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> Software engineering salaries are not exorbitant. In fact, engineers may be consistently underpaid for the value delivered. What about the value of those who

> Software engineering salaries are not exorbitant. In fact, engineers may be consistently underpaid for the value delivered. What about the value of those who cooked your lunch? Without them, software engineers would starve and die, so that makes them have far more value, no? Do you think that food service workers are also underpaid?

loopz 7y ago
whataboutism
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  When asking about the value that a certain occupation provides, I think it's fair to compare them to the rest of society and ask about the balance. I'm not bringing up the plight of other employees randomly to dismiss one argument, I'm asking for a defense of the stark difference in economic status.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Right now a lot more meals than usual are being prepared at home, and a lot of people who had jobs doing that are out of work. On the other hand, essentially the entire accounting system for the state hardest hit by coronavirus is run by "nonessential" employees, because that is what we are calling people who can work from home. Right now, there are definitely lots of people who can't work from home that are enormously essential in the ordinary sense. For instance, say you have a plumbing emergency. But, you know, your unemployment check is pretty essential too.
    - SethMurphy 7y ago
      The plumber example doesn't hold up here (https://www.contractormag.com/around-the-web/article/21126653/white-house-identifies-plumbers-as-essential-critical-infrastructure-workers https://www.contractormag.com/around-the-web/article/2112665...) As someone who had a plumbing emergency I can attest it was essential also. I can also say I am sure we would have been able to get the repair done regardless, as humans want to help (and make money). It is correct that those who are working remotely are no longer supporting the cooks, child care workers, etc ... while also having hardship due to the lack of these services. These hardships however are temporary. Our society can't really afford to live with these disparities. I spent a first career in the restaurant industry before learning to work with computers. I can say for certain in my case the first career was much harder and had much less rewards. However, I don't see eating out as essential, but a privilege. I am not sure how we walk back this system, but it seems the time has come that more people raise their own children and cook their own food regardless of their jobs.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        I can't figure out what you are trying to say, particularly about plumbers. You seem to be disagreeing with me about something, but your link supports them being essential, which is what I wrote. There is a division between people whose jobs are secure right now and those who are (or soon will be) out of work. There is also a division between people who can work remotely and people who have to be at a job site in person. My point, or one of them, is that these are independent of each other, so all together there are four types of people/jobs.
        SethMurphy 7y ago
        My apologies, I misinterpreted your remarks as saying plumbers were essential but not able to work. I was therefore defending plumbers necessity and showing their status based on it. Thank you for the clarification on your point for me. I do agree with you. Those that are able to work now are certainly lucky (as long as the work allow proper social distancing) whether remote or essential. My last point was on remote workers, especially those in tech which I am most familiar with, is that one should realize how pampered that role has become at the cost of others. Many of the new stresses those situations involve now with cooking and child care that was done by the service workers who are not essential and can not work remotely are the same stresses those service workers encounter all the time, not just in a pandemic situation. If one is able to work remotely now you should take this time to count your blessings and re-evaluate your own internal definition of struggle and what you are entitled to as part of society. Also, as you may have alluded too, remote does not necessarily mean job security, rather it could be quite the opposite in the long term. It is times like these I wish I was a plumber.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Cooking at home is not stressful like working at a restaurant, come on.
        SethMurphy 7y ago
        My point was many lower wage workers can not afford the luxury of prepared meals or child care. I was in no way comparing cooking professionally to cooking domesticaly. As someone who worked at every job except baker in the food service industry for a decade and changed careers because of the stress I can not agree with you more. Restaurant work is hard and in my opinion underpaid.
  - mcv 7y ago
    Sure, but don't just compare to people who are also underpaid. Also compare to management. In many companies, managers get paid a lot more than software developers. That's not necessarily fair.
dv_dt 7y ago
I think both engineers and food service workers are generally underpaid.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y ago
  Some engineers go around making APIs that are as fun (and slow) as doing taxes. I hope they get paid.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kragen 7y ago
Consider a food service worker in Facebook's cafeteria. In an hour, perhaps they make 30 lunches, which in the best case delight 60 people for an hour: 60 person-hours of delight for an hour of work. Now contrast a Facebook programmer, who in one hour might be able to fix a bug that has been annoying 0.1% of Facebook's 2.5 billion users, causing them to be frustrated rather than delighted for, say, two minutes a day, for the next three years before the feature gets rewritten. Maybe that sounds trivial, but if so, shut up and multiply: 2.5 million hours of delight per month for 36 months gives you 90 million hours of delight, for the same hour of work. So, at a rough estimate, then, the gourmet hacker is 1.5 million times as productive as the gourmet chef. Maybe if I've been overoptimistic it's only a factor of 100,000 or 10,000, but it's huge. And that's how Facebook can be profitable at all despite all the shitty and stupid things they do: capturing even a tiny fraction of the value they produce makes them wildly profitable, as long as they can successfully externalize the harm they do. Some software companies don't even need to externalize their damages. And that's why software is eating the world. That isn't the only reason hackers get paid more than foodservice workers. No business is going to pay more for its inputs than it is forced to; that reduces its profits. Hackers also enjoy a dramatically better bargaining position than most foodservice workers, because a hacker with US$3000 has a better BATNA than a cook with $3000: the cook is going to be trying to sell $3 burritos out of an Igloo ice chest outside of concerts while the hacker can buy a laptop, bring up a couple of VPSes on AWS, and spend a few weeks putting together a useful web service, maybe get a few dozen to a few thousand users, but at any rate can easily scale to hundreds of thousands of users. The cook is dependent on someone investing a few hundred thousand dollars (in the US) to have top-quality tools and a good location. Difficult to do yourself unless your family is rich or you graduated from the Cordon Bleu. This is purely factual reasoning, so it cannot answer normative questions like whether it would be ethically better to pay hackers more or less. It only purports to explain the chains of cause and effect in the world that give rise to that situation, and illuminate the other possibilities inherent in the current state of affairs, and how they might change.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tomc1985 7y ago
jodrellblank 7y ago
> Without them, software engineers would starve and die Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves, bringing a packed lunch, or surviving on an empty stomach for a few hours until they get home. Not to mention buying lunch from somewhere else or ordering delivery food if one cafe is gone. Unless you're positing a world where all food production, farming, fishing, etc. has vanished, then software engineers are in no worse a position than chefs, cooks, baristas, grocery store employees, or anyone else.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  > Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves I have an idea! Let's call it DevFood, and make it a requirement for everyone. I mean, we already expect the software engineers to analyze the requirements, so we don't have to hire analysts; we expect them to test their products, so we don't have to hire testers; and we expect them to do the operations, so we do not have to hire an administrator. So tell me, why do we have to waste money on an extra guy who makes the lunch? DevFood is the future of software development!
- Tomis02 7y ago
  > Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves Their productivity would drop a bit, though. The idea is that people making food enable developers to deliver their best work.
the_other 7y ago
Definitely.
pietrovismara 7y ago
>Do you think that food service workers are also underpaid? Yes. >Without them, software engineers would starve and die Have you ever cooked your lunch?
theK 7y ago
People are generally capable of cooking to nourish themselves. Learning enough cooking to cook for yourself can be achieved in one afternoon. The foodworker employment market is completely based on convenience culture. The software engineering employment market is very different to that.

