11 ms·

What about the linesmen who provide the power for your computers? What about the road workers who make it possible for you to get to work? What about the Afri

What about the linesmen who provide the power for your computers? What about the road workers who make it possible for you to get to work? What about the African miners who dig up the rare earths for your components to run your computer? What about the guys soldering all this crap together? I bet you'd say the road worker creates hardly any value, but in reality the economy just ceases to function without roads. Or sewage. Or power lines. Or gas stations powered by truck drivers. Or a million other things. Developers create a portion of a valuable system, they're not water-walking god-kings. I know, I'm one of them--and my code is probably faster and more reliable than a very large proportion of that created in the rest of the industry, but I don't kid myself thinking I'm doing it all by myself or creating something that has a stand-alone value and operates outside of a larger system; we're all cogs and together we make an amazing machine. I'm glad I can watch Silicon Valley on TV instead of having to live around those characters. Delusions are detrimental.

blazespin 10y ago
Coding is definitely higher value for sure, just as driver who operates a berry picking machine can deliver more value than a migrant individually picking berries.
- codeddesign 10y ago
  Why a migrate rather than say someone who picks berries by hand? Vice did a story comparison on this and actually migrate workers worked harder and picked more fruit than Americans pulled from temp agency. But in your comparison, the machine would be of higher value, the operator would be of little value since it does not take extensive skill to operate - much less skill than someone working on power lines for example. It's all based upon geographic demand.
  - iopq 10y ago
    Anybody can pick cherries by hand, but a bad machine operator could damage it and cause losses to your farm.
mark-r 10y ago
Supply/demand. There's a much larger supply of people capable of building roads vs. those capable of developing a system. And the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. You're right about the value of teams being greater than an individual contributor, but the ability to work within a team is a valuable skill just like any other.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people. The truth is, you are just assuming the people making the roads have nothing to offer in terms of outstanding value, because that's your preconceived notion. You already decided they were worth less than you, even though you never bothered to check. Never bothered to measure. Never bothered to ask. If you really believed in your value, you wouldn't be afraid of a system where people are paid what they are worth to the company. Instead you hide behind "market rates" because market rates are good to you. But markets are flawed, we've seen it over and over. There's a lot of money in rigging markets, and the salary market is no exception.
  - dijit 10y ago
    Don't bring gender into this. You can't say highly technical fields are comparable to customer support. Do you think the receptionists in hospitals should earn the same as doctors?
    - afandian 10y ago
      Serious? There's more to customer support than picking up a phone. I've worked with some very intelligent customer support people who know the product as well as the engineers.
zaroth 10y ago
Our economy pays differently for different jobs for exactly one reason; scarcity. The best road workers in the world, they do what? The best miner? Now, the best coder? Some coders should be paid like the best road worker. Few road workers should be paid like the best coders, because there's just too many ready replacements who would do the work for less. Coding is becoming that way, but far from it currently. Our best invention is the one that puts us totally out of work.
- tuna-piano 10y ago
  It's not just scarcity. That ignores half the equation (demand). Poop popsicles are extremely rare (I have yet to see one). But their price would be essentially $0, if/when they exist.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    Scarcity is supply below demand, not just low supply. Scarcity implies a shortage, and shortage implies too little, not just low supply, right?
    - nickff 10y ago
      More supply than demand only exists for 'free' or 'public' goods. If there are costs of production, nobody (except government) will want to supply more than is demanded, as they will be giving the product away (or paying people) to get rid of it. Garbage is an instance of supply > demand.
      - alasdair_ 10y ago
        As a trivial counterexample, consider the market for bad artwork from amateurs. There is far more (in terms of quantity) supplied than is demanded.
        nickff 10y ago
        Most of that artwork is literally garbage.
ghshephard 10y ago
