It’s a bit extreme to say putting projects on GitHub is worthless when it comes to generating job opportunities. In my experience, if you’ve got a project that delivers a ton of value to a suffiently large set of people, somebody usually will reach out.
Sample size of one: my company tends to ding candidates from Google if they have any whiff of the kind of status- or compensation-driven thinking displayed in this comment section. Can sometimes indicate limited independent thinking and low concern for others. Definitely can close doors.
What's compensation driven thinking ? There's a difference between only caring about money vs asking for what you deem fair. Startups always abuse the naivete of new grads and low ball them by saying they are working for a grander cause. That is BS too.
Small town personal tax agencies aren't financially competitive with Deloitte either. Doesn't make them abusive if Deloitte tier accountants choose to work for them.
Every industry has small low income employers and big titans with deep pockets. The big take most of the high quality talent by offering high salaries, and the small compete for the scraps with niche offerings.
Only in software does being the former seem to be some moral crime. Like if you're not as good as a place to work at as google you're meant to put "we're fairly shit. B- tier candidates at best please" on your hiring page.
That's true. But by the same token the owners of those agencies don't get up on their high horse about candidates that are "compensation driven". If a top talent interviews with a small town agency and asks if they can do 33% of Deloitte instead of 30%, the agency might say yes and might say no, but they don't say "how dare you even think about money when I am offering you a chance to do god's work on earth by helping to build venmo, but for dogs?!?"
Startups can't pay BigCo wages because they don't have the money to. They have to leverage other, harder-to-value benefits which BigCo generally can't offer.
Increased responsibility, fewer "rules" on how to execute, more tightly focused mission are a few.
Naturally this differs company to company and there are always bad actors.
The compensation equation works out differently for each individual. Not everyone should work at a startup.
And that is fair. But the parent comment insinuated that anyone asking for money is doing something wrong or is inferior to "someone who truly loves technology". It's a highly personal decision with no right or wrong IMO.
Agreed. "Compensation-driven thinking" may not be the best choice of words. Money is always a touchy subject.
I read parent's comment to be more about highlighting the expectations mismatch that occurs sometimes when candidates aren't willing to make compromises and then blame the startup for being "too stingy".
I've seen this mismatch occur on both sides of the table. Startups have a harder time hiring due to as they need to seek people willing to forgo direct compensation in exchange for these harder-to-value benefits. Startups need to stay self-aware they'll have a harder time hiring since the candidate pool is smaller.
Candidates applying to startups also need to temper their salary expectations. If you want to join a startup, especially pre-Series C, and you're not willing to compromise on direct compensation, then prepare for a harder time. The employer pool is much smaller and you're not likely to get the most out of working at a startup if salary is a top priority.
While I don't know about the status, but compensation is definitely is the correct thinking. Startups need to offer something for less compensation, a lot of times they offer less and even less flexible than a big co.
When you're comparing against Google, outside of Facebook/Netflix pretty much all companies offer less. There are certainly plenty of predatory startups out there that are exploiting labor with unrealistic promises of riches and cap tables that guarantee no such happy outcome for employees. As an employee you have to look out for yourself, but if you set Google as the standard then everyone else is going to look cheap. There are many companies out there who simply don't have the unit economics to compete with FAANG, but may be more attractive for other reasons.
Then they can’t afford google talent. Short of pay they’d have to offer some other compelling narrative (e.g. HBO’s SV “changing the world through algorithms”). In essence it’s a trick to give up their economic advantage.
My main point is that Google doesn't define market comp, they define top-of-market comp. If you are a software engineer expecting to make Google money then you need to make peace with the fact that there are very very few places where you can earn that. It doesn't mean that all other companies are somehow low-balling or cheating their devs just because they don't have Google's money hose of a business.
>if they have any whiff of the kind of status- or compensation-driven thinking displayed in this comment section.
Whenever I hear about an employer that doesn't want employees who want to get paid a fair market value, I just assume the bosses and owners are the greedy ones which exploit their employees emotions in order to under pay them.
Basically what you're talking about here is arrogance.
And typically yeah... that's true. You don't really want arrogant people on your team, unless they're super productive and share their knowledge freely.
Maybe I’m misreading, but the strawman seems to be that research can be done in a vacuum without collaborating.
The parent commenter seems to be suggesting that a PhD isn’t a requirement to work successfully on interesting research problems. It’s possible to go online and read the same papers everyone’s reading. You can still talk to people to get guidance and find out known things that are not published.
Ya I guess it was something of a strawman. But it's pretty close to the truth since it's very hard to get good guidance outside academia or places like google with lots of phds around.
Doesn’t the French government have some leverage via pharmaceutical intellectual property rights? I’m no expert, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “everyone should just buy in bulk like we do.”
Right, but engineers probably are going to have some level of conviction and judgement when it comes to something they helped build. They're personally invested in a feature they've worked on.
If I was an engineer at Apple who worked on iMessage, and I heard acquaintances talk about the bugginess about iMessage, I would probably start out being defensive but then I would regret that we didn't ship a better product.
I think an EPM is less likely to feel like that, as they are not so closely tied to the actual product, which is what the Reddit poster was saying.
It's easy to blame "the other". Having worked at Apple I never felt like it was the EPM causing quality issues for us. It was us setting an aggressive schedule ourselves and, more importantly, having poor testing. The EPM was mainly just making sure tasks didn't get missed, reprioritizing them as the schedule moved based on discussions with managers & other engineers etc. Sure at some point in the schedule the central EPM committee for a release would start locking things down & punting less critical issues, but that's something that's done for every single release even for engineer-driven companies because you have to ship at some point.
Keep in mind also that these EPMs themselves tend to be fairly competent engineers in their own right so these aren't MBAs making decisions, they've just moved on as their career evolved. They care about quality just as much as anyone. The difficult part is making the call of cutting a feature especially if it's a keynote feature because there's just not enough time to actually ship it because that's predicting the future. Another difficult call is what bug constitutes a delay of an OS release, especially when the bug report may not have the necessary details to indicate it might be more critical than it seems.
TLDR: It's not as easy as saying it's all the EPMs fault. There's plenty of blame to go around because nobody is perfect & predicting the future (which is what scheduling is) is very hard.
