4 ms·

Great response - I very much agree that from the employee's point of view you are always trading off a number of factors and they are by far not all about money

Great response - I very much agree that from the employee's point of view you are always trading off a number of factors and they are by far not all about money. My main contention really was with the assertion that you don't see why you should get rich - as if it were about what is deserved whereas of course it is a market where the correct price is the one people are willing to pay. I myself trade off a number of factors in my career which don't equate necessarily to salary.

alkonaut 6y ago
I'm not saying it would be wrong to be rich or that devs should be rich if they work for companies that make a lot of money per employee. But that's a pretty "valley centric" view that creating software means creating infinitely scalable money machine and each developer always creates a value much larger than what they are paid. For most us devs, especially in europe where a larger fraction of us developers work, I imagine, in traditional industry rather than "in software", there just isn't a situation where we create this massive value. We create more than we earn, sure, but it's not exacly Netflix money. The company I work for, like almost all companies, have a huge number of employees and a profit margin that has looked pretty similar for a lifetime. What's unfair is perhaps that there are instances of such companies, where the developers really could and should be rich because they write software that make billions. If such devs were paid better, then I could also be paid better, because I'm paid in competition with them. More likely though they'd be paid more and the jobs that aren't in that category would be done elsewhere. So in a sense, I'm also a tiny bit happy that the pay structures aren't as widely distributed as they are in some places.

4 ms·

Great response - I very much agree that from the employee's point of view you are always trading off a number of factors and they are by far not all about money

by barnacled 6y ago

alkonaut 6y ago
I'm not saying it would be wrong to be rich or that devs should be rich if they work for companies that make a lot of money per employee. But that's a pretty "valley centric" view that creating software means creating infinitely scalable money machine and each developer always creates a value much larger than what they are paid. For most us devs, especially in europe where a larger fraction of us developers work, I imagine, in traditional industry rather than "in software", there just isn't a situation where we create this massive value. We create more than we earn, sure, but it's not exacly Netflix money. The company I work for, like almost all companies, have a huge number of employees and a profit margin that has looked pretty similar for a lifetime. What's unfair is perhaps that there are instances of such companies, where the developers really could and should be rich because they write software that make billions. If such devs were paid better, then I could also be paid better, because I'm paid in competition with them. More likely though they'd be paid more and the jobs that aren't in that category would be done elsewhere. So in a sense, I'm also a tiny bit happy that the pay structures aren't as widely distributed as they are in some places.