I know a dude who got a nice package from a pizza company to be CTO + lead programmer. I think he has a few people under him, but the bigger deal was that he could get a percentage of the $ saved.
He worked all day and night to get LLMs to take orders, in a month 40% of their orders are taken through the LLM. For a company with 100s of stores, this is a huge cost saving.
Guy knows how to program, he knows technology, and he knew the domain from a previous job.
You and I and probably half of HN could do the job of "CEO of a mid-size tech company." We don't, not because of lack of ability, but because we don't tick those culture/personality/background checkboxes.
You're not going to leetcode-grind or PhD your way into a $10M software engineering job.
> The CEO is in his position because he has the "right" pedigree and the "right" network, went to the "right" school, talks the "right" way, has the "right" ivy league mannerisms, goes to the "right" polo clubs.
None of this is true. The CEO is either significantly compensated because it’s her company (majority ownership) or because the board likes the direction the ship is being steered and wants to make sure she doesn’t leave to steer another ship.
> You and I and probably half of HN could do the job of "CEO of a mid-size tech company." We don't, not because of lack of ability, but because we don't tick those culture/personality/background checkboxes.
What is it you think the CEO does? Half of HN absolutely could not run a 2000 employee firm they are intimately familiar with, let alone an arbitrary one.
> You're not going to leetcode-grind or PhD
Leetcode no, phd yes. The fact that you put them side by side pretty strongly indicates you don’t know what compensation is tied to.Leetcode skills provide limited value to a company. A PhD with a track record of leading ML publications absolutely can put you up there.
Compensation is about what value they think they can get out of you and how much competition there is for you.
Don’t sit around telling yourself execs have trivial jobs. It just makes you look ignorant. Spend some time looking at what each brings to the table for that specific company. Barring nepotism or corruption, there is usually something significant there.
I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I think I (and most other decent engineers) can probably point to tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in savings generated over the course of a single career.
As far as I can tell, it gets frittered away by empire-builders who take that $ and spin up new teams for nonsense. Kicking back a % to the engineers who harvested all the savings seems like a much better model.
> I'd take that deal in a heartbeat.
Same! That would be a very exciting and lucrative role. Unfortunately it's basically the opposite of what the industry does today. I think we've all seen the six-figures per month AWS bills to power infrastructure for a workload that could be comfortably hosted on a Raspberry Pi.
If the industry ever goes back to caring about efficiency and cost, sign me up.
At the high end of the white collar market you're paid to deliver impact and your pay is determined by the quantity of the impact and how differentiated it is (no big bonuses for the guy who presses the "print a million dollars" button).
Sounds like the skills aren't very differentiated. IME it's quite rare for a business to miss differentiation in business impact in an order of magnitude.
Going to your earlier question, the candidate in question has many skills but is not overly specialized. He commands that price because he can point at the right place in the stack and say "There's $10 million in savings here" when everyone else misses it or "Changing the architecture in this way lets us ship 6 months faster" and he is able to do this repeatedly.
