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I moved into IT from "formal" engineering and its always frustrated me that a job that involves working on extremely expensive engines using upper level college

by tekla 4y ago

I moved into IT from "formal" engineering and its always frustrated me that a job that involves working on extremely expensive engines using upper level college math gets paid almost nothing compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I've been on floors where multi-million dollar pieces of equipment are used to produce parts with obscene levels of precision being used by expert machinists making 80k a year who risk their own personal safety making these parts. I have EE friends with master degrees who design PCBs that are printed millions of times that struggle to afford rent. It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little?

williamcotton 4y ago
> It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? Value is determined by quantitative exchange in a market and not by any intrinsic qualities such as difficulty of labor.
ramesh31 4y ago
Profit margin. It's all profit margin. Software is reliably >25%, where physical manufacturing is in the single digits.
- georgeburdell 4y ago
  But the question is why? Shouldn’t there be the same race to single digit margins in software as well?
  - simmerup 4y ago
    I think you're right. It's my suspicion that eventually software engineers will be paid the same as copy writers and scientists. But not yet.
    - insightcheck 4y ago
      I was initially going to disagree that copywriters get paid in the same range as scientists, but the numbers in the US are roughly similar from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Indeed. -Indeed average copywriter annual pay [0] is $54,998 USD, versus a staff scientist's [1] at $69,091 USD -BLS median copywriter pay for 2021 [2] was $69,510 USD, versus a medical scientist's [3] at $95,310 USD I'm surprised that the median annual salary difference is only roughly $15,000 to $25,000 USD in favor of working as a scientist, considering the additional years doing a Master's/PhD, whereas copywriter jobs often don't need even a Bachelor's. In addition, I would've guessed that the median copywriter salary would have been far lower, as my perception was that there is a far greater supply of candidates for copywriter jobs than scientist jobs in the US (maybe this is offset by fewer scientist positions?). Alternatively, maybe the numbers are missing important contextual information in some way. [0] https://www.indeed.com/career/copywriter/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/copywriter/salaries [1] https://www.indeed.com/career/staff-scientist/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/staff-scientist/salaries [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-authors.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-... [3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/medical-scientists.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/med...
      - simmerup 4y ago
        The scientists I know see it as almost a vocation. They want the prestige of having their names in journals and the feeling that they're helping advance human knowledge. I can't really blame them... I class it as a bit like development in the way they undervalue their skills so that they can get it. I guess the other side of it is that the people paying scientists really don't know if their grant money will pay off so they want to hedge their bets on costs (eg salaries)
      - t-3 4y ago
        > In addition, I would've guessed that the median copywriter salary would have been far lower, as my perception was that there is a far greater supply of candidates for copywriter jobs than scientist jobs in the US (maybe this is offset by fewer scientist positions?) Probably, but given that ~20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, while ~40% have a college degree, the supplies might not be too different. Reading and writing are also skills which are neither prestigious nor especially lucrative, while scientists of any kind are esteemed pretty highly.
  - insightcheck 4y ago
    The distribution cost of selling software is far lower than selling a physical product. For example, to manufacture and sell cars, you currently have to worry about supply chain considerations and chip shortages. You don't need to worry about this to sell software to an interested purchaser.
  - atwood22 4y ago
    The marginal cost of software is basically zero. The marginal cost of hardware is high.
  - ccorcos 4y ago
    Marginal cost of an additional user is zero. And instant global distribution with the internet. And then there’s the freemium B2B SaaS business model (Slack, Notion) that is just insanely lucrative…
  - majormajor 4y ago
    A different answer than everyone else so far: Leverage. Super-simple example: a single developer focused just on internal tools for a 10 person company. Let's say that this company has a full plate, everyone is busy 100% of the time. They can't really bring on new clients. They could hire a new person to do some of the work, but let's say that that new person will cost almost as much as a new client would bring in. Their margins are very tight, they wouldn't be able to expand fast at all, and losing a client would be very perilous. (This is how a lot of small companies work. People getting laid off because a client went away is something I've seen firsthand.) Let's say over the course of a year an engineer could build out enough basic, CRUD-app-style automation to free up 30% of everyone else's time. Now you can get multiple new clients for the cost of one new person! And if you can further automate and reduce the drudgery, even more! (This is also a partial explanation for why the outsourcing, salaries-will-go-to-zero expectations of the early-2000s haven't come to pass: it requires tight communication and a good understand of people's workflows, which is much harder to do across time zone and language barriers. Hardware, on the other hand, needs a firmer spec and less ability to iterate rapidly with rapid communication and feedback.) Of course the real world is more complicated and some of that automation comes from SaaS tools, etc (a less-direct way of paying those engineers, and something that could be more outsourceable in the long run) but a surprising amount of companies still need hands-on internal expertise to glue everything together. Less code tends to result in more code, because now that you and your competitors have gotten more efficient too, you have to get even more efficient to move the needle again. The thing about business processes is that they will always evolve as old companies die, new ones start, and consumers (both individuals and other companies) want different things.
