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Beijing Startup Offers Engineers $1M Salary Plus Options in Battle For Talent (financialpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Financial Post report: Beijing ByteDance Technology is the brainchild of entrepreneur Zhang Yiming. The company is best known for a mobile app called Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets. In five years, the app has become one of the most popular news services anywhere, with 120 million daily users. Toutiao is on pace to pull in about US$2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising. It was just valued at more than US$20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, roughly the same as Elon Musk's SpaceX. In China, the Beijing company is controversial because of its recruiting. ByteDance hires top performers from such giants as Baidu and Tencent Holdings, sometimes raising salaries 50 per cent and tossing in stock options. "Our philosophy is to pay the top of the market to get the best," says the slight 34-year-old in an interview at the company's headquarters, his first with foreign media. "The company that wants to achieve the most, you need the best talent." Top performers can make US$1 million in salary and bonus a year, plus options, according to people familiar with its hiring. Total compensation can exceed US$3 million.
Given the enormous cratering in purchasing power of the US dollar over the past decade, this is more in line with where salaries for good tech people should be. And minimum wage should be $75/hour.
Tech companies are raping us.
I've seen much bigger productivity gaps between the best developers and average guys who have maybe 1 to 3 years of experience under their belt. I'm talking about folks who have mastered their art over the corse of a couple of decades and who could (for example) design and build a new programming language and a basic compiler proof of concept in a month.
I understand that there are a lot of folks out there who are down on the idea of "superstar programmers" and who believe the idea that anyone mastering the art of development is somehow detrimental. But in my experience the ones who are the loudest to complain about substantial productivity differences are ones who have risen to "Senior Developer" status but who still engage in "voodoo stick" programming.
In my experience, the major difference between the most productive devs and the least productive devs isn't what they do. It is what they don't do. Experienced guys know where all the blind alleys are, where all the unneeded flexibility should be trimmed, and where all the bad requirements are that can be negotiated away.
Been in the business for 20 years. I spend a lot more time making other developers productive than I do actually coding myself. By applying my experience to all of their work streams rather than just my own, I make the entire project run much much smoother.
The trick is finding enough time to actually code myself to keep those skills up to date.
People generally hire other people they like. If they are actually productive its a plus. I've noticed in jobs and in life your pay grade is dependant upon how much people like you. Management probably thought he was weird so out he goes.
The kicker? They downsized him after about a year... but they still kept me. No idea why.
The main issue is that the management had no idea what they're doing. You can't attract and maintain talent if you have no idea what it looks like to begin with. The second factor is that in absence of an ability to recognize talent, people fall back on other methods and poor Milton here probably wasn't overly personal or the type to make friends with the weasels in middle management.
Wow. He knew how to use Excel pivot tables AND how to write Emacs macros? Truly a genius.
Now now ... play nice or no sweets for you ...
You left out "how to read Oracle explain plans", BTW.
The point clearly is, the guy could do pretty much anything. Very broad areas of experience and expertise. The comment provided samples, not a resume ;)
And all three are exploited, making 100k-150K salaries. The best developer I ever met started at what is now a very large and well know company as a high school student. 20 years later the company has 5000 engineers. If it was a choice between him and 200 random engineers at the company, management wouldn't even debate it, everyone knows he's the smartest person they ever met. The frustrating part is in all three cases management knows they have people that are worth over a million a year and that these people are responsible for a significant part of the companies profit but they still treat these people worse than their average employee.
The problem with superstar programmers is they are hard to count on: they are difficult to recruit, offer no guarantees on retention, and can have friction with other superstars.
So you're saying they're still people.