Major difference is trainable skills versus innate talent. The number of people who can be trained/educated to perform the tasks you described above are pretty large. The number of people who can write elegant, concise code is a pretty small pool. It's also important to distinguish between day-day coders who write CRUD apps (trainable skill), and developers who develop platforms that others build on. Another way of looking at this - by providing significant rewards to top-end developers (and top end developers should be starting around $500K, and be making north of $1mm with 5-6 years of experience in their chosen vertical), you encourage outstanding individuals who might chose another field where they might be more richly rewarded (Law, Finance, ...) to put their skills to good use in programming. And that's the crux of the matter - I don't believe we should provide outsized rewards to developers with exceptional talent because they deserve the extra money - I think everyone who works a 40-hour week deserves a comfortable, stress free life. I believe we should provide outsized rewards to developers with exceptional talent so as to ensure efficient allocation of capital and labor, resulting in economies with increased productivity, and greater rewards for everyone interlinked in that economy. From that perspective - I guess I agree with you, we are all cogs working together to make this amazing machine -I just want to make sure the right cogs are allocated to the right machine.
- PhilWright 10y ago
  There is nothing unique or special about being a programmer. Programmers think they are undervalued and should get more. But guess what, nurses think they should get more as well because they are saving lives. Soldiers think they should get more for making us all safe. Police think they should get more for reducing the level of crime in society which benefits us all. Teachers think they should get more because they are educating the next generation of wealth creators. Everyone thinks they should get a little more of the pie. How do you resolve this? (Hint: supply and demand)
  - ghshephard 10y ago
    Couple points - I didn't say there is anything unique or special about being a programmer from a skill perspective. Almost everyone who can graduate from high school can be taught to program, and put together useful applications. I tried to call that out when describing the difference between a day-day CRUD developer and platform developer. But there is a distinct hierarchy of developers who can, for example, instinctively comprehend pointer-to-pointer data structures, or have walked through and mostly understand AoCP, or heck, can (quickly) write concise elegant code like this: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/beautiful.html http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea.... One key difference between programming and teaching/soldiering/policing, is leverage. A single 100x teacher/soldier/police officer is limited in the impact they can have on the world, whereas a single 100x developer can write a platform/system that is used by 100s of millions of people.
eggy 10y ago
Try building a road system with just road workers, and no civil engineers or systems and operations analysts, and all this entails. Or pay the house painter what you pay a software engineer, and see how many people paint their house themselves, or with less frequency. House painters would be priced out of the market, and more homeowners would fall, and/or have crappier paint jobs. That is supply and demand in a nutshell, and how markets value a skill or talent you have to offer with obvious exceptions.
- praveer13 10y ago
  Won't the same argument for supply and demand work in this case too? (Engineer salaries)
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Less people are ready to fill the engineer positions. Or rather: less people are qualified to fill engineer positions.
taneq 10y ago
All of those guys already got paid by the time you sit down at your desk. The wealth that the GP is talking about is the incremental wealth created by the engineers under consideration. They're taking publicly available things and putting them together in a new way to create something more valuable than the cost of parts and labour.
- beisner 10y ago
  Yeah, I suppose it would be interesting to look at the value multipliers throughout the supply chain to see if they are even or uneven. There is a difference between value of input goods and a value of output products, and workers capture some percentage of that difference as pay.. For instance, if someone who takes raw metals at $1/unit and processes them into component-ready materials at $2 per unit and are paid $0.50/unit, they're capturing 50% of the value they have created. A programmer takes software and hardware components that have some intrinsic value (perhaps not, difficult to reason about here) and processes them into software and hardware or services that have a greater intrinsic value. At large tech companies, the programmer might get a salary of $1XX,XXX, but the company might making a profit on the services that programmer created of $5XX,XXX, which only capturing 20% of the value added. I guess what I wonder is: should everyone in the pipeline for goods creation capture the same percentage of what the inherent value they've created? Or is it the nature of markets to differentiate based on scarcity of labor at each stage?
JED3 10y ago
You have a prejudice against Silicon Valley / California. Aside from that, I think one key point you failed to observe is that the engineers are often the biggest producer of innovation and invention in the production process. Software engineering is not manual labor, instead a heightened level of mental focus and ingenuity is required to perform the job. I think I might have a prejudice against manual labor.
zasz 10y ago
You could be charitable and read OP as making the case that labor in general should capture a greater portion of corporate profits than it does now. I'm sympathetic to your comment, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
nthcolumn 10y ago
If you'd do it for free it is probably not real work and you don't deserve to get paid - writers, musicians, hackers, politicians. (runs :)

blazespin 10y ago

Coding is definitely higher value for sure, just as driver who operates a berry picking machine can deliver more value than a migrant individually picking berries.

