7 ms·

What a tragically sad inefficiency of our current society that people who are way smarter than me are toiling away in the dark for pennies an hour on something

What a tragically sad inefficiency of our current society that people who are way smarter than me are toiling away in the dark for pennies an hour on something extremely hard and useful to society, only to have their results denied by the system. Meanwhile I'm being paid obscene amounts of money to center divs and type @Autowired and @Component for projects that never end up launching anyway. It's all so badly badly flawed.

throw9872349872 6y ago
Thats why most of us are in industry ;)
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  Money is an important motivator, but one wonders if it's possible to make amazing societal contributions and also make $2 million in a decade :)
  - hokumguru 6y ago
    I think those people end up in research work at large companies. Essentially doing academic work in the private sector.
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      Now all that's left to do is democratize that and you have a perfect world, no? That is to say increase the pool of such jobs from 10,000 to 10,000,000
      - stale2002 6y ago
        > That is to say increase the pool of such jobs Umm, no. The reality is that research type jobs are not that numerous for a reason. That reason being we just don't need that many of them. The reason why industry pays more is because that is what society needs.
        GPerson 6y ago
        I think need has less to do with it than you suggest. We don’t ‘need’ most industry jobs any more than academic jobs. It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia, and so it has more money to pay employees.
        stale2002 6y ago
        > It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia Ok... And almost by definition, that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
        Joof 6y ago
        As long as we all agree that Facebook is one of the most meaningful and useful contributions to society, then yes, capitalism determines ideal value.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        arczyx 6y ago
        > ...that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth. I feel that this is a rather narrow view, since there are a lot of companies who generate wealth by being detrimental to society at large (usually those who are just rent-seeking instead of continuously creating value).
        SquishyPanda23 6y ago
        You've confused utility with wealth.
        pishpash 6y ago
        They generate money which people can spend, so if that's the only criterion for wealth (it isn't), then mindlessly printing money is also useful to society (it isn't).
  - throw9872349872 6y ago
    I posit you make a greater contribution to society by earning as much as you can by utilizing your talents, then donating the excess when you don’t need it anymore.
    - tolbish 6y ago
      Earning as much as you can often means intentionally blinding yourself to the negative effects of how you're getting there.
altdatathrow 6y ago
Comments like these are why I'm excited about the no-code movement. So much of the past decade of tech hasn't resulted in anything tangibly better or different. It's the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them. Once we automate the ability to build these CRUD apps, we'll find out whether corporations still feel a $200k/yr UBI is appropriate.
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  HAHA a $200,000 pee year UBI is definitely how I would describe most of these jobs... Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop. What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software. When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?) If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    What if the robots decide they have different priorities?
- apta 6y ago
  Except that there's absolutely no evidence that the so called "no-code" movement will achieve anything beyond what we already have today.
  - someguydave 6y ago
xmprt 6y ago
In the same vein, the fact that teachers are paid orders of magnitude less than lawyers boggles my mind. I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued and that the people who would make good teachers never end up teaching.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued I’m a teacher. I’ve never seen any evidence teachers are undervalued. Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. Difficulties in hiring can be fully explained by having the same pay scale for those teaching subjects in demand in the outside world like Computer Science or Mathematics and those with either less demand or greater supply like Physical Education or English. Paying primary school teachers and secondary school teachers on the same scale is distortionary in the same manner. Teachers in the government sector get very, very good job security and benefits for doing a hard job but plenty of people do hard jobs for much poorer compensation. And teachers aren’t magic. They come in a very distant third in their effects on student achievement behind student characteristics and family characteristics. > By almost all objective measures, teachers don’t actually seem to be underpaid in the traditional sense. “Nationwide, the average teacher salary was $60,477 during the 2017–18 school year.” And teachers work around 2 hours less a week than the average profession (“ 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals”). BLS Occupational Information Network studies found that teaching isn’t a particularly stressful job relative to other professions, and teachers typically have pretty solid relative job security. In addition to all of this, teachers don’t make a lot when they leave teaching and education majors have the lowest standardized test scores of any major. Although teachers have extraordinarily high social prestige, it looks like we are paid close to what we are worth on the actual job market. https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-education-reform-is-wrong-a-primer-f6c0361a48d1 https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
  - 6y ago

