IT Meritocracy. Part 12: We Will Pay Google Wages.

This is the last article in my Meritocracy series and I want to go on record. It’s not worth going through the pain of founding a software company self-funded without a goal of making it big — to afford practicing what you preach.

No, my goal is not sticking it to Microsoft, Oracle, and the rest of the Great IT Consulting Food Chain happily charging its man-hours. It is to restore meritocracy (meaning fair wages) for the select few: generalist- and founder-level enterprise software developers.

How Long?

It took Google about 15 years to offer its engineers the current compensation. We’ll always have orders of magnitude lower headcount (per programming task/project). With less mouths to feed we hope to reach the point of “Google wages” much sooner. Like any startup, we’ll pivot a lot, but with so many lessons already learned the future looks solid.

We are confident to launch self-funded and start offering developers $300–400K compensation packages within five years.

If LionStack (or whatever it becomes) is not successful — to comfortably support Google L6 compensation with its revenue, we are doing something wrong and shouldn’t be in the software business.

Yes, it is similar to my statements about juniors that should GTFO of programming if they cannot become supervision-free seniors within a year. Make a bookmark. Hold me responsible in five years.

Failure is not an option. Jason and I will persevere and even take consulting gigs if needed. LionStack will succeed. What happens after that, doesn’t change my goal. I am not going to retire.

Wherever I will end up: still at my startup, the company acquired it, or helping somebody else, my team will stick to the same rule: fewer programmers doing (and making) more — through technology. Leave the technology part to me. Along with finding top generalist-level developers and training talented juniors to become true generalists in six months.

I want LionStack to become a Google. Not “the”. A Google. It is about the profit, not the size. Remember, fewer programmers doing more. Will we grow? Not in a Silicon Valley or Wall Street way, sorry. I want LionStack to spawn other startups. Every employee reaches his/her compensation cap sooner or later. I want founder-level engineers to become founders. Taking my cut of course. I’ve talked about it in this series.

Let’s Make Something Clear Before I Go Any Further.

Am I obligated to create startups for my top developers? I don’t owe “fellow geeks” anything. But if/when someone is ready, I will make it happen. Everyone wins.

Is it my, self-proclaimed geek savior and meritocracy advocate, sacred duty to restore pre-outsourcing salaries across the entire industry? Pay that much to everyone who comes to me to “hold me to my word”? Keep dreaming.

It’s my responsibility to make my company as successful, as Google, so I can pay my employees Google wages out of LionStack’s revenue. Whom I will pay those salaries, will depend on that person’s output and nothing else. No bonus or stock option (RSUs, etc.) games. Make me money, and I’ll make it worthwhile for you.

Which will only happen after Jason and I take care of ourselves. A nice entry-level Lambo or one of Singer’s Porsches would suffice for enduring the pain to launch a startup self-funded. After all other expenses, like our children education. Make no mistake. It’s Jason’s and my sweat (and blood) equity.

Do you consider airlines instructions to put the oxygen mask on yourself first, and then help others, selfish too? Save yourself, and then others. If everyone thought about his/her own pocket when it came to political, employment, and other money decisions, no scammy politician or greedy employer could have fooled us. So please… don’t bring up “averages” you feel entitled to.

Besides, I am not writing this for “average” developers. I always mean top engineer salaries. Never think about the present, let alone meaningless industry and country “averages”. If you are average, find another occupation — where you’d get to the top. What number you pick when you see the salary range e.g. $120–150K in some job description? Followed by the stupid “DOE” clause. The top one, right? Not the bottom. Not the middle. You know you deserve the top pay. If you don’t yet, you will in one year of brisk professional growth.

Unfortunately “top” means “cap”. Anyone with passion, talent, and ambition gets to the top i.e. reaches his salary cap rather quickly. As long, as you work for the man, which always comes with the cap. I have a solution for that, if you have the balls to ditch the employment safety net.

What Do You Bring to the Table?

Do you hate Google’s algorithmic interviews? What about way worse subjective and biased corporate IT ones? Have you suffered from incompetent interviewer mistakes?

Bring something that speaks louder than any resume or interview answers: your portfolio of work.

We’ll hire talented juniors w/o a portfolio, though it’s not that hard, and more importantly fun to develop a few apps. The portfolio gets you in the door. It is not your “job security”. We’ll fire anyone who is not learning quickly. It’s a revolving door, like anywhere else, sorry.

For someone past the one-year mark: of a junior becoming senior, you must have a portfolio. No exceptions.