loopz 7y ago

whataboutism

Jasper_ 7y ago
When asking about the value that a certain occupation provides, I think it's fair to compare them to the rest of society and ask about the balance. I'm not bringing up the plight of other employees randomly to dismiss one argument, I'm asking for a defense of the stark difference in economic status.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Right now a lot more meals than usual are being prepared at home, and a lot of people who had jobs doing that are out of work. On the other hand, essentially the entire accounting system for the state hardest hit by coronavirus is run by "nonessential" employees, because that is what we are calling people who can work from home. Right now, there are definitely lots of people who can't work from home that are enormously essential in the ordinary sense. For instance, say you have a plumbing emergency. But, you know, your unemployment check is pretty essential too.
  - SethMurphy 7y ago
    The plumber example doesn't hold up here (https://www.contractormag.com/around-the-web/article/21126653/white-house-identifies-plumbers-as-essential-critical-infrastructure-workers https://www.contractormag.com/around-the-web/article/2112665...) As someone who had a plumbing emergency I can attest it was essential also. I can also say I am sure we would have been able to get the repair done regardless, as humans want to help (and make money). It is correct that those who are working remotely are no longer supporting the cooks, child care workers, etc ... while also having hardship due to the lack of these services. These hardships however are temporary. Our society can't really afford to live with these disparities. I spent a first career in the restaurant industry before learning to work with computers. I can say for certain in my case the first career was much harder and had much less rewards. However, I don't see eating out as essential, but a privilege. I am not sure how we walk back this system, but it seems the time has come that more people raise their own children and cook their own food regardless of their jobs.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      I can't figure out what you are trying to say, particularly about plumbers. You seem to be disagreeing with me about something, but your link supports them being essential, which is what I wrote. There is a division between people whose jobs are secure right now and those who are (or soon will be) out of work. There is also a division between people who can work remotely and people who have to be at a job site in person. My point, or one of them, is that these are independent of each other, so all together there are four types of people/jobs.
      - SethMurphy 7y ago
        My apologies, I misinterpreted your remarks as saying plumbers were essential but not able to work. I was therefore defending plumbers necessity and showing their status based on it. Thank you for the clarification on your point for me. I do agree with you. Those that are able to work now are certainly lucky (as long as the work allow proper social distancing) whether remote or essential. My last point was on remote workers, especially those in tech which I am most familiar with, is that one should realize how pampered that role has become at the cost of others. Many of the new stresses those situations involve now with cooking and child care that was done by the service workers who are not essential and can not work remotely are the same stresses those service workers encounter all the time, not just in a pandemic situation. If one is able to work remotely now you should take this time to count your blessings and re-evaluate your own internal definition of struggle and what you are entitled to as part of society. Also, as you may have alluded too, remote does not necessarily mean job security, rather it could be quite the opposite in the long term. It is times like these I wish I was a plumber.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        Cooking at home is not stressful like working at a restaurant, come on.
        SethMurphy 7y ago
        My point was many lower wage workers can not afford the luxury of prepared meals or child care. I was in no way comparing cooking professionally to cooking domesticaly. As someone who worked at every job except baker in the food service industry for a decade and changed careers because of the stress I can not agree with you more. Restaurant work is hard and in my opinion underpaid.
- mcv 7y ago
  Sure, but don't just compare to people who are also underpaid. Also compare to management. In many companies, managers get paid a lot more than software developers. That's not necessarily fair.

