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Articles like these, while only loosely related, always make me think that the software engineering bubble has to pop. You have people with ton of education bus

by shados 8y ago

Articles like these, while only loosely related, always make me think that the software engineering bubble has to pop. You have people with ton of education busting their behind dealing with little brats all day to try to make sure they have a future... During that time, some bro who read a couple of books and hammered on his keyboard, and MAYBE did a 3 months bootcamp gets bummed if he can't pull in 100k in one of the coasts with a flex schedule and free lunches/coffee/smoothies/whatever. God forbid they get paged in the middle of the night, they'll scream bloody murder. Same contrasts with trade workers: hiring qualified carpenters/plumbers/painters/whatever is becoming incredibly difficult. Obviously I'm only considering the extremes here, but those extremes are...very common. Society can't go very far if the ONLY thing people do is write keywords in a text editor all day. We need to properly value other professions too.

capdeck 8y ago
This is a very valid point. While I don't have all the answers, but it seems like if a person is pulling an honest 40 hour week they should afford at the very least a real minimum standard of living, regardless of what that person does. I know this sounds hairy and anti-capitalist and "who is going to pay for this", etc. But this is what real value is in my opinion.
- pault 8y ago
  What if I spend 40 hours a week making paper hats? Should I be entitled to a living wage?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - krapp 8y ago
    Yes. If you choose to dedicate the bulk of your waking life to creating wealth for your employer, you should be compensated, at a minimum, well enough to feed, clothe and house yourself. or there should be something like UBI in place to allow employers to decouple the cost of keeping their employees alive from the cost of doing business.
    - kojeovo 8y ago
      How does that change if 100m people want to live in a city that realistically houses 10m? A bit of an unrealistic scenario, but my city has a very low vacancy rate, and you can't live there on minimum wage / just above. There are just too many people making more money.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      The point of this example is that making paper hats creates little to no wealth. No one is going to compensate you handsomely for whatever random activity you choose - there has to be demand.
      - krapp 8y ago
        A living wage, or even minimum wage, isn't being "compensated handsomely," it's being compensated at least enough to survive. If having someone make paper hats 40 hours a week is a bad business model, that's not the employee's concern. Why should the person running the paper hat making business expect to make a living at it, but not the person making the hats?
  - AngryData 8y ago
    If there was enough demand for 40 hours worth of folded paper hats, yes.
throwaway98121 8y ago
I think we should treat teachers better and pay them more. I agree we should value other professions too. That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. The freebies, on call outrage, etc is inherent to the tech industry with venture capitalist money or otherwise insane net profits... the longer term sustainability is questionable, but fresh college grads or others early in their careers having unreasonable expectations of reality are not so different than your average political science or psychology major taking on egregious levels of debt only to struggle with making student loan payments. Again, I agree with valuing other disciplines. I think there’s also something to be said about supply and demand. The Googles and Amazons of the world typically hire people at least somewhat competent in CS. Sure you could pick up pick up Ruby on Rails or whatever framework to join the gig economy, but your chances won’t be great at becoming a engineer at a Google caliber company. The issue with teacher pay isn’t just about what society values but is more nuanced. My conservative friends don’t see the value in public education and insist on sending their kids to private schools. I don’t know how those teachers are paid, but for the public school system that I participated in, the argument becomes well my kid doesn’t attend so why should I pay for it? In my opinion, it’s very short sighted and destructive for the country in the long term. It’s not only teachers we are devaluing but an entire generation of children whose parents are not able to absorb the exorbant costs of private schools.
- baddox 8y ago
  I think we should pay teachers more as well, but not the same teachers we have now. Based on my experience in public school (and my own opinion, obviously), teachers on average earned what they deserved, or more than they deserved.
- shados 8y ago
  > That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder. Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.
baddox 8y ago
I won’t make any predictions about the future of software engineering opportunities, but your line of reasoning will never have any inherent connection to job opportunities. As the cliche goes, life’s not fair, and working harder preparing yourself for your career has never meant that you will make more money than someone who didn’t work as hard.
- shados 8y ago
  Absolutely, there's no full correlation between how hard you work and how successful you are, there are situations where the contrast is totally out of wack. We're (unfortunately) used to execs taking home insane pays for dubious reasons, but right now we're seeing something similar with every day people.
  - x0x0 8y ago
    The supply of people who can reliably turn time at a keyboard into code that solves problems people are willing to pay to have solved is wildly outstripped by demand. You're just continuing to see that in a world where most other industries don't have a supply problem. Also, as rationale people will be happy to tell you, buying my employees lunch is a screaming deal. An employee going to lunch takes at least an hour: walk to takeout, wait in line (everyone gets hungry at the same time), walk back and eat. I can recover at least 30 minutes by paying to have lunch delivered every day. Plus, for better or for worse, it costs me roughly $16 pp per day but it would cost me probably $25 to pay an employee $16. I didn't write the tax rules, but I can optimize within them. Note there is also not a single person in my company who makes less than $32 (16*2) per hour. So I'm very happy to pay $16 to recover, on average, 30 minutes of their time.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      Why not make them work through lunch and provide overhead delivery of liquid nutritional supplements and coffee through a rubber tube? And you could have their desk chair plumbed to the sewer line so they would not need to take bathroom breaks. You might recover another 60 minutes of time during the day.
xamuel 8y ago
Most people wouldn't be able to cut it in software dev, whether they did the 3 month bootcamp or even if they managed to pass a 4-year university program. 99% of the time, Little Jimmy's 4th grade English teacher would have a snowball's chance in hell as a professional developer.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zanny 8y ago
  This might have been true 20 years ago when software development meant everything from a fundamental understanding of hardware (including how pixels are laid out, how to manage gamma, etc for the front end) to knowing a lot of theory (because you had to implement your collections in house, manage the code base by hand, etc) but nowadays I'm pretty sure at least half of everyone could be pointed at a web framework and bootstrap and make a functional website in half a year. Sure a professional would have made that in a week, but their next site will take half as long, and then half as long... until they are within striking distance of someone who does still know all those fundamentals. They will mostly be limited in what they can do, but most people don't really need developers that can do anything even if they pay for them without realizing that. Programming is being commoditized. In the same way you don't see a doctor first thing when you go to one; you see a nurse, tech, or assistant. Not everything requires the most expensive learning investment. Most programming jobs don't require you to be able to write a proof of the code you copy paste from Stack Overflow.
  - shados 8y ago
    Very true. The most important thing you mentioned is this one IMO: > even if they pay for them without realizing that In health care, you have doctors, physician assistants, nurses, administrators, etc. They have very different background, schooling and certifications as well as salaries. In software, you have some differences (individual contributors, tech leads, managers, etc), but it's not granular at all within the categories. While the self taught html dev is making 90-100k, the MIT graduate builting complex systems with 5 years of experience is making 150k (Using round numbers here, don't read too much into it), when the difference is significantly bigger. People are quick to point out at flukes: there's totally exceptions, the CMU grad who can't code themselves out of paper bag, and the random highschool dropout who has been coding since they were 7 who are now world famous geniuses...but they're exceptions yet treated as the rule.
scarejunba 8y ago
Dude, people die in ditches far from their home for a tenth of what I make in a year living in comfort. Society values people based on perceived economic impact not perceived job difficulty. And that’s probably a good idea.
AlexCoventry 8y ago
No, it's less than half who could do it with a gun to their head, less than a quarter who would choose to over pretty much anything else. Those are very loose upper bounds, too.
sizzle 8y ago
Is this a product of supply and demand?