  - est31 4y ago
    There will be, but right now software is eating the world (and establishing entire new markets) faster than developer talent enters the market. So prices for developers go up. Eventually this will end, either by the demand curve slowing down, or developer supply meeting demand. Whether it happens within the next 5 or 10, or even 20 years, who knows.
    - dougabug 4y ago
      This saturation of demand for software talent has been predicted for literally decades. In 1992, Ed Yourdon published “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” only to reverse himself four years later with the publication of “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.” If anything, the rate at which capable software professionals can create value has dramatically increased over time. Software is not a zero sum game, cumulative advances make it possible to solve an expanding frontier of problems with increasingly effective and efficient solutions.
      - est31 4y ago
        Frontier is a good term because just as the US frontier age eventually ended, the software frontier expansion is also eventually going to stop.
        dougabug 4y ago
        I don’t mean frontier as in “the American Western Frontier.” I meant frontier as in, “the frontiers of human knowledge.” It’s not clear to me that the latter is limited in the way that the former is. Creation of knowledge products both facilitates the further production of new knowledge products and expands the scope of new knowledge products which can be created. This process is like a chain reaction where the potential energy unleashed may ultimately exceed any practical scale modern economics has meaningfully considered. Software costs almost nothing to deploy, even on a global scale, versus its potential value delivered; and it can be created or improved with almost no additional consumption of resources vs (the programmer) simply existing.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    The rate of innovation in software is not constrained by capital or physics (and to a lesser extent regulation) to the extent it is in other engineering disciplines, which overweights the importance of individual skill and execution in outcomes. Software isn't an intrinsically high-margin business, but the cost of creating and operating in new high-margin business frontiers is uniquely low, allowing individuals to leave the rapidly commoditizing part of the software business in the rear-view mirror. The margins would be single-digits if the pace of change and innovation possible was like other engineering disciplines. The business of software engineering evolves at an incredible rate that would be unimaginable in the engineering discipline I went to school for.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    In a free market, there is such race in every industry. It's just that demand for software is growing too damn fast and supply can't keep up.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Software's network effects make it much easier to construct a "monopoly" which gets to have very large margins. Where you see margins, look for moats.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  You might want to look at the margins of Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, ...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
As someone in software with an EE background, I think it's simple. There's far more demand for software people compared to the available supply, so pay rates are high. Which job is "harder" has absolutely nothing to do with it. I noticed the trend about 20 years ago when I decided that I'd never again have a job that was mostly hardware design. The money's in software.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  The demand is there. After all, somebody has to be doing the design work for the electronic products out there. In a globalized economy with outsourced production most of the EE work goes to SEA with cheaper labor.
  - root_axis 4y ago
    There is simply much more software work to be done than hardware work. Pretty much every company running a real business has some software presence on their staff, whereas the presence of people with an EE background is quite rare by comparison.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    Hardware design work is hard, but you usually only have to do it once for any given component or any given product. Most of the parts I use were already well-established in their markets over 10 years ago. (Although whether they'll still be around 10 years from now -- or 1 year for that matter -- is a very different question.) Conversely, a web developer's work is never done. There is always another web site to build. Failing that, someone always wants to do another gratuitous reskin of an existing site, just to keep their users from growing complacent.
Apocryphon 4y ago
> It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? ZIRP, and the VC ecosystem, FAANG stock bubble, EBITDA-creative accounted IPOs, etc. that grew up around it, are a helluva an alphabet soup: > why do companies do mental gymnastics to call themselves a tech company. It’s because venture as an asset class traditionally invested in technology because that is what presented the growth and return characteristics that matched their risk profile. So you try to call a desk rental or mattress seller a tech company. > Then, for the companies that attracted the money had to spend it. Salaries inflate. Cultures change. Consumers are subsidized. Sure, some technology is created, but overall, nothing operates as it would without that thirsty capital. It changes the economics for competitors that do not welcome in the dollars. https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world
Xcelerate 4y ago
I went from chemical engineering into data science, and I wonder this constantly. Everything about chemical engineering was much more difficult (at least what you would be expected to do in a typical job; exceptions apply). I really miss the hard sciences, but I also really do not want to take a 4x pay cut. Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler than specialized ChemE knowledge; supply should have ramped up so quickly that comp would have fallen to typical engineering salaries long ago if that were the case.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler than specialized ChemE knowledge; supply should have ramped up so quickly that comp would have fallen to typical engineering salaries long ago if that were the case. I would question my assumptions before disputing the function of supply and demand curves.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  There aren’t any people over the age of like 35 who started their career in data science. Careers are sticky, people don’t like switching once they’re in one. They’re being trained quickly and I think you’re right, the salary used to be higher than a normal software dev but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
