Amen to this comment. I have three engineers who I'm personally awed by. One of them was a graduate student at my university, two of them work for my current employer. You could hire all three for the cost of one definitionally average engineering employee at Google or MS. All three are well-educated, well-credentialed, experienced engineers from two nations that virtually define Rich First World Country.
I'd be honestly embarrassed to tell you what I make at the day job. When I told my bosses I was quitting to pursue other opportunities, they tried to convince me to stay, and the insanity that is salary negotiation reared its ugly head: the value of my labor has increased by easily a factor of ten in the last three years, the best offer they could possibly give was +N%. This follows standard economy-wide employment practices where we pretend that almost everyone (with the exception of salesmen, finance professionals, and very few other white-collar jobs) is an 18th century water loom operator and pay them in, essentially, the same matter as we paid 18th century water loom operators.
I think one of the major Big Ideas of this century is that the economy is being dragged kicking and screaming to where salaries converge closer to actual value faster, rather than being tangentially sorta-kinda arranged in rough proportion to expected value. That's exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.
I was going to become a headhunter or a body shop precisely because I believed that I was significantly better than the market at picking good but cheap people. But then I realised that the headhunter/recruiter job was more about selling (selling your services to the company, that is.) than it was about getting good people. Once they have the contract with the company, any warm body, it seems, will do. Large companies are heavily invested into this 'water loom' model.
The problem with the 'end run' of just starting your own company is that you then end up with embedded systems engineers doing things like web applications, because it's easy to do the web application as an independent, while it's harder to properly utilize that Engineer's talent without a large corporate team.
I'd be honestly embarrassed to tell you what I make at the day job. When I told my bosses I was quitting to pursue other opportunities, they tried to convince me to stay, and the insanity that is salary negotiation reared its ugly head: the value of my labor has increased by easily a factor of ten in the last three years, the best offer they could possibly give was +N%. This follows standard economy-wide employment practices where we pretend that almost everyone (with the exception of salesmen, finance professionals, and very few other white-collar jobs) is an 18th century water loom operator and pay them in, essentially, the same matter as we paid 18th century water loom operators.
I think one of the major Big Ideas of this century is that the economy is being dragged kicking and screaming to where salaries converge closer to actual value faster, rather than being tangentially sorta-kinda arranged in rough proportion to expected value. That's exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.