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My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of

My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are making great money by utilizing the greatest tool of all time: the computer. It's uncomfortable because many of us didn't understand this going in. We liked computers for a long time, we had a penchant for working with them, and it turned out that made us great money. Meanwhile, our friends who are teachers, firefighters, child-care workers, etc. are doing tough work daily for less pay, perhaps simply because they didn't use computers much or didn't like them. And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid.

dpeck 5y ago
You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time. For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much money was being made and pushed them towards computing as something more like a high ROI trade. You see the same done for specialized welding for smart, but not academically smart, kids. It’s hard work to get into, but if you get there it can pay very well, regardless of if you care much about the underlying metallurgic properties that you’re dealing with or not. This is completely fine either way, but it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was.
- kk6mrp 5y ago
  It feels to me like most people no longer find fulfillment in their work, regardless what it is. It really seems like almost everyone is in it for the money and could care less about the lack of craftsmanship.
  - pradn 5y ago
    A lot of that seems like it comes from the company or industries not seeming to care about the worker: bad work environments, precarious jobs, stress, working on something commercially useful but not otherwise meaningful.
  - cma 5y ago
    It is hard to imagine e.g. Google devs are enthusiastic about manipulative ads or blocking parts of Linux from developers in a software lock-in scheme.
  - Matrixik 5y ago
    I liked tinkering with computers all the time before I started working as software engineer. But after over one year of working I started wanting everything to just work so I don't need to do anything with it...
- gampleman 5y ago
  Perhaps this will paradoxically be a good thing. I have for a long time been wondering if or to what extent are the reports of ageism in the industry well founded. If it turns out that hiring older developers gets you a much higher likelihood of getting someone who cares, this might change matters significantly (assuming of course that there actually is a problem in the first place).
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I expect this to change radically as the entry level 6-figure crowd gets older. Speaking for myself, my ability to care about my work is inversely proportional to my retirement account balances, and I want out asap. Software development and the internet in general isn't fun any more and there are things I'd rather do.
- v77 5y ago
  I'm in my 40's and my graduating comp sci class was the biggest in history at that time because of the money people were making in the first dot com boom.
  - dpeck 5y ago
    There was a bit of a downswing in CS degrees around the first DOTCOM bust, a lot of folks left programs at 2nd tier colleges and moved to adjacent but less “software” and “subject to outsourcing” like industrial engineering, electrical engineering. I didn’t exactly have a broad view at the time, but it seemed like top ~20 Comp Sci programs were largely unaffected and kept growing the whole time.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Not sure how it is today, but for me in the mid-90s, there was a lot of interest in software and computer degrees, but the curriculum was sufficiently difficult to filter out the posers. I went to a huge state school, and our first year Comp Sci class was, not exaggerating, an auditorium-sized lecture of 1000+ students dreaming about becoming a Microsoft Millionaire. Most of the students didn't make it through hello_world.c. We also had requirements like Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, MOSFETs, Linear Systems, and Signal Processing. The electives were all very tough, too. By the time we graduated, there were about 30-40 of us. So, there was a lot of interest, but most didn't actually graduate with the major.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in actual software. [0] Well, more than that, but the others gave up on the first week or two.
  - MathCodeLove 5y ago
    I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I think that to an extent these movements do more harm than good. Women should absolutely be made aware that tech is a viable career path for them as much as anyone else - yet it seems that as of late there's a sort of societal coercion that mimics that historically seen in gender dominated industries like welding for men or nursing for women.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.
      - 5y ago
- Mezzie 5y ago
  Agreed. I spend a lot of time on TikTok (my main interests tech-wise are HCI, digital discovery, and social computing so it's like catnip) and a LOT of younger people are going into tech for the money. I'm 33 and I started programming in the 90s (I was raised by two geek parents a la Larry Page who were supportive), so I'm sort of in-between the two 'generations'. At age 37 and above, pretty much everybody is either a career switcher (in which case they've considered things that aren't money) or started before developing got big. I say 37 because that was old enough to already be coding and brought INTO the money with job offers in the dot com era. (I had a couple of offers from people who didn't believe I was 11/12, and I knew some people who were 16-19 who were leaving school to take REALLY well paying jobs none of us ever expected.) After that, it was well known that coding could lead to a lot of money, and as the sector continues to grow and other opportunities to escape poverty shrink, it's pretty inevitable that people end up in coding for the money. Especially since that's how we teach them: All the tech courses are about employment, not playing. Kids don't learn tech as a joy or a tool to make their lives better, it's just another corporate hoop.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    I’m 31 and at least in my age bracket most of the people I was in CS with weren’t the money crowd. I’d believe it’s true now (I don’t really know), but it’s likely more recent than the OP thinks.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      Post 2008, I'd say. I was a 2010 graduate, and the change between 'do what you love' and 'College is for MONEY' was like a culture bomb going off.
      - gonehome 5y ago
        I think the real calculus should be do something that interests you, but also consider ROI and if education cost is worth it. Most of the people I know with the worst financial outcomes overpaid to study stuff they didn’t care much about (and isn’t marketable or often even valuable) because they thought it was what they were supposed to do.
- ryandvm 5y ago
  What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    > Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life. I disagree. I coded for fun once, as a kid, and have never felt the need to do it again. If I never coded again, I wouldn't even notice because I my passions lie elsewhere. But working as a software developer is still tolerable because I'm just sitting at a desk, typing on a computer. As long as I don't have meetings...
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Are you above 35?
      - handrous 5y ago
        Not that poster, but I am over 35, and I hate computers. Fucking around with computers without being paid to do it is just about the last thing I'd want to do. They're miserable time-sinks unless you've got a strong need for something only they can do, or you just like tinkering with them for the sake of it. Which, I did enjoy once upon a time, but not anymore, and I don't have any hobbies that really need computers beyond some light use of existing software, and even those are mostly just nice-to-haves. Everything else I might use a computer for that'd require real work to set up handily fails the XKCD software ROI chart.
        pbourke 5y ago
        I feel lucky that at 44 I still get a thrill when something runs as expected for the first time or when tests go all green. I still enjoy working with software in the general sense and learning new things in my areas of interest. Organizations, however, and the environments that they create (both human and software) are a different story ...
- toto444 5y ago
  And that's great. High wages means the market signals a shortage of workforce. That more people of lower productivity fill the gap means the market works in a healthy manner.