  - runnerup 4y ago
    More like no one hires you into a new career after 35. I’m 34 now and it was hell getting into software engineering from chemical engineering even with good project experience and acing leetcode.
    - visarga 4y ago
      I switched from full stack to ML at 38. I was preparing for a few years by doing courses, personal projects and following new papers as they come up. When I got hired there was no issue with the fact that I was self trained - they have been interviewing for 6 months and failing every candidate by then. Soon after I got hired I was myself part of the interviewing committee and saw the hiring situation first hand - most candidates can't program their way out of a shoe or explain how the most commonly used neural net layers work. I mean, I had one who couldn't open a TXT file in 30 minutes, the data file he was supposed to use in the problem.
drewcoo 4y ago
Software is a pure ideas business. You'd be surprised how many people have, sell, and get venture capital for ideas without a huge upfront spend attached just to try something out. Software is the scratch tickets of "engineering."
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Nice, haven't seen "engineering" elitism since university. Software is the nervous system of a business. Everything from accounting, to payroll, to inventory tracking, to sales, to marketing, to communications, is achieved in today's world by interfacing with dozens if not hundreds of software programs and systems. Impossible to achieve with hardware alone obviously, you need operating systems, you need data centers, need custom dashboards and BI, you need ACH/SWIFT routing interfaces to make payments go through, you need file management, you need chat software to communicate with employees and customers, you need software nearly every step of the way. It's complex as hell. And the complexity of making all those systems work together just compounds that complexity.
  - jfim 4y ago
    Most of that is software glue, and not particularly challenging. It's necessary to run a modern company to have this kind of glue to connect systems together, but at the same time EE and ChemE are much more challenging.
    - lumost 4y ago
      Consider that the space shuttle was considered one of the most complex projects in history with around 1 million parts. 1 million loc projects are common, a large tech company like google likely has billions of loc. Putting all of this together sensibly is hard.
      - imgabe 4y ago
        A line of code isn't really equivalent to a physical part of a space shuttle.
antoniuschan99 4y ago
There's a huge demand for Software Developers in every industry in the last few years. Retail, Finance, Marketing, etc. Also, looking at a Marketing Company for example. There would be a ton of need for Software Developers, but generally no need for an electrical engineer.
api 4y ago
If there was tremendous demand for ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well. How hard something is has nothing to do with it. If the current supply and demand stays the way it is eventually things will even out. Programmer salaries will stagnate as more people enter the field and other fields may have salaries go up if there are not enough candidates. This process is very slow though. It’s not a very efficient market due to opaqueness and the fact that people don’t like to change jobs too much. A huge reallocation can take a generation or more.
- robocat 4y ago
  > ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well Only if ditches are valuable enough. Otherwise everyone does without ditches (long drop, sump hole), or find solutions that don’t need ditches (eg wireless or overground cables), or invent new ways of making ditches that are not digging (ditch witch, suction vacs), or other smart workarounds (trenchless water pipe, fibre optic horizontal drilling).
Spooky23 4y ago
Because real engineers become hyper-specialists and get trapped. My one my high school classmates was a mechanical engineer who was one of the top guys for some semiconductor process that failed to scale and got abandoned. Got laid off and was unemployable. He sold herballife to go back to school and is a physical therapist now. It happens in software too. Plenty of sad tales of geezers let go from banks and government who have legacy mainframe or middleware skills.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bumby 4y ago
  This doesn’t ring true to me, especially for an ME which is one of the broadest disciplines. I know one who had a BS and has worked in construction on building automation and energy systems, automotive robotics, healthcare as a process engineer, aerospace software, and finally as a data scientist.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    It's probably true but the ME in question chose to go a different route probably because they deep down did not like the job. No doubt they could have retooled their skillset and kept reapplying at various places or move elsewhere if they were inclined.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Some people struggle with reinvention. I tend to branch out every 4-5 years. I think this person thought he had the one true career and had difficulty with reality. Our high school cohort was just old enough to see the end of the “dinosaur” tech company era. This guy was a few years older than me (his younger brother was my age), I think he thought he was retiring with a gold watch or whatever. It seems quaint now, but it was a thing. My dad’s friend was a GE lifer, they moved around the world like they were in the army to the next posting. Today, we’re all more paranoid and mercenary, even govenrment workers jump ship.
- raverbashing 4y ago
colinmhayes 4y ago
The most you can get paid is the amount your company thinks it would cost to replace you. The difficulty of your job has absolutely nothing to do with how much you’re paid, other than maybe reducing labor supply a bit. But there are tons of smart people, if the opportunities exist people will come. Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Their options mean that if a company doesn’t want to pay much they’ll work somewhere else. Expert machinists using fancy equipment in a factory don’t really have the same ability to just go to a competitor, so they can’t negotiate a raise.
- t-3 4y ago
  The machinist actually probably can move around relatively easily (and a good machinist isn't much cheaper than an engineer, if at all). The engineers are going to be both more specialized and less in-demand. They work at a higher level where less people are needed, and due to specialization, can often be contracted out.
