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Comment by aszen

5 years ago

I think people in the industry are paid based on the potential value they can create (whether real or not), knowing many things or understanding fancy technologies matters little if one can't put them to use for the benefit of the company.

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aszen

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EMM_386  5 years ago

I've helped found multi-million dollar companies that I left before I could "cash out" because they were desktop based companies working with technology I considered growing stale and I wanted to switch to the web.

Now I'm doing the same thing with another company with the web, expect I'm handling everything as a sole-engineer, full stack.

Here I'm dealing with creating an Angular application to replace an aging ASP.Net MVC app, having to rewrite hundreds of SOAP services into a proper REST architecture, and dealing with an Oracle database who's schema we need to keep in place. With a C# .Net Core back-end.

This company needs me, badly, but I doubt this is going to be come a cash cow either (no equity, just a paycheck, and their budget is tight).

Just doing my job as usual.

  • aszen  5 years ago

    It seems to like you are refactoring an existing application, I'm personally in the middle of something similar but rather than doing it solo, I'm trying to engage other Dev's, grab their interests by demoing the new architecture and see if I can get a few more hands on this work.

    I'm doing all of this extra work because I think the best way to create value for a company is to make it easy for other/new developers to jump in to the project and contribute something of value quickly. My refactoring would have failed completely if other Dev's are not able to contribute the new code

    • EMM_386  5 years ago

      > It seems to like you are refactoring an existing application, I'm personally in the middle of something similar but rather than doing it solo, I'm trying to engage other Dev's, grab their interests by demoing the new architecture and see if I can get a few more hands on this work.

      The problem is they literally can't afford it. They looked at "near shoring" companies but they were too expensive. They said we got a quote for developers from another country who will do this work for $20/hour.

      I explained that this has the potential of ruining a green-field project that absolutely needs to be architected and coded properly from the ground-up.

      If we go that route the best I can do is enforce code standards and handle every pull-request.

      3 replies →

runawaybottle  5 years ago

Also, most companies like to brand themselves as ‘tech’ to signal that they are growth based. Why is Peloton a tech company? They’re not.

A lot of us have jobs because companies need to fulfill the image. It’s half the reason why so many people are allowed to do full-stack when in reality they would have no business dealing with those parts of the stack in a real operation.

So no, you don’t actually deserve more money because you are working on more things in an inconsequential space (e.g What the entire Peloton engineering team does is probably bullshit. You need maybe a few devs).

There are certainly better examples than Peloton, but that’s what came to mind (a home gym tech (lol) company). Can’t wait until Bowflex starts hiring out web developers.