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Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a prog

Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.

marshray 11y ago
Technical writers, human language translators, lawyers, and many other professions are primarily about "active literacy" as much or moreso than software developers. Do you feel they are all worth $0 too, or just programmers?
- Alex3917 11y ago
  The screenplay for The Hunger Games has value. A shopping list also has value. However, their values are very different. Sure, each was created by a pencil user. But they don't actually have anything in common, so asking how much money pencil users 'should' make doesn't even make sense as a question.
  - threatofrain 11y ago
    I think you have a specific framework for viewing things, but you are being deliberately obscure rather than just elucidating your thoughts, and so I think the downvotes are just. What would happen if you exercised clarity? Bad things? You are saying that a pencil user isn't worth anything, but you also recognize that a pencil user can write a script. You feel that it is the script which has value, and not the pencil user. So I suppose you're saying the programmer isn't worth anything, but the program is worth something. That's one lens to view things, but it's also a gimped on its own. One should have multiple lens.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Agreed that the presentation does not help but it is an interesting train of thought and by far the most interesting part of this particular thread on HN. Indeed the output has value, the skill by itself is of no value. Just like painting has value and writing have value. There are lots of terrible paintings, terrible programs and terrible books. Those have no value, and then there are some really good paintings, great programs, great books. Those do have value. And the skill that allowed the bad stuff to be created is the same skill that allowed the good stuff to be created. So the skill per-se is not the differentiating factor, the quality of the application of that skill is what allows one to create valuable work and being the intermediary between someones ideas and valuable work is why programmers, writers and painters can make a living. It's the whole basis of IP law and all the associated bits-and-pieces that allow all of us to make a living. Intellectual property has a shadow side, but this side is the one that keeps the IT world afloat. The same laws that govern file sharing allow writers, programmers and other people skilled in some art to create enough value that they can make a living, sometimes even a very comfortable one and those writers and programmers that manage to hold on to the fruits of their labor long enough can do very well for themselves indeed. > What would happen if you exercised clarity? Bad things? Unlikely, but not everybody is equally capable of expressing their thoughts clearly. I should know, I've struggled with this for many years and only in the last 5 or so I've gotten better at that. HN has definitely been a tremendous aid in learning how to express myself more clearly to avoid being mis-understood.
RussianCow 11y ago
At one point in history, knowing how to use a typewriter was itself a marketable skill, because few actually had access to one and knew how to use it. These days, most people in the developed world know how to type, but still only a small portion know how to write programs. Saying that this is worthless is silly at best; someone is willing to pay someone else to turn their ideas into code, so it must be worth something.
- gizi 11y ago
  It does not matter whether programming is marketable or not. What matter is that the results of programming, such as Google Search or Facebook, are highly marketable. Mistake number one: never sell yourself. Only sell the result of your efforts, and preferable not to middlemen, but directly to the real buyer. That is how you create hundreds of billions of dollars in value.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    You're flooding this comment thread with these posts. A single person didn't build any of these billion dollar companies you're referencing; at some point they had to hire more people, who in turn "sold themselves" by your confused logic, to build the company. Most of these halo companies have non-programmers who were brought in to monetize and grow the value in them. Sheryl Sandberg isn't a programmer nor I think the rest of that board. Eric Schmidt was an electrical engineer.
    - gizi 11y ago
      You see, I don't like the mentality that exudes from "How to price a programmer". Furthermore, this site, "Hacker News", is not supposed to be upvoting that kind of posts, because in that case, the people on this site are not hackers at all. The vote here has obviously been subverted. But then again, it does not matter. Making billions is not a matter of voting or misguided pseudo-democracy. Mark Zuckerberg made hundreds of billions because he is undoubtedly a great hacker. All the misguided voting on the planet will not change anything to that. The battlefield is the marketplace and not the voting nonsense.
ketralnis 11y ago
If you need someone with programming skills and are willing to pay them, and someone with those skills will work for that amount, that's the price of a programmer. Asserting that the skill is worthless doesn't make sense as long as people will pay for it. Even if you just consider it a form of literacy, scribes absolutely were paid to do their work before literacy was as widespread
- rgbrgb 11y ago
  People don't pay for "programmers" they pay for people to make products.
  - mruniverse 11y ago
    People don't pay for people to make products, they pay for people to make them money. People don't pay for people to them to make money, they pay for people to build wealth. People don't... wait I have to throw up. Will be back.
    - dang 11y ago
      You have a decent point here, but please don't optimize for snark on HN.
      - mruniverse 11y ago
        But pompous comments are ok?
        dang 11y ago
        They're definitely not great, but the class of all comments that strike someone as pompous is so large that standardizing on snark in replies would sink us.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. Programming absolutely is a job. Its a thing people pay people to do for them. > It's not even a skill; Its absolutely a skill. > rather, it's more of an active literacy. Literacy is a skill. It becomes less of a notable skill when its common enough (near universal) in society, fading into the background. But programming absolutely isn't that common of a skill. > Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user. You might have a case if you were talking about a "computer user" rather than a "programmer", but as it is, that's just silly.