- yobbo 4y ago
  > Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Not sure this is reality; or that a meritocracy for webdevs exists. In recent years, it seems the quality of big "prestige brand" websites (not exactly big tech) is declining, to the point of being unusable on mobile browsers or throttled connections. Not because of technical trade-offs, but reliance on frameworks to achieve "demoable effects" instead of real world features or usability. We're more than fifteen years into "ajax" and today's kids simply can't do it without burning 10x the cpu cycles and bandwidth. To me it seems there is a decoupling between the utility of webdevs and their pay, and some sort of market failure is occurring.
  - galdosdi 4y ago
    I think this is analogous to and is happening for similar reasons as the airline customer experience gradually went from being very "classy" to increasingly "cheap" all at the same time as the market for air travel expanded tremendously.
- 4y ago
scruple 4y ago
I left embedded for web in 2014 and I doubled my salary overnight. My experience from embedded translated to an ability to troubleshoot problems that baffled others and has led to a lot of personal career growth that I suspect I wouldn't have otherwise seen. Wish it wasn't like this, because I quite miss what I was doing in that previous life, but it is what it is.
- dougmany 4y ago
  I have an EE degree and was in embedded for a few years. I kept getting hired for that one problem, then was no longer needed. All the jobs I could find were short term contract work or "Thanks for fixing that, now we don't need you" situations. I still get emails about short term, in office work in the Midwest. I enjoyed the work but I couldn't find stable employment. Embedded worked out to be a good transition to software and then web development though.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  I'm considering the same. Out of curiosity, did you jump into front end or back end dev?
  - scruple 4y ago
    Primarily backend... But I had a 2 year stint as a data engineering lead and then led a ReactJS SPA product development team for 18 months. I'm back to the backend now, though, and I'm very happy with it.
MonkeyClub 4y ago
> compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but that being said... Finally someone said it! Ok, I understand that we’re in some anal-retentive age as humans, where we’re discovering our new digital medium and whatnot, but enough with the fixation on small shiny digital bullshit - it’s robbing us of real depth and wonder. And if it’s reached to the point where real engineering is depreciated, I wonder what carcasses lie ravaged in fields no one looks at until it’s too late. > It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? I think it’s understandable if you explain it using the same reason that mushrooms are clearly the better drug, but cocaine is the more popular one (our dopamine wiring? idk), criss-crossed with an actively pushed economic bubble that’s high on the rise, and will be for a long while.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Not sure that bubble is long for this world. Scarcity called, it said "remember me? Ive been on vacation to everywhere but the west, now I'm back!". What makes shrooms better than coke? Never tried either one, probably not stable enough to risk it, so curious what your valuation criteria are.
  - achenet 4y ago
    not the person you're responding to, but I suspect it would be due to life outcomes of both - mushrooms have been shown to help people resolve past trauma and change their habits for the better, whereas cocaine tends to be habit forming and cokeheads are generally pretty unhappy people.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      Yep that’s pretty much what I meant, plus that psychedelics in general have wider dimensions while cocaine is sort of a dumb drug. Not judging, just saying.
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  Software development is completely abstract and is one of the most difficult things humans do. An average codebase can easily hold millions of lines of code with millions more hidden in libraries that all have to work together. The complexity is incredible really. This post in no way diminishes the complexity of the hard sciences.
WalterBright 4y ago
Because picking the right colors on a website brings in more money.
mbrodersen 4y ago
It’s all about demand and supply. It has nothing to do with how hard/easy anything is. So it actually makes perfect sense. Everybody needs web software. Very few needs hard engineering skills.
- airocker 4y ago
  There is some correlation if price keeps high for a long duration
david38 4y ago
You are not paid by the difficulty of your work. You are paid according to how much the hiring manager thinks he can replace you for. Sometimes this creates falsely inflated salaries- like when a company insists on hiring Harvard MBAs. Often it creates lower than expected salaries. People forget just how many Asian EEs there are.
boppo1 4y ago
>It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? Interest rate intervention (making them lower than equilibrium) changed the DCF valuation that is the fundamental way of evaluating business (i.e. people working together on large endeavors) to one where promising massive returns in the future(20+ years) made low returns in the near term (x<20 years) acceptable. Investment dollars chased growth and VC and PE grew. Meanwhile, in order to compete for capital, all businesses focused on delivering value now had to adjust their income statements (try to grow revenue, or more likely cut expenses) as hard as possible to compete with businesses that aren't delivering on much now but seem like they will change everything in the future. Google "DCF Valuation" and model out 100 years in excel. Add a row that divides the PV of each year by the NPV so you can see the % it contributes to the NPV. Then setup a bar chart so you can visually get a vibe for the integral of different time periods. Once that is all setup, try a real simple assumption: 0 growth for CF and .5% for your Risk Free Rate. Then try it at 5%. If the Federal Reserve sticks to its guns and gets rates up, and keeps them there, it will be unsurprising to see "hard" engineering jobs be valuable again, while all the CSS people suddenly can't find two pennies to rub together.
- _vdpp 4y ago
  I’ve been wondering if SWE pay rates have been artificially high for a while due to easy lending - it will be interesting to see if your prediction comes true. Probably a lot of SW companies out there right now are dependent on discretionary income which puts them at risk in a tough market.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    SWE salaries are also very high because right now it's cheap as hell to run a software company leading to huge returns. Overheads are miniscule. The salaries can take a larger slice of the pie. A lot of people in the comments are talking about how EE work is comparatively much harder. But that's irrelevant. SWEs simply make businesses more money.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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honkycat 4y ago
