7 ms·

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube al

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero and the attitude is "we're better than the rest of humanity. We deserve all, the rest deserves nothing." I did an Electrical Engineering faculty. I know how hard it is to do math and physics and all that. But since there's such an easy money to be made from slinging yet another website or a stupid mobile app with these dumbed down languages, the interest in the sciences and anything more complicated slowly wanishes. We'll pay the price eventually. Maybe not now, maybe not in 10 years, but eventually. We're too comfortable. "There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge." - Dune (I'm from Eastern Europe)

chrisseaton 7y ago
> I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. What is this in reference to? Where do buying cars and holidays in Greece come into this article? Is there a stereotype of programmers holidaying in Greece?! And tech types mostly hate buying cars don’t they?
- molteanu 7y ago
  In reference to all the money being invested in questionable places.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I think we’re missing some part of your train of thought here. But fundamentally tech graduates make a lot because the work they do makes a lot. You can’t argue the projects are both over staffed and pay too much at the same time! If there’s enough money coming into the company to pay that many people that much money then good for them? Looks like it is possible. Where should the money go instead? To the investors? That doesn’t sound better for ordinary people. But I don’t think they use it to go on holiday to Greece, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about normal tech graduates being involved in international tax evasion of all things - they don’t earn that much and I think most of it goes on rent in many places!
    - DataWorker 7y ago
      You are missing the point, which is that incentives can change society, for better or worse. If we have problems assigning appropriate value to things as a society we go astray. If we place greater value on ad sales than we do in real scientific progress in the long run we all lose.
  - petre 7y ago
    Doesn't make any sense though. Most people need a car to travel from A to B and a vacation to relax and be able to continue to work properly instead of quitting.
- netsharc 7y ago
  The OP is from Eastern Europe, and those 2 things he's mentioned are probably the local aspirations (Greece being not so far).
- Rerarom 7y ago
  He's from Romania, where people don't usually afford vacations abroad, and when they do, Greece is the canonical choice. Also, a lot of people's existences there revolve around car ownership. In addition, IT people have relatively high salaries (they even have an explicit tax exemption).
- peruvian 7y ago
  Last year and this summer Greece was the trendy vacation location for millennials aged 23-30, most of which work in the tech space and thus can afford such vacations (often in lieu of retirement plans/savings though).
headmelted 7y ago
“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero” This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  I would say I have seen two.
  - rusk 7y ago
    I would say that there is challenging work out there if you look for it. I’ve studiously avoided the kinds of places described here and it has paid off for me.
- pishpash 7y ago
  Entitled incompetents who are not only highly paid but expect scheduled promotions as if given a sinecure have really run amock in this sad sad industry.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.
  - wbl 7y ago
    "In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult."-Clauswitz. I would trust SNAFU exists for a reason.
- ACow_Adonis 7y ago
photonios 7y ago
I always wondered whether this phenomenon was something local or whether it holds true outside eastern Europe as well. I saw that you're from eastern Europe and I checked out your website. You're in the exact same city I am in. I moved here a couple of years ago from western Europe. What a small world.
- molteanu 7y ago
  If these, and others of its kind, are the things that also keep you awake at night, feel free to get in touch. It's hard to openly express them around here (edit: here, meaning the city where I live, not HN) as I always seem to get into trouble for that. Thought police is always on the lookout.
  - balfirevic 7y ago
    But your original comment in this thread basically amounts to "damn kids these days, they earn too much and don't know shit". Plus random insults about how they think they deserve it all (and nobody else). It doesn't take a thought police to reject that as almost surely greatly exaggerated and undeservedly disrespectful.
novalis78 7y ago
I truly enjoyed reading Saifedean Ammous ‘Bitcoin Standard’. Among other things he explores the relationship between the soundness of a monetary system, the establishment of the gold standard and industrial revolution and technological progress and what he calls ‘zombie industries’ kept artificially alive by loose money policies. Highly recommended.
mundo 7y ago
How much of this is due to venture capital? Like, if it were possible to make a billion dollars by investing in 100 plumbing companies even if 99 of them turn out to have been dumb, would plumbers make $250K out of college?
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  One can think of VC's as shooting canons full of money into the weeds and hoping they nail a unicorn. Less flippantly VC funded companies succeed not because they hire more competent people but because they are vastly better funded than more normal competition.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  My impression is not much; high salaries are instead driven by Google/FB etc.
- beefalo 7y ago
  Only if you figured out how to sell a self serve $15/month plumbing service or run advertising through the pipes
