I feel like a lot of this depends on what Oliver meant by “competitive”, and people are making different assumptions in the comments. I indeed think 70% of average local programmer wage would be too low, because I expect the people LC hires to be better than that average. OTOH, if it means “30% off literally the highest offer you can get”, which this comment implies, that seems pretty reasonable to me (contingent on market rate coming into it at all). The highest offer you can get probably comes with a bunch of unpleasantness they have to pay people to tolerate. People who could work at FAANGs choose to accept lower pay elsewhere for lots of reasons all the time, so I don’t think there’s a moral imperative to match them.
You can make separate arguments about whether market value should enter into LC compensation at all, but if it does, I don’t think “70% of the highest amount you could possibly earn, for a job you will find more enjoyable on a variety of levels” is unreasonable.
[Full disclosure: I occasionally contract for LW/LC and benefit from them being freer with worker compensation]
This is roughly the sense in which I meant “competitive” (I think there are some edge-cases here, where for example I don’t expect we will be able to fully cover the right tail of outcomes. Like, if Sam Bankman-Fried had decided to work with us instead of found FTX, we of course couldn’t have paid him 10 billion dollars, or similar situations).
I feel like a lot of this depends on what Oliver meant by “competitive”, and people are making different assumptions in the comments. I indeed think 70% of average local programmer wage would be too low, because I expect the people LC hires to be better than that average. OTOH, if it means “30% off literally the highest offer you can get”, which this comment implies, that seems pretty reasonable to me (contingent on market rate coming into it at all). The highest offer you can get probably comes with a bunch of unpleasantness they have to pay people to tolerate. People who could work at FAANGs choose to accept lower pay elsewhere for lots of reasons all the time, so I don’t think there’s a moral imperative to match them.
You can make separate arguments about whether market value should enter into LC compensation at all, but if it does, I don’t think “70% of the highest amount you could possibly earn, for a job you will find more enjoyable on a variety of levels” is unreasonable.
[Full disclosure: I occasionally contract for LW/LC and benefit from them being freer with worker compensation]
This is roughly the sense in which I meant “competitive” (I think there are some edge-cases here, where for example I don’t expect we will be able to fully cover the right tail of outcomes. Like, if Sam Bankman-Fried had decided to work with us instead of found FTX, we of course couldn’t have paid him 10 billion dollars, or similar situations).
FWIW that wasn’t my interpretation of it when I read the draft and might be worth spelling out.
Can you clarify whether you’re talking about “30% of X” i.e. 0.3*X, or “30% off X”, i.e. 0.7*X?
0.7*X