Another framing of this is whether companies treat their engineering organizations as a cost center or a profit center. Cost centers suppress salaries as much as possible optimizing the budget. There's little growth within these companies which is why the zero-sum philosophy is passed down to their compensation strategy. Whereas profit centers encourage more and more investment as compounding profits come in from previous dividends. Growth is what powers everything, higher pay has a positive-sum gravitational pull on talent sustaining a flywheel for more profits to come in (hopefully).
All the companies that pay very well such as on https://levels.fyi/2023/ are profit centers encouraging investment in talent, competing for the best across companies because they know its worth it. Each hire even at extremely competitive wages will make back their salary manyfold if they're successful.
That’s fair, but 0 guardrails just entirely minimizes the incentive to create a custom GPT.
I was also thinking about when there’s paid access to certain GPTs. Someone can just download the files and spin up their own? Doesn’t seem valuable for devs. If that’s how the incentives were intended then sure. I just don’t expect many people to be enabling use cases with it.
I think the GPTs market is a bit of a novelty thing. But it might work with low costs. I've been making my own GPTs last few days and I find the capability useful but very inconsistent.
If you give a GPTs personality more complex tasks, it gets distracted and reverts to its default ChatGPT personality.
There aren't enough parameters and compute in these LLMs for the things we're pushing them to do. We need hardware to catch up and offer analog compute for neural nets, so we can scale them way up. And of course evolve architectures to make use of that capability. Only then I see this becoming truly rock solid.
Also using the context window for personalities is likely the wrong approach. You gotta finetune this on the model itself.
But yeah GPT can't keep a secret. But humans also can't, so I guess it's imitating us fine.
Most companies still don’t necessarily list total compensation. For base salary though, these ranges are quite helpful and has definitely caused some “good” trouble increasing baseline wages among competing companies.
At higher levels it’s still ambiguous what ranges truly are since job postings can span multiple job levels (which is why some ranges can feel dubiously wide). Ended up writing a bit about this phenomenon here and what contributes to it: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/notes-on-california-transparency...
In particular, the median for software engineer compensation stayed the same (which is a slight decrease when adjusted for inflation), while roles such as software engineering management saw a 5% increase in overall pay. Specific areas such as Augmented Reality saw larger hikes in compensation. AI engineers have also seen elevated compensation compared to their other engineer counterparts, which we analyze on our post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/ai-engineer-compensation.html
Tangential to the article, but I think there is an error in this report. At Staff Engineer title you have Broadcom listed at second place with total compensation $786,000. The level listed is ICB 6. ICB 6 is actually 2 levels above Staff Engineer in Broadcom's leveling, titled as Master.
Staff Engineer, ICB 4, average pay at Broadcom comes up as $321k in it's leveling table.
That's actually intentional, and one of the reasons why our site exists. Every company has different nomenclature for their leveling that doesn't necessarily align with other companies. So we developed a standard as a normalization for all the leveling which you can view here: https://levels.fyi/standard
While volume of hiring may have been lower overall so far this year, median compensation has generally remained steady or increased in the first half of 2023 relative to the last half of 2022 for most roles. In particular, the median for software engineer compensation stayed the same, while roles such as software engineering management saw a 5% increase in overall pay.
Augmented reality was quite in-demand so far in 2023. AI engineers have also seen elevated compensation compared to their engineer counterparts, which we analyze on our post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/ai-engineer-compensation.html
being just a regular IT person with 15+years experience and getting paid fairly well for what the local market is, whats the chance of a normal person working at a place that pays $700,000 as a SWE? How do you even approach that? Does someone mid career have a chance to pivot?
Almost nowhere pays $700k for a SWE. These numbers come from stock grants or similar financial instruments; that money gets realized eventually, but it's not guaranteed in the same way that a fortnightly bank deposit is.
Stock grants are typically vested quarterly, sometimes after an initial waiting period of 1-2 years. RSUs are just cash, I don’t see how they would not be considered being paid. They certainly show up on my W2.
I didn’t say they aren’t considered being paid; I said that they’re speculative instruments in a way that a paycheck isn’t.
In other words: 700k is 700k when realized, but there’s no particular guarantee that so-and-so many units of stock are worth that much; it depends on the market. Comparing TC as if 700k is guaranteed is misleading.
If we are discussing the levels.fyi pay report, then they are only including the numbers you get in a single year, you are incorrect. $700k is obviously top top band, but this is referring to annual pay.
I went from making barely $100k to a senior engineer at a FAANG simply by passing the interviews. No special background, I worked at the same function at a 50 person local SEO marketing company before that. I did take 1 year off to "find myself" and do some hobby projects that helped catch recruiting attention - nothing anyone would have ever seen here, but enough materiel to discuss in an interview
Didn't get up to $700k -- that's L7/Director territory (hard to reach) -- but it's definitely possible to get into the $300-400k range just by being a run of the mill engineer at big tech.
To answer your question on how to make lots of money mid-career, think about how you're scaling yourself. Are you an IT person supporting a 20-100 person team at a small company? You gotta learn how to scale your time and effort by impacting more than that. You'll have to impact more than 2 million people to get to 700k.
This feels like the modern equivalent of Malthusian theory. Many people have had similar thoughts throughout much of history, but human prosperity has always prevailed. Knowledge is infinite, and as long as there is new knowledge to seek, things are never going to stagnate or be over. Atoms have never been the limiting factor, it's been knowledge on what to do with them.
It certainly can't be infinite. It might be a really big limit. It might be asymptotically approached, and never reached. But even very big combinatorial numbers are not to be confused with infinity.
If there is no limit to prosperity, it follows that not only do you not run out of atoms, you also don't run out of ways to rearrange those atoms that you prefer to earlier arrangements. In that case there is no configuration of the universe that is ultimately the most preferable, which must mean that you have exploitable cyclic preferences.
The post makes a case for a radically expanded future as a possibility we can't seriously ignore -- that a "business as usual" future doesn't make sense. Your objection is that you don't expect stagnation. Neither does the writer!
Nobody, nobody, is sitting there complaining about a world in which knowledge is growing.
> [..] this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
"Knowledge is infinite" means nothing. Things not stagnating or being over also means nothing, that description would fit any nightmarish scenario, too.
We are destroying the habitats of species at such a rate, we barely have begun exploring the ocean and we will never even know what is already lost for good. Knowledge. We know that inequality is rising at increasing pace, that people starve, that for the first time, future generations have less to look forward to than previous ones... what more do we need to know to do something with that all knowledge? Or is the knowledge what to do with the knowledge some kind of cherry on top reserved for last?
While some say "knowledge" and what a fascinating adventure it all is, I just hear "numbness" and "alienation". Collecting gimmicky factoids about the world at best, factoids about man-made concepts at worst, while not seeing the woods for all the trees. You say pessimism, I say toxic positivity, now what?
I found a fridge magnet in form of the Hebrew letter Shin recently, and because I had time to pass I read some stuff about it, including this:
> When the shin is representative of the intellectual dimension, the three lines stand for the three intellectual faculties of the Sefiros: the right line being Chochmah, the flash of an idea; the left line being Binah, understanding; and the centerline Daas, application of knowledge.
Knowledge without understanding is worse than no knowledge in my opinion, and without application, even understanding is worse than no understanding. Or as MLK put it:
> Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