jbay808 7y ago
I think the reason software pays so well is because the world is simply littered with computers. Today's software developers are earning a fortune from the fertile soil that has been spread around in the form of computers in everyone's pockets. Making those computers x% more useful to y% of their owners scales as a function of the number of computer owners. The fruit keeps hanging lower and lower to the point that it's hard not to step on it. It's easy money because most of the work is done as the byproduct of investments by other industries, like telecom, but the extra value is unlocked by the software developers.
- ethbro 7y ago
  It's generalizable and something I'm confused they don't teach kids in career counseling. Max(salary) = unit_value * number_of_units_impacted Software generates a high ceiling because number of units impacted can be huge, so unit value can be low. In contrast, you can only pay teachers / doctors / firefighters / police officers so much, because their number of units impacted has a fundamental cap (the number of people they can physically interact with in a given day). Which is... unfortunate. Because (IMHO) they deliver a lot more value to society, and work harder, than I do.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    Bullshit Jobs includes an interesting section about the IT professions saying that 'noone wants to pay to develop a database that is amazing, but people will pay millions to someone who increases clickthrough on an ad of even a 0.1%.'
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Congratulations. You just discovered the Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Hmm. I'd need to see some research to believe that's happening. It seems like non-software folks are getting paid the same, leading to wider inequality.
zahrc 7y ago
> [...] it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing [...] If there’s something that I’m really really grateful of, growing up in Germany, it’s the dual apprenticeship system. [1] And Germany also does a splendid job at giving students a glimpse of working experience at uni (if you are willing, at least) [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16159943 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16159943
janee 7y ago
It's disheartening to read comments like this when I think of the graduates I've worked with over the years and the yearning for betterment and peer recognition I often see.
spamizbad 7y ago
It’s worth pointing out that things like the Moon Landing, which we now see as the pinnacle of human engineering achievement, was once widely regarded as a “Moondoggle”[1], sucking up billions of dollars with delays and cost-overruns around every corner. Apollo 11 was probably a few key decisions away from being one of history’s greatest lessons in hubris. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
gorgoiler 7y ago
Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement. The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense. The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engineers scale this to thousands of machines running across continents, always up, always connected, with non trivial caching, CDNs, cluster turn up, release engineering with automated testing and performance regression analysis on each diff before it’s even committed, let alone in production, and every other manner of instrumentation and tooling under the sun brought to bear on the product code itself. When they run out of things to do that are awesome they turn their eye to building their own compilers, languages, hardware, and networking gear, all to maximize productivity and minimize cost. It’s a zoo, and the zookeepers are some of the smartest people I’ve met.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ben_jones 7y ago
  > "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)" I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay! Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well. The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).
th0ma5 7y ago
> I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. I'm not sure the direction of causality here. Reminds me of "In theory, practice is just like theory, but in practice it rarely is." I think your ideals are pushing you to great places, but your experience is showing you that it either doesn't exist or at least you haven't found it yet. I've been a part of projects that I'm very proud of that have all kinds of awfulness that I'd rather have not done. Still pretty good work in my opinion, and I'm not sure that good work is fully purposeful and correct at every point.
stereolambda 7y ago
Some of this rings true, although I know some idealistic people in their twenties (I don't hang out that much in CS circles though). But I would argue there are also legitimate reasons to choose computer tech over hard science. In the former you have the chance to potentially do some independent, self-directed work or at least achieve financial independence. This means you could do something with your agency. The latter puts you into the bureaucratic machine with fierce institutional, metrics-driven competition. You hardly can do anything without a grant given by some political or commercial interest. Many people would also be anxious about what our current political and economic system could do with further major breakthroughs - on the scale of nuclear, say. More concentration of power is likely. This is also what the "communications-driven innovation" (per the article) seems to have brought, but this seems trivial compared to impact of biological engineering, tampering with the actual nervous system or whatever.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. What is this in reference to? Where do buying cars and holidays in Greece come into this article? Is there a stereotype of programmers holidaying in Greece?! And tech types mostly hate buying cars don’t they?

