Author | David Goudet
Translated by | Wang Qiang
Planning | Tina
A gaming platform company pays its chief engineer an annual salary that is twice as much as the company's first round of investment in its start-up.
In today's IT industry, companies are paying developers on a rising footing, and how many other industry players are thinking of switching careers. But easier said than done, and most people give up on this path early once they realize that a programmer's career isn't what they thought.
On the other hand, many companies today are aware of two realities when hiring developers: Not all programmers are very good, and companies need talented software engineers.
"Great software engineers are very creative and can see patterns of concept that others don't see."
——Reed Hastings，Netflix CEO。
A job with an annual salary of $8 million
A 2021 Annual Software Engineer Compensation Report shows that the number of salaries companies pay to hire high-level developers is staggering:
In this salary report, the highest annual salary for a junior engineer position is $226,000, and the company is Netflix. The lead engineer position, with a maximum annual salary of $646,000, is LinkedIn. The highest-priced chief engineer position was Roblox, with an annual salary of $1,200,000 (about 8 million yuan).
Why are they so generous?
It is no longer enough to grasp the basic theory
These top IT companies aren't hiring rookie programmers. When developers get into these high-paying positions, their responsibilities are often not as simple as dealing with simple API implementations or MVC models.
Roblox engineers are working on the most complex problems in today's technology: distributed systems, real-time communications, 3D collaborative experiences, massive data processing, social networking, rendering, physics, and more.
Roblox is an online gaming platform and game creation system. Developers from around the world can create their own 3D online games within Robolox's platform and already have over 150 million monthly active users. These users spend a lot of virtual currency and develop new games on the platform every day. The Robolox platform has its own economic system, and other programmers can create their own games within the platform.
The System of Robolox is the currently popular concept of the "metacosm". Scientists and programmers at this level need to constantly face and solve new types of complex problems that have not been encountered before. The DeepMind team decided to develop a computer platform that could beat the world champion of Go, but their biggest challenge was that the total number of possible games of Go was about 10^172 (much more than the number of atoms in the universe). So they created a whole new approach to this challenge, which has become a major pillar of the modern AI revolution.
It's important to find the right person
Roblox is expanding at an unprecedented rate, and the most impressive of the engineering positions it is currently hiring is the position of lead engineer with an annual salary of up to $1.2 million. To qualify for this role, you need to:
At least 10 years of product management experience;
Possess the industry's top capabilities to identify and prioritize impactful challenges;
Ability to analyze the trade-offs of complex (multidimensional) solutions and propose alternatives that meet the requirements of the solution;
Strong written and verbal communication skills, able to convey a variety of ideas through detailed specifications and/or wireframes;
These requirements are quite subjective and have a lot of room for interpretation, but it's clear that Robolox is looking for people with extraordinary abilities to lead the company's technical team so that it can stay competitive in the "metaverse" bandwagon.
Intel's decline story is a perfect example of how, without good IT engineers, businesses will sooner or later lose their competitive advantage. Intel has held a leading position in the semiconductor industry for decades. But over the past few years, Intel's main rival, AMD, has clearly gained the upper hand.
To reverse the downturn, Intel needs a new CEO who understands technology to lead the company. AMD, for example, has significantly narrowed the gap with Intel in the CPU market, and the CEO who led them to this achievement is a phD technologist.
—T.J. Rodg ers, founder of Cypress Semiconductor.
In the first years of this century, Intel missed out on the mobile computing revolution. The company had the opportunity to build the main chip for apple's first iPhone of the year, but the Intel CEO at the time didn't think it was a lucrative deal. As a result of Intel's decision, ARM-based instruction set processors have gained valuable development opportunities in the mobile computing market, allowing companies such as Qualcomm and Samsung that manufacture ARM instruction set chips to grow and develop.
In the PC industry, Intel's main competitor AMD has gained a performance advantage with the Zen series of processors, putting tremendous market pressure on Intel. Because the performance did not meet investor expectations, the former CEO of Intel had to leave the market.
AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, is an electrical engineer, while Former Intel CEO Bob Swan is a business manager with a lack of technical background. Because of the manager's short-sightedness, the company has lost a huge emerging market worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and has suffered frequent setbacks in its own traditional field.
"Good engineers deserve a sky-high salary"
In the IT industry, it is not very rare to give engineers a sky-high salary. Netflix, for example, has a very aggressive pay policy, paying its computer programmers almost twice as much as Google or Facebook. At Netflix, all software engineers are titled "Senior Software Engineers," have no concept of "level," and don't admit interns and recent graduates. According to relevant data, the average annual salary of Netflix software engineers is more than $500,000.
At a conference in 2020, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings gave his own take on "high-paying hiring": Netflix's first few years were in a period of rapid development, needing to recruit more software engineers, and the company quickly realized that developing a successful engine was a talent-intensive job that required the top employees in the market.
The researchers estimate that the strongest programmers should be 2 to 3 times more productive than the worst programmers. But it turns out that compared to the latter, the former can be 20 times faster to code, 25 times faster to debug, and 10 times faster to program execution. Since the study was published, the entire software industry has been impacted, and many managers have begun to explore why some programmers have the ability to bring far more value and creation than other peers. Combining Netflix's limited funding and upcoming projects, it had a very clear choice: hire 10 to 15 regular engineers, or spend all of its budget on a "rock star."
Over the years, Netflix has found that the top programmers pay far more than 10 times more value, and their creativity is about 100 times greater than that of the average programmer.
He says that high-level technologists don't just write/debug programs faster than others, they also need to be able to solve more abstract and complex problems. "Top engineers are more valuable than their peers, and not just because the former is better at writing code,"
"Great software engineers are very creative and can see patterns of concept that others don't see." Reed Hastings said, "Since then, that's how we hired Netflix employees. This approach was very successful. The speed of our innovation and output is growing exponentially. ”
High salary is still the general trend of the global IT industry, and the chief engineer not only needs to understand the technology, but also has the ability to produce products and management, such talents are unattainable wherever they are, and the leverage effect he can bring will be huge. We believe that scarce engineers are worth paying a high salary, and it's a great way to motivate many developers to keep moving forward.
Resources:
Intel – From the inventor of the CPU to the laughingstock of the industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoTx9LQIKEA&feature=youtu.be
Quora: Why Netflix has adopted such a radical wage policy, paying its computer programmers almost twice as much as Google or Facebook: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-pursue-such-an-aggressive-wage-policy-by-paying-its-computer-programmers-almost-twice-as-much-as-Google-or-Facebook
Quora: Does Netflix's work culture create a culture of fear among its employees: https://www.quora.com/Does-the-Netflix-work-culture-create-a-culture-of-fear-amongst-its-employees/answer/Sid-Reddy-17
Netflix's CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries: https://insights.dice.com/2020/09/28/netflix-ceo-explains-why-he-pays-technologists-huge-salaries/
https://medium.com/codex/why-does-roblox-pay-1-2-million-to-a-single-developer-62f1de432456