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You are implying the amount of difficulty / effort put in by programmers is as great as for other highly paid professions. I just don’t think this is true for m
by yibg 7y ago
You are implying the amount of difficulty / effort put in by programmers is as great as for other highly paid professions. I just don’t think this is true for most cases. I’ve worked at 2 of the FANG companies where compensations is on par or higher than doctors / lawyers / consultants etc. Sure we all pulled some nights and weekends and did some reading and experimentation on the side, but for the most part it was off to the pub / go home at 6. My evenings and weekends were mostly spent doing “normal” things like playing games, hanging out with friends etc. outside of startups I don’t know any programmers pulling 80 hour weeks regularly, including side projects and self learning.
- milankragujevic 7y agoI don't know any lawyers or doctors pulling 80 hour weeks regularly without billing extra for it.
- akiselev 7y agoYou don't know any doctors who have ever done a residency?
- buzzerbetrayed 7y agoI wouldn’t say that “Regularly” means “only during the first 3 years of your career”
- sukilot 7y agoand 4 years of medical school. A programmer can earn enough to retire before a doctor finishes their training.
- yibg 7y agoI know quite a few lawyers at the larger firms doing 70 - 80 hour weeks on a regular basis. The goal of course is making partner, but few will get there. Consultants and bankers ditto.
- djmips 7y agoI guess you need to get a job like game programming to see hours like that on a regular (career) basis.
- rckoepke 7y agoYou are implying that effort should be correlated to pay. It isn't. The hardest job I ever had was being a bartender/barback at a very busy bar - it sure didn't pay much. It's possible that one programmer can bring generate and capture more economic value by doing one "not very complicated thing" that gets pushed to 1 billion instances[0] than a brain surgeon can by doing one extremely complicated thing on a few dozen or hundred people per year. 'curl' is not complicated, but it clearly has incredible economic value, and has an install base of over 1 billion devices. [0] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/17/the-worlds-biggest-curl-installations/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/17/the-worlds-biggest-cu...