Theory for why Levels vs. Indeed pay scale divide exists

Context: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1627276049083146240

Here are screenshots for when that link goes dead because the internet has been deleted and replaced entirely by AI-generated spam:

What I’m inferring is there are two career tracks. I can give a good explanation for why these two tracks would exist. There are basically two types of programming work: basic bitch shit and computer science proper.

People want to get jobs at Google because they have (had) a reputation for being full of proper computer scientists who know their algorithms backwards and forwards. With that came the Levels pay scale because they were all Ph.D.s doing cutting-edge work to make giant systems incrementally faster. On top of that, you’ve got Silicon Valley COLA increases multiplied by what it costs to hire entire classes of MIT undergrads. That sets certain cultural expectations.

On the other hand, you’ve got your basic bitch programmers in every other company’s IT department. These places just want the website and the ERP system to work. They aren’t looking for people who know algorithms. They’ve never heard of algorithms. This is your basic bitch programming, and it’s still actually really hard. But you don’t need to know any math to do it.

This is your “broad, shallow” type of knowledge vs. the “deep, narrow” type of knowledge.
You need to be a full-stack dev to be more useful than an empty chair in the former type. But you need to be able to walk through code line-by-line to turn off multithreading occasionally in order to better exploit caching resources to have the specialized, extremely academic compsci kind of knowledge.

So now you have these two cultures, the Skunkworks culture and the “local toilet paper distributor” culture. They have these two different pay scales. Now, how do you tell the two different types of programmer apart?

Trick question: you don’t. How many people do you know who can tell a great CPU design from a mediocre CPU design?

That’s where the confusion and negotiation and bleed-through comes in. And that’s where you get these stories of people jumping from one career track to the other. They were working at the local TP distributor and then passed the Google interview. You aren’t going to negotiate 300k at your local TP distributor. But maybe Google negotiates you down to 70k for your Ph.D.-level computer science breakthrough code because you don’t know any better.

And further confounding matters, you’re going to have little shithead companies trying to trick 300k talent into working for 70k and big companies hiring shithead talent for 300k because the CEO read half an article in a trade magazine. There will be more confusion about this in the IT field than in other fields because A) It’s abstract and complex and basically no one understands what’s going on around them, B) there’s a ton of money and financial hijinks floating around to fund retarded behavior, C) coding makes autistic people even more autistic, and D) diversity hijinks.

The latter is the main reason Google’s rep is in the toilet. Skunkworks? More like just skunk…is what you smell like.

I say “rep” but what I really mean is among people who know anything, which doesn’t yet include “smart money” types. We’re talking such a small fraction that it won’t affect their real rep among most people for many years, similar to Harvard or Oxford. Most people still think Harvard has a great rep. You have to be pretty high-IQ to appreciate how dumb people in the state department are. Feuerbach? More like brokebach mountain amirite. Go to church faggot. If you’re so smart why are you working 16-hour days to write code that won’t matter in 20 years?

I suppose it’s a lot of money to jerk off all day, and it would be tough to convince people who think that’s “winning” that it isn’t.