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Say what you want, but I doubt anybody would accept anybody as hedge fund managers after 6 months into a Hacker School. The fact that 6 months or less of traini
by kfk 11y ago
Say what you want, but I doubt anybody would accept anybody as hedge fund managers after 6 months into a Hacker School. The fact that 6 months or less of training are enough to make $85k is very, very, telling of the situation. Note that those huge salaries and easy barriers to entry will bring salaries down and commoditize things. I think it's good that sometimes you guys do a bit of reality check, especially if you plot things against the long term. I doubt 10 years from now a RoR developer will be so much above the median salary.
- VeejayRampay 11y agoThough you should be honest and note that no one is making $85K after 6 months or less of training. Those people are obviously filling positions, but not the $85K ones.
- PaulHoule 11y agoI dunno. One thing I do know is that in the same geographic area you will commonly find two programmers who do similar things but one of them gets paid twice as much as the other. It may be true that one is more productive than another, but if you talk with the boss in either situation the story you will hear is that they have a budget to pay somebody $X and so they pay $X and that is non-negotiable.
- akavi 11y agoI personally know five people who landed salaries of 100 k$/yr or more after three months of programming training. That's five people whom I'm on close enough terms with to overcome the salary discussion taboo. So I imagine there are many, many, many more.
- sciurus 11y agoIf you don't mind a few questions: In what city? At what type of companies? With what kind of previous educational and career background?
- akavi 11y agoSF/NYC. Liberal arts college degrees from well-regarded universities, public and private. Minimal previous careers (none were more than two years out of college), but all non-technical. The jobs are at various smallish, startup-ish web oriented tech companies.
- sciurus 11y agoThanks for filling in more useful details!
- lsaferite 11y agoAnd were they able to keep those jobs? I firmly believe that programming is a creative and not production job. With that in mind, some people are naturals and everything just clicks for them. Others are perhaps silver tongued and can talk their way into the job even without the needed skills up front. Those will either learn on the job, ride on coat tails, or flame out. And then you have those who clearly have no clue and the hiring process was flawed in some deep way. The real test is, do they still have the job 3/6/12 months later? If the answer is yes, then either they deserve the salary or their boss doesn't.
- akavi 11y agoFour of them are more than two years on. The last just started, so we'll see. I think you underestimate the number of people for whom it clicks. Programming does seem to require a certain amount of general intelligence, but the notion of an innate specific talent being required for it isn't supported by my experience.
- brlewis 11y agoNote that those huge salaries and easy barriers to entry will bring salaries down and commoditize things. The commoditization of programming has been predicted for a long time and we're still waiting.
- kfk 11y agoAnd that's because demand has exploded. If you look at the technologies available today and, say, 10 years ago, wouldn't you say you need much less coders now than then to do the same things? That means one of 2 things can happen in another 10 years: demand keeps exploding, in which case you might be right; demand stabilize, in which case good luck sustaining $100k+ salaries for college kids with <3 years of work experience. There is no inherent more added value in programming than in other professions, it is a pure demand thing. Without demand, things should go back to "normal" with low salaries on the entry level side and high paychecks on the management side (because it's more valuable effectively managing 10 resources than 1).
- elbear 11y agoIf we believe that software is eating the world, it makes sense that more and more coders will be needed to keep up with the transformation. Will it stop at some point? Maybe, but when?
- brlewis 11y agoI agree it's supply/demand. If it were pure value then teaching would be the highest-paying profession.
- marcosdumay 11y agoThat's Jevon's paradox applied to services. The more our productivity increases (that is, our labor get cheaper) the more money people will spend on our services. That's of course limited to the maximum potential our work can have on the world.
- ommunist 11y agoBy the way, do you know how long does it take to become a professional coal miner?