by shados 8y ago

capdeck 8y ago

This is a very valid point. While I don't have all the answers, but it seems like if a person is pulling an honest 40 hour week they should afford at the very least a real minimum standard of living, regardless of what that person does. I know this sounds hairy and anti-capitalist and "who is going to pay for this", etc. But this is what real value is in my opinion.

pault 8y ago
What if I spend 40 hours a week making paper hats? Should I be entitled to a living wage?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 8y ago
  Yes. If you choose to dedicate the bulk of your waking life to creating wealth for your employer, you should be compensated, at a minimum, well enough to feed, clothe and house yourself. or there should be something like UBI in place to allow employers to decouple the cost of keeping their employees alive from the cost of doing business.
  - kojeovo 8y ago
    How does that change if 100m people want to live in a city that realistically houses 10m? A bit of an unrealistic scenario, but my city has a very low vacancy rate, and you can't live there on minimum wage / just above. There are just too many people making more money.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    The point of this example is that making paper hats creates little to no wealth. No one is going to compensate you handsomely for whatever random activity you choose - there has to be demand.
    - krapp 8y ago
      A living wage, or even minimum wage, isn't being "compensated handsomely," it's being compensated at least enough to survive. If having someone make paper hats 40 hours a week is a bad business model, that's not the employee's concern. Why should the person running the paper hat making business expect to make a living at it, but not the person making the hats?
- AngryData 8y ago
  If there was enough demand for 40 hours worth of folded paper hats, yes.

