Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.

By this reasoning no charities should exist (they pay less than commercial orgs) and even people who are willing to work for less in order to feel good about their contribution should not be allowed to.

It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.

> Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.

As a country we have decided to let the market decide what to prioritize. Who are we to judge "creepy VR avatars" are less important if people are willing to fair and square pay for them? If they are creepy, don't pay for them.

> No charities should exist.

No that is not the appropriate conclusion. People are of course free to work for less and balance their circumstances. If they want to volunteer for a charity by choice, more power to them. But no, using taxpayer money to fund "charities" is by-and-large corruption in my book.

> It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.

If we are doing labels, yours is a very communistic, statist, view.

--

P.S. regardless of your PoV, I like that you acknowledge my core point: that the OP is seeking special treatment in the form of cheap labor from the US. You are simply arguing for that special treatment being justified, not denying that's the core demand.

Profit is not and shouldn't be the primary driver for whats useful economic activity. There is a lot of good work to be done that can't or won't be sustained by the market. Basic scientific research for example.

Who ends up paying for the decision to pay a meta engineer x, but the climate change engineer x/5?

It’s the engineer who picks the climate change job instead.

Essentially what you’re saying is that due to society not being willing to pay competitively, engineers should take the kick to the nuts and be paid peanuts to make up for societies bad decisions.

Sounds like a pretty stupid decision, frankly.

Sure the engineer ends up losing out. Thankfully, some people put values over personal profit.

It sounds more like someone is taking advantage of people, using nominative idealism to do so.

I mean sure you could argue that, as communists and others perhaps do, for instance, but we are chiefly talking about the US, where individual profit is decided, IMHO correctly, as the primary metric. Sure, you may want to choose to minimally do certain things for national security or other legitimate reasons as the people vote for (as I mentioned in three posts above), but that is supposed to be a deliberate choice of the people and their representatives, driven by their desires, not as an automatic subsidy to any pre-established business, in the form of lax immigration policy which can have second-order effects.

You have a good point. We should fund government positions more so they can pay people better. Then the government orgs would have better talent and produce better output that would benefit everyone, since these are charities.

You are very confused about how the US works. Go find out where the Internet comes from, for example.

Ironic that you use it as an example, since Internet blew up exponentially the moment commercial activity was allowed.

It blew up with commercial activity, but it never would have existed in the first place if it hadn't been created in taxpayer-funded research labs.

[citation needed].

ARPANET was not the only network in existence, even then. Networks existed in various forms. Later, BBSes existed. My guess is sooner or later there would have been something (probably more than one, even) our current internet, but we would never know. Would it look worse or balkanized or proprietary, my guess would be yes, I give you that, but we'll never know that either.

(I originally noted in my topmost post minimal, surgical, involvement is the aspiration, not necessarily zero, but I digress.)

Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity.

Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives.

> Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity. [Citation needed] Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. [Citation needed] It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]

Working for a company that sometimes makes satellites that make measurements of climate change is so indirect at helping people if at all. Donating to that company (by being paid less) is not a good use of money, in terms of charitable benefit. I don't think any of this is wild enough to need citation in a discussion where the median comment is not expected to have citations.

How many people honestly think it's a good idea to donate to a for-profit company?

> It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]

I'm talking about level of benefit, which is not subjective.

Edit: Also I just reread the original comment and realized the climate change measurement was listed as a negative, so for the two citation neededs I point back at the original post about the company. Donating a single dollar beats a negative.

This is entirely reasonable as marginal analysis but it's not universalizable. Ultimately, somebody has to work for the charities or there wouldn't be anything to donate to.

We're not talking about working for a charity though. Just a rather ordinary company.

For the broader analysis, the people that can easily get huge salaries should prioritize donation, and the people that can't should prioritize actually working at a charity.

There are 4.8 million developers in the US most of them are not making Meta salaries and I would say that 80% will never see 200K inflation adjusted in thier lives.

Instead of going to levels.fyi go to salary.com and choose any major city in the US that is not on the west coast.

No most developers don’t get RSUs or anything else aside from their salaries and maybe a bonus.