- paganel 5y ago
  > For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true I'll come up with one of the few exceptions to the rule, i.e. me. I'm in my very early 40s and I went in it for the money 20+ years ago, I hadn't even played with a computer as a kid or as a teenager for the simple reason that my parents couldn't afford to purchase me one (and I wasn't really thinking of becoming a computer programmer back as a teenager, I found the work boring). Pretty soon though I discovered that I liked this, I even, in a way, avoided a career path that would have brought me into larger companies so into management (I think it's harder to remain a computer programmer in a larger company once you pass a certain age, I can't explain the reason for why that happens). Either way, I'm almost 100% sure that no-one can spend 15-20-30 years in this job if they don't like it, i.e. only for the money alone, at times it can be really draining on one's mental condition.
- jjav 5y ago
  > For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Just to add, during the dot.com boom there was a brief spike of people coming into software purely due to the hype of riches without much interest in software development. Thankfully the dot.com boom was relatively brief and it crashed hard, so from what I saw then most of those people got disenchanted right away (by the time they graduated the crash was happening) and changed careers. This time the boom has been going on for basically a decade, so it is becoming more common and lasting.
- swat535 5y ago
  I see nothing wrong with this. Very few people truly have a passion for their work and for most , it's just a means to an end. This has been true for all other "high paying" professions such as law and medicine. One of my best friends is a lawyer and he happened to mention that no one really gets into law because to fulfill some higher purpose.. Further, I don't think it really has an impact on the quality of the work they produce, you don't need a spiritual awakening to build good systems. You just need to be vigilant and gain experience. As an older engineer (is mid thirties old?..) I've grown out of this and now look elsewhere to nourish my need for numinous in things like philosophy, art, music, relationships, etc. When I was younger, I used to naively think my identity was a "Software Engineer"; now looking back I chuckle at that outlook on life. On a final note, I would argue that more people joining our profession is a _good_ thing. It will create more jobs, increase demand and we end up with a stronger workforce. I don't think gatekeeping a field yields to a healthy outcome.
- mikestew 5y ago
  ...once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing That was true 35 years ago, and without the metric butt-ton of money being paid now (though programming has always paid well within my lifetime). I've worked with those folks. The reason you might not see it is because they either left the field they hated, or worse, they stuck around long enough to become managers of what they don't understand. it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was. Mmm, I don't know that it ever "was". Ignore the Carmacks, Wozniaks, et. al., of the world and you'll find that most folks holding programming jobs had the standard four year degree (because you were unlikely to get hired in 1985 without one), working on internal LOB apps.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Unlikely to get hired? Not in my experence; not in 1985. A healthy fraction of the folks working in Silicon Valley were musicians! Certainly not many were degreed in computer science because very few were back then. So what brought them to Silicon Valley? For a great many, love of the machine.
sudhirj 5y ago
The difference here is usually leverage. A teacher spending an hour to teach one child teaches one child, but a programmer who spends an hour writing code to generate a dollar’s worth of value can have that run thousands of times a second or 24/7 even when they’re sleeping. Of course teachers who understand this also make money, see Miss Excel ( https://www.instagram.com/miss.excel/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/miss.excel/?hl=en ), who was/is making $100k a day with excel instruction videos on tiktok and instagram. It’ll all about leverage.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  I disagree - the difference isn’t leverage it’s monetize-ability. If teachers were paid a lifetime percentage of their students earnings teachers would make far more than software engineers. Barring some cultural revolution that’s not going to happen. Software engineers simply make more money because the companies they work for have high margins.
  - zeroonetwothree 5y ago
    This assumes there’s actually a significant benefit from school on lifetime earnings, which is at best debatable if not actually at odds with all available research.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      I’d love to see the research you’re citing. Are you suggesting kids would be better off if schools didn’t exist with respect to lifetime earnings? Seems easy to prove wrong by trivially looking at high school dropout vs graduate incomes.
      - MichaelBurge 5y ago
        It's not that trivial, because the types of people that choose to drop out might be the types of people that earn less, even if there are no causal links at all. For example, they might be risk averse and a risk averse personality might lead to other decisions that make more money. (or the opposite) It would be easy for a fad to arise calling education unnecessary and a waste of time, and for people to consider the option to drop out less risky just because it gets talked about more. So even if the correlation held statistically now, in any year it could change just because the subgroup of risk-averse people are more likely to consider it. So you still couldn't use it to make permanent decisions(like creating a school system for hundreds of years). Homeschooling vs. high school graduates would remove "choice to drop out" from the student, but then "choice to homeschool" on the parents might carry down genetically or culturally and maybe "aversion to government authority" improves earnings on average. I try to reject all statistics on "easily understandable" social topics. Leave that for scientists only. It's too easy to make a mistake and not get any warning that you made a mistake, and believe wrong things your whole life.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
Indeed, I feel extremely fortunate to have wound up with computers as an interest while young because that allowed me to build a well paid career doing something I love despite lacking a degree, but that sense of unfairness you mention makes it a bit bittersweet. I think the bottom line is that everybody should be able to earn a good living wage, regardless of their line of work. It feels broken that one would need to seek a specific job or set of jobs to have a hope of living comfortably.
pc86 5y ago
There has never been a 1:1 relationship between how essential a job is, nor how difficult it is, and the pay. It's mostly about a) the barriers to entry, which can be academic (law, medicine), regulatory (law, medicine, probably finance?), institutional (finance, tier 1 law), or just how grueling it is to get through (definitely medicine outside of some specialties like family med or peds, probably tier 1 finance/IB too); b) leverage/BATNA. A is more systemic - it drives wages up or down as an industry and is why a family med doctor makes $200k/yr but a radiologist makes $600k/yr. B is more localized, if I have a lot of leverage or my BATNA is "sit on a beach and drink" I might pull a $400k TC instead of $300k simply by waiting around for a better offer. The more people in my field have that opportunity, the more of a systemic pressure this has on wages. Anyone can be a teacher. The certification requirements are low. The academic requirements aren't anything more than most kids are getting anyway (a degree in anything will qualify you in most US states). Most teachers need to work so their BATNA is "work someplace else doing the exact same thing for roughly the exact same amount of money." What's more (and I didn't really mention it above) is that you can't tie teaching directly to income. Not that you should be able to, but if you're a quant at an HFT shop you can probably draw a line with a pen from your code to tens of millions of dollars in profit that's there this year that wasn't there last year. Do that year over year and it's hard to argue against you getting paid $800k-1M/yr in cash and bonuses. Helping one of your students read a little better, or finally understand linear algebra, isn't going to increase your personal bottom line at all.
