<story><title>Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from</title><url>https://lianza.org/blog/2018/01/21/fellow-engineers-this-is-where-your-money-comes-from/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>&amp;gt; getting 99% of the profits?&lt;p&gt;Profits by definition are calculated after labor costs are deducted, so employees get 0% of the profits in salary.&lt;p&gt;However, take a look at your company&amp;#x27;s accounts and see how much of the gross revenue is paid out as wages and salary. It&amp;#x27;ll be a big chunk. There&amp;#x27;s your share.</text></item><item><author>throwawayjava</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; This is why I struggle with scenarios where people discuss pay and work without considering value.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Counter-point: firms exist.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m the one figuring out how to create value, why the hell are the C suite, middle managers, and investors getting 99% of the profits?&lt;p&gt;So no, in the context of a large firm, it&amp;#x27;s definitely &lt;i&gt;NOT&lt;/i&gt; an engineer&amp;#x27;s job to figure out how their skills align with market demand. And that&amp;#x27;s the &lt;i&gt;whole damn point&lt;/i&gt; of a firm.&lt;p&gt;Now, this may be reasonable advice if I want to maximize by income. But maybe my goal is to maximize income &lt;i&gt;under the constraint&lt;/i&gt; that &amp;quot;my excellent engineering&amp;quot; is the primary consideration in my performance evaluations. And there&amp;#x27;s nothing wrong with that; people trade income for all sorts of things. Telling someone not to make that trade-off is like chiding them for buying an expensive latte or sending their kids to an expensive private school. It&amp;#x27;s not your money, so it&amp;#x27;s none of your business.&lt;p&gt;edit: And, furthermore, the success of large firms and the high compensation available at those firms suggest that the author&amp;#x27;s advice might actually be actively harmful. As an engineer, you might actually be better off ignoring engineering-value alignment because you might be better off simply executing well within a well-oiled machine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawayjava</author><text>Sorry, but I think that this view is both obviously wrong and actively harmful. It&amp;#x27;s an example of where going with textbook definitions actually &lt;i&gt;obfuscates&lt;/i&gt; reality.&lt;p&gt;Highly compensated managers are taking a share of profit, often quite literally (look at how VP and above positions are compensated). But always indirectly -- you can&amp;#x27;t tell me a 7-8 figure salary &amp;quot;isn&amp;#x27;t a share of profit&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s obvious BS. And if my own compensation is a share of profit in the same sense (which, a port of it literally is), then my observation that non-engineers get 99% of that share is still accurate.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, and much more importantly, this is pretty tangential to my original point. The point is that if I&amp;#x27;m an engineer at a large firm, it is NOT my job to do the MBA thing. The entire premise of a firm is that the author of this post is wrong.</text></comment>
<story><title>Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from</title><url>https://lianza.org/blog/2018/01/21/fellow-engineers-this-is-where-your-money-comes-from/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>&amp;gt; getting 99% of the profits?&lt;p&gt;Profits by definition are calculated after labor costs are deducted, so employees get 0% of the profits in salary.&lt;p&gt;However, take a look at your company&amp;#x27;s accounts and see how much of the gross revenue is paid out as wages and salary. It&amp;#x27;ll be a big chunk. There&amp;#x27;s your share.</text></item><item><author>throwawayjava</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; This is why I struggle with scenarios where people discuss pay and work without considering value.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Counter-point: firms exist.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m the one figuring out how to create value, why the hell are the C suite, middle managers, and investors getting 99% of the profits?&lt;p&gt;So no, in the context of a large firm, it&amp;#x27;s definitely &lt;i&gt;NOT&lt;/i&gt; an engineer&amp;#x27;s job to figure out how their skills align with market demand. And that&amp;#x27;s the &lt;i&gt;whole damn point&lt;/i&gt; of a firm.&lt;p&gt;Now, this may be reasonable advice if I want to maximize by income. But maybe my goal is to maximize income &lt;i&gt;under the constraint&lt;/i&gt; that &amp;quot;my excellent engineering&amp;quot; is the primary consideration in my performance evaluations. And there&amp;#x27;s nothing wrong with that; people trade income for all sorts of things. Telling someone not to make that trade-off is like chiding them for buying an expensive latte or sending their kids to an expensive private school. It&amp;#x27;s not your money, so it&amp;#x27;s none of your business.&lt;p&gt;edit: And, furthermore, the success of large firms and the high compensation available at those firms suggest that the author&amp;#x27;s advice might actually be actively harmful. As an engineer, you might actually be better off ignoring engineering-value alignment because you might be better off simply executing well within a well-oiled machine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angersock</author><text>Who drives the better cars, has better vacations, and better real-estate?</text></comment>