5 ms·

Its not great but its not terrible. Just software is way overpaid. Median Household Income 2017 Bronx $37,397 Brooklyn $56,942 Manhattan $85,071 Queens $64

by rb808 7y ago

Its not great but its not terrible. Just software is way overpaid. Median Household Income 2017 Bronx $37,397 Brooklyn $56,942 Manhattan $85,071 Queens $64,509 Staten Island $79,201 New York City $60,879 New York State $64,894 United States $60,336 https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income-taxes/med_hhold_income.htm https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income-taxes/med_hhold_i...

js2 7y ago
> Just software is way overpaid. That indicates to me how underpaid most other jobs are, not that programmers are way overpaid.
- Zhenya 7y ago
  Or, you know, the market is dictating the rate.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    The market is rarely as good at setting prices as its most ardent defenders claim. (Or, to be fair, as bad at setting them as its most ardent critics claim.)
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      What does this statement tell anyone reading it? Or, in pretentious terms, this involves an argumentum ad temperantiam (fallacy that you can compare two unquantified extremes and get something useful)
  - uwuhn 7y ago
    We haven't even begun to see the ceiling for experienced engineers imo. We hit $500k TC not being a completely-unthinkable offer for anyone other than extreme domain experts way earlier than I expected.
  - manifestsilence 7y ago
    That the market is manipulable should be evident from the quantity of money that is spent on lobbying legislators about it, and how much opposition there is to unions. Belief in a totally free and natural self-regulating market is just as bad an appeal to Naturalism as to say we should eschew health care because people were meant to die if they get sick.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      There is very, very little money in politics given the power that’s at stake. > (in case you’re keeping track: all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.) https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
  - geofft 7y ago
    "The market is dictating the rate" is pretty tautological. The interesting questions are whether the market is rational, whether this is what we as society want the market doing (which is not to imply regulation, just that we could collectively decide to prioritize other things), whether existing regulation is influencing the market in some way, etc. It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant. It isn't obvious to me that these two companies have approximately the same hiring budget, or if one has a higher budget than the other than giving market offers to start negotiation instead of above-market is a winning strategy.
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      > It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant. From your first paragraph I get the feeling you might be familiar with this, but for others the term this is alluding to is called elasticity. Essentially a little change in supply and a little change in demand aren't always worth the same. What you experience (and what others have measured) suggests the demand for competent software developers (the company side) is relatively inelastic compared to the supply of competent software developers (the employee side). Put another way, if they tried to pay you less the number of applicants they got would go down quite fast. Put even simpler, the market for software developers is a seller's market.
- CM30 7y ago
  What do you think the average wage should be? I'm getting the impression that a lot of people think $100-200,000 a year should be the 'norm' for many jobs, but I'm not entirely sure myself.
  - js2 7y ago
    I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. Using the Raleigh metro area, for example, that works out to about $90K/year, not including retirement: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market.
    - distances 7y ago
      > To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market. Or, perhaps even more common, something wrong with the housing market.
    - CM30 7y ago
      > I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. I'd definitely agree with this. And I'd also partly wonder whether this could be used to sell companies/the well off on better housing/land use/rent control policies too, since in many places, the only reason the expectations have gotten so high is because the system is simply broken/completely unaffordable. For someone to get the kind of lifestyle mentioned in central London or near Silicon Valley, you'd need at least a couple of hundred grand a year. Maybe this would change if people realised that the more they fight affordable housing, the more it'll hit them/their companies financially having to pay out for their workers to live in such broken systems.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly. For what it's worth, I'm of the opinion that the long tail of high-paying jobs (which I count myself in, to be clear) is having a negative effect on the cost of living by making it easy for us to drive up the prices of limited resources like housing near an urban core, restaurant reservations near an urban core, etc. If you curtail that somehow (my preferred approach is heavy taxation, but you could also regulate salaries or perhaps encourage the free market to charge people disproportionately more if they make more money), I suspect the problem will fix itself, and <<$100K salaries will start to go farther. Then you don't need to solve the problem of where we get more funding for journalism / taxi driving / whatever from.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Total compensation in the United States is $10 trillion. There are about 190 million people aged 18-64. If you gave everyone a job paying the same salary, everyone would make about $53,000. (If you make more than that, you benefit from income inequality!) So no, the data shows that these jobs are paid a normal amount, while programmers are vastly overpaid.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    You can't just decide overpaid = anyone over mean, underpaid = anyone under mean. If a brain surgeon is a hard job and takes 15 years of school, and a crossing guard is an easy job that you just show up and stand with a sign... both should be paid 53k? I think a lot of people would have a problem with this.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      I don't really follow the argument you're making here or how it connects to 'js2's original argument, but I'll make the obvious observation that there are extraordinarily difficult jobs that don't tend to pay well (professional classical musicians, for example), and easy jobs that pay better than the mean (garbage collectors).
      - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
        Garbage collecting may be "easy" in a cognitive or skills sense, but it's unpleasant, surprisingly dangerous and hard on the body.
        tptacek 7y ago
        Sure. My point is that supply and demand does not in fact map directly to talent and difficulty.
        brianwawok 7y ago
        It has a very high correlation. Also ability to generate money. Pro NBA player and pro violin player are both hard. The pro NBA player is paid more, but he generated a lot more wealth. Most orchestras rely on donations just to keep the lights on.

by rb808 7y ago

js2 7y ago

> Just software is way overpaid. That indicates to me how underpaid most other jobs are, not that programmers are way overpaid.