- cm2012 5y ago
  For most non stem teachers, teaching is the best paid job they could possibly get once you account for pension, etc
  - pc86 5y ago
    Yes even in US public schools, and even for relatively new hires, the benefits can be pretty great. Time off, retirement, etc. And it's still possible to get into administration and make what an entry-level SWE makes. Hell, when I was in HS in the very early 00's there was a big scandal in my area because we found out the district superintendent was making $200k/yr. For context, most of my friends' parents worked blue collar and manual labor jobs. Teachers averaged $44k/yr or so back then.
silicon2401 5y ago
> I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are making great money by utilizing the greatest tool of all time: the computer. This is one of the main reasons I'm a software engineer and shudder to think about doing anything else for a living, despite not even liking software that much. > It's uncomfortable because many of us didn't understand this going in. This is probably not as common as you think. Most of the SWEs I know switched over from other fields because it's an obviously easier gig. Epidemiology, architecture, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, archaeology, public policy. People are painfully aware of how easy we have it and that's precisely why they're (we're) SWEs, not because of any interest in coding itself.
EamonnMR 5y ago
It feels like we're tradespeople being paid like businesspeople because we're in demand right now and it could change at any moment.
- avereveard 5y ago
  They been trying to transform programming into blu collar work since the first developer demanded more than minimum wage for their labour, with 4g languages and anyone can code movements and whatnot. Thank gods while they're right - anyone can indeed write code - the valuable part of our labor is problem solving - and no amount of better tooling will change that. Ultimately we are business people, we are accountants, we are tour operators and much more: our labor value is in the ability to transform these jobs into requirements and solutions, coding is how we describe our understanding of the domain, and it's production inconsequential once all the hard questions get resolved. To bad today that gets a stench from the so called agile crowd, which would prefer us to tackle problem with aggressive randomness in the hope that infinite monkeys can be as cost effective as a single thinker.
bumby 5y ago
>And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid. I think this touches on an uncomfortable point that many people don’t acknowledge: our current system generally* pays people according to how much they contribute to the economy and not by how much they contribute to society. The scalable nature of software means developers can disproportionately add value to the economy, even while sometimes simultaneously working on projects that could be arguably a net negative for society. * yes, we can all point to people who get paid handsomely without adding anything substantive, but general rules are meant to be applied, well…generally
- lucasyvas 5y ago
  I've felt for a long time that the reason software is not fulfilling its promise is because it has been tied exclusively to capitalist goals. The incentive structure is completely broken. I think a balance probably exists, but we are badly missing the mark.
  - bumby 5y ago
    Do you think that is still the case? I can think of all kinds of applications where software can contribute to non-profit driven goals. Healthcare, government, energy/climate, etc. I think the problem is it becomes hard for some to take those jobs when they could instead work in, say, social media or finance for many multiples of the pay.
- bradstewart 5y ago
  At the risk of adding to his number 12... this is capitalism.
  - bumby 5y ago
    I actually think there’s a more nuanced perspective. Capitalism just means we can monetarily reward what we value. Capitalism is a means, not an end. So if the GP has an issue with what is being observed, I think the author’s remark of “this is capitalism” stops short. A better question is what is at the root of one position being valued over another? E.g., if we really value teachers as much as we collectively say we do, why aren’t teaching colleges the most competitive and their positions the most valued? The U.S. often sends their best and brightest to tech, consulting, law, and medicine. Other societies send theirs to education. Both can occur under capitalism. I would argue it’s not “capitalism” but that the economy is most valued. Capitalism could just as well make social workers the highest paid individuals if there was a different value construct.
zerocount 5y ago
I would gladly give up software development for a medical or law degree. I would gladly study for a bar exam or do a medical internship instead of grinding Leetcode and throwing salt over my shoulder or some other good luck inducing act, in the hope of passing the often subjective, 'are you a fit', can you design and code Z in the next 38 minutes type interview. The barrier of entry is way too low these days and therefore we have this hazing ritual for an interview process. It's absurd to think that after 12 years in the business, I won't be able to figure out what to do with those requirements. I'm sorry, we need 5 years of Java, not 4. For those young developers, save up your money over a 10 year period and get out.
- avgDev 5y ago
  I know people saving up and getting out of the medical field, as it became extremely toxic in the US. Expensive and mostly ran by huge corporate entities seeking profit. I would much rather click on a computer.
  - WJW 5y ago
    In the end, everything you do for money will become "work", because if it was only the fun parts people would just do it for free as a hobby (see also: open source).
  - jazzyk 5y ago
    There are quite a few toxic places in the software business, no? Medical field (being a physician) is not a walk in the park, but: 1. nobody questions you intelligence/knowledge after, say, 20 demonstrably successful years in the business 2. on your way home you can say "tough day, but at least I am making $600K/year"
- Mimmy 5y ago
  Residency isn't the barrier to entry to being a doctor (at least not practically), the real barrier is getting accepted into medical school. The process can also feel like a crapshoot. Likewise passing the bar isn't the barrier to entry to a good law career (at least not practically), it's getting through the interviews at a top law firm. Many attractive industries have problems when it comes to deciding who's eligible to reap their rewards.
moneywoes 5y ago
In the US* Canadian checking in :/
lkrubner 5y ago
The wages for software developers were basically stagnant from 2001 to about 2014 or 2015. The big surge in pay is relatively recent. While this is a complex subject, I have written about a few examples, and can offer more. But take this as one example: Right now the best devops people in New York City are making between $200 and $300 an hour. That's obviously good money, but in the 1990s I had older friends who were making $200 an hour as Oracle consultants. At the top, the nominal pay has remained the same, but adjusting for inflation, that is a 50% paycut. Likewise, lower down, I know lots of mid-level devs who are happy to make $100 an hour right now, but I also had older friends who were slapping together classic VBA apps with VisualBasic, back around 1999, and they were also making $100 an hour, so, again, it's a 50% pay cut. But it is absolutely true that pay has been surging since about 2014/2015, so I imagine the software developer pay is about to catch up to the highs of the 1990s. It's also true that the picture only looks bad when compared to inflation. To your point, most other professions did even worse, so the benefits of being a computer programmer are more obvious if the comparison is to other professions. All in all, after the peak in 2000, the USA economy had a difficult 15 years.
- jazzyk 5y ago
  >But it is absolutely true that pay has been surging since about 2014/2015 Only partially true: 1. High total compensation (not salaries) is limited to FAANG/Unicorn employees (awash with money) 2. That high compensation has been achieved by stock options multiplying in value, thanks to abnormal run of the stock market (thank you Federal Reserve), which is not going to continue with rising interest rates 3. Salary base seems to be stuck at $150K for mid-senior developers in bigger cities (except for NYC) for many years now