codeddesign 10y ago
Why a migrate rather than say someone who picks berries by hand? Vice did a story comparison on this and actually migrate workers worked harder and picked more fruit than Americans pulled from temp agency. But in your comparison, the machine would be of higher value, the operator would be of little value since it does not take extensive skill to operate - much less skill than someone working on power lines for example. It's all based upon geographic demand.
- iopq 10y ago
  Anybody can pick cherries by hand, but a bad machine operator could damage it and cause losses to your farm.

mark-r 10y ago

Supply/demand. There's a much larger supply of people capable of building roads vs. those capable of developing a system. And the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. You're right about the value of teams being greater than an individual contributor, but the ability to work within a team is a valuable skill just like any other.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
> the monetary difference between an average road and a really great road is not nearly as much as the difference between an average system and a really great system. Pick another profession then. How about customer support? The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people. The truth is, you are just assuming the people making the roads have nothing to offer in terms of outstanding value, because that's your preconceived notion. You already decided they were worth less than you, even though you never bothered to check. Never bothered to measure. Never bothered to ask. If you really believed in your value, you wouldn't be afraid of a system where people are paid what they are worth to the company. Instead you hide behind "market rates" because market rates are good to you. But markets are flawed, we've seen it over and over. There's a lot of money in rigging markets, and the salary market is no exception.
- dijit 10y ago
  Don't bring gender into this. You can't say highly technical fields are comparable to customer support. Do you think the receptionists in hospitals should earn the same as doctors?
  - afandian 10y ago
    Serious? There's more to customer support than picking up a phone. I've worked with some very intelligent customer support people who know the product as well as the engineers.

zaroth 10y ago

Our economy pays differently for different jobs for exactly one reason; scarcity. The best road workers in the world, they do what? The best miner? Now, the best coder? Some coders should be paid like the best road worker. Few road workers should be paid like the best coders, because there's just too many ready replacements who would do the work for less. Coding is becoming that way, but far from it currently. Our best invention is the one that puts us totally out of work.

tuna-piano 10y ago
It's not just scarcity. That ignores half the equation (demand). Poop popsicles are extremely rare (I have yet to see one). But their price would be essentially $0, if/when they exist.
- zaroth 10y ago
  Scarcity is supply below demand, not just low supply. Scarcity implies a shortage, and shortage implies too little, not just low supply, right?
  - nickff 10y ago
    More supply than demand only exists for 'free' or 'public' goods. If there are costs of production, nobody (except government) will want to supply more than is demanded, as they will be giving the product away (or paying people) to get rid of it. Garbage is an instance of supply > demand.
    - alasdair_ 10y ago
      As a trivial counterexample, consider the market for bad artwork from amateurs. There is far more (in terms of quantity) supplied than is demanded.
      - nickff 10y ago
        Most of that artwork is literally garbage.

ghshephard 10y ago

Major difference is trainable skills versus innate talent. The number of people who can be trained/educated to perform the tasks you described above are pretty large. The number of people who can write elegant, concise code is a pretty small pool. It's also important to distinguish between day-day coders who write CRUD apps (trainable skill), and developers who develop platforms that others build on. Another way of looking at this - by providing significant rewards to top-end developers (and top end developers should be starting around $500K, and be making north of $1mm with 5-6 years of experience in their chosen vertical), you encourage outstanding individuals who might chose another field where they might be more richly rewarded (Law, Finance, ...) to put their skills to good use in programming. And that's the crux of the matter - I don't believe we should provide outsized rewards to developers with exceptional talent because they deserve the extra money - I think everyone who works a 40-hour week deserves a comfortable, stress free life. I believe we should provide outsized rewards to developers with exceptional talent so as to ensure efficient allocation of capital and labor, resulting in economies with increased productivity, and greater rewards for everyone interlinked in that economy. From that perspective - I guess I agree with you, we are all cogs working together to make this amazing machine -I just want to make sure the right cogs are allocated to the right machine.