And before someone replies that I’m “bitter”. No I’m good, I’m 50. I did my stint at BigTech and I don’t have the shit tolerance level to deal with the politics of any large company.

You are actually proving my point. If there are 4.8 million developers who are not commanding Meta salaries, and they "pay well" it should be fairly straightforward to get labor.

It's simple: the more picky you are the more you will have to pay. The GP admitted the upper bound of Meta, which is a company that is sustainably operating in the same country. If you cannot compete in a labor market, either raise your product pricing or be more efficient. If not, you will make less profit and/or go out of business, which is an appropriate outcome most of the time.

No one is entitled to their business model.

I can’t believe that his work is so complicated that he can’t take a good older developer in thier 30s, who would be more than willing to move to a lower cost of living area where they can raise a family affordability and design an internal training program to get them up to speed.

Offer things that we care about like free health insurance, “unlimited PTO”, a generous 401K match with immediate vesting, etc.

I personally wouldn’t move to Alabama. But many would.

At 50, I need to work. But I don’t need to chase after FAANG salaries. I optimize for my other priorities. As I said in my previous post, I’m not “disdaining what I can’t have”. I’ve been there done that.

I think the other part of the problem is no one in software wants to work in Huntsville.

There are numerous reasons why AL sucks.

There's a ton of reasons to not like AL, but Huntsville is actually pretty decent from what I've seen of it.

Huntsville isn’t the socially liberal (ie we are all people and you do you) oasis like Atlanta, Miami and other major cities in red states.

To be clear, I’m not saying all conservatives are evil. I have nothing against the Kemp’s (GA’s governor) and traditional conservatives.

I totally agree with you, people thinking of moving there should be aware of the politics of the area.

But compared to a lot of the rest of Alabama and other stereotypes of the South, it's really a decent place. Definitely not the anti-science, anti-intellectual backwater many might assume. There's a lot of bright people there with interest in aerospace and engineering at all levels. And it's also a college town.

And yet you'll suffer from their policies. Just avoid getting pregnant and have complications, for one example.

Given that Meta pays so well, why are they so dependent on H1B?

Or google? In 2023 they had a net elimination of 6576 US jobs, but added 5479 H1B.

This isn't a simple market issue, these companies are abusing worker visas to replace Americans from their own companies.

Exactly how many “remote principal software developer” jobs do you think there are available and that’s a self selected sample and even then they for some reason separate “senior software developer”.

Look at salary.com where you can see by cities.

None of the BigTech companies have many remote jobs. Google is even requiring their customer facing professional services department to be in certain cities. That was a bridge too far even for AWS.

IF Meta is the benchmark for “good” pay, then this is nuts.

There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.

Are you saying that these firms are economically uncompetitive, with META, and should shut shop?

>Are you saying that these firms are economically uncompetitive, with META, and should shut shop?

A company with same requirements but not the funding? Absolutely

>There are far more people who need code, than just the people at FAANG companies.

With different requirements you can find way more people.

In that case, there is 100% going to be a move to offshoring.

Ideally, the industry would relocate outside of the US, to a place where they can be competitive.

However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.

So defense will languish.

I guess that’s all I have. I can’t see a way out of the situation if we accept your premise.

Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins, that too of something like meta.

Requirements are requirements. If you need a hammer, scalpels won’t help.

> However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.

The US defence budget is ~20x Meta revenues. They can be competitive, but they don't choose to allocate their resources that way.

They seem pretty happy to try to guilt trip people into taking the pay hit ‘for the good of the country’ while someone in the middle pockets the difference though.

> Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins

Really? It's the first time I am hearing US is procuring defense for cheap!

If there is a margin issue, that's an efficiency problem, i.e. the company is being an idiot or deliberately wasteful/stealing (perhaps due to structural problems like overreliance on cost-plus contracts).

This isnt the first time you are hearing that social media margins are better than defense margins.

That is a misrepresentation of what was said, and an unkindness to the conversation being had.

Tech scales, in a way that manufacturing and physical products dont. I would assume that on HN, this is common knowledge, and that you also are aware of it.