  - comp_throw7 5y ago
    > 1. High total compensation (not salaries) is limited to FAANG/Unicorn employees (awash with money) Very nearly every publicly-traded tech company, actually. The list of "tech" companies where mid-level engineers aren't breaking 200k TC is much shorter than the opposite. > 2. That high compensation has been achieved by stock options multiplying in value, thanks to abnormal run of the stock market (thank you Federal Reserve), which is not going to continue with rising interest rates Initial offers have been increasing; we aren't talking about golden handcuffs that employees have from stock growth. To give a very recent example: Amazon recently bumped up their pay-band for mid-level engineers and they seem to be hitting 350k/year (maybe more; have seen a couple reports of 400k). Their mid-level pay-band previously topped out at ~300k/year. > 3. Salary base seems to be stuck at $150K for mid-senior developers in bigger cities (except for NYC) for many years now ...you mean "except the Bay Area", right? Though it's definitely not true either way; I live in a large city that isn't in the Bay, Seattle, or NYC, and 180k is a pretty common number for senior engineer base salaries, and I see 200k+ more and more frequently. (Not that I care too much about just base; given the choice why would I work for a company that only pays base salary, i.e. ~half of what other companies pay?)
melony 5y ago
To a large extent, it is their individual choices. They went in with their eyes wide open, knowing what the market is like. If you decided to pursue something like librarian studies without a concrete plan for income, then it is hardly the fault of society if you do not get a job. I have commented on this yesterday and I will post it here again. Not every job will change the world, but often those boring but well paying jobs are more important than the "impactful" careers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29553341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29553341
- WJW 5y ago
  Individual choice, yes. And it is indeed not the fault of society that some jobs provide less money or security than others. But "they went in knowing what the market is like" is not really true for the vast majority of 18-20 year olds. Most simply do not have enough experience about "adult life" yet to make a rational and informed choice.
DnDGrognard 5y ago
But at the same point in our careers for the same equivalent we do not have the same $ and status as professions like law and medicine. You are also confusing our broadly speaking "professional" jobs with some of those other examples and firefighters have early retirement and DB pensions in the UK
gorgoiler 5y ago
Software engineers get to have leverage 100% of the time. Poor teachers: when I was teaching it was more like 20% of the time, and the other 80% was breaking rocks. Planning, marking, parents, discipline, pastoral care, sports, and straight up babysitting. That’s a big part of why the pay is so different, in my experience. Teachers have to put in a lot of time and effort to make a diff[erence] and the rest of the work is completely unskilled labor. For SWEs, the next pull request is only limited by your ability to focus and type. I’m a full time SWE these days, and enjoying the 10x pay.
opportune 5y ago
Personally I went into software because it has the highest pay/effort and I think this is becoming even more common for younger generations.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. There's plenty of suffering on top of that time and money too. https://web.archive.org/web/20201112012023/http://www.medicalschoolsuccess.com/med-school-hell/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201112012023/http://www.medica...
62951413 5y ago
Wait until you get to your 40s to appreciate other factors. "teachers, firefighters" enjoy: * structured careers with well-defined benefits that they keep even after retirement * accumulate experience that's valued by their employers all the way to retirement * can find a job anywhere; don't need to emigrate/move to SFBA/NYC/London/Berlin, speak foreign languages, be surrounded by aliens from distant lands * are respected for what they do Software development is heavily skewed towards the young demographics. We just don't think about it when we are young and still in love with computers. In the immortal words quoted by Steve McConnell over 20 years ago: "Wanted: Young, skinny, wirey fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week."
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Wait until you get to your 40s to appreciate other factors. "teachers, firefighters" enjoy: * structured careers with well-defined benefits that they keep even after retirement * accumulate experience that's valued by their employers all the way to retirement * can find a job anywhere; don't need to emigrate/move to SFBA/NYC/London/Berlin, speak foreign languages, be surrounded by aliens from distant lands * are respected for what they do If you get to your 40s as a dev and want that without leaving development, become a public sector (direct government, not contract) software developer.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > structured careers with well-defined benefits that they keep even after retirement That's why careers have a stock comp. Jobs don't. > accumulate experience that's valued by their employers all the way to retirement Real engineers do get that. > don't need to emigrate/move to SFBA/NYC/London/Berlin > speak foreign languages > be surrounded by aliens from distant lands I can't help but hear a dog whistle here...
908B64B197 5y ago
> I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. I don't know about that. Software scales almost infinitely. Impossible to double the number of billable hours or patient load of a cardiologist outside of an herculean effort, but software folks can easily 10x the number of people they bring value to in a short amount of time. > We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are making great money by utilizing the greatest tool of all time: the computer. Honestly, medical school isn't really the correct example to use because it's not efficient at all. The big reason medical schooling is so hard is because they have to get a completely unrelated undergrad before even thinking about applying to med school. That means racking up serious debts before even knowing if you are going to get admitted. You can imagine how that fosters a culture of diversity and inclusion and help poor, often non-white, applicants reach medicine when the first step is to get into 6 figures debts with absolutely no guaranteed income. Other countries with similar health outcomes for their population simply admit freshmen into med school right away. Residency is something else. It's overworked since the total number of residents is capped by the AMA (also you have to fly-in to your residency interviews on your dime, so much for underrepresented applicants!) and honestly there's a lot of cargo culting. 48 hours shifts with no sleep because it's believed that it's impossible to correctly handover patients from one medical professional to the other (hint, this is a solved problem in a lot of high stress cognitive disciplines outside of healthcare). It's a culture of always working harder instead of working smarter, and the people take pride in that strangely enough. All it really does is create a moat and allow AMA members to charge more because they made themselves scarce. > Meanwhile, our friends who are teachers, firefighters, child-care workers, etc. are doing tough work daily for less pay, perhaps simply because they didn't use computers much or didn't like them. And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid. Firefighters tend to have nice pension funds in a lot of cities. Teacher's pay is incredibly interesting. Engineers are paid on results (this is even more true at serious tech companies where a significant portion of ones earning will be stock comp) while teachers are paid a government approved rate no matter the results. I know a lot of parents that would pay serious money to teachers based on results (if their kid can get into Stanford/MIT for instance) if said teachers could show a track record of having previously mentored alumni for instance. Instead, the premium is now captured by real-estate since parents that care will pay extra to get into a good school district.
divbzero 5y ago
15. Some of the highest paying software jobs are at companies that profit from attention/marketing and might not have a net positive contribution to society.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dpeck 5y ago