Nerd trap. It is hard science, and interesting so people are more willing to deal with bullshit to get close to it. Engineering processes are very well developed and therefore less leadership is expected out of the ICs. I mostly troubleshoot this dreadful old C# application these days. At this point, you almost couldn't pay me to do it. And I don't have any better prospects with the great depression 2 coming up
deleted 4y ago
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jpnx 4y ago
I guess this has something to do with a lot of manufacturing having moved to Asia. Here in Germany it is flipped arround. As a software developer in Berlin I can only dream about the salaries I could get as mechanical / electrical engineer in South Germany at one of the big car manufacturers.
- antoniuschan99 4y ago
  Guess it’s all about supply and demand since Germany is the Mecca for Process Controls and Automation. There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software
  - t-3 4y ago
    > There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software Not "in North America". On the coasts, in attractive big cities, sure. The midwest is still full of manufacturing though, and they still hire engineers (but they're going to make $100,000+, not $300,000+ like software devs in CA).
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Perhaps those manufacturing jobs could pay closer to software if the employers were willing to give more equity.
    - antoniuschan99 4y ago
      That Manufacturing is more light and heavy industries though? Like Automotive and the like? When I mean hardware I mean Electronics and PCB - like Apple or Internet Connected Electronics.
      - t-3 4y ago
        There are lots and lots of electronics in automobiles, industrial machinery, and robots. They need engineers of all kinds to design products, processes, equipment, etc.
hellohowareu 4y ago
Supply & Demand (aka Market Economics) dictates pay rate. Not difficulty, danger, or years spent studying challenging topics. Changing a color... that's basic html/css-- that's the lowest pay rung of front end developers, which is the lowest paid occupational field within the occupation of full stack web app engineers. So, you're grossly exaggerating. People who just change colors of a web site might make $15-20/hr in the US. The folks making $150-$200k+ have skills in frontend development, serverside development, databases, plus often things like data engineering or setting up/maintaining cloud computing infrastructure. From there, add in specialty Security knowledge or Machine Learning or highly efficient massively global scale+speed programs, and you'll begin to understand how they're making $400k-$600k+ For example: Go have a look at kubernetes (combined with Docker, Helm, and a Cloud provider + all the various underlying technologies which involve an OS and 2+ programming languages and/or frameworks) and tell me how difficult it is compared to machining + CNCing + welding a metal part. Not to knock machinists-- I've worked on metal machines and I understand why master mechanics make $100k/year. But I also see why they don't make $200k/year (exception for luxury vehicles)-- there's only so much to learn and only so many dimensions of complexity, especially in terms of continuing education on new technology.
- sgarland 4y ago
  I've met precious few devs of any flavor who understand databases. Not just "how do I write SQL," but actually understand what the query optimizer is doing, minor but infuriating differences between DB flavors, and critically, troubleshooting them. ORMs and cloud DB providers have enabled people to charge ahead without understanding the consequences of their actions, and when latency starts climbing, just scale vertically! Re: Kubernetes, again, managed services and package providers like Helm have made it easy for anyone to spin up a K8s cluster and even successfully run things on it, without having the underlying ability to fix or maintain it when things go awry.
- noasaservice 4y ago
  > and tell me how difficult it is compared to machining + CNCing + welding a metal part. Not to knock machinists-- I've worked on metal machines and I understand why master mechanics make $100k/year. > But I also see why they don't make $200k/year (exception for luxury vehicles)-- there's only so much to learn and only so many dimensions of complexity, especially in terms of continuing education on new technology. I can simplify k8s down to "this is just a bunch of containers that run small pieces of software that talk to each other and autoscale up and down as you tell it to", and naturally that doesn't scratch the surface of what's going on. In 4+ DoF metal manufacture, there's so many things to keep mind of. Basically, those people are metallurgical-based materials scientists. They'd be in charge of helping choose the materials for the application, billet sizes from the ingot factories, QA at all levels, impurity calculations from the ingots, grain structure sizes, can even be radioactivity measurements. And then there's the actual machining process. If you've ever used a 6DoF mill, its nowhere near idiot-proof. And one improperly tightened part = damaged 6DoF head. That's a sad day indeed. And you're not done after the part completes. There's also post-processing all the way on up. And I didn't even discuss metrology - or the study of measurements. Measuring what you're doing is the difference between a passed part and a failed part. And your failures may be caught upstream. And depending on some parts, you may also be doing xray spectroscopy to determine voids and other subsurface defects with the machining type you used. You also mentioned welding. That's its own massive area of tons of failure modes, not all which also can be seen by the naked eye. Or, imagine doing underwater welding in a water tower that sprung a leak because someone shot at it. You're going up with 200 lbs of equipment, including SCUBA gear and thermite or a thermic lance. To be honest, I have it easy. I work remote as systems engineer. I thought about switching to EE if the economy cools. But the "blue collar" (Read: tremendously skilled roles) are looked down on because they mess with physical stuffs. And the EE's do physical but are considered white collar, so they're "more acceptable". But I try to see them as the fellow professionals they truly are. The end of the day, they can hold their stuff and go "I made this". I certainly can't hold up an EC2 and say the same. Doesnt have the same feel.