- thristian 11y ago
  If I've got five years' experience writing, say, front-end JavaScript, I can reasonably call myself a programmer. A company that wants to develop software in C for embedded microcontrollers might reasonably advertise for a programmer. But my value to that company is approximately $0, because I can't (in a reasonable time frame) do the things they want done.
  - SomeStupidPoint 11y ago
    The same objection applies to translators -- which is why people talk about the languages one is literate in for both professions when hiring. But it's not like there's much dispute that being a translator is a job.
saganus 11y ago
Not sure if trolling or not. Anything has value as long as someone is willing to pay for that. Simple as that. Is a Van Gogh painting worth 50-100 million dollars? It is if someone pays that much for it. Nothing more. Nothing less. If you think programmers are worth $0, then that's your prerogative. However you must surely be typing these comments in a computer programmed by yourself, using an OS and reading it in a browser you wrote from scratch, otherwise why pay money (that ultimately will arrive at the pockets of the programmers) for something that is worth $0?
makesnosense 11y ago
How did this guy get into YC with his startup? Hands down troll of the year with this comment.
- meritt 11y ago
  Getting into YC doesn't guarantee someone isn't a douchebag.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I think both of you are way out of line. If you spent more than 10 seconds thinking about what the guy wrote then you'd see that there actually is a point to it. Calling him a troll and a douchebag is exactly the opposite of what HN is all about. Attack the idea, not the man or downvote and let it go.
    - zo1 11y ago
      This thread looks like it has an unusually high amount of flagged/down-voted comments.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - scott_karana 11y ago
        Yes, but that's just an indicator of its controversy, not its validity. HN is a pretty homogenous filter bubble after all.
    - meritt 11y ago
      View his comment history and you'll see he's a constant troll and negative asset to this community.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tremguy 11y ago
Come on, don't feed the troll
- eswat 11y ago
  I guess you can look at the comment as trolling. But look past that and it is an interesting idea that’s worth thinking about.
  - tremguy 11y ago
    Well, I kind of see that point of view, if we are talking about the activity of "programming", which in itself may not necessarily be thought of as an productive activity. But the article was about developing software, which is a productive activity.
modarts 11y ago
> programming isn't a job Hmm, interesting. Wonder what i'm actually doing from 10-7 every day in that case.
jacquesm 11y ago
You're 10 steps ahead of us all and probably living more than 10 years into the future. Yes, programming is a form of literacy. But in todays world, programming is also a job. Just like being a scribe was a job in ancient times, HTML'er was a job 10 years ago (and still is in some places) and programmer is one today (but assembly programmer is a job that is now in large part taken over by compilers). And that skill has a lot of value to people that don't have that skill or are limited by their own time so we get paid for it. Probably a decent number of years will have to pass before we can call programming 'just a skill' akin to writing. If you're going to put ideas out that are borderline detached from the current reality it would be great if you gave your thoughts a bit more foundation so you're easier to follow, it just so happens that I saw what you meant but I can also understand why someone who is currently a programmer by profession would in some subtle way feel offended if you called their profession (which is a hard one!) the equivalent of a telephone user or a pencil user.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  Perhaps I'm assuming a casual familiarity with some of pg's earlier essays than no longer exists. Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities. As for being ahead of my time, if you look at the job market today it's true that you do have a lot of people paid purely for their ability to code. These are mostly W2 employees, who work at the kind of places where you start out as a junior developer making 60 - 80k, and then make double that after 8-10 years. And given the current state of society, this is actually a pretty good career path. However, we also have consultants who bill on a project basis based on value rather than skill, who might easily make 400k a year even as junior developers. (E.g. c.f. patio11's essays.) And we have entrepreneurs and founding team members who get paid largely in stock, the worth of which is largely determined by how much the market values the product. It's kind of weird because as an industry we definitely need people who have ridiculously good technical skills, to the exclusion of all else. But for the most part programming is a pink-collar job that just happens to be done mostly by men. (In that it requires education, but there is a lot of downward pressure on salaries because the people involved are perceived as being largely interchangeable.) This is why I'll sometimes describe myself as a software developer, but never as a programmer or a software engineer. Because although I know how to code and I might even spend most of the day coding, I don't ever want to work at a job where I'm paid based on my coding ability.
kashyapc 11y ago
You could not be more wrong. At least without any further elaboration, your assertion that it's not a job sounds dowright doltish and the following analogy irrelevant.
fsloth 11y ago
Sure, we can go philosophical and say that when I'm ordering a taxi I'm programming - although my input is a simple time-coordinate pair. Since we are using natural language as real human beings our communication is context sensitive and this instance the context was the role of a paid position in a programming role. Don't go too philosophical without setting up the context, preferably with examples. And then think if you are actually saying something non-obvious.

