Compared to the money that tech companies make, way underpriced.
The reason that companies pay engineers more than in other industries/countries, is that in general companies in other industries/countries don’t make nearly as much as SV companies.
The implicit contract goes as follows: You pay ~50,000 engineers around $400,000/year, and you essentially get a money printer and get to be one of the richest people in the world. Who wouldn’t take that trade?
In general, you can’t do that in any other country or industry.
Big tech doesn’t generally make money by selling software.
They make money through monopoly effects on their social networks and ad platforms. They need some devs to build/maintain that platform of course, but devs are not as core to their business as they think they are. The monopoly status is the money printer.
Of course, but how do you become a monopoly? By selling your software, often implicitly through eyeballs and clicks. I disagree that devs aren’t important to this process. You want to make your software as ridiculously low- friction as possible. If making your software 10% faster/smoother/better is going to result in more users, you should be willing to throw as much money (within reason) at that problem as it takes until you have strong network effects.
Once you have a monopoly it becomes less necessary to do anything, which is maybe where we find ourselves today.
Big Tech companies make money by extracting value from other parts of economy. Not only developers are normally not the ones creating that value, they are also not the only part of the mechanism that extracts it - sales, marketing and legal are at least as important
I strongly disagree. Big tech got to be big because they made better products than their competitors, at least initially. I don’t think google/Facebook even used to run ads in the early days.
The reason that companies pay engineers more than in other industries/countries, is that in general companies in other industries/countries don’t make nearly as much as SV companies.
The implicit contract goes as follows: You pay ~50,000 engineers around $400,000/year, and you essentially get a money printer and get to be one of the richest people in the world. Who wouldn’t take that trade?
In general, you can’t do that in any other country or industry.