jollybean 4y ago
This is mostly do to a 'proximity effect'. The close a business or individual is to justifying their salary, the more they are paid. It's why bankers are often paid more than they are worth. This is an industrial effect: 'hardware' is moving to China, because VC doesn't like long business cycles. And so the jobs shift there etc..
dcolkitt 4y ago
If you think that’s bad, just wait until you see what salaries look like for postdocs in theoretical physics. The economy does not reward people for how smart they are, how impressive their credentials are, or how hard their skills were to learn. It rewards people who solve problems. Preferably problems that other rich people have. Many, many, many more rich people have website problems than PCB circuit board problems. Ergo those that can solve website problems make more money. Doing something difficult can be a way to make a lot of money, because it restricts supply and is a competitive moat. But low supply is a winning recipe when coupled with high demand. The supply of string theorists is low, but so is the demand. If you’re going to do something difficult make sure that it’s something that lots of rich people need. For example being a hedge fund quant is a really well paying job because it’s both difficult, and highly in demand because every rich person on the planet wants higher returns on their portfolio.
- smilekzs 4y ago
  Nit: Printed Circuit Board circuit board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  Was going to post almost the exact same thing. Income is, sadly, an exchange of assets and services, not a reward for being good at a thing.
pyuser583 4y ago
My first software engineering job Was creating an internal, CRUD app for a utility company. It allowed tasks to be efficiently given to installers based on their locations. It was a really basic CRUD app, but it increased efficiency dramatically. Insane amounts of value were created. The repairers were experienced professionals. Some had advanced degrees in EE. But that silly little CRUD app made them exponentially more productive. They could have been heart surgeons, astronauts, or anything really.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
With physical products, design is a cost center not a revenue center. They want to pay next to nothing for the design, and then just churn out pieces. You'd think they'd want to pay more for a design that then costs less to manufacture, but it just doesn't work that way. Cheapness all around.
renewiltord 4y ago
Because it's worth nothing in comparison. I'll say the thing others won't: real engineering is about creating value through constraint fitting. Web development is more engineering than this formal engineering. Better constraint fitting. Greater value created. Better engineers. Video game logic leads people to believe hard => valuable. But the real world is different. Valuable => valuable. But that's also kind of gauche to say because it's a bit of punching down. The tradition in society is to say kind things about those who have to work hard and produce little value. "The janitors are the real backbone of America" and so on and so forth. Absent value we must feed them platitudes so that they can clothe themselves in shreds of dignity. Occasionally, though, it's worthwhile to look at the truth. Which is most definitely revealed in our revealed preferences. How much would you spend on this occupation if you started a company?
onion2k 4y ago
Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? What you earn is a function of the complexity of what you do and the value you generate. Web engineers earn a lot because of the second part of the equation.
lordnacho 4y ago
This is basically the water/diamonds question in disguise. You'll find it in any introductory economics textbook: Why does water cost nothing when we all need it, but diamonds cost a fortune when nobody needs it?
znpy 4y ago
> Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? low barrier to entry, high potential impact. also web development is trendy and developers in general will make a lot of fuss about pretty much anything (tabs vs spaces? emacs vs vi? xorg vs wayland, "btw i use arch" is literally a meme) and about money in particular... a lot of company finally give up and accept paying more and then a lot more companies have to follow the trends and pay more.
BlackSwanManZ 4y ago
It's because software engineers don't need capital to do their job, giving them a ton of leverage compared to other engineers. Imagine if you make airplane engines for GE as an ME, and you want a higher salary, who else are you going to go to? There's barely any companies in the country that have the capacity to make airplane engines, so there's less competition for your labor. Your work is probably fairly specialized to, so if you transfered into some other engineering domain, you'd start at entry level salary. Now look at a software engineer working for google, if he wants more there's a dozen companies, in silicon valley, FAANG, wall street that will take his services, he and a few friends can even start their own thing with their laptops and a garage. And skills transfer relatively well between different software engineering jobs. Because software as low entry to barrier and many employers and non specialized skillset, the competent generalist has massive leverage in the labor market. Mr PhD in electric optics, has 3 employers in the country that can give an opportunity to actually use his degree.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >Imagine if you make airplane engines for GE as an ME, and you want a higher salary, who else are you going to go to? There's barely any companies in the country that have the capacity to make airplane engines, so there's less competition for your labor. Sure, but what happens when you decide you're sick of a poor salary, and you learn Python and CS in your spare time and interview for Google and then quit your airplane engine job to make 3x as much working for Google? Where is GE going to get a replacement with your expertise and experience? What happens if all the engineers at GE do this? It seems like the only reason this doesn't happen is because of inertia: the airplane engine engineers just aren't ambitious enough to leave their field for much higher pay. That doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy for a company making a critical component of a globally-important industry however.
  - BlackSwanManZ 4y ago
    Most don't even know that they can leetcode themselves to a way higher salary. And if you got a PhD in something, it's very hard on your ego to leave it behind. Plus the corporate propaganda on taking a paycut to do "cool things" works very well. Look at how many smart people work at SpaceX

