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Think the programming talent pool is increasingly getting split into run-of-the-mill and superstar developers. The location based pay argument depends on if yo
by MrPowers 6y ago
Think the programming talent pool is increasingly getting split into run-of-the-mill and superstar developers.
The location based pay argument depends on if you're an average or superstar employee.
Average employees (e.g. building CRUD websites) will get location based pay because that's what the market dictates.
Superstar employees, people that are unique on the global scale, will get superstar pay, regardless of location. In the Spark world, there are few people that are able to understand the source code, optimize Catalyst plans, write huge data processing pipelines, etc. These types of employees won't see location pay adjustments.
Basecamp pays superstar rates for superstar employees.
Factory workers that perform "routine functions" earn location based wages.
- nnp7000 6y agoYes, I feel pay for developers is going to become more bimodal as time goes on; similar to lawyer compensation.
- MrPowers 6y agoYep, agreed. Here's an article for the bimodal nature of starting salaries for lawyers for interested parties: https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-curve/ https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c... The upper end of the biglaw salaries was capped because of an unspoken "cartel pricing cap". Big law firms don't want to compete for the upper-echelon talent. Not sure if tech companies will be able to informally collude in such a manner to cap the upper end of the bimodal curve.
- phendrenad2 6y agoThis is fascinating. I wonder if doctors and engineers and other knowledge-based professions have a similar distribution if you look hard enough.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bradleyjg 6y agoBigLaw is getting squeezed by its clients. There are increasing numbers of companies that don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for fresh grads no matter how bright. That leaves law firms with the choice of either subsidizing young associates, which is dangerous given the competition for top partners, or finding some way to cut pay. While few have wanted to break away from marquee associate pay, the quiet rise of staff attorneys at BigLaw represents the breakdown of the bimodal system.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI know a relatively new lawyer that moved from a top law firm in NYC to a tech firm on the west coast and got a huge increase in pay, especially per hour worked.
- vidarh 6y agoGetting a rise per hour worked in law by leaving the big law firms is often "easy". My ex worked for one of the top lawfirms in London, and quickly realised their very high headline pay (straight out of uni into ~2x median UK pay, and increasing at far above average rates for 10+ years) gave the new graduates lower per-hour pay than their secretaries. It was basically a death-march to see who'd stick it out long enough. Only a few would make partner anyway, so they needed to shed a lot of people to make their cost structure work, and so they'd work them into the ground and use who stays as the selection method at the lower end.
- bradleyjg 6y agoIn case anyone want to read more about this, that employment structure is called the “tournament model”.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoIt was a raise by absolute value also, not just per hour. Added bonus of no income tax in Washington.
- njarboe 6y agoThey have before[1]. I think one reason salaries started to climb so much recently in silicon valley was because this collusion to suppress salaries ended. [1]https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million/ https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...
- varjag 6y agoIt's not working like that; there is no committee deciding your fair pay based on your technical prowess. It's all down to how well you are able to market yourself. Granted possessing actual competence makes that easier, but really, the world is full of competent, smart but not particularly pushy people who get ripped off.
- MrPowers 6y agoI agree, the free market decides your wage no only on technical prowess, but also your "influencer score" and your personality traits. Technically savvy folks with a low influencer score may get paid less. Technically savvy folks who do not negotiate well may get paid less. The modern market rewards folks based on their "basked of skills".
- Frost1x 6y agoThe limited empirical data I've seen shows the idea of superstar programmer in terms of efficiency may be a facade, unless superstar is a 1.5-2x efficiency developer (the slides are concise, there's a corresponding paper published I can't seem to find this morning): https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetid=650687 https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetid...
- MrPowers 6y agoDominique Brezinski's latest Spark Summit talk is what cemented my feeling that superstar economics are at play in the current marketplace (in certain fields): https://databricks.com/session_na20/patterns-and-operational-insights-from-the-first-users-of-delta-lake https://databricks.com/session_na20/patterns-and-operational... He talks about the data processing framework he built that's ingesting "hundreds of terabytes, approaching a petabyte a day". New technologies let small teams do tons of work.
- barry-cotter 6y agoQuite. 10 fresh graduates of the University of North Central Tennessee’s CS program are capable of doing a better job of anything in the CS realm than Notch, Jeff Dean or Linus Torvalds.
- lokar 6y agoWhile Jeff is a great programer, writing code has not been his primary contribution at Google.
- gravypod 6y agoI highly doubt that for Dean and Torvalds. They are not programmers, they are software engineers. Both guide others to make 10x or 100x impacts to the world. 10 new grads, in most cases, cannot do that. Let alone this takes for granted both of their algorithms and data structures knowladge.
- lokar 6y agoTop talent in big tech are not working as programmers. They work as engineers. They often do a limited amount of actual programming, most of the contribution is leadership, design and architecture.
- brmgb 6y ago> Think the programming talent pool is increasingly getting split into run-of-the-mill and superstar developers. That doesn't conform to my experience (European / working in the industrial sector / hiring developers but not a developer anymore myself) at all. Pay is mostly based on the sector you work in and the origin of the company you work for. You will have an incredible salary if you work for an American web company especially a big one. You will have a fairly good salary in finance which might become an extremely good salary the closer you get to trading. Meanwhile, some of the guys working with me were experts in sensors fusion, embedded development and highly available systems with decades of experience and were paid peanuts (that was in the defense industry). They all stayed out of a mix of loyalty and the conviction they wouldn't find something as interesting somewhere else (probably right founded from what I have seen).
