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Discussion on: What Developers Are: Why an Unprofitable Company Can Have 70% Margins

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

Engineers get paid a lot.

This is not really true. I am not saying pay is low, in generally it results in a comfortable living style.

As the article points out, engineers create current and future business value. They produce the source of income.

Going up the hierarchy and side stepping to sales and marketing, you see people earning much more than the engineers. Yet, the are not the source of the business value. You cannot manage a diamond out of coal. You cannot sell coal as diamonds (and see the light of day).

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codingmindfully profile image
Daragh Byrne

Engineers who can also sell things are a goldmine. Rare as anything though I find.

And even with diamonds, the ones who dig it out of the ground and even the ones who polish them get paid less than those who find ways to sell them. This is capitalism - the value paid at market is often unrelated to the reality of the situation.

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

The diamond analogy does not go that far.

Software developers do not dig out diamonds. Anybody can dig out diamonds. Developers make diamonds mostly out of thin air.

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asadgenx profile image
AsadGenx

@Daragh, what you said is totally true. I worked for a startup in the beginning of my career, created a web application for blog posting, which was a huge success, then guess what! the SEO analyst(marketing guy) earned 2% of the profit from the product, when I demanded at 1% of profit, I was told that anyone can code what you did but not every one can sell what you have coded. Hence he was paid more than I did.

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deiga profile image
Timo Sand

Important to note here is that without proper leadership and sales, coal will not turn into polished diamonds or into high-profit sales either.

Leading a team is at least as valuable as being a contributor in the team.
And selling is at least as hard of a job than creating things to sell.

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks • Edited

Maybe in some fields sales is more difficult than building the product. But I do not agree that generally sales is harder than development. And certainly does not justify significant differences in rewarding performed work.

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zackdotcomputer profile image
Zack Sheppard

This is very true - it doesn't matter how talented the team producing the "raw resource" of the software is if they lack the necessary supporting teams. I'm totally guilty of falling into the "but Engineers can do anything" trap and now try to remember the necessity of leaders to choose the right product, marketers to reach and convince the customer, and operations to charge the customer and deliver the product.

To extend the running metaphor in this threads: it doesn't matter if you can create diamonds from thin air if you're doing it in a warehouse, no one except HackerNews knows about it, and everyone wants rubies anyways.

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zackdotcomputer profile image
Zack Sheppard

Being able to point to other people and say "well those people get paid more" doesn't negate the fact that engineers do, in fact, get paid a lot. The median engineer in the US makes $84k per year, which is 1.5x the median whole HOUSEHOLD income and easily enough to put these engineers in the top 10% of the country.