marshray 11y ago

Technical writers, human language translators, lawyers, and many other professions are primarily about "active literacy" as much or moreso than software developers. Do you feel they are all worth $0 too, or just programmers?

Alex3917 11y ago
The screenplay for The Hunger Games has value. A shopping list also has value. However, their values are very different. Sure, each was created by a pencil user. But they don't actually have anything in common, so asking how much money pencil users 'should' make doesn't even make sense as a question.
- threatofrain 11y ago
  I think you have a specific framework for viewing things, but you are being deliberately obscure rather than just elucidating your thoughts, and so I think the downvotes are just. What would happen if you exercised clarity? Bad things? You are saying that a pencil user isn't worth anything, but you also recognize that a pencil user can write a script. You feel that it is the script which has value, and not the pencil user. So I suppose you're saying the programmer isn't worth anything, but the program is worth something. That's one lens to view things, but it's also a gimped on its own. One should have multiple lens.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Agreed that the presentation does not help but it is an interesting train of thought and by far the most interesting part of this particular thread on HN. Indeed the output has value, the skill by itself is of no value. Just like painting has value and writing have value. There are lots of terrible paintings, terrible programs and terrible books. Those have no value, and then there are some really good paintings, great programs, great books. Those do have value. And the skill that allowed the bad stuff to be created is the same skill that allowed the good stuff to be created. So the skill per-se is not the differentiating factor, the quality of the application of that skill is what allows one to create valuable work and being the intermediary between someones ideas and valuable work is why programmers, writers and painters can make a living. It's the whole basis of IP law and all the associated bits-and-pieces that allow all of us to make a living. Intellectual property has a shadow side, but this side is the one that keeps the IT world afloat. The same laws that govern file sharing allow writers, programmers and other people skilled in some art to create enough value that they can make a living, sometimes even a very comfortable one and those writers and programmers that manage to hold on to the fruits of their labor long enough can do very well for themselves indeed. > What would happen if you exercised clarity? Bad things? Unlikely, but not everybody is equally capable of expressing their thoughts clearly. I should know, I've struggled with this for many years and only in the last 5 or so I've gotten better at that. HN has definitely been a tremendous aid in learning how to express myself more clearly to avoid being mis-understood.