Do you find salary secrecy incredibly annoying? I am writing this article partly to deflect all the flak of the “talking about Google wages but not paying them” kind we caught for publishing exact pay ranges and explaining our expectations: you do this, you get that, you learn A and B, you are paid $C, etc. I believe this crystal clear pay criteria should be communicated in every sourcer call and specified in every job description — instead of the stupid “DOE”.

Unfortunately a published number invites individuals with “years” of that E to comment on our wages in the context of what they feel entitled to. I’m going to make it very simple. Want to bitch about our compensation, always advertised in the job description? Remember what I said earlier? Always ask “What’s in it for me?”, when it comes to money. So what is in LionStack’s compensation for you? Meaning why you want to work for us?

You read it right. Praising or criticizing our current numbers means only one thing: you are applying for a job. Great! Let’s see what you bring to the table i.e. how you can make us millions every year and get $400K+ in return. Do you have the aptitude: longer than average attention span, stamina, and drive for excellence, let alone expert knowledge of the Java ecosystem, Px100 is currently based on, to learn it and “pedal in a higher gear”?

It’s economics, nothing else. When I talk about “big tech” e.g. Google wages, let alone 2–3x lower IT ones, I know, that I can make them those millions. I am an engineer. It’s not different from any other technical planning or design. If I say I can do something, it means I know exactly what and exactly how.

Should I, like a good engineer, “design” the right approach to convince “algorithmically” and “scientifically” minded Google or man-hour minded Oracle of my greatness? I tried for years. Until I realized I can make a lot more than $400K by skipping the employer and helping thousands smaller, but equally information-centric customers directly. A win-win.

What Is Worth a $400K Salary?

I know, I’ve already written about it in the series. Just a brief recap. What kind of long overdue B2B technology I am talking about — comparable to the B2C “big tech” worthy of $400K compensation?

B2C companies, like Google, Facebook, and Netflix either sell ads (collect marketing data, etc.) tacked onto their “free” services, or charge relatively low for them, serving billions of users. Their mind-blowing revenue and growth is backed by two things:

1. Enormous user bases craving the most basic Internet (e.g. search and eCommerce) or entertainment (social networks, media streaming, etc.) services.

2. Universal nature and stable feature set of any single-purpose consumer product e.g. a messenger app or mobile game. Develop once and sell to millions of users unchanged.

The latter has been the Holy Grail of B2B automation ever since COBOL. I wrote about it too. There never will be a universal “shrink wrap” solution to automate inherently unique business processes, full of rapidly changing complex business rules.

DIY: Oracle Forms and all its successors e.g. Salesforce failed to eliminate programming. “Almost-turnkey” “packages” with hundreds of checkbox-filled screens to turn on and off features, requested by all customers over the product’s lifetime, didn’t work either. The users don’t want to spend several months learning the features, they never asked for, while discovering, that the few critical ones for them are not in the product.

The best, industry (IBM, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce) has been offering for the past 20 years: so called “customizable” ERP “packages” can be compared to crude chocking-safe big Lego blocks for toddlers. I’ve talked about it. Those blocks require lots of cutting, filing, gluing, and other fabrication to produce fine shapes assembled of universal classic (small) Lego blocks: programming language commands.

Giving “classic Lego” to armies of code monkeys didn’t work either. Too many of those little blocks? For a single “kid” to figure out how to build a full-scale house model? Only if he/she is playing with them by the book. Trust me, there is room for significant (10–100x) improvement, if you think a bit differently.

When are we going to graduate from the IT daycare with its “big Lego”? Abandoning the pipe dream of turning an accounting ERP into Candy Crush via comprehensible for our non-technical bosses DIY software “builders”.

Leave it to the pros: to develop the next generation of industrial-grade tools for expert programmers — to get closer to the Holy Grail of business process automation.

A bit different from B2C, backed by enormous customer bases using your product as is, any automation goal is always the same — helping more customers. Significantly bigger ones in B2B cases: able and willing to pay thousands for monthly subscriptions and millions for one-off projects. B2C vs. B2B mystery no more. It’s a different scale, that’s all. Don’t you think a single ERP customer is equal to a million of B2C users: ad clickers, $1 app buyers, etc.?

The same programming ingenuity applies: winning over more users. The efforts backing technical scaling of user bases e.g. new kinds of databases and Big Data analytics to handle millions of clicks (likes, etc.) per second are not different at all from inventions, empowering a team of five to effortlessly scale automation of unique business requirements of tens/hundreds of clients, bringing in comparable revenue.