throwaway98121 8y ago

I think we should treat teachers better and pay them more. I agree we should value other professions too. That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. The freebies, on call outrage, etc is inherent to the tech industry with venture capitalist money or otherwise insane net profits... the longer term sustainability is questionable, but fresh college grads or others early in their careers having unreasonable expectations of reality are not so different than your average political science or psychology major taking on egregious levels of debt only to struggle with making student loan payments. Again, I agree with valuing other disciplines. I think there’s also something to be said about supply and demand. The Googles and Amazons of the world typically hire people at least somewhat competent in CS. Sure you could pick up pick up Ruby on Rails or whatever framework to join the gig economy, but your chances won’t be great at becoming a engineer at a Google caliber company. The issue with teacher pay isn’t just about what society values but is more nuanced. My conservative friends don’t see the value in public education and insist on sending their kids to private schools. I don’t know how those teachers are paid, but for the public school system that I participated in, the argument becomes well my kid doesn’t attend so why should I pay for it? In my opinion, it’s very short sighted and destructive for the country in the long term. It’s not only teachers we are devaluing but an entire generation of children whose parents are not able to absorb the exorbant costs of private schools.

baddox 8y ago
I think we should pay teachers more as well, but not the same teachers we have now. Based on my experience in public school (and my own opinion, obviously), teachers on average earned what they deserved, or more than they deserved.
shados 8y ago
> That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreasonable expectations from them. That's obviously not the root cause, but it's something to ponder. Essentially, all I was saying is that the article made me think about how crazy the contrast between those 2 professions is.

baddox 8y ago

I won’t make any predictions about the future of software engineering opportunities, but your line of reasoning will never have any inherent connection to job opportunities. As the cliche goes, life’s not fair, and working harder preparing yourself for your career has never meant that you will make more money than someone who didn’t work as hard.

shados 8y ago
Absolutely, there's no full correlation between how hard you work and how successful you are, there are situations where the contrast is totally out of wack. We're (unfortunately) used to execs taking home insane pays for dubious reasons, but right now we're seeing something similar with every day people.
- x0x0 8y ago
  The supply of people who can reliably turn time at a keyboard into code that solves problems people are willing to pay to have solved is wildly outstripped by demand. You're just continuing to see that in a world where most other industries don't have a supply problem. Also, as rationale people will be happy to tell you, buying my employees lunch is a screaming deal. An employee going to lunch takes at least an hour: walk to takeout, wait in line (everyone gets hungry at the same time), walk back and eat. I can recover at least 30 minutes by paying to have lunch delivered every day. Plus, for better or for worse, it costs me roughly $16 pp per day but it would cost me probably $25 to pay an employee $16. I didn't write the tax rules, but I can optimize within them. Note there is also not a single person in my company who makes less than $32 (16*2) per hour. So I'm very happy to pay $16 to recover, on average, 30 minutes of their time.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Why not make them work through lunch and provide overhead delivery of liquid nutritional supplements and coffee through a rubber tube? And you could have their desk chair plumbed to the sewer line so they would not need to take bathroom breaks. You might recover another 60 minutes of time during the day.

xamuel 8y ago

Most people wouldn't be able to cut it in software dev, whether they did the 3 month bootcamp or even if they managed to pass a 4-year university program. 99% of the time, Little Jimmy's 4th grade English teacher would have a snowball's chance in hell as a professional developer.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zanny 8y ago
This might have been true 20 years ago when software development meant everything from a fundamental understanding of hardware (including how pixels are laid out, how to manage gamma, etc for the front end) to knowing a lot of theory (because you had to implement your collections in house, manage the code base by hand, etc) but nowadays I'm pretty sure at least half of everyone could be pointed at a web framework and bootstrap and make a functional website in half a year. Sure a professional would have made that in a week, but their next site will take half as long, and then half as long... until they are within striking distance of someone who does still know all those fundamentals. They will mostly be limited in what they can do, but most people don't really need developers that can do anything even if they pay for them without realizing that. Programming is being commoditized. In the same way you don't see a doctor first thing when you go to one; you see a nurse, tech, or assistant. Not everything requires the most expensive learning investment. Most programming jobs don't require you to be able to write a proof of the code you copy paste from Stack Overflow.
- shados 8y ago
  Very true. The most important thing you mentioned is this one IMO: > even if they pay for them without realizing that In health care, you have doctors, physician assistants, nurses, administrators, etc. They have very different background, schooling and certifications as well as salaries. In software, you have some differences (individual contributors, tech leads, managers, etc), but it's not granular at all within the categories. While the self taught html dev is making 90-100k, the MIT graduate builting complex systems with 5 years of experience is making 150k (Using round numbers here, don't read too much into it), when the difference is significantly bigger. People are quick to point out at flukes: there's totally exceptions, the CMU grad who can't code themselves out of paper bag, and the random highschool dropout who has been coding since they were 7 who are now world famous geniuses...but they're exceptions yet treated as the rule.

scarejunba 8y ago

Dude, people die in ditches far from their home for a tenth of what I make in a year living in comfort. Society values people based on perceived economic impact not perceived job difficulty. And that’s probably a good idea.

AlexCoventry 8y ago

No, it's less than half who could do it with a gun to their head, less than a quarter who would choose to over pretty much anything else. Those are very loose upper bounds, too.

sizzle 8y ago

Is this a product of supply and demand?