molteanu 7y ago
In reference to all the money being invested in questionable places.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  I think we’re missing some part of your train of thought here. But fundamentally tech graduates make a lot because the work they do makes a lot. You can’t argue the projects are both over staffed and pay too much at the same time! If there’s enough money coming into the company to pay that many people that much money then good for them? Looks like it is possible. Where should the money go instead? To the investors? That doesn’t sound better for ordinary people. But I don’t think they use it to go on holiday to Greece, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about normal tech graduates being involved in international tax evasion of all things - they don’t earn that much and I think most of it goes on rent in many places!
  - DataWorker 7y ago
    You are missing the point, which is that incentives can change society, for better or worse. If we have problems assigning appropriate value to things as a society we go astray. If we place greater value on ad sales than we do in real scientific progress in the long run we all lose.
- petre 7y ago
  Doesn't make any sense though. Most people need a car to travel from A to B and a vacation to relax and be able to continue to work properly instead of quitting.
netsharc 7y ago
The OP is from Eastern Europe, and those 2 things he's mentioned are probably the local aspirations (Greece being not so far).
Rerarom 7y ago
He's from Romania, where people don't usually afford vacations abroad, and when they do, Greece is the canonical choice. Also, a lot of people's existences there revolve around car ownership. In addition, IT people have relatively high salaries (they even have an explicit tax exemption).
peruvian 7y ago
Last year and this summer Greece was the trendy vacation location for millennials aged 23-30, most of which work in the tech space and thus can afford such vacations (often in lieu of retirement plans/savings though).

headmelted 7y ago

“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero” This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
I would say I have seen two.
- rusk 7y ago
  I would say that there is challenging work out there if you look for it. I’ve studiously avoided the kinds of places described here and it has paid off for me.
pishpash 7y ago
Entitled incompetents who are not only highly paid but expect scheduled promotions as if given a sinecure have really run amock in this sad sad industry.
bsenftner 7y ago
It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.
- wbl 7y ago
  "In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult."-Clauswitz. I would trust SNAFU exists for a reason.
ACow_Adonis 7y ago

photonios 7y ago

I always wondered whether this phenomenon was something local or whether it holds true outside eastern Europe as well. I saw that you're from eastern Europe and I checked out your website. You're in the exact same city I am in. I moved here a couple of years ago from western Europe. What a small world.

molteanu 7y ago
If these, and others of its kind, are the things that also keep you awake at night, feel free to get in touch. It's hard to openly express them around here (edit: here, meaning the city where I live, not HN) as I always seem to get into trouble for that. Thought police is always on the lookout.
- balfirevic 7y ago
  But your original comment in this thread basically amounts to "damn kids these days, they earn too much and don't know shit". Plus random insults about how they think they deserve it all (and nobody else). It doesn't take a thought police to reject that as almost surely greatly exaggerated and undeservedly disrespectful.

novalis78 7y ago

I truly enjoyed reading Saifedean Ammous ‘Bitcoin Standard’. Among other things he explores the relationship between the soundness of a monetary system, the establishment of the gold standard and industrial revolution and technological progress and what he calls ‘zombie industries’ kept artificially alive by loose money policies. Highly recommended.

mundo 7y ago

How much of this is due to venture capital? Like, if it were possible to make a billion dollars by investing in 100 plumbing companies even if 99 of them turn out to have been dumb, would plumbers make $250K out of college?

