Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Until recently, one used to often hear people say that while software engineers had high salaries, they were actually only paid a small fraction of what they were really worth. If that were true, these mass layoffs probably wouldn't be happening, and they certainly wouldn't be causing stock prices to rise, as they did when Meta announced its layoffs.
Were the people who said software engineers were underpaid mistaken? Why did they believe this? Was it based on some naive calculation of profit per employee, ignoring the cost of capital, as is really common among people with no formal economics education?
There's a meme in software eng of the 10x programmer who does the work of 10 normal ones. In my experience, these people exist. But the 10x is more that the average programmer is lazy to a fault, i.e. the 1x is such a low standard that 10x isn't really all that.
So the answer is that the 10x are grossly underpaid while all the 1x are overpaid. And there's a lot more of the latter.
Its worth noting that the productivity of the 10x engineer doesn't mean he writes 10x the code or anything as such.
It might be that the "10x" engineer can just add 1 line of code that would take x engineers 10t amount of time. Or sometimes that one line of code could be incomprehensible to everyone but the 10x engineer, in which case even an infinite number of normal engineers wouldn't be a sufficient replacement of that one 10xengineer.
Viewing (engineer) productivity as something that can be measured is the wrong way to think of it. The correct way is "What is now possible with the addition of this engineer that was previously impossible?".
Einstein might have the raw intelligence of 50 toddlers, but even 50,000 toddlers couldn't do what Einstein did. IQ doesn't scale.
My hot take here is that every engineer is getting paid exactly what they should be getting paid. If your baseline calibration is the 10x engineer then yes some engineers should probably not get paid at all, and the inverse of that would mean the 10x engineer gets paid infinite money. Neither of those makes sense with even a minimal understand of marginal utility.
So, the market is probably much closer to the truthful salary than your intuitions.
Yeah, won't disagree with the blatant one-sided class warfare. These dynamics are very salient to me given I come from a relatively poor and low status background and my technical skills are the only leverage I have, surrounded by nepotism and classism of the likes incomprehensible to most Americans. (I live in a shithole country).
I don't know which monster or Elder God symbolises this specific problem, it's not entirely Moloch. But whatever he is, I will forever live in his shadow, its etched into my mind, My (future) kids are going to go to the best schools and have the right tastes, because I didn't and I know the potent bullshit that comes along with not doing so.
It's not that all engineers are not not fungible, some certainly are. But as you said, those whose work isn't are difficult to spot. A bad thing avoided can rarely ever be credited.
However this might be a good place for Hanlons Razor. A manager who doesn't know this is probably a bad manager. A manager (standin for all non technical people engineers have to deal with) might not know what a good engineer looks like, but he should know what a good manager looks like.
A good managers work is just an in-fungible as the good engineers. The fact that he might stay calm and hold the teams morale together by taking the blame himself when they are not working well together will not show up in the quarterly report.
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