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FuriouslyAdrift 3 days ago

Netflix has a reputation for the highest salaries in tech. That tends to attract top talent.

https://medium.com/dice-insights/netflix-ceo-explains-why-he...

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crystal_revenge 3 days ago | parent [-]

My career experience has been that there's low correlation between TC and talent, especially at the high end of the talent spectrum.

While I know some really smart people working at various FAANGS making great TC, nearly all of the people that are truly something special are grinding away on hard problems, relatively unknown, getting paid "fine" because they'd rather work on truly hard problems than make optimal amounts of money.

My experience has been that the high TC crowd is above average skillwise, but attracts far more people whose number one concern career-wise is maximizing TC. These are often people that chose technical work because they did the math and felt it was the highest paying per effort required but aren't really passionate about the areas they get paid in.

Truly brilliant people, especially ones from less traditional backgrounds, tend to have a hard time surviving in high TC orgs because they aren't aligned with the culture. Likewise whenever I interact with someone in a high TC role, I'm undoubtedly disappointed by how little they care about their area of work. For them the point of the job is to make money, and they make a lot of money, so there's nothing to talk about.

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ip26 3 days ago | parent [-]

You can apply a filter to top 10% talent and get a perfectly well supplied collection of driven, high output people who are motivated by high TC. It’s a subset, of course. And while visionary genius may not be motivated by TC, nobody said Netflix was looking to crack string theory. People don’t have to be passionate about their job to do really good work.

	▲	crystal_revenge 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> People don’t have to be passionate about their job to do really good work. Even in your core logic here you're proving my point. It's not about being passionate about your job, it's about being passionate about your work, which for me and most of the people I've enjoyed working with the most only has a rough overlap with our jobs. It's a true privileged to work in an area with high paying jobs, but if tech completely crumbled I would remain working in the field so long as the work was relevant to what interests me, regardless of how little it paid. Doing really good work, in the sense I'm talking about, has little to do with how good you are at your job. In fact, as your job pays more it increasingly requires a distracting loyalty to your employer and the "work" you do tends to increasingly become less interesting. There are very clear exceptions to this, but for the most part I've found it to be the case. High TC speaks solely to an individuals ability to meet the needs of a high paying employer. I prefer to work with people who are working on something much larger than their job, so tend to work at weirder companies that pay less. I guess it all comes down to what you define as "talent" (as that was the original point), personally I'm not interested in working with people whose primary talent is being a good employee.