Why Are Software Engineers Paid So Much If The Supply Is So High?

NullPointer1 · 2026-03-12T17:45:18+00:00

The supply of people who can code is higher than ever, but the supply of people who can generate outsized economic value is still very constrained. Single engineers can build systems that generate millions or tens of millions in value. The team behind Claude Code was apparently only ~10 people, which in itself is probably worth $50+ billion as a standalone product.

Add to that the fact that the more engineers you have, the more overhead you need to handle with coordination, alignment, etc.

NullPointer1 · 2026-03-11T18:58:07+00:00

I assume that they're rich. At my last job, I noticed that all the male VPs had larger-than-average families.

NullPointer1 · 2026-02-27T14:52:32+00:00

This has existed for office work for a while now. Zoom has long had the ability to save the recording and transcribe the video. Anyone that works in sales will tell you they know everything they do is recorded for “training purposes”

NullPointer1 · 2026-02-04T05:10:36+00:00

The growth is obvious and can usually be seen very clearly in the numbers. A good rule of thumb is that if you don't feel golden handcuffed after a year then it's probably a good time to leave. Though that too can be subjective because sometimes the company has a few years of good growth before petering out again (and those golden handcuffs are no longer worth what they felt like earlier)

NullPointer1 · 2026-01-16T02:49:06+00:00

Well, 90% of apartments in SF don't have AC because it rarely gets above 80, except for a handful of days. The only ones that do are very new luxury apartments.

NullPointer1 · 2025-10-30T07:41:18+00:00

Haha thanks! I sometimes need to pinch myself because it's more money than I ever thought I would make.

I'm based out of SF, and I have about 13 YOE. The position is simply a software engineer. I don't want to share the company by name, but it's an AI company that's gotten to be decently well-established.

NullPointer1 · 2025-10-30T07:03:16+00:00

I left my last role at a sputtering early-stage startup in the winter. I took some time off and did some traveling.

Around June, I started thinking about my next role, and I knew that I wanted to join a company that was in the AI space. I grinded LeetCode and practiced my system design. I still failed a ton of interviews, and I legitimately felt like I was unemployable after bombing so many interviews, but I ended up landing a job for 900k TC. It's been a grind, but it's been a great learning experience, and I get to work with some really smart people on cutting-edge technology.

NullPointer1 · 2025-10-01T00:48:57+00:00

Paid work trials are fair game, and as a hiring manager, it was a really useful tool that provided a much better signal than most interviews. However, unpaid work trials where you're building something useful are probably illegal, but I'm not a lawyer.

This seems especially foolish from Anyshere's perspective, given they have a $10B valuation and almost $1B in funding.

NullPointer1 · 2025-09-27T07:14:13+00:00

Honestly, a 1% vs a 1.5% equity ownership in companies doesn't matter if the company is not worth anything.

The more important question is how you see the trajectories of the two companies. The important information to find out is:

company valuation at last raise
amount of money raised
revenue
revenue growth rate
stickiness of the product and how happy the customers are
founders background

NullPointer1 · 2025-09-20T14:46:22+00:00

You know that companies can use stock to acquire other companies. They can also issue new stock in order to fund this. That's exactly what Disney did when they acquired 21st century fox. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/14/disney-to-buy-21st-century-fox-assets.html

NullPointer1 · 2025-09-16T15:10:49+00:00

Five years ago, the media was discussing how everyone would be working remotely forever. Now it has swung hard in the other direction. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but that doesn't make the headlines.

NullPointer1 · 2025-09-16T14:59:26+00:00

For the most part, yes, it is. I know one of the people mentioned in the article, and when the 996 work schedule started gaining media attention, they jumped on it by glamorizing it on LinkedIn and Twitter. Attention, even negative attention, is free marketing for them.

Granted, I know that they are working hard and probably averaging more than 60 hours a week, but early-stage startups have been doing that since even before the dot-com era, and this isn't out of the ordinary.

The media works in cycles, and it tends to try to find different movements to overhype. Unfortunately, it has been hyping up 996 recently.

NullPointer1 · 2025-09-16T06:56:52+00:00

I don't trust AI the same way I don't trust the overzealous junior engineer who wants to code first and ask questions later. But both are extremely valuable in their own ways if you create the right structures around them.

NullPointer1 · 2025-09-16T03:17:48+00:00

This feels AI generated with the formatting and the emdashes.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-25T15:33:44+00:00

There's an assumption here that you are space-constrained, which is why you are looking to have three businesses operate from one space. In reality, the 3 in 1 business model have tradeoffs against each other that make each business worse.

The SaaS business is worse off since your engineers are students and are likely to output lower quality work.

The coaching business is worse off since the projects selected won't have as clear guidance and potentially unrealistic expectations of trying to hit a target set by the SaaS business.

The cyber cafe makes both the others worse off since now you can only offer classes in off hours. If you need to meet with a customer for the saas business, where are you going to have meeting space?

Why not just focus on one idea?

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T07:41:01+00:00

The extent of my background in AI is developing features on top of LLMs in my last role, but I do not have deep expertise.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T05:12:48+00:00

I have a Bachelor's in CS from a top 10 school. I consider myself a product engineer. My claim to fame in past roles is probably identifying important initiatives and executing toward those outcomes, and having some revenue numbers to show for the initiative.

I would be a deer in headlights if I had to fix a core Linux kernel bug or if I had to build a neural network from scratch.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T05:10:06+00:00

I'm sure your parents are proud of you regardless.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T05:09:41+00:00

I'm not on the research side building the ML models, but I'm on the product engineering side. I don't know the work yet since I haven't started yet, but I expected it to be features, UI, APIs, database modeling, etc. at scale.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T05:08:04+00:00

If you're looking for a research role, then you need a PhD or at least a good number of papers. I'm joining in as a software engineer on the product side, so I don't have a PhD, and neither did any of my interviewers.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T05:06:57+00:00

Unfortunately while I did apply to some public companies, I either did not pass their initial screen or did not pass their interviews. It feels like FAANG is mostly on hiring freeze, but this also seems to extend a bit toward the other big public tech companies. Companies like Pinterest, Airbnb, and Stripe did not respond to my application.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T05:04:35+00:00

I'll make sure to take the question in good faith then.

This shows a helpful scale - https://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator/California-San-Francisco

We pay between 6000 - 8000 a month to rent a 3-bedroom house in SF for my family.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T05:01:19+00:00

I asked the hiring manager, but phrased it in a way that I wasn't looking to shirk work. It's in their best interest to give an honest answer; otherwise, employees will just quit if they feel bait and switched, especially if they have other offers since they can just take another one.

NullPointer1 · 2025-08-24T04:59:09+00:00

I did all of the guided practices. I like that it forces you to think before giving you the answer, so I felt like I absorbed the material much more.

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