How it’s done? Via good engineering: the same meticulous OOP and FP, Googlers are known for. Definitely less mysterious ”algorithms”, though I don’t believe Google devs code their own as often in their everyday work, as one might think after their “algorithmic” interviews, which seem like a shakedown to me. Anyone can pick up a book or research online (e.g. at StackOverflow) if he/she needs to code something completely new from scratch.

Show your employer how much you can make or save: the hard cold cash. Whether classified under a “cost center” or “revenue generator” doesn’t matter. If you bring in e.g. $20M either from a one-off 18-month project, or as recurring SaaS revenue from 5K subscribers, thinking they paid for a 100% custom application developed just for them, you surely justify a $400K compensation package.

You can also count it differently: whether you are worth 10 $20/hr (doesn’t get lower than that) code monkeys, assuming they produce a working product, which rarely happens. I’d say $200/hr ($400K) is very reasonable for the guarantee to build a robust system, that works. Instead of the wasteful hundred-amateur commotion, leading to the the familiar IT destination: the 90% failure land.

What’s Up with Google?

Google is synonymous with the internet itself. It brought our civilization many other things: from Android to the littlest APIs and frameworks. That’s not the industry revolution I want to talk about. Around the early 2010s Google did the unthinkable wages-wise. It defied corporate IT salary brackets. Other alleged “software” companies (consulting shops really) like Microsoft and Oracle didn’t. Only a handful of top B2C employers followed.

Google paid the same $110–130K during 2000s, drastically changed in 2010s. After 2011–2012 we could at least argue with our bosses when they told us that our job became a commodity to pay half of what it used to across the industry, because that’s what we deserved. We could point at Google and say “there”.

Met with the new response “We are not Google”. No, “buy over build” IT departments aren’t. Neither is equally dumbed down Great IT Consulting Food Chain selling them what they “buy”. “Consulting” business is the opposite of “fewer programmers doing and making more”. Even if some boutique shop (let alone Deloitte or Oracle) wanted to do something better, than selling man-hours of typing glue code, smart people are not found in numbers, required to scale such business.

Eradicating the Disease.

An old colleague of mine I’d refer to as J. reached out to me recently. He brought up many valid pains like management incompetence and agile-killing PMO. They are just symptoms. Not the cause of the disease.

Inadequate technology is that single cause.

Do you plan to change it, while being comfortably employed at the same hated job? You can’t: fight the “management”, PMO, third-world bodyshops, and other parasites eating you alive.

There are two ways of killing pathogens in your body.

One is to fight them: e.g. with another foreign organism like Penicillin. A second, more natural and reliable way is to simply make the environment uninhabitable for that virus or bacteria. Our body does it by raising the temperature.

Bring the technology — meaning tasks you work on, to the next level, and all the parasites die. 100x leaner staff means no code monkeys needed. If they could learn the new generation of sophisticated software development tools anyway. What it leads to? Right, no bodyshops. Going further: generalist programmers “managing” themselves (as Scrum envisioned) means no clueless “functional” managers. Am I theorizing? Indeed none exist at Google. The PMO? “Enterprise architecture”? Pre-sales and post-sales? A couple of years in the bright new world inhabited by expert programmers and no one else, and everyone will forget about PMs and “architects”.

All you need to do, is raise the technology to the new level, so everyone standing in your way: from the code monkeys and their middlemen to semi-technical bosses will find themselves unfit to work with it; The opposite of what’s been happening in IT for the past 20 years: dumbing down the technology, so code monkeys and semi-technical bosses alike can understand it. They are no longer needed due to fewer programmers doing more — covering all B2B automation work. Google and Netflix made it happen in B2C. I made it happen inside LionStack for our expanding B2B niches. You can and should do it in your projects.

Now, can you build that hostile for your bosses environment at your day job? By asking the boss of your boss or even his/her boss, supposedly a business visionary of sorts?

Hey, J. I know you are reading it. Bring it up to Y. (or whoever replaced him) attention. See how long you’ll last after that.

I am sorry, the bright new world can only be built outside of the System.

Does it mean you need to leave your day job to “join the revolution”? No. Don’t tell me, you work on your “tickets” eight hours a day. Everyone knows how much free time a true programmer has in an averagely dysfunctional “IT organization”. Use it wisely.

Start doing that much better job you always wanted, and your bosses didn’t let you — privately. Start networking — primarily online. Not with recruiters. With potential sales-savvy cofounders. You’ll figure out what to do and where to look for niches and connections. It’s a research problem, not different from the rest of software engineering. Start solving it, and I promise you, you’ll be ready to quit the rat race in a year.