throw9872349872 6y ago

Thats why most of us are in industry ;)

sushshshsh 6y ago
Money is an important motivator, but one wonders if it's possible to make amazing societal contributions and also make $2 million in a decade :)
- hokumguru 6y ago
  I think those people end up in research work at large companies. Essentially doing academic work in the private sector.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    Now all that's left to do is democratize that and you have a perfect world, no? That is to say increase the pool of such jobs from 10,000 to 10,000,000
    - stale2002 6y ago
      > That is to say increase the pool of such jobs Umm, no. The reality is that research type jobs are not that numerous for a reason. That reason being we just don't need that many of them. The reason why industry pays more is because that is what society needs.
      - GPerson 6y ago
        I think need has less to do with it than you suggest. We don’t ‘need’ most industry jobs any more than academic jobs. It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia, and so it has more money to pay employees.
        stale2002 6y ago
        > It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia Ok... And almost by definition, that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
        Joof 6y ago
        As long as we all agree that Facebook is one of the most meaningful and useful contributions to society, then yes, capitalism determines ideal value.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        arczyx 6y ago
        > ...that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth. I feel that this is a rather narrow view, since there are a lot of companies who generate wealth by being detrimental to society at large (usually those who are just rent-seeking instead of continuously creating value).
        SquishyPanda23 6y ago
        You've confused utility with wealth.
        pishpash 6y ago
        They generate money which people can spend, so if that's the only criterion for wealth (it isn't), then mindlessly printing money is also useful to society (it isn't).
- throw9872349872 6y ago
  I posit you make a greater contribution to society by earning as much as you can by utilizing your talents, then donating the excess when you don’t need it anymore.
  - tolbish 6y ago
    Earning as much as you can often means intentionally blinding yourself to the negative effects of how you're getting there.

altdatathrow 6y ago

Comments like these are why I'm excited about the no-code movement. So much of the past decade of tech hasn't resulted in anything tangibly better or different. It's the same mundane ideas rewritten with ever-more-complex toolchains while legions of programmers argue why the latest blend of frameworks offer things completely impossible before them. Once we automate the ability to build these CRUD apps, we'll find out whether corporations still feel a $200k/yr UBI is appropriate.

sushshshsh 6y ago
HAHA a $200,000 pee year UBI is definitely how I would describe most of these jobs... Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop. What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software. When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?) If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)
- jimbokun 6y ago
  What if the robots decide they have different priorities?
apta 6y ago
Except that there's absolutely no evidence that the so called "no-code" movement will achieve anything beyond what we already have today.
- someguydave 6y ago

xmprt 6y ago

In the same vein, the fact that teachers are paid orders of magnitude less than lawyers boggles my mind. I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued and that the people who would make good teachers never end up teaching.

barry-cotter 6y ago
> I don't think lawyers are overpaid considering the supply and demand but given the amount of value that teachers provide to society, it's surprising that teachers are so undervalued I’m a teacher. I’ve never seen any evidence teachers are undervalued. Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. Difficulties in hiring can be fully explained by having the same pay scale for those teaching subjects in demand in the outside world like Computer Science or Mathematics and those with either less demand or greater supply like Physical Education or English. Paying primary school teachers and secondary school teachers on the same scale is distortionary in the same manner. Teachers in the government sector get very, very good job security and benefits for doing a hard job but plenty of people do hard jobs for much poorer compensation. And teachers aren’t magic. They come in a very distant third in their effects on student achievement behind student characteristics and family characteristics. > By almost all objective measures, teachers don’t actually seem to be underpaid in the traditional sense. “Nationwide, the average teacher salary was $60,477 during the 2017–18 school year.” And teachers work around 2 hours less a week than the average profession (“ 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals”). BLS Occupational Information Network studies found that teaching isn’t a particularly stressful job relative to other professions, and teachers typically have pretty solid relative job security. In addition to all of this, teachers don’t make a lot when they leave teaching and education majors have the lowest standardized test scores of any major. Although teachers have extraordinarily high social prestige, it looks like we are paid close to what we are worth on the actual job market. https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-education-reform-is-wrong-a-primer-f6c0361a48d1 https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
- 6y ago