by tekla 4y ago

williamcotton 4y ago

> It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? Value is determined by quantitative exchange in a market and not by any intrinsic qualities such as difficulty of labor.

ramesh31 4y ago

Profit margin. It's all profit margin. Software is reliably >25%, where physical manufacturing is in the single digits.

georgeburdell 4y ago
But the question is why? Shouldn’t there be the same race to single digit margins in software as well?
- simmerup 4y ago
  I think you're right. It's my suspicion that eventually software engineers will be paid the same as copy writers and scientists. But not yet.
  - insightcheck 4y ago
    I was initially going to disagree that copywriters get paid in the same range as scientists, but the numbers in the US are roughly similar from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Indeed. -Indeed average copywriter annual pay [0] is $54,998 USD, versus a staff scientist's [1] at $69,091 USD -BLS median copywriter pay for 2021 [2] was $69,510 USD, versus a medical scientist's [3] at $95,310 USD I'm surprised that the median annual salary difference is only roughly $15,000 to $25,000 USD in favor of working as a scientist, considering the additional years doing a Master's/PhD, whereas copywriter jobs often don't need even a Bachelor's. In addition, I would've guessed that the median copywriter salary would have been far lower, as my perception was that there is a far greater supply of candidates for copywriter jobs than scientist jobs in the US (maybe this is offset by fewer scientist positions?). Alternatively, maybe the numbers are missing important contextual information in some way. [0] https://www.indeed.com/career/copywriter/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/copywriter/salaries [1] https://www.indeed.com/career/staff-scientist/salaries https://www.indeed.com/career/staff-scientist/salaries [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-authors.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-... [3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/medical-scientists.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/med...
    - simmerup 4y ago
      The scientists I know see it as almost a vocation. They want the prestige of having their names in journals and the feeling that they're helping advance human knowledge. I can't really blame them... I class it as a bit like development in the way they undervalue their skills so that they can get it. I guess the other side of it is that the people paying scientists really don't know if their grant money will pay off so they want to hedge their bets on costs (eg salaries)
    - t-3 4y ago
      > In addition, I would've guessed that the median copywriter salary would have been far lower, as my perception was that there is a far greater supply of candidates for copywriter jobs than scientist jobs in the US (maybe this is offset by fewer scientist positions?) Probably, but given that ~20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, while ~40% have a college degree, the supplies might not be too different. Reading and writing are also skills which are neither prestigious nor especially lucrative, while scientists of any kind are esteemed pretty highly.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  The distribution cost of selling software is far lower than selling a physical product. For example, to manufacture and sell cars, you currently have to worry about supply chain considerations and chip shortages. You don't need to worry about this to sell software to an interested purchaser.
- atwood22 4y ago
  The marginal cost of software is basically zero. The marginal cost of hardware is high.
- ccorcos 4y ago
  Marginal cost of an additional user is zero. And instant global distribution with the internet. And then there’s the freemium B2B SaaS business model (Slack, Notion) that is just insanely lucrative…
- majormajor 4y ago
  A different answer than everyone else so far: Leverage. Super-simple example: a single developer focused just on internal tools for a 10 person company. Let's say that this company has a full plate, everyone is busy 100% of the time. They can't really bring on new clients. They could hire a new person to do some of the work, but let's say that that new person will cost almost as much as a new client would bring in. Their margins are very tight, they wouldn't be able to expand fast at all, and losing a client would be very perilous. (This is how a lot of small companies work. People getting laid off because a client went away is something I've seen firsthand.) Let's say over the course of a year an engineer could build out enough basic, CRUD-app-style automation to free up 30% of everyone else's time. Now you can get multiple new clients for the cost of one new person! And if you can further automate and reduce the drudgery, even more! (This is also a partial explanation for why the outsourcing, salaries-will-go-to-zero expectations of the early-2000s haven't come to pass: it requires tight communication and a good understand of people's workflows, which is much harder to do across time zone and language barriers. Hardware, on the other hand, needs a firmer spec and less ability to iterate rapidly with rapid communication and feedback.) Of course the real world is more complicated and some of that automation comes from SaaS tools, etc (a less-direct way of paying those engineers, and something that could be more outsourceable in the long run) but a surprising amount of companies still need hands-on internal expertise to glue everything together. Less code tends to result in more code, because now that you and your competitors have gotten more efficient too, you have to get even more efficient to move the needle again. The thing about business processes is that they will always evolve as old companies die, new ones start, and consumers (both individuals and other companies) want different things.
- est31 4y ago
  There will be, but right now software is eating the world (and establishing entire new markets) faster than developer talent enters the market. So prices for developers go up. Eventually this will end, either by the demand curve slowing down, or developer supply meeting demand. Whether it happens within the next 5 or 10, or even 20 years, who knows.
  - dougabug 4y ago
    This saturation of demand for software talent has been predicted for literally decades. In 1992, Ed Yourdon published “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” only to reverse himself four years later with the publication of “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.” If anything, the rate at which capable software professionals can create value has dramatically increased over time. Software is not a zero sum game, cumulative advances make it possible to solve an expanding frontier of problems with increasingly effective and efficient solutions.
    - est31 4y ago
      Frontier is a good term because just as the US frontier age eventually ended, the software frontier expansion is also eventually going to stop.
      - dougabug 4y ago
        I don’t mean frontier as in “the American Western Frontier.” I meant frontier as in, “the frontiers of human knowledge.” It’s not clear to me that the latter is limited in the way that the former is. Creation of knowledge products both facilitates the further production of new knowledge products and expands the scope of new knowledge products which can be created. This process is like a chain reaction where the potential energy unleashed may ultimately exceed any practical scale modern economics has meaningfully considered. Software costs almost nothing to deploy, even on a global scale, versus its potential value delivered; and it can be created or improved with almost no additional consumption of resources vs (the programmer) simply existing.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  The rate of innovation in software is not constrained by capital or physics (and to a lesser extent regulation) to the extent it is in other engineering disciplines, which overweights the importance of individual skill and execution in outcomes. Software isn't an intrinsically high-margin business, but the cost of creating and operating in new high-margin business frontiers is uniquely low, allowing individuals to leave the rapidly commoditizing part of the software business in the rear-view mirror. The margins would be single-digits if the pace of change and innovation possible was like other engineering disciplines. The business of software engineering evolves at an incredible rate that would be unimaginable in the engineering discipline I went to school for.
- olalonde 4y ago
  In a free market, there is such race in every industry. It's just that demand for software is growing too damn fast and supply can't keep up.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Software's network effects make it much easier to construct a "monopoly" which gets to have very large margins. Where you see margins, look for moats.
foobiekr 4y ago
You might want to look at the margins of Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, ...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

