constructs with confusion. To them it's not "copying", it's they figured out a better way to do it and the rest is fair game.
Bosses like it, and maybe it keeps people from interviewing for other jobs?
I've worked with a few coworkers who came from a 996 environment and kept doing it out of habit. As I was young and impressionable, I started doing it also. I'm not going to be careful with my sentence: these people were absolutely NOT getting more work done than others, in fact they seemed to move glacially, because they had so many more hours to fill up. It's a total footgun, and it chases away good people once the rot reaches management and they start promoting based on perception rather than reality.
This has been the case for these setups long before 996 came in vogue. For the extreme majority of people there's an upper bound on what they can actually get done over a period of time. Trying to squeeze more out of that becomes performative.
As a similar anecdote, when I was at university a few decades ago there was one major where students were pretty insular. They were well known for very long hours in their building, some people would stay there a few days at a time even.
Then I had one as a roommate. He kept normal hours. he didn't work any more or harder than any of the rest of us. He explained that in their building it was mostly socializing, parties, and playing around. He went in, did his work, and left.
After that moment I approached it with eyes wide open and saw this play out over and over again in my life.
The mythology is:
- 30 people between the ages of 18 and 25 sharing a tiny, single office room working on folding tables and CAT 7 cables hanging from the ceiling
- Whiteboards from floor to ceiling on every wall covered in scribbles and diagrams in red, black, and blue pen, half-erased with some "SAVE FOREVER" circled parts
- Typing really fast on loud, clicky keyboards
- Doing nothing but coding or working 18 hours/day with no life at all
- Living at work in sleeping bags
- Surviving on cold delivered pizza, hot instant ramen, and coffee with only a mini fridge, a microwave, and a coffee pot
- Spending absurdly little money on everything
The problem is that if even one gigabusiness began vaguely in such a manner, someone will declare some aspect(s) were "essential" and try to cargo cult the "hard work" pseudo-signals without considering sustainability or that it's even necessary. There are far too many engineers who will overwork themselves until they reach burn out or will not maximize real productivity by working less and taking breaks/vacations, and then won't want to work on a venture at all anymore.
PSA: Don't be a sucker and don't work for below market rates. Eschew working for other people and megacorps when possible; form unions, worker-owned co-ops, and/or get significant amounts of preferred liquidation-preference shares.
I would tell a recruiter directly that 996 is a red flag.
Prior to that it was cracked (née 10x (née ninja)) engineers or sigma grindset or whatever.
It's performative. If you bring people together to build something that they actually give a shit about, you'll out-perform a group of people who are grinding out of fear. And you'll _definitely_ out-perform the kinds of people who are buzzword heavy.
i agree. but. there's something in the behaviour of these unicorns that should be examined.
the idea that an engineer can be a ninja, 10x or unicorn independent of the processes of their environment and working group is laughable. i have known several people who were identified as "highly productive" and they all had some individual traits like a) they were very good with individual time management, b) were not afraid to say when they didn't understand something and c) were all pretty smart. (and d, knew how to give good code review comments without pissing people off.)
but... they also needed an environment where they could push back and say things like "i do not feel participating in today's 1-on-1 meeting (or meeting with product management) is a good use of my time", where task design gave them chunks of work that were appropriate and they were given the freedom to identify (and avoid) "wicked" problems.
which is to say... i don't think the story of the ninja/unicorn is complete fantasy, but management has to understand how it's real and craft an environment where an engineer's inner-unicorn can emerge.
I've been an early employee (sub 10 and 20) in two unicorns and another (a presidential campaign) that didn't have a valuation but did the equivalent. People did not work 40 hours per week, and I feel comfortable saying that the companies could not have been as successful if people had.
The common threads were:
- incredible ICs
- founders who spiked in the most important areas for that market
- a mission that everyone truly believed in
- a culture of people who deeply cared about one another but were comfortable pushing back (as you said!)
It's incredibly rare to find all of these together. I agree that management is responsible for helping others thrive, but not necessarily that they should shape the environment to fit any engineer. Some people want things (projects, challenges, roles) that don't make sense in that company's context. It's okay, especially when it's hard, to agree that this isn't the place for someone.
Are you saying people worked less than 40 hours a week or more than 40 hours a week in those organizations? I’m assuming over, but it’s unclear to me from the tone of your post.
Been there too, and for me it was under 40 hours. Sometimes you'd have to cut people off and say they needed to go home if they were trying to pull more. But the whole 'strategy' is that cleaning up mistakes takes way more time than getting it right the first time, so keeping people fresh and without distractions is the most important thing.
Over 40 hours and it wasn’t particularly close.
What is a ‘wicked’ problem?
I think this is for a different domain than software engineering, but it describes the basics, mostly difficult to get consensus on detailed requirements, often due to "personal" or "group political" reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
I sometimes use the term to describe heisenbugs, which is probably incorrect.
What happened? Started with Musk purging half his staff ...
I've been around long enough in this industry to see the pendulum swing back and forth a few times. The peak of 2020/2021 was the epitome of "spoiled tech worker" but now we're well on our way the other side, I'd say.
> And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that some engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting?
The statement was specifically about top 1% engineers in Silicon Valley. That’s a very, very small subset of all engineers in the US.
The pointy end of the talent spectrum in SV is a very weird place because it has had a lot of engineers for whom work is life. Living at the office and having coworkers working 24/7 might be something they like.
I’m not condoning this or saying it’s common. It’s not common. However, once you narrow down to the extreme outliers in the long tail of talent distribution you will find a lot of people who are downright obsessive about their work. Their jobs also pay north of $1mm including equity, so spending a few years of their life 996ing on a topic they love with energized people isn’t exactly a bad deal for them.
In general, if a recruiter told an average engineer that 996 was expected that would be the end of that conversation. Average US engineers are not signing up for 996 for average compensation.
I am this person (not a genius or whatever) but work is absolutely life for me. I still absolutely resent the 996 culture and would never do that. I'd like to have agency when I want to abuse myself
The fact that 996 is coming to America is an ill omen for worker's rights and, well, society in general IMO.
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Sentiment is changing
If you had enough time to look back through my post history, you’ll find back in 2021 2022 I was loud as hell Screaming from as high as I could on this board primarily that we need to be doing everything we possibly could do to unionize, build labor cooperatives etc. and absolutely nobody gave a shit.
I would get roasted every time and that’s fine I know what I’m doing.
but the attitudes are changing and while it’s frustrating to have to deal with that I feel like being a Hector on this topic is just the entry fee.
I’m extremely dissatisfied at the pace and scale and lack of leaders and organization and push back and etc… so I expect the next two years to be really really really bad and the hope is that people wake up at a large enough scale that they actually are able to affect something but I don’t have a lot of hope for that.
What I describe is not real activism imo but at least I can tell you from first hand documentation that sentiment is changing.