Gibbon1 7y ago
One can think of VC's as shooting canons full of money into the weeds and hoping they nail a unicorn. Less flippantly VC funded companies succeed not because they hire more competent people but because they are vastly better funded than more normal competition.
sweeneyrod 7y ago
My impression is not much; high salaries are instead driven by Google/FB etc.
beefalo 7y ago
Only if you figured out how to sell a self serve $15/month plumbing service or run advertising through the pipes

jbay808 7y ago

I think the reason software pays so well is because the world is simply littered with computers. Today's software developers are earning a fortune from the fertile soil that has been spread around in the form of computers in everyone's pockets. Making those computers x% more useful to y% of their owners scales as a function of the number of computer owners. The fruit keeps hanging lower and lower to the point that it's hard not to step on it. It's easy money because most of the work is done as the byproduct of investments by other industries, like telecom, but the extra value is unlocked by the software developers.

ethbro 7y ago
It's generalizable and something I'm confused they don't teach kids in career counseling. Max(salary) = unit_value * number_of_units_impacted Software generates a high ceiling because number of units impacted can be huge, so unit value can be low. In contrast, you can only pay teachers / doctors / firefighters / police officers so much, because their number of units impacted has a fundamental cap (the number of people they can physically interact with in a given day). Which is... unfortunate. Because (IMHO) they deliver a lot more value to society, and work harder, than I do.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  Bullshit Jobs includes an interesting section about the IT professions saying that 'noone wants to pay to develop a database that is amazing, but people will pay millions to someone who increases clickthrough on an ad of even a 0.1%.'
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Congratulations. You just discovered the Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Hmm. I'd need to see some research to believe that's happening. It seems like non-software folks are getting paid the same, leading to wider inequality.

zahrc 7y ago

> [...] it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing [...] If there’s something that I’m really really grateful of, growing up in Germany, it’s the dual apprenticeship system. [1] And Germany also does a splendid job at giving students a glimpse of working experience at uni (if you are willing, at least) [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16159943 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16159943

janee 7y ago

It's disheartening to read comments like this when I think of the graduates I've worked with over the years and the yearning for betterment and peer recognition I often see.

spamizbad 7y ago

It’s worth pointing out that things like the Moon Landing, which we now see as the pinnacle of human engineering achievement, was once widely regarded as a “Moondoggle”[1], sucking up billions of dollars with delays and cost-overruns around every corner. Apollo 11 was probably a few key decisions away from being one of history’s greatest lessons in hubris. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...

gorgoiler 7y ago

Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement. The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense. The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engineers scale this to thousands of machines running across continents, always up, always connected, with non trivial caching, CDNs, cluster turn up, release engineering with automated testing and performance regression analysis on each diff before it’s even committed, let alone in production, and every other manner of instrumentation and tooling under the sun brought to bear on the product code itself. When they run out of things to do that are awesome they turn their eye to building their own compilers, languages, hardware, and networking gear, all to maximize productivity and minimize cost. It’s a zoo, and the zookeepers are some of the smartest people I’ve met.

pmiller2 7y ago
This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ben_jones 7y ago
> "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)" I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay! Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well. The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).

th0ma5 7y ago

> I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. I'm not sure the direction of causality here. Reminds me of "In theory, practice is just like theory, but in practice it rarely is." I think your ideals are pushing you to great places, but your experience is showing you that it either doesn't exist or at least you haven't found it yet. I've been a part of projects that I'm very proud of that have all kinds of awfulness that I'd rather have not done. Still pretty good work in my opinion, and I'm not sure that good work is fully purposeful and correct at every point.

stereolambda 7y ago

Some of this rings true, although I know some idealistic people in their twenties (I don't hang out that much in CS circles though). But I would argue there are also legitimate reasons to choose computer tech over hard science. In the former you have the chance to potentially do some independent, self-directed work or at least achieve financial independence. This means you could do something with your agency. The latter puts you into the bureaucratic machine with fierce institutional, metrics-driven competition. You hardly can do anything without a grant given by some political or commercial interest. Many people would also be anxious about what our current political and economic system could do with further major breakthroughs - on the scale of nuclear, say. More concentration of power is likely. This is also what the "communications-driven innovation" (per the article) seems to have brought, but this seems trivial compared to impact of biological engineering, tampering with the actual nervous system or whatever.