You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time. For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much money was being made and pushed them towards computing as something more like a high ROI trade. You see the same done for specialized welding for smart, but not academically smart, kids. It’s hard work to get into, but if you get there it can pay very well, regardless of if you care much about the underlying metallurgic properties that you’re dealing with or not. This is completely fine either way, but it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was.

kk6mrp 5y ago
It feels to me like most people no longer find fulfillment in their work, regardless what it is. It really seems like almost everyone is in it for the money and could care less about the lack of craftsmanship.
- pradn 5y ago
  A lot of that seems like it comes from the company or industries not seeming to care about the worker: bad work environments, precarious jobs, stress, working on something commercially useful but not otherwise meaningful.
- cma 5y ago
  It is hard to imagine e.g. Google devs are enthusiastic about manipulative ads or blocking parts of Linux from developers in a software lock-in scheme.
- Matrixik 5y ago
  I liked tinkering with computers all the time before I started working as software engineer. But after over one year of working I started wanting everything to just work so I don't need to do anything with it...
gampleman 5y ago
Perhaps this will paradoxically be a good thing. I have for a long time been wondering if or to what extent are the reports of ageism in the industry well founded. If it turns out that hiring older developers gets you a much higher likelihood of getting someone who cares, this might change matters significantly (assuming of course that there actually is a problem in the first place).
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I expect this to change radically as the entry level 6-figure crowd gets older. Speaking for myself, my ability to care about my work is inversely proportional to my retirement account balances, and I want out asap. Software development and the internet in general isn't fun any more and there are things I'd rather do.
v77 5y ago
I'm in my 40's and my graduating comp sci class was the biggest in history at that time because of the money people were making in the first dot com boom.
- dpeck 5y ago
  There was a bit of a downswing in CS degrees around the first DOTCOM bust, a lot of folks left programs at 2nd tier colleges and moved to adjacent but less “software” and “subject to outsourcing” like industrial engineering, electrical engineering. I didn’t exactly have a broad view at the time, but it seemed like top ~20 Comp Sci programs were largely unaffected and kept growing the whole time.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Not sure how it is today, but for me in the mid-90s, there was a lot of interest in software and computer degrees, but the curriculum was sufficiently difficult to filter out the posers. I went to a huge state school, and our first year Comp Sci class was, not exaggerating, an auditorium-sized lecture of 1000+ students dreaming about becoming a Microsoft Millionaire. Most of the students didn't make it through hello_world.c. We also had requirements like Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, MOSFETs, Linear Systems, and Signal Processing. The electives were all very tough, too. By the time we graduated, there were about 30-40 of us. So, there was a lot of interest, but most didn't actually graduate with the major.
3pt14159 5y ago
That's true, but they also often leave. I've taught three[0] people a little younger than me software that all wanted to do it for the freedom and financial security and two of the three transferred out of software to something else in tech like product management. It really bummed me out too, because it was the two women out of the three. Their lives are still markedly better than before, but I want more women in actual software. [0] Well, more than that, but the others gave up on the first week or two.
- MathCodeLove 5y ago
  I don't understand this weird fetishism with getting X demographic into software/tech. Naturally I don't think that any demographic should be restricted from entering the field, and everyone should be equally encouraged and provided the same opportunities, but more and more I see these pushes for trying to pump the numbers of specific demographics. If someone wants to join the industry, great. If not, also great. I think that to an extent these movements do more harm than good. Women should absolutely be made aware that tech is a viable career path for them as much as anyone else - yet it seems that as of late there's a sort of societal coercion that mimics that historically seen in gender dominated industries like welding for men or nursing for women.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    It’s hard to know if an environment is hostile to you or not if there are no examples of safety. For example I would hesitate to join a magic the gathering group if I didn’t first check that they’re friendly to newbies. Especially because I know magic the gathering can vary in experience and that a group that isn’t friendly is not an outlier. If I think about it this way I can understand why a woman might not want to join a company with no other women engineers; how is she supposed to know she’ll be treated with respect, and won’t be pushed to something like management or product, if there are no examples to go off of? It likely worsens broadly if a woman knows exactly 0 women who are engineers as she grows up and considers a career for herself. She might not know any engineering is a viable path.
    - 5y ago
Mezzie 5y ago
Agreed. I spend a lot of time on TikTok (my main interests tech-wise are HCI, digital discovery, and social computing so it's like catnip) and a LOT of younger people are going into tech for the money. I'm 33 and I started programming in the 90s (I was raised by two geek parents a la Larry Page who were supportive), so I'm sort of in-between the two 'generations'. At age 37 and above, pretty much everybody is either a career switcher (in which case they've considered things that aren't money) or started before developing got big. I say 37 because that was old enough to already be coding and brought INTO the money with job offers in the dot com era. (I had a couple of offers from people who didn't believe I was 11/12, and I knew some people who were 16-19 who were leaving school to take REALLY well paying jobs none of us ever expected.) After that, it was well known that coding could lead to a lot of money, and as the sector continues to grow and other opportunities to escape poverty shrink, it's pretty inevitable that people end up in coding for the money. Especially since that's how we teach them: All the tech courses are about employment, not playing. Kids don't learn tech as a joy or a tool to make their lives better, it's just another corporate hoop.
- gonehome 5y ago
  I’m 31 and at least in my age bracket most of the people I was in CS with weren’t the money crowd. I’d believe it’s true now (I don’t really know), but it’s likely more recent than the OP thinks.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Post 2008, I'd say. I was a 2010 graduate, and the change between 'do what you love' and 'College is for MONEY' was like a culture bomb going off.
    - gonehome 5y ago
      I think the real calculus should be do something that interests you, but also consider ROI and if education cost is worth it. Most of the people I know with the worst financial outcomes overpaid to study stuff they didn’t care much about (and isn’t marketable or often even valuable) because they thought it was what they were supposed to do.
ryandvm 5y ago
What I always tell people thinking about a software engineering career is that, yes, it's great money but I strongly advise only doing it if you actually like working with computers. Otherwise it's going to be a nightmare. Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  > Working as a software developer without a passion for coding is kind of like doing math homework every day for the rest of your life. I disagree. I coded for fun once, as a kid, and have never felt the need to do it again. If I never coded again, I wouldn't even notice because I my passions lie elsewhere. But working as a software developer is still tolerable because I'm just sitting at a desk, typing on a computer. As long as I don't have meetings...
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Are you above 35?
    - handrous 5y ago
      Not that poster, but I am over 35, and I hate computers. Fucking around with computers without being paid to do it is just about the last thing I'd want to do. They're miserable time-sinks unless you've got a strong need for something only they can do, or you just like tinkering with them for the sake of it. Which, I did enjoy once upon a time, but not anymore, and I don't have any hobbies that really need computers beyond some light use of existing software, and even those are mostly just nice-to-haves. Everything else I might use a computer for that'd require real work to set up handily fails the XKCD software ROI chart.
      - pbourke 5y ago
        I feel lucky that at 44 I still get a thrill when something runs as expected for the first time or when tests go all green. I still enjoy working with software in the general sense and learning new things in my areas of interest. Organizations, however, and the environments that they create (both human and software) are a different story ...
toto444 5y ago
And that's great. High wages means the market signals a shortage of workforce. That more people of lower productivity fill the gap means the market works in a healthy manner.
paganel 5y ago
> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true I'll come up with one of the few exceptions to the rule, i.e. me. I'm in my very early 40s and I went in it for the money 20+ years ago, I hadn't even played with a computer as a kid or as a teenager for the simple reason that my parents couldn't afford to purchase me one (and I wasn't really thinking of becoming a computer programmer back as a teenager, I found the work boring). Pretty soon though I discovered that I liked this, I even, in a way, avoided a career path that would have brought me into larger companies so into management (I think it's harder to remain a computer programmer in a larger company once you pass a certain age, I can't explain the reason for why that happens). Either way, I'm almost 100% sure that no-one can spend 15-20-30 years in this job if they don't like it, i.e. only for the money alone, at times it can be really draining on one's mental condition.
jjav 5y ago
> For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Just to add, during the dot.com boom there was a brief spike of people coming into software purely due to the hype of riches without much interest in software development. Thankfully the dot.com boom was relatively brief and it crashed hard, so from what I saw then most of those people got disenchanted right away (by the time they graduated the crash was happening) and changed careers. This time the boom has been going on for basically a decade, so it is becoming more common and lasting.
swat535 5y ago
I see nothing wrong with this. Very few people truly have a passion for their work and for most , it's just a means to an end. This has been true for all other "high paying" professions such as law and medicine. One of my best friends is a lawyer and he happened to mention that no one really gets into law because to fulfill some higher purpose.. Further, I don't think it really has an impact on the quality of the work they produce, you don't need a spiritual awakening to build good systems. You just need to be vigilant and gain experience. As an older engineer (is mid thirties old?..) I've grown out of this and now look elsewhere to nourish my need for numinous in things like philosophy, art, music, relationships, etc. When I was younger, I used to naively think my identity was a "Software Engineer"; now looking back I chuckle at that outlook on life. On a final note, I would argue that more people joining our profession is a _good_ thing. It will create more jobs, increase demand and we end up with a stronger workforce. I don't think gatekeeping a field yields to a healthy outcome.
mikestew 5y ago
...once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing That was true 35 years ago, and without the metric butt-ton of money being paid now (though programming has always paid well within my lifetime). I've worked with those folks. The reason you might not see it is because they either left the field they hated, or worse, they stuck around long enough to become managers of what they don't understand. it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was. Mmm, I don't know that it ever "was". Ignore the Carmacks, Wozniaks, et. al., of the world and you'll find that most folks holding programming jobs had the standard four year degree (because you were unlikely to get hired in 1985 without one), working on internal LOB apps.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Unlikely to get hired? Not in my experence; not in 1985. A healthy fraction of the folks working in Silicon Valley were musicians! Certainly not many were degreed in computer science because very few were back then. So what brought them to Silicon Valley? For a great many, love of the machine.

sudhirj 5y ago

The difference here is usually leverage. A teacher spending an hour to teach one child teaches one child, but a programmer who spends an hour writing code to generate a dollar’s worth of value can have that run thousands of times a second or 24/7 even when they’re sleeping. Of course teachers who understand this also make money, see Miss Excel ( https://www.instagram.com/miss.excel/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/miss.excel/?hl=en ), who was/is making $100k a day with excel instruction videos on tiktok and instagram. It’ll all about leverage.

endisneigh 5y ago
I disagree - the difference isn’t leverage it’s monetize-ability. If teachers were paid a lifetime percentage of their students earnings teachers would make far more than software engineers. Barring some cultural revolution that’s not going to happen. Software engineers simply make more money because the companies they work for have high margins.
- zeroonetwothree 5y ago
  This assumes there’s actually a significant benefit from school on lifetime earnings, which is at best debatable if not actually at odds with all available research.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    I’d love to see the research you’re citing. Are you suggesting kids would be better off if schools didn’t exist with respect to lifetime earnings? Seems easy to prove wrong by trivially looking at high school dropout vs graduate incomes.
    - MichaelBurge 5y ago
      It's not that trivial, because the types of people that choose to drop out might be the types of people that earn less, even if there are no causal links at all. For example, they might be risk averse and a risk averse personality might lead to other decisions that make more money. (or the opposite) It would be easy for a fad to arise calling education unnecessary and a waste of time, and for people to consider the option to drop out less risky just because it gets talked about more. So even if the correlation held statistically now, in any year it could change just because the subgroup of risk-averse people are more likely to consider it. So you still couldn't use it to make permanent decisions(like creating a school system for hundreds of years). Homeschooling vs. high school graduates would remove "choice to drop out" from the student, but then "choice to homeschool" on the parents might carry down genetically or culturally and maybe "aversion to government authority" improves earnings on average. I try to reject all statistics on "easily understandable" social topics. Leave that for scientists only. It's too easy to make a mistake and not get any warning that you made a mistake, and believe wrong things your whole life.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

Indeed, I feel extremely fortunate to have wound up with computers as an interest while young because that allowed me to build a well paid career doing something I love despite lacking a degree, but that sense of unfairness you mention makes it a bit bittersweet. I think the bottom line is that everybody should be able to earn a good living wage, regardless of their line of work. It feels broken that one would need to seek a specific job or set of jobs to have a hope of living comfortably.

pc86 5y ago

There has never been a 1:1 relationship between how essential a job is, nor how difficult it is, and the pay. It's mostly about a) the barriers to entry, which can be academic (law, medicine), regulatory (law, medicine, probably finance?), institutional (finance, tier 1 law), or just how grueling it is to get through (definitely medicine outside of some specialties like family med or peds, probably tier 1 finance/IB too); b) leverage/BATNA. A is more systemic - it drives wages up or down as an industry and is why a family med doctor makes $200k/yr but a radiologist makes $600k/yr. B is more localized, if I have a lot of leverage or my BATNA is "sit on a beach and drink" I might pull a $400k TC instead of $300k simply by waiting around for a better offer. The more people in my field have that opportunity, the more of a systemic pressure this has on wages. Anyone can be a teacher. The certification requirements are low. The academic requirements aren't anything more than most kids are getting anyway (a degree in anything will qualify you in most US states). Most teachers need to work so their BATNA is "work someplace else doing the exact same thing for roughly the exact same amount of money." What's more (and I didn't really mention it above) is that you can't tie teaching directly to income. Not that you should be able to, but if you're a quant at an HFT shop you can probably draw a line with a pen from your code to tens of millions of dollars in profit that's there this year that wasn't there last year. Do that year over year and it's hard to argue against you getting paid $800k-1M/yr in cash and bonuses. Helping one of your students read a little better, or finally understand linear algebra, isn't going to increase your personal bottom line at all.

cm2012 5y ago
For most non stem teachers, teaching is the best paid job they could possibly get once you account for pension, etc
- pc86 5y ago
  Yes even in US public schools, and even for relatively new hires, the benefits can be pretty great. Time off, retirement, etc. And it's still possible to get into administration and make what an entry-level SWE makes. Hell, when I was in HS in the very early 00's there was a big scandal in my area because we found out the district superintendent was making $200k/yr. For context, most of my friends' parents worked blue collar and manual labor jobs. Teachers averaged $44k/yr or so back then.

silicon2401 5y ago

> I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are making great money by utilizing the greatest tool of all time: the computer. This is one of the main reasons I'm a software engineer and shudder to think about doing anything else for a living, despite not even liking software that much. > It's uncomfortable because many of us didn't understand this going in. This is probably not as common as you think. Most of the SWEs I know switched over from other fields because it's an obviously easier gig. Epidemiology, architecture, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, archaeology, public policy. People are painfully aware of how easy we have it and that's precisely why they're (we're) SWEs, not because of any interest in coding itself.

EamonnMR 5y ago

It feels like we're tradespeople being paid like businesspeople because we're in demand right now and it could change at any moment.

avereveard 5y ago
They been trying to transform programming into blu collar work since the first developer demanded more than minimum wage for their labour, with 4g languages and anyone can code movements and whatnot. Thank gods while they're right - anyone can indeed write code - the valuable part of our labor is problem solving - and no amount of better tooling will change that. Ultimately we are business people, we are accountants, we are tour operators and much more: our labor value is in the ability to transform these jobs into requirements and solutions, coding is how we describe our understanding of the domain, and it's production inconsequential once all the hard questions get resolved. To bad today that gets a stench from the so called agile crowd, which would prefer us to tackle problem with aggressive randomness in the hope that infinite monkeys can be as cost effective as a single thinker.

bumby 5y ago

>And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid. I think this touches on an uncomfortable point that many people don’t acknowledge: our current system generally* pays people according to how much they contribute to the economy and not by how much they contribute to society. The scalable nature of software means developers can disproportionately add value to the economy, even while sometimes simultaneously working on projects that could be arguably a net negative for society. * yes, we can all point to people who get paid handsomely without adding anything substantive, but general rules are meant to be applied, well…generally

lucasyvas 5y ago
I've felt for a long time that the reason software is not fulfilling its promise is because it has been tied exclusively to capitalist goals. The incentive structure is completely broken. I think a balance probably exists, but we are badly missing the mark.
- bumby 5y ago
  Do you think that is still the case? I can think of all kinds of applications where software can contribute to non-profit driven goals. Healthcare, government, energy/climate, etc. I think the problem is it becomes hard for some to take those jobs when they could instead work in, say, social media or finance for many multiples of the pay.
bradstewart 5y ago
At the risk of adding to his number 12... this is capitalism.
- bumby 5y ago
  I actually think there’s a more nuanced perspective. Capitalism just means we can monetarily reward what we value. Capitalism is a means, not an end. So if the GP has an issue with what is being observed, I think the author’s remark of “this is capitalism” stops short. A better question is what is at the root of one position being valued over another? E.g., if we really value teachers as much as we collectively say we do, why aren’t teaching colleges the most competitive and their positions the most valued? The U.S. often sends their best and brightest to tech, consulting, law, and medicine. Other societies send theirs to education. Both can occur under capitalism. I would argue it’s not “capitalism” but that the economy is most valued. Capitalism could just as well make social workers the highest paid individuals if there was a different value construct.

zerocount 5y ago

I would gladly give up software development for a medical or law degree. I would gladly study for a bar exam or do a medical internship instead of grinding Leetcode and throwing salt over my shoulder or some other good luck inducing act, in the hope of passing the often subjective, 'are you a fit', can you design and code Z in the next 38 minutes type interview. The barrier of entry is way too low these days and therefore we have this hazing ritual for an interview process. It's absurd to think that after 12 years in the business, I won't be able to figure out what to do with those requirements. I'm sorry, we need 5 years of Java, not 4. For those young developers, save up your money over a 10 year period and get out.

avgDev 5y ago
I know people saving up and getting out of the medical field, as it became extremely toxic in the US. Expensive and mostly ran by huge corporate entities seeking profit. I would much rather click on a computer.
- WJW 5y ago
  In the end, everything you do for money will become "work", because if it was only the fun parts people would just do it for free as a hobby (see also: open source).
- jazzyk 5y ago
  There are quite a few toxic places in the software business, no? Medical field (being a physician) is not a walk in the park, but: 1. nobody questions you intelligence/knowledge after, say, 20 demonstrably successful years in the business 2. on your way home you can say "tough day, but at least I am making $600K/year"
Mimmy 5y ago
Residency isn't the barrier to entry to being a doctor (at least not practically), the real barrier is getting accepted into medical school. The process can also feel like a crapshoot. Likewise passing the bar isn't the barrier to entry to a good law career (at least not practically), it's getting through the interviews at a top law firm. Many attractive industries have problems when it comes to deciding who's eligible to reap their rewards.

moneywoes 5y ago

In the US* Canadian checking in :/

lkrubner 5y ago

The wages for software developers were basically stagnant from 2001 to about 2014 or 2015. The big surge in pay is relatively recent. While this is a complex subject, I have written about a few examples, and can offer more. But take this as one example: Right now the best devops people in New York City are making between $200 and $300 an hour. That's obviously good money, but in the 1990s I had older friends who were making $200 an hour as Oracle consultants. At the top, the nominal pay has remained the same, but adjusting for inflation, that is a 50% paycut. Likewise, lower down, I know lots of mid-level devs who are happy to make $100 an hour right now, but I also had older friends who were slapping together classic VBA apps with VisualBasic, back around 1999, and they were also making $100 an hour, so, again, it's a 50% pay cut. But it is absolutely true that pay has been surging since about 2014/2015, so I imagine the software developer pay is about to catch up to the highs of the 1990s. It's also true that the picture only looks bad when compared to inflation. To your point, most other professions did even worse, so the benefits of being a computer programmer are more obvious if the comparison is to other professions. All in all, after the peak in 2000, the USA economy had a difficult 15 years.