RussianCow 11y ago

At one point in history, knowing how to use a typewriter was itself a marketable skill, because few actually had access to one and knew how to use it. These days, most people in the developed world know how to type, but still only a small portion know how to write programs. Saying that this is worthless is silly at best; someone is willing to pay someone else to turn their ideas into code, so it must be worth something.

gizi 11y ago
It does not matter whether programming is marketable or not. What matter is that the results of programming, such as Google Search or Facebook, are highly marketable. Mistake number one: never sell yourself. Only sell the result of your efforts, and preferable not to middlemen, but directly to the real buyer. That is how you create hundreds of billions of dollars in value.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  You're flooding this comment thread with these posts. A single person didn't build any of these billion dollar companies you're referencing; at some point they had to hire more people, who in turn "sold themselves" by your confused logic, to build the company. Most of these halo companies have non-programmers who were brought in to monetize and grow the value in them. Sheryl Sandberg isn't a programmer nor I think the rest of that board. Eric Schmidt was an electrical engineer.
  - gizi 11y ago
    You see, I don't like the mentality that exudes from "How to price a programmer". Furthermore, this site, "Hacker News", is not supposed to be upvoting that kind of posts, because in that case, the people on this site are not hackers at all. The vote here has obviously been subverted. But then again, it does not matter. Making billions is not a matter of voting or misguided pseudo-democracy. Mark Zuckerberg made hundreds of billions because he is undoubtedly a great hacker. All the misguided voting on the planet will not change anything to that. The battlefield is the marketplace and not the voting nonsense.

ketralnis 11y ago

If you need someone with programming skills and are willing to pay them, and someone with those skills will work for that amount, that's the price of a programmer. Asserting that the skill is worthless doesn't make sense as long as people will pay for it. Even if you just consider it a form of literacy, scribes absolutely were paid to do their work before literacy was as widespread

rgbrgb 11y ago
People don't pay for "programmers" they pay for people to make products.
- mruniverse 11y ago
  People don't pay for people to make products, they pay for people to make them money. People don't pay for people to them to make money, they pay for people to build wealth. People don't... wait I have to throw up. Will be back.
  - dang 11y ago
    You have a decent point here, but please don't optimize for snark on HN.
    - mruniverse 11y ago
      But pompous comments are ok?
      - dang 11y ago
        They're definitely not great, but the class of all comments that strike someone as pompous is so large that standardizing on snark in replies would sink us.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. Programming absolutely is a job. Its a thing people pay people to do for them. > It's not even a skill; Its absolutely a skill. > rather, it's more of an active literacy. Literacy is a skill. It becomes less of a notable skill when its common enough (near universal) in society, fading into the background. But programming absolutely isn't that common of a skill. > Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user. You might have a case if you were talking about a "computer user" rather than a "programmer", but as it is, that's just silly.

thristian 11y ago
If I've got five years' experience writing, say, front-end JavaScript, I can reasonably call myself a programmer. A company that wants to develop software in C for embedded microcontrollers might reasonably advertise for a programmer. But my value to that company is approximately $0, because I can't (in a reasonable time frame) do the things they want done.
- SomeStupidPoint 11y ago
  The same objection applies to translators -- which is why people talk about the languages one is literate in for both professions when hiring. But it's not like there's much dispute that being a translator is a job.

saganus 11y ago

Not sure if trolling or not. Anything has value as long as someone is willing to pay for that. Simple as that. Is a Van Gogh painting worth 50-100 million dollars? It is if someone pays that much for it. Nothing more. Nothing less. If you think programmers are worth $0, then that's your prerogative. However you must surely be typing these comments in a computer programmed by yourself, using an OS and reading it in a browser you wrote from scratch, otherwise why pay money (that ultimately will arrive at the pockets of the programmers) for something that is worth $0?

makesnosense 11y ago

How did this guy get into YC with his startup? Hands down troll of the year with this comment.

meritt 11y ago
Getting into YC doesn't guarantee someone isn't a douchebag.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  I think both of you are way out of line. If you spent more than 10 seconds thinking about what the guy wrote then you'd see that there actually is a point to it. Calling him a troll and a douchebag is exactly the opposite of what HN is all about. Attack the idea, not the man or downvote and let it go.
  - zo1 11y ago
    This thread looks like it has an unusually high amount of flagged/down-voted comments.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - scott_karana 11y ago
      Yes, but that's just an indicator of its controversy, not its validity. HN is a pretty homogenous filter bubble after all.
  - meritt 11y ago
    View his comment history and you'll see he's a constant troll and negative asset to this community.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

tremguy 11y ago

Come on, don't feed the troll

eswat 11y ago
I guess you can look at the comment as trolling. But look past that and it is an interesting idea that’s worth thinking about.
- tremguy 11y ago
  Well, I kind of see that point of view, if we are talking about the activity of "programming", which in itself may not necessarily be thought of as an productive activity. But the article was about developing software, which is a productive activity.

modarts 11y ago

> programming isn't a job Hmm, interesting. Wonder what i'm actually doing from 10-7 every day in that case.

jacquesm 11y ago

You're 10 steps ahead of us all and probably living more than 10 years into the future. Yes, programming is a form of literacy. But in todays world, programming is also a job. Just like being a scribe was a job in ancient times, HTML'er was a job 10 years ago (and still is in some places) and programmer is one today (but assembly programmer is a job that is now in large part taken over by compilers). And that skill has a lot of value to people that don't have that skill or are limited by their own time so we get paid for it. Probably a decent number of years will have to pass before we can call programming 'just a skill' akin to writing. If you're going to put ideas out that are borderline detached from the current reality it would be great if you gave your thoughts a bit more foundation so you're easier to follow, it just so happens that I saw what you meant but I can also understand why someone who is currently a programmer by profession would in some subtle way feel offended if you called their profession (which is a hard one!) the equivalent of a telephone user or a pencil user.

Alex3917 11y ago
Perhaps I'm assuming a casual familiarity with some of pg's earlier essays than no longer exists. Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities. As for being ahead of my time, if you look at the job market today it's true that you do have a lot of people paid purely for their ability to code. These are mostly W2 employees, who work at the kind of places where you start out as a junior developer making 60 - 80k, and then make double that after 8-10 years. And given the current state of society, this is actually a pretty good career path. However, we also have consultants who bill on a project basis based on value rather than skill, who might easily make 400k a year even as junior developers. (E.g. c.f. patio11's essays.) And we have entrepreneurs and founding team members who get paid largely in stock, the worth of which is largely determined by how much the market values the product. It's kind of weird because as an industry we definitely need people who have ridiculously good technical skills, to the exclusion of all else. But for the most part programming is a pink-collar job that just happens to be done mostly by men. (In that it requires education, but there is a lot of downward pressure on salaries because the people involved are perceived as being largely interchangeable.) This is why I'll sometimes describe myself as a software developer, but never as a programmer or a software engineer. Because although I know how to code and I might even spend most of the day coding, I don't ever want to work at a job where I'm paid based on my coding ability.

kashyapc 11y ago

You could not be more wrong. At least without any further elaboration, your assertion that it's not a job sounds dowright doltish and the following analogy irrelevant.

fsloth 11y ago

Sure, we can go philosophical and say that when I'm ordering a taxi I'm programming - although my input is a simple time-coordinate pair. Since we are using natural language as real human beings our communication is context sensitive and this instance the context was the role of a paid position in a programming role. Don't go too philosophical without setting up the context, preferably with examples. And then think if you are actually saying something non-obvious.