PhilWright 10y ago
There is nothing unique or special about being a programmer. Programmers think they are undervalued and should get more. But guess what, nurses think they should get more as well because they are saving lives. Soldiers think they should get more for making us all safe. Police think they should get more for reducing the level of crime in society which benefits us all. Teachers think they should get more because they are educating the next generation of wealth creators. Everyone thinks they should get a little more of the pie. How do you resolve this? (Hint: supply and demand)
- ghshephard 10y ago
  Couple points - I didn't say there is anything unique or special about being a programmer from a skill perspective. Almost everyone who can graduate from high school can be taught to program, and put together useful applications. I tried to call that out when describing the difference between a day-day CRUD developer and platform developer. But there is a distinct hierarchy of developers who can, for example, instinctively comprehend pointer-to-pointer data structures, or have walked through and mostly understand AoCP, or heck, can (quickly) write concise elegant code like this: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/beautiful.html http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea.... One key difference between programming and teaching/soldiering/policing, is leverage. A single 100x teacher/soldier/police officer is limited in the impact they can have on the world, whereas a single 100x developer can write a platform/system that is used by 100s of millions of people.

eggy 10y ago

Try building a road system with just road workers, and no civil engineers or systems and operations analysts, and all this entails. Or pay the house painter what you pay a software engineer, and see how many people paint their house themselves, or with less frequency. House painters would be priced out of the market, and more homeowners would fall, and/or have crappier paint jobs. That is supply and demand in a nutshell, and how markets value a skill or talent you have to offer with obvious exceptions.

praveer13 10y ago
Won't the same argument for supply and demand work in this case too? (Engineer salaries)
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Less people are ready to fill the engineer positions. Or rather: less people are qualified to fill engineer positions.

taneq 10y ago

All of those guys already got paid by the time you sit down at your desk. The wealth that the GP is talking about is the incremental wealth created by the engineers under consideration. They're taking publicly available things and putting them together in a new way to create something more valuable than the cost of parts and labour.

beisner 10y ago
Yeah, I suppose it would be interesting to look at the value multipliers throughout the supply chain to see if they are even or uneven. There is a difference between value of input goods and a value of output products, and workers capture some percentage of that difference as pay.. For instance, if someone who takes raw metals at $1/unit and processes them into component-ready materials at $2 per unit and are paid $0.50/unit, they're capturing 50% of the value they have created. A programmer takes software and hardware components that have some intrinsic value (perhaps not, difficult to reason about here) and processes them into software and hardware or services that have a greater intrinsic value. At large tech companies, the programmer might get a salary of $1XX,XXX, but the company might making a profit on the services that programmer created of $5XX,XXX, which only capturing 20% of the value added. I guess what I wonder is: should everyone in the pipeline for goods creation capture the same percentage of what the inherent value they've created? Or is it the nature of markets to differentiate based on scarcity of labor at each stage?

JED3 10y ago

You have a prejudice against Silicon Valley / California. Aside from that, I think one key point you failed to observe is that the engineers are often the biggest producer of innovation and invention in the production process. Software engineering is not manual labor, instead a heightened level of mental focus and ingenuity is required to perform the job. I think I might have a prejudice against manual labor.

zasz 10y ago

You could be charitable and read OP as making the case that labor in general should capture a greater portion of corporate profits than it does now. I'm sympathetic to your comment, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

nthcolumn 10y ago

If you'd do it for free it is probably not real work and you don't deserve to get paid - writers, musicians, hackers, politicians. (runs :)