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoHN has a very strong web bias, so that comment is likely only looking at that kind of work. Here in Midwestern US, I see the same stratification that you do.
- nonameiguess 6y agoI wanna upvote this so many times. I used to work in geointelligence surrounded by some of the world's smartest people doing some of the most amazing work I will ever see. We were doing things with pixel data that Google is still at least a decade away from, and the efficiency of the ground processing ingest systems were so insane that when the government tried to give the contract to someone else, it took their software 21+ days to do what we could do in minutes. But it took decades of fine tuning to get to that point, physicists and mathematicians working in close concert with engineers who understood hardware, software, and orbital mechanics equally well. Meanwhile, I left and am now making double, in some cases triple, what some of my old coworkers are making, all because I'm in a hotter industry infused with VC cash, not because I'm any better. And I absolutely miss it and understand why some of those people don't leave. The problems you get to work on and the access to classified data and close collaboration with so many world class research laboratories is unmatched. You'll never get that level of intellectual engagement working for a web company until you're in one of the handful of moonshot programs staffed by PhDs, but you will get money, so I chose money.
- paulie_a 6y agoI absolutely disagree, the pool of superstar/senior devs is tiny. The vast majority of devs that are past junior are mid-level, don't let the job title fool you I'd say superstar is probably 10 years minimum of experience. And even then it doesn't just come to a person. Most will forever be mid and that is ok
- MrPowers 6y agoSeems like you're equating superstar developers with years of experience and that hasn't been my observation. PyTorch was created by an undergrad. I've worked with senior devs that have let engineering pass them by and are now the equivalent of non-programming programmers: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-nonprogramming-programmer/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-nonprogramming-programmer/ I agree that the pool of superstar devs is tiny.
- Ericson2314 6y ago> Think the programming talent pool is increasingly getting split into run-of-the-mill and superstar developers. Absolutely bullshit also designed to turn workers against each other to the ownership class's benefit. We live and die by the quality of each other's abstractions. If everyone is writing shit, I can go it alone 1980s nolstagia style, or swim in molasses. If everyone else is writing excellent libraries, I am flying with a jet pack. There is definitely attempts with certain bootcamps, anti-intellectual languages like Go, to beat programmers into submission. The "superstars" may do fine in the short term, but will not survive this trend long term.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- biztos 6y ago> anti-intellectual languages like Go Meaning...? I generally agree with your class argument but don't see how Go fits into it, nor what an "intellectual" language would be.
- riskable 6y agoPerhaps they thought the lack of memory management options in Go is anti-intellectual? I'm not a huge fan of Go (more of a Python/Rust person--to promote my bias) but I can't think of how it would be "anti-intellectual" (either). The statement was way out of place.
- Ericson2314 6y agoIgnoring prior art, like generic types until 10 years later. Basically it's the evolution of java repeated; the second time is farce.
- Forge36 6y agoThere are large questions of trade offs, how are we measuring value? Run-of-the-mill works best when things are well understood and stable. Superstar is needed when things get unpredictable and stop working unexpectedly. Think of the large number of JS frameworks which have come and gone over the past decade. Microsoft's .net4 -> core -> .net5 How can we tie compensation to ownership? We've seen software die as the abstraction falls into disrepair. There's a huge numbers of frameworks to try and solve this, WINE, Dosbox, SCUMMVM, Dolphin. Flying with a Jetpack is great until it runs out of fuel
- jjice 6y agoA bit off topic, but how does a university student distinguish themselves as a good developer? I have projects I think are interesting on my GitHub and I've worked three internships while in Uni, but how can I make sure I stand out during the job hunt (currently in my last semester) while I'm competing against some of my classmates that didn't know the equality operator could be used outside of an if statement (a real example)?
- auspex 6y agoThere is a bit of a marketing element to it as well. You have present yourself as the perfect candidate based on your experience. Let the employer know how much you want the job. Know the details about the company. Practice answers to questions. Treat this like you’re training to win the US Open. You would be surprised how little effort most people out into preparing. Also keep in mind that you won’t get every job you apply for and it might not even be your fault. When hiring managers are building a team they may be looking for a specific “personality or subtype” to fill out the team. Where If they had multiple head counts they would probably hire you but are holding out for the perfect fit.
- gravypod 6y agoWhat I did: Post on HN who wants to be hired, work at a small startup for a while, be a driving force between positive change. My first job was 50k/year and I lost money just by getting to work (gas, fees, parking, etc). Told my boss and in 6 months I got a >50% raise to 80k/year + stocks + parking space. Next job was 120k + stocks + remote for a company in the valley. Each job hop will net you a pay increase similar to this. It'll also give you new perspective on software engineering. My email is in my profile if you want to discuss in more detail!
- ricardobayes 6y agoI stood out by taking part in my uni's Formula Student group and wrote safety-critical code for the car. This enabled me to find an interesting job straight out of uni where my code would be deployed to millions of cars around the world.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago