17 ms·

There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense.

• jonwachob91 4y ago
  >> SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional Nurses are professionals too, and they will never see anything close to $300k/year.
  • TexanFeller 4y ago
    The intelligence floor for becoming a nurse is low, so nurses have extremely large variance in their intelligence, knowledge, and training. Knowing someone is a nurse doesn’t mean you can assume they are pros. Some nurses keep up with the latest medical research papers and are overall similarly knowledgeable to doctors, and some know less about biology than I do and will tell you about vaccine conspiracies and how some homeopathic nonsense will help you. I’ve met people at both ends.
• sarojmoh1 4y ago
  What's the alternative though? What other "career" change can a SWE make that will make them even close to what they used to make? What about escaping corporate swe and working for oneself?
• erellsworth 4y ago
  Average salary for a software developer in the US is over $100k/year. For a 30 year old, that would put them in the 95% income percentile, or 87% for a 40 year old. The comparison to other lawyers is weak because becoming a lawyer requires a hell of a lot more education. You can become a software developer without even a having a college degree. You are also ignoring other professions like nursing. Nurses make far less than software developers and work a hell of a lot harder. Same with teachers. As far as barely making a middle-class salary while rich people get richer off your work? Welcome to capitalism.
• AyyWS 4y ago
  > do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets You want to represent a murderer, rapist or a Bernie Madoff? Lawyers deal with an order of magnitude more BS. You may feel bad when you work on a dead end feature. Imagine if your representation let a rapist walk.
• Enginerrrd 4y ago
  This is... To be charitable: uninformed. As a civil engineer: I assure you my studies were QUITE rigorous. The job is very demanding, and I assure you the complexity can be very high, the consequences of mistakes are severe and occur over a massive variety of time scales. I had to work for four years apprenticing under licensed engineers after school and pass no fewer than four examinations, and get 4 licensed engineers to personally vouch for my work before getting licensed myself as a civil engineer. I am personally liable, in perpetuity, for loss of life injury or property which occurs as a result of work that I put my stamp on. As a licensed P.E (who is, dare I say, fairly talented amongst my peers even) with a total of 8 years experience, do you know what I get paid to deal with that complexity and liability? About $80k in medium cost of living area for 45 hours/week. That's not atypical. Does that "control for the intelligence" required of the job?
  • weatherlite 4y ago
    Wow unfair, is it because you work for the public sector that the salary is mediocre? It is not a bad wage but indeed sounds like the salary should be 50% higher.
    • Enginerrrd 4y ago
      No, I work in the private sector in land development. This is actually a good deal for me because I'm full remote whereas in my area I'd be looking at a $15-20k pay cut.
  • abduhl 4y ago
    80k for 8 years of experience with a PE is a bit low. You should be cracking six figures by now if you’re structural and coming close if you’re actual (roadway) civil. Are you in materials testing? If so, obviously you should try to switch over to an inspection gig to get some of that sweet overtime. I was clearing something like 110k salary at similar experience back when I practiced and quite a bit more with my equity/COLA/bonus, but I was in a high risk niche field. Not sure where you’re at but any market of reasonable size should be able to support you getting a raise, especially if you’re actually as good as you think. I agree with everything you say. Software engineers (most should not even be called engineers, they’re coders or developers and on the same level as a lab technician to me) are prima donnas whose mathematical and scientific backgrounds are (on average) at least one level of education behind any actual licensed engineer/professional making half as much. And their degree of liability is infinitely lower, as you note. I’ll probably get sued or be involved in a lawsuit for my work another half dozen times before 2032 even though I haven’t stamped anything in 3 years.
• stonemetal12 4y ago
  >do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets? Yes, I more or less think they do. Unless they are a headliner or founder of their own firm. Lets say you are a lawyer at glob corp, and they get sued. Do you really think you can say "Eh, the other guy has a point. I am not going to defend this one."? You either work the case defending glob corp, or you are no longer glob corp's lawyer.
• cure 4y ago
  > do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets? Probably not, but instead they get to bill their working hours in 6 minute increments. And they have to bill a high number of hours a day. Praise yourself lucky if you don't have to do that!
• max51 4y ago
  >SWEs make less than any other professional Except for almost all of them. Aside from a few exceptions (doctors, laywers), everyone else makes significantly less. A structural engineer with a master's degree for exemple will makes less than half (closer to 3 - 4x in my region).
• _fat_santa 4y ago
  > The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. You don't have to make 300k for the pay to be great. Even if you fall short of that and land at a company that only pays you $120k, you're still making a killing compared to most other professions. > Corporate SWE is pretty awful Then get out of Corporate. I work for an SMB, make about as much as I used to in Corporate, but the stress level and workload makes is much easier. Everyone want's one of those SWE jobs for a company that is in the news, but in fact you want the exact opposite. You want a low profile job at a company no one outside your niche has heard of. The pay is about the same, work is 10x less crazy, and if you disagree with a decision, usually you know the person that made it because the company is only about 200 employees.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    > SMB I think the signal:noise ratio isn’t great in this sector. Although corporate is 100% guaranteed misery, I have yet to come up with a reliable way to find SMBs where IT (because that’s how they call it, a SWE is the same as the help desk in their view) isn’t considered as “the geeks working the cost center in the basement”. Do you have a method or did you rely on blind luck like the rest of us?
• kache_ 4y ago
  If you're not getting paid enough, have you tried leaving your job and finding another one?
• jmcgough 4y ago
  Lawyer pay honestly isn't that great. I know lawyers who went to top schools and routinely work 60-80 hour weeks to make as much as SWE do. The lawyers who didn't go to top schools became public defenders etc and make about 70k a year and are saddled with a quarter million dollars in law school debt.
• InefficientRed 4y ago
  > do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets? LOL Jira has nothing on billing in 15 minute increments.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Agreed. I made more from owning and living in a house than I can possibly save from SWE job.
  • www_harka_com 4y ago
    How do you make money from owning and living in a house?
    • jonfw 4y ago
      Buy a house, live in it, sell it for more than you bought it for
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      It goes up in value. Also interests rates decreasing means more immediate money in lower living costs.
      • bruce343434 4y ago
        You can't pay for groceries with those unrealized gains. You'd have to sell your house. Wait, where will you live?
        • Clubber 4y ago
          You can take out a loan on the house with the house as collateral. That's a tactic wealthy people use with their stocks. Also having a home equity loan is a good padding for rainy days.
        • quickthrower2 4y ago
          True but you can borrow against the house to invest, for example
      • zarzavat 4y ago
        It’s a rather abstract view of making money. Other houses also go up in value. You only make money from the difference between how much houses in your area are going up, and how much houses in the area you want to move to are going up. And that difference may well be negative.
• draw_down 4y ago
• trashtester 4y ago
  SWE's are not the only ones that think that their pay is low compared to their intelligence level, their education level, how tough, inconvenient or important their work is or what they feel they deserve for some other reason. For instance, I'm sure there are plenty of HR managers in various companies that are secretly furious about all the young young mostly males, mostly white or asian, still in their 20s, join the company and make more than they do.
  • drekipus 4y ago
    I'm sure HR managers know that the majority of jobs they are hiring for are different from the job they're in, with different pay scales and demographics. Infact I'd say it's their profession.
    • sshine 4y ago
      Also, HR Manager is a low-risk job. Recruiter is the high-risk equivalent. So not only do you compete with a lot of people for the job, the pay structure does not depend on performance.
      • cableshaft 4y ago
        Maybe, but I've also seen HR departments be the first to go in lean times. We effectively didn't have an HR department at my previous job, at a company of 500+ people. And they did when I first started, about a dozen people.
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Why would the ethnicity or sex matter when these HR managers would still see the same differences regardless of ethnicity or sex? Either way, I'd think twice about putting HR managers as victims here when they are the main perpetrators of low raise budgets and high hiring budgets.
    • trashtester 4y ago
      When people see that some other group of people, with identity traits different from themselves, are doing better than themselves on some metric, it often induces resentment. That's just a fact. Whether its justified or not, varies with circumstances and what ethical system people have. When black people in the 50's felt that way about white people and their privileges, most people today would see those concerns as justified. When German people in 1922 became angry because most jews had enough money for food, while many Germans went hungry, and started believing in conspiracy theories, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, most people today would say they were not justified. (though there are still some who secrely believe those things) And when Hutu's wanted to "cut down the tall trees" in 1994, most people in the west only read the headlines, and didn't care that much. In the case of HR managers being unhappy that software developer make more than them, some will blame some generic "wage gap", others will explicitly believe in some kind of Patriarchy conspiracy theory. (And a lot of HR managers, of course, are simply fine with things as they are.)
• thrwawy283 4y ago
  I'm optimistic growing remote work means extending the working life of an SWE (counter to ageism).
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Most companies with good pay have a decently high median age for senior SWEs. I'm not sure why anyone 50+ would want to work at the vast majority of startups...
  • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    so, de-aging video call filter?
• tialaramex 4y ago
  Many lawyers have to religiously time track everything. Because hours attributable to a specific client are billed and billable hours are where the revenue comes from.
  • sandoze 4y ago
    No SWE has been audited for pointing their JIRA ticket too high.
    • spacemanmatt 4y ago
      Totally not true. Creating room to sit on your thumbs through the time management system gets noticed by pretty much everyone. Some SWE roles are billed to client accounts hourly, too.
  • lucumo 4y ago
    This happens for quite a few software engineering jobs too. It's not the 6 minutes I heard lawyers do, but I definitely have been asked to track intervals of 15 minutes.
    • jonfw 4y ago
      If you were a lawyer and said "I am not willing to track my time" you limit your options significantly more than a programmer
  • Victerius 4y ago
    On the other hand, lawyers knowledge of the law and legal procedures doesn't become stale after a few years. "Requires 20 years experience in the Affordable Care Act" - Said no law firm ever
    • agent281 4y ago
      It does get stale and changes per jurisdiction. Just look at how GDPR and CCPA changed the privacy landscape. At least programmers don’t have to deal with linked lists having different time complexities in California.
• bruce343434 4y ago
  Lawyers work on "discovery". Requesting and sifting through piles of documents. The jira ticket doesn't seem so bad.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    In general to me the whole process of getting the degree, the bar and then the actually work and the pay unless you make it seems like rather bad compared to how easy SWE or related work can be. The school is laughably expensive for something that should in reality be rather cheap. Read books, listen to lecturers? No laboratory work or practical experience and so on, clearly overpriced. And the studying to get approval of cartel? And then end up working for rather poor compensation for quite a long bit in career... As the pay is bi-modal, yes partners rake in money, but they also need to get the clients. But the people doing bulk of the work aren't that well paid.
    • mistymountains 4y ago
      Exactly. I was into a half dozen top law schools and had a very good LSAT score but what you mentioned nagged at me until I chose a technical masters instead.
• jaredandrews 4y ago
  > do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets? LOL, a lawyer in my family does. He actually meets with a whole group of lawyers every month or so and they all do a retrospective to figure out how well applying agile/lean/whatever principles to their firms has been working. He actually feels it gives them a real edge.
  • pushingice 4y ago
    I've suggested this to my lawyer wife more than once. The problem is that she works for multiple partners with no visibility in to each other's tasks. So each partner thinks they can have 100% of her time whenever they want, and get upset when that turns out not to be true.
• trollytroll69 4y ago
  buddy our goal is to make their professions just a shitty and atomizing as ours. it is the way (the faster the better). the professional class are an impediment to progress idc how mean that sounds.
• Gigachad 4y ago
  Cry me a river. Software development is some of the easiest, highest paid work in history. The majority of the population is grinding away in tough physical labor or abusive service jobs getting paid pennies while software devs moan about only making low six figures and getting a few boring jira tickets while they sit in their home office reading hacker news for half the day.
  • computerex 4y ago
    Well, I think the parent is comparing software engineering to other white collar professions like lawyer. In my opinion comparing SWE to blue collar work like construction is apples to oranges. Ofc the blue collar work is harder and more demanding physically. It’s better to think about whether software engineers are being compensated fairly relative to other professions like lawyers. I think they are given that wages seem to be governed with supply and demand. On one hand I don’t make as much as my sister, who is a doctor. On the other hand, I make enough/comfortable money and don’t have to deal with the liability/responsibilities/obligations of being a doctor or lawyer, and I can work from bed naked should I choose to do so.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      You also don’t need to spend years in a very expensive education with tall entry barriers and taking on massive debt. But also, you had the info in doctor fakeries available and still chose software.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
        I think you meant doctor salaries?
      • bradlys 4y ago
        I mean - this is YMMV. Typical SV FAANG engineer is from an Ivy League or adjacent competitive school. Often with a masters. So, yes, you might not have to do the full specialty training and residency but it can still be quite competitive and expensive. You’re only earning surgeon money when you’ve made staff level at FAANG. Which usually means you’re near the same age as surgeons and there was a lot of risk and grind getting there. If anyone thinks getting to staff at FAANG is trivial - I’d suggest they’ve been very lucky in life and aren’t a representative person of how hard it is. People who could do either often go into software because of the nearly unlimited earnings cap. Theoretically you could start your own company and be ultra rich. That’s what I see often as the source. Less common with doctors afaict.
• xwdv 4y ago
  You could work two easy software engineering jobs from home in parallel and double your income though.
  • gerhardhaering 4y ago
    Good luck if you spend 40-70 % of your working time in meetings and pair programming sessions, like I do.