"Pretty hard" is an understatement. In ten years, somebody receiving a 30% raise each year sees their pay go up by a factor of nearly 14. Over a 30 year career it is a factor of 2600. Somebody starting at 50k would end their career making 130,000,000 annually.
Thank you for hilariously illustrating how bubble-y the current moment feels.
If you think dramatically increasing compensation is going to continue in the next decade like it has in the last one, I think you might be disappointed.
Now that companies are comfortable with remote, HR departments are eventually going to realize that services like Deel exist, and that its not actually that hard to hire employees overseas.
Once job ads start removing the "US only" part from the requirements, comp is going to come crashing back to earth.
A remote worker in the US being paid 4-5X as much as a remote worker in Europe is a massive market inefficiency just waiting to be arbitraged by companies.
As the tech giants growth inevitably slows over the coming years, they're going to have to start looking more closely at their cost structure to meet investor expectations.
Nope. Cheap, outsourced labor has been available for decades. If what you’re saying was true, the shift would have already happened. The reality is that the vast majority of outsourced labor is significantly lower quality than the onshore talent. Mix that with poor communication and a ten hour time zone difference … it’s usually net negative.
This is an easy observation to make yet so many fail to see it. We already have contractors at my company and they aren't that productive. They are handed the easiest tasks with no business knowledge required because well, they are just contractors. Well, that and the fact that they live in a completely different timezone which means communication is async which means slower cycles of understanding and learning.
Instead of outsourcing, even relatively small businesses are now opening international branch offices with full time local employees, tapping the pool of talented engineers who would prefer not to emigrate. The grandparent poster is correct: if there's real savings to be had, eventually someone will find a way to get to it.
I think you’re both right: outsourcing jobs rarely saves money due to the communications & cultural gaps if you’re trying to closely manage someone’s work and they don’t have a very clear understanding of where their work fits in the larger scheme of things.
What works better is outsourcing entire business functions so all of that routine coordination can happen in the same team/time zone, and you have an easier time measuring performance.
My company has been in the foreign contractor market for a while. I still make a massive US salary. Having been on the hiring team for many of these contractor shops I can tell you that the skill level of contractors in India/Africa/China/Ukraine has another 5-10 years before it even begins to approach the average skill of a seasoned American engineer. For a while my business as an independent contractor was quite literally fixing code written by foreigners because the company thought they could play this arbitrage game.
For example, we've hired several engineers through a very big name, silicon valley backed, foreign contractor firm. They perform at the level of a junior engineer at best.
Another perspective to consider is that the best talent in those countries (specifically China and India) are not going to these consulting firms.
China in particular have large tech companies (e.g. tiktok) that offer pays that almost matches the US, which skimmed the best engineers away from these contracting jobs.
The best ones also usually end up in California with a H1B visa. Also, why would one prefer to do random consulting work for a company exploiting salary arbitrage when they can choose to work for various companies doing more interesting work (either remotely or locally)?
HR departments are eventually going to realize that services like Deel exist, and that its not actually that hard to hire employees overseas
The only fly in the soup there is that I see loads of remote roles that can only be performed in the USA because of PII. It's not so much that the workforce is getting globalized, but that the country-specific workforce is going remote in whatever boundaries they're legally allowed to work (in this case, within US borders).
Some people do actually end up at that kind of a multiple of their initial salary. It’s not that such growth is impossible it’s just really really uncommon and generally takes regularly changing roles.
It doesn't just require changing roles. People making 140,000,000 annually are basically only the founders of the very largest tech companies. CEOs of the very largest tech companies will get stock grants in the nine figures on occasion, but not annually. No staff engineer who changed jobs every three years for three decades is making nine figures.
So yes, if you start as a junior engineer and end your career as a CEO of one of the most successful companies on the planet then you can see this growth. But those aren't regular raises for doing good work. Those are completely different pay strata for completely different jobs.
I agree, anyone who thinks 9 figures is likely would have to be smoking something. But, failing to reach the absolute top number possible is hardly failure. Last year over 4,000 Americans made 10+ million in direct W-2 compensation Aka not stock options or capital gains etc.
That’s just last showing years W-2. Someone that made that much but retired in 2019 doesn’t count. It also excludes anyone that will cross the threshold at some point in the future. It even excludes people that got stock options worth that much but can avoid calling them taxable income right now.
Lifetime odds for a random American might be ~1:10,000. But not everyone tries to make that much money from a W-2 either. Becoming a school teacher is hardly putting your hat in the ring for that kind of compensation. Which arguably drops lifetime odds closer to 1 in 1,000 if not better for people that make a real attempt. I am trying to avoid any kind of truss Scotsman argument, but IMO there is a meaningful difference between random chance and stuff people work for.
"Some people" are also born in poverty and become billionaires. Not nearly enough to make it worth talking about like it's anything but a statistical aberration.
Quite a few people do cap out in the 7 or low 8 figures though. The old “climbing the corporate ladder” adage is based on actual people even if most people never climb vary high it’s a real possibility if you actually want to make serious money.
Personally, I and most developers don’t think it’s worth it which is one of the reasons why it’s not actually difficult to get started.
> Quite a few people do cap out in the 7 or low 8 figures though.
Gonna be the [citation needed] guy here again; "quite a few" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. According to the most recent wage statistics from 2020, there are less than 100,000 people reporting incomes of $1M or over; that alone doesn't just put you in the top 1%, it puts you in the top 0.1%. "Low 8 figures" is in the low thousands.
I'm not the first person to point out that Silicon Valley (and SV-style) software engineering incomes seem to have skewed HN's idea of what "average" salaries are and I won't be the last, but I think it's really true. If you make a six figure income, you're pretty much in the top 10% of that wage statistics chart; the median income is around $30K.
> Personally, I and most developers don’t think it’s worth it
The number of people who started as developers and increased their salaries to that $1M+ level have got to be very, very low, and I don't think you can really imply that most developers have the opportunity to do so and simply choose not to. That kind of "engineering founder" success requires skills beyond engineering (and, as much as we sometimes like to pretend otherwise, a certain amount of good fortune).
First you read that chart wrong. 94,130 people make between 1M and 1.5M from the data you linked, an additional 34,060 make 1,500,000.00 — 1,999,999.99 etc. The actual number is (167,593,971 + 358 - 167,409,340) = 184,989 Americans make over 1M per year based on SSA data. Next that number is a massive underestimate based on how SSA calculates wages due to how Federal income taxes are calculated and the normal tax avoidance strategies used to minimize that W-2 number.
Beyond that the relevant question is not what percentage of people currently make that much money out of all people or even all workers. The relevant question is what percentage of people that aim for it eventually make that money. If hypothetically people make 1+M for on average 7 years of their life then your looking at something like ~10 x 184,989 people or roughly 1 out of every 180 people in the population. But again not everyone is in the running, a Teacher is hardly aiming to climb the corporate ladder to millions. Depending who you cut out the actual odds might be as high as 1-5%.
And of course ignoring actors etc who might make that much money but aren’t getting it on a W-2.
PS: To see just how biased official income statistics are try and calculate Bill Gates official lifetime taxable income some time vs how much his current net worth + total donations + 2.4B divorce added up to even ignoring all actual spending.
