Naive questions ahead, if hires weren’t made scarce by some absurd filter, why would they pay $200-300k extra? Feels like the whole idea of stellar salaries must be based on something stellar. Afair, before Google(?) made it normal, developers were sort of dirt cheap. Weren’t developers in abundance at all times?
The reason they pay $200-300k extra is to attract the best they can. Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG?
The absurd filter is just some kind of lottery. They could have a different one: at the end of the day, it's only when the person starts working that you can actually see what they are worth.
The thing with a filter like this one is that it filters out a whole category of people who may actually be good. And it reinforces itself: you hire people who are good at leetcode, who will themselves possibly be good at hiring people who are good at leetcode. Does a company of leetcoders perform better than a company made of a diversity of good engineers? Not clear.
I agree with this. But the root commenter talks about it as something these people are worth, when it’s just that - a lottery. A company that has so much money that they don’t know which barrier to put there to stop the flood. You jump through absurd hoops and join the club. Kinda like being accepted into a cool kids league, but activities are the same.
> Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG?
Very much a tangent, but what do you mean by a company being "ethical"?
I have a few concerns about how that term is often used in these discussions:
(1) it's treated as a binary quality, rather than some kind of continuum, and
(2) there's rarely a recognition that different persons have different conceptions of what's ethical, let alone a justification for what the writer's preferred definition is uniquely superior.
