zlacker

>>zuhaye+(OP)
Other companies nickel and diming engineers think they are somehow getting something for free. All the highest performing companies in the world pay insane amounts to their programmers

>>ldjkfk+E4
Paying someone a lot doesn't magically make them a good engineer. You have to actually hire the best people, and there's only so many of them to go around.

>>jdm221+h6
Right you are correct. But true talent on any random team is easily worth 3x the average salary on that team. Im speaking about programmers here

>>ldjkfk+R6
The "real talent" is worth nx of the average salary when the work of the real talent makes the company better.

If one (“talent") is a stellar runner, but when the team goes on a run the "talent" has to wait for their teammates to get to the finish line, most of whom go running once every two months, and the "talent" gets dress shoes instead of spikes etc., the "real talent" is worth, to the team or company, as much as the average employee on that team.

An easy and naïve recommendation would be to remove the constraints that limit the work of talent, but it is much easier for talent to move to organizations that, for a variety of reasons, are more conducive to the expression of their abilities than to fight the inertia of organizations. Those very organizations which, for one reason or another, have existed for a long time and pay salaries to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

>>borrok+i9
No even on a highly paid team of engineers making 250-400k, half of them are actively producing technical debt. One good engineer can replace 2, and then leave the code base simpler and more maintainable.

>>ldjkfk+0a
This seems like a broad generalization that has little support beyond -- perhaps -- the personal experience of the commenter, who, I suspect, considers themselves one of the "good engineers" and not one of the overpaid and decidedly less competent engineers, annoying producers of technical debt.

Comments of this nature would be much more informative if were they to begin with "what I've seen is in my professional life", "in the three or four teams I've worked on", or "according to some friends, who consider themselves to be top engineers, working in teams similar in size and scope."

Otherwise, we are left with the sometimes realistic and sometimes much more fairy tale-like story of incompetent leadership holding back talent for no other reason than incompetence or nepotism or envy of those who are smarter and more accomplished.

I have been in similar situations and considered myself a top professional, which may well be true, but in large, mature organizations, regression to average performance is largely an inevitable consequence of size and the need for coordination, a problem whose solution is not to be found in a redistribution of salaries.

How else, with a few exceptions, do employees at Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. think that back in the day things were so much better, that talent was treated better, that there was a real engineering culture, whereas now it's all about sitting in chairs, people in finance having the most power, interviews were so much harder, and we have so much technical debt?

OpenAI is, at this point, a research organization, in spirit and in purpose. If and when it becomes a "normal company," the logics of scale and scope will lead the early employees to complain about how things have evolved. But I suspect that the "let's get rid of the makers of technical debt and use the budget to give top talent more money" will not produce the expected and desired result of a renewed engineering culture, because top talent will not be as useful as it once was.

Whenever a top executive leaves a mature company (or dies, see Apple), the risk of catastrophe is aired, but catastrophe rarely occurs. There is a lesson there.