dv_dt 7y ago

I think both engineers and food service workers are generally underpaid.

0xdeadbeefbabe 7y ago
Some engineers go around making APIs that are as fun (and slow) as doing taxes. I hope they get paid.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kragen 7y ago

Consider a food service worker in Facebook's cafeteria. In an hour, perhaps they make 30 lunches, which in the best case delight 60 people for an hour: 60 person-hours of delight for an hour of work. Now contrast a Facebook programmer, who in one hour might be able to fix a bug that has been annoying 0.1% of Facebook's 2.5 billion users, causing them to be frustrated rather than delighted for, say, two minutes a day, for the next three years before the feature gets rewritten. Maybe that sounds trivial, but if so, shut up and multiply: 2.5 million hours of delight per month for 36 months gives you 90 million hours of delight, for the same hour of work. So, at a rough estimate, then, the gourmet hacker is 1.5 million times as productive as the gourmet chef. Maybe if I've been overoptimistic it's only a factor of 100,000 or 10,000, but it's huge. And that's how Facebook can be profitable at all despite all the shitty and stupid things they do: capturing even a tiny fraction of the value they produce makes them wildly profitable, as long as they can successfully externalize the harm they do. Some software companies don't even need to externalize their damages. And that's why software is eating the world. That isn't the only reason hackers get paid more than foodservice workers. No business is going to pay more for its inputs than it is forced to; that reduces its profits. Hackers also enjoy a dramatically better bargaining position than most foodservice workers, because a hacker with US$3000 has a better BATNA than a cook with $3000: the cook is going to be trying to sell $3 burritos out of an Igloo ice chest outside of concerts while the hacker can buy a laptop, bring up a couple of VPSes on AWS, and spend a few weeks putting together a useful web service, maybe get a few dozen to a few thousand users, but at any rate can easily scale to hundreds of thousands of users. The cook is dependent on someone investing a few hundred thousand dollars (in the US) to have top-quality tools and a good location. Difficult to do yourself unless your family is rich or you graduated from the Cordon Bleu. This is purely factual reasoning, so it cannot answer normative questions like whether it would be ethically better to pay hackers more or less. It only purports to explain the chains of cause and effect in the world that give rise to that situation, and illuminate the other possibilities inherent in the current state of affairs, and how they might change.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tomc1985 7y ago

jodrellblank 7y ago

> Without them, software engineers would starve and die Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves, bringing a packed lunch, or surviving on an empty stomach for a few hours until they get home. Not to mention buying lunch from somewhere else or ordering delivery food if one cafe is gone. Unless you're positing a world where all food production, farming, fishing, etc. has vanished, then software engineers are in no worse a position than chefs, cooks, baristas, grocery store employees, or anyone else.

Viliam1234 7y ago
> Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves I have an idea! Let's call it DevFood, and make it a requirement for everyone. I mean, we already expect the software engineers to analyze the requirements, so we don't have to hire analysts; we expect them to test their products, so we don't have to hire testers; and we expect them to do the operations, so we do not have to hire an administrator. So tell me, why do we have to waste money on an extra guy who makes the lunch? DevFood is the future of software development!
Tomis02 7y ago
> Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves Their productivity would drop a bit, though. The idea is that people making food enable developers to deliver their best work.

the_other 7y ago

Definitely.

pietrovismara 7y ago

>Do you think that food service workers are also underpaid? Yes. >Without them, software engineers would starve and die Have you ever cooked your lunch?

theK 7y ago

People are generally capable of cooking to nourish themselves. Learning enough cooking to cook for yourself can be achieved in one afternoon. The foodworker employment market is completely based on convenience culture. The software engineering employment market is very different to that.