jazzyk 5y ago
>But it is absolutely true that pay has been surging since about 2014/2015 Only partially true: 1. High total compensation (not salaries) is limited to FAANG/Unicorn employees (awash with money) 2. That high compensation has been achieved by stock options multiplying in value, thanks to abnormal run of the stock market (thank you Federal Reserve), which is not going to continue with rising interest rates 3. Salary base seems to be stuck at $150K for mid-senior developers in bigger cities (except for NYC) for many years now
- comp_throw7 5y ago
  > 1. High total compensation (not salaries) is limited to FAANG/Unicorn employees (awash with money) Very nearly every publicly-traded tech company, actually. The list of "tech" companies where mid-level engineers aren't breaking 200k TC is much shorter than the opposite. > 2. That high compensation has been achieved by stock options multiplying in value, thanks to abnormal run of the stock market (thank you Federal Reserve), which is not going to continue with rising interest rates Initial offers have been increasing; we aren't talking about golden handcuffs that employees have from stock growth. To give a very recent example: Amazon recently bumped up their pay-band for mid-level engineers and they seem to be hitting 350k/year (maybe more; have seen a couple reports of 400k). Their mid-level pay-band previously topped out at ~300k/year. > 3. Salary base seems to be stuck at $150K for mid-senior developers in bigger cities (except for NYC) for many years now ...you mean "except the Bay Area", right? Though it's definitely not true either way; I live in a large city that isn't in the Bay, Seattle, or NYC, and 180k is a pretty common number for senior engineer base salaries, and I see 200k+ more and more frequently. (Not that I care too much about just base; given the choice why would I work for a company that only pays base salary, i.e. ~half of what other companies pay?)

melony 5y ago

To a large extent, it is their individual choices. They went in with their eyes wide open, knowing what the market is like. If you decided to pursue something like librarian studies without a concrete plan for income, then it is hardly the fault of society if you do not get a job. I have commented on this yesterday and I will post it here again. Not every job will change the world, but often those boring but well paying jobs are more important than the "impactful" careers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29553341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29553341

WJW 5y ago
Individual choice, yes. And it is indeed not the fault of society that some jobs provide less money or security than others. But "they went in knowing what the market is like" is not really true for the vast majority of 18-20 year olds. Most simply do not have enough experience about "adult life" yet to make a rational and informed choice.

DnDGrognard 5y ago

But at the same point in our careers for the same equivalent we do not have the same $ and status as professions like law and medicine. You are also confusing our broadly speaking "professional" jobs with some of those other examples and firefighters have early retirement and DB pensions in the UK

gorgoiler 5y ago

Software engineers get to have leverage 100% of the time. Poor teachers: when I was teaching it was more like 20% of the time, and the other 80% was breaking rocks. Planning, marking, parents, discipline, pastoral care, sports, and straight up babysitting. That’s a big part of why the pay is so different, in my experience. Teachers have to put in a lot of time and effort to make a diff[erence] and the rest of the work is completely unskilled labor. For SWEs, the next pull request is only limited by your ability to focus and type. I’m a full time SWE these days, and enjoying the 10x pay.

opportune 5y ago

Personally I went into software because it has the highest pay/effort and I think this is becoming even more common for younger generations.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. There's plenty of suffering on top of that time and money too. https://web.archive.org/web/20201112012023/http://www.medicalschoolsuccess.com/med-school-hell/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201112012023/http://www.medica...

62951413 5y ago

Wait until you get to your 40s to appreciate other factors. "teachers, firefighters" enjoy: * structured careers with well-defined benefits that they keep even after retirement * accumulate experience that's valued by their employers all the way to retirement * can find a job anywhere; don't need to emigrate/move to SFBA/NYC/London/Berlin, speak foreign languages, be surrounded by aliens from distant lands * are respected for what they do Software development is heavily skewed towards the young demographics. We just don't think about it when we are young and still in love with computers. In the immortal words quoted by Steve McConnell over 20 years ago: "Wanted: Young, skinny, wirey fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week."

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Wait until you get to your 40s to appreciate other factors. "teachers, firefighters" enjoy: * structured careers with well-defined benefits that they keep even after retirement * accumulate experience that's valued by their employers all the way to retirement * can find a job anywhere; don't need to emigrate/move to SFBA/NYC/London/Berlin, speak foreign languages, be surrounded by aliens from distant lands * are respected for what they do If you get to your 40s as a dev and want that without leaving development, become a public sector (direct government, not contract) software developer.
908B64B197 5y ago
> structured careers with well-defined benefits that they keep even after retirement That's why careers have a stock comp. Jobs don't. > accumulate experience that's valued by their employers all the way to retirement Real engineers do get that. > don't need to emigrate/move to SFBA/NYC/London/Berlin > speak foreign languages > be surrounded by aliens from distant lands I can't help but hear a dog whistle here...

908B64B197 5y ago

> I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. I don't know about that. Software scales almost infinitely. Impossible to double the number of billable hours or patient load of a cardiologist outside of an herculean effort, but software folks can easily 10x the number of people they bring value to in a short amount of time. > We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are making great money by utilizing the greatest tool of all time: the computer. Honestly, medical school isn't really the correct example to use because it's not efficient at all. The big reason medical schooling is so hard is because they have to get a completely unrelated undergrad before even thinking about applying to med school. That means racking up serious debts before even knowing if you are going to get admitted. You can imagine how that fosters a culture of diversity and inclusion and help poor, often non-white, applicants reach medicine when the first step is to get into 6 figures debts with absolutely no guaranteed income. Other countries with similar health outcomes for their population simply admit freshmen into med school right away. Residency is something else. It's overworked since the total number of residents is capped by the AMA (also you have to fly-in to your residency interviews on your dime, so much for underrepresented applicants!) and honestly there's a lot of cargo culting. 48 hours shifts with no sleep because it's believed that it's impossible to correctly handover patients from one medical professional to the other (hint, this is a solved problem in a lot of high stress cognitive disciplines outside of healthcare). It's a culture of always working harder instead of working smarter, and the people take pride in that strangely enough. All it really does is create a moat and allow AMA members to charge more because they made themselves scarce. > Meanwhile, our friends who are teachers, firefighters, child-care workers, etc. are doing tough work daily for less pay, perhaps simply because they didn't use computers much or didn't like them. And yet, their jobs are ESSENTIAL and we need people to do them even though they're grueling and underpaid. Firefighters tend to have nice pension funds in a lot of cities. Teacher's pay is incredibly interesting. Engineers are paid on results (this is even more true at serious tech companies where a significant portion of ones earning will be stock comp) while teachers are paid a government approved rate no matter the results. I know a lot of parents that would pay serious money to teachers based on results (if their kid can get into Stanford/MIT for instance) if said teachers could show a track record of having previously mentored alumni for instance. Instead, the premium is now captured by real-estate since parents that care will pay extra to get into a good school district.

divbzero 5y ago

15. Some of the highest paying software jobs are at companies that profit from attention/marketing and might not have a net positive contribution to society.

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