Comment by sealeck

I started out freelancing.

You have to spend large amounts of time finding clients and being a salesman as you sell yourself and your services to them.

Once you do that, you have to prove that you're the person you promised. Unfortunately, most clients reaching out to freelancers are very....difficult.

After you've done the job, you have to be your own accountant and billing department. I should mention here that collecting from a lot of clients is often a frustrating endeavor and you will almost certainly be scammed at least once (at which point you have to do the math on handing most of your profits over to a lawyer and risking getting a bad reputation as a legal risk).

Because you're contracting, you are on the hook for higher taxes than normal to cover stuff like social security. Unless you are getting bottom-dollar insurance (the stuff with a $10,000+ deductible where you still get bankrupted if your medical bills are bad), you are probably paying tens of thousands in health insurance.

Want holidays, vacation, or just a day off? That means you are missing a paycheck (at least missing a bunch of billable hours) and may have upset clients. If you need to make $100,000 at a corporate job, then you'll need to charge at least $150,000. If you want to work a normal 2,000hr/yr, then you are going to have to sell your client on $75/hr while they're seeing $25/hr or less from some overseas "talent".

Also don't forget that lots of the highest-paying jobs aren't open to freelancers. Even if you contract, you'll be going through an agency charging big money then giving you a tiny fraction of what they take in.

After I got married and had kids, I was busy enough without running a business. I want to spend time with my kids while they are still kids. I may make less as a FTE, but I work a lot fewer hours and have way less work stress.

It’s uncommon in the US because freelancing means having to source your own - usually both expensive and crappy - healthcare.

It used to be incredibly common in the UK - half the decent devs in London were contractors making 2-3x what permanent employees made. It’s now uncommon because the government nerfed it with IR35 rules.

Devs are often either not good business people and/or don't want to be. Freelancing, in any industry, involves a lot more than just doing the actual job.

Also, as others have already mentioned, salaried with is much more stable.

At least these are my primary reasons, and those of some others I've spoken to on the matter.

We all cannot afford job instability, with mortgages to pay.

I make my employer a million dollars a year by making a 0.1% improvement in a billion-dollar-a-year business.

No billion-dollar-a-year business? No million dollars of value created.

You could probably calculate it based on how much ad revenue one can gain by having your own default search engine be the default in Firefox.

At least, that's probably how Google determined value added when deciding if it's worth the return when they funded (read: paid for development at) the Mozilla Corporation.

A lot of engineers in the US would consider 150k a year to be a good salary too. Calling 150k "low" is indicative that the person saying that lives in a bubble and has not bothered to look outside it. Lots of software engineers are employed in the US outside of Silicon Valley or NYC.

From personal experience, it's definitely possible to earn more than 2x that in total compensation before taxes as an individual contributor in Europe. Maybe not all of Eastern Europe, but I can't really speak to that.

It can be tricky to narrow down definitions but there are at least a million and probably less than 5 million software developers in the US. The last few years have seen ~100k students graduate with CS degrees each year. Thousands of layoffs over the timespan of years isn't going to impact it all that much. If you played your cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only expect that to have expanded, and anyone with a handful of years of experience is going to be above that and should consider shopping around for >$150k if they aren't there already.

In my experience, a CEO pretty much sets the company culture. And it feels really weird to choose someone who's here for money/title to set your culture. But of course, the CEO is not chosen by the employees, but rather by other people who are also here for the money/title :-).

In a startup, the CEO also convinces VCs to invest. And again it's interesting: VCs have no clue about the technology, so you would think they try to invest for CEOs who set a good company culture. But instead they get convinced by the CEOs who bullshit them the best. Which makes sense: not only VCs don't have a clue about the technology, but somehow they think they actually do understand. I have heard a few discussions between CEO and VCs in startups (talking about the technology I was actually working on), and it was hilarious.

> If people work less as a result they don't really care.

They just don't know. Even if they genuinely try to ask feedback from the employees, it's biased. Employees generally don't give honest feedback because it's a risk for them (especially if the company culture is bad, which is where the feedbacks would matter the most).

I would say it's both. A high market rate for labor pushes CoL up (because people have lots of money to spend), but a high CoL also pushes the market rate for labor up (because you can't get anyone to work for you if you don't pay them enough to make ends meet). Trying to decide which one is the root cause is a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Yeah that's why I was so surprised they were adamant the job was on-site there. It was an IT job. Easily remotable or done from an office in any place in the world.

Wow that's almost 10 times as much as me :) Still wouldn't live there though, especially now.

For me it's those horrible cloudflare and recaptcha things. I get them soooo much. And also that stupid cloudflare "We're checking if you're human" page.

I am on Linux though. Perhaps Firefox on Windows or Mac fares better. But these problems are from the last year or two and don't happen in chromium also on Linux.

As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is willing and able to tank the entire project, but it looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you want to be competing for?

I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.

There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent operations for simple living wage, or less.

Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade.

Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others.

Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone.

They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.

It's not clear CEO pay is driven my market forces at all. Pay seems almost completely divorced from competency.

> Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.

There's no reason to believe that. But it's still better than someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can't execute.

What does it mean to be qualified?

The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy.

A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs.

The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.

That’s a problem with your selection process, not the lack of qualified applicants. It’s funny that the qualification that people require often seems to be ‘has done this thing to no great success elsewhere’.