Zhenya 7y ago
Or, you know, the market is dictating the rate.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  The market is rarely as good at setting prices as its most ardent defenders claim. (Or, to be fair, as bad at setting them as its most ardent critics claim.)
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    What does this statement tell anyone reading it? Or, in pretentious terms, this involves an argumentum ad temperantiam (fallacy that you can compare two unquantified extremes and get something useful)
- uwuhn 7y ago
  We haven't even begun to see the ceiling for experienced engineers imo. We hit $500k TC not being a completely-unthinkable offer for anyone other than extreme domain experts way earlier than I expected.
- manifestsilence 7y ago
  That the market is manipulable should be evident from the quantity of money that is spent on lobbying legislators about it, and how much opposition there is to unions. Belief in a totally free and natural self-regulating market is just as bad an appeal to Naturalism as to say we should eschew health care because people were meant to die if they get sick.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    There is very, very little money in politics given the power that’s at stake. > (in case you’re keeping track: all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.) https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
- geofft 7y ago
  "The market is dictating the rate" is pretty tautological. The interesting questions are whether the market is rational, whether this is what we as society want the market doing (which is not to imply regulation, just that we could collectively decide to prioritize other things), whether existing regulation is influencing the market in some way, etc. It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant. It isn't obvious to me that these two companies have approximately the same hiring budget, or if one has a higher budget than the other than giving market offers to start negotiation instead of above-market is a winning strategy.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    > It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant. From your first paragraph I get the feeling you might be familiar with this, but for others the term this is alluding to is called elasticity. Essentially a little change in supply and a little change in demand aren't always worth the same. What you experience (and what others have measured) suggests the demand for competent software developers (the company side) is relatively inelastic compared to the supply of competent software developers (the employee side). Put another way, if they tried to pay you less the number of applicants they got would go down quite fast. Put even simpler, the market for software developers is a seller's market.
CM30 7y ago
What do you think the average wage should be? I'm getting the impression that a lot of people think $100-200,000 a year should be the 'norm' for many jobs, but I'm not entirely sure myself.
- js2 7y ago
  I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. Using the Raleigh metro area, for example, that works out to about $90K/year, not including retirement: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market.
  - distances 7y ago
    > To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market. Or, perhaps even more common, something wrong with the housing market.
  - CM30 7y ago
    > I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. I'd definitely agree with this. And I'd also partly wonder whether this could be used to sell companies/the well off on better housing/land use/rent control policies too, since in many places, the only reason the expectations have gotten so high is because the system is simply broken/completely unaffordable. For someone to get the kind of lifestyle mentioned in central London or near Silicon Valley, you'd need at least a couple of hundred grand a year. Maybe this would change if people realised that the more they fight affordable housing, the more it'll hit them/their companies financially having to pay out for their workers to live in such broken systems.
- geofft 7y ago
  Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly. For what it's worth, I'm of the opinion that the long tail of high-paying jobs (which I count myself in, to be clear) is having a negative effect on the cost of living by making it easy for us to drive up the prices of limited resources like housing near an urban core, restaurant reservations near an urban core, etc. If you curtail that somehow (my preferred approach is heavy taxation, but you could also regulate salaries or perhaps encourage the free market to charge people disproportionately more if they make more money), I suspect the problem will fix itself, and <<$100K salaries will start to go farther. Then you don't need to solve the problem of where we get more funding for journalism / taxi driving / whatever from.
rayiner 7y ago
Total compensation in the United States is $10 trillion. There are about 190 million people aged 18-64. If you gave everyone a job paying the same salary, everyone would make about $53,000. (If you make more than that, you benefit from income inequality!) So no, the data shows that these jobs are paid a normal amount, while programmers are vastly overpaid.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  You can't just decide overpaid = anyone over mean, underpaid = anyone under mean. If a brain surgeon is a hard job and takes 15 years of school, and a crossing guard is an easy job that you just show up and stand with a sign... both should be paid 53k? I think a lot of people would have a problem with this.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    I don't really follow the argument you're making here or how it connects to 'js2's original argument, but I'll make the obvious observation that there are extraordinarily difficult jobs that don't tend to pay well (professional classical musicians, for example), and easy jobs that pay better than the mean (garbage collectors).
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      Garbage collecting may be "easy" in a cognitive or skills sense, but it's unpleasant, surprisingly dangerous and hard on the body.
      - tptacek 7y ago
        Sure. My point is that supply and demand does not in fact map directly to talent and difficulty.
        brianwawok 7y ago
        It has a very high correlation. Also ability to generate money. Pro NBA player and pro violin player are both hard. The pro NBA player is paid more, but he generated a lot more wealth. Most orchestras rely on donations just to keep the lights on.