As someone in software with an EE background, I think it's simple. There's far more demand for software people compared to the available supply, so pay rates are high. Which job is "harder" has absolutely nothing to do with it. I noticed the trend about 20 years ago when I decided that I'd never again have a job that was mostly hardware design. The money's in software.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
The demand is there. After all, somebody has to be doing the design work for the electronic products out there. In a globalized economy with outsourced production most of the EE work goes to SEA with cheaper labor.
- root_axis 4y ago
  There is simply much more software work to be done than hardware work. Pretty much every company running a real business has some software presence on their staff, whereas the presence of people with an EE background is quite rare by comparison.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Hardware design work is hard, but you usually only have to do it once for any given component or any given product. Most of the parts I use were already well-established in their markets over 10 years ago. (Although whether they'll still be around 10 years from now -- or 1 year for that matter -- is a very different question.) Conversely, a web developer's work is never done. There is always another web site to build. Failing that, someone always wants to do another gratuitous reskin of an existing site, just to keep their users from growing complacent.

Apocryphon 4y ago

> It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? ZIRP, and the VC ecosystem, FAANG stock bubble, EBITDA-creative accounted IPOs, etc. that grew up around it, are a helluva an alphabet soup: > why do companies do mental gymnastics to call themselves a tech company. It’s because venture as an asset class traditionally invested in technology because that is what presented the growth and return characteristics that matched their risk profile. So you try to call a desk rental or mattress seller a tech company. > Then, for the companies that attracted the money had to spend it. Salaries inflate. Cultures change. Consumers are subsidized. Sure, some technology is created, but overall, nothing operates as it would without that thirsty capital. It changes the economics for competitors that do not welcome in the dollars. https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world

Xcelerate 4y ago

I went from chemical engineering into data science, and I wonder this constantly. Everything about chemical engineering was much more difficult (at least what you would be expected to do in a typical job; exceptions apply). I really miss the hard sciences, but I also really do not want to take a 4x pay cut. Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler than specialized ChemE knowledge; supply should have ramped up so quickly that comp would have fallen to typical engineering salaries long ago if that were the case.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
> Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler than specialized ChemE knowledge; supply should have ramped up so quickly that comp would have fallen to typical engineering salaries long ago if that were the case. I would question my assumptions before disputing the function of supply and demand curves.
colinmhayes 4y ago
There aren’t any people over the age of like 35 who started their career in data science. Careers are sticky, people don’t like switching once they’re in one. They’re being trained quickly and I think you’re right, the salary used to be higher than a normal software dev but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
- runnerup 4y ago
  More like no one hires you into a new career after 35. I’m 34 now and it was hell getting into software engineering from chemical engineering even with good project experience and acing leetcode.
  - visarga 4y ago
    I switched from full stack to ML at 38. I was preparing for a few years by doing courses, personal projects and following new papers as they come up. When I got hired there was no issue with the fact that I was self trained - they have been interviewing for 6 months and failing every candidate by then. Soon after I got hired I was myself part of the interviewing committee and saw the hiring situation first hand - most candidates can't program their way out of a shoe or explain how the most commonly used neural net layers work. I mean, I had one who couldn't open a TXT file in 30 minutes, the data file he was supposed to use in the problem.

drewcoo 4y ago

Software is a pure ideas business. You'd be surprised how many people have, sell, and get venture capital for ideas without a huge upfront spend attached just to try something out. Software is the scratch tickets of "engineering."

chrisco255 4y ago
Nice, haven't seen "engineering" elitism since university. Software is the nervous system of a business. Everything from accounting, to payroll, to inventory tracking, to sales, to marketing, to communications, is achieved in today's world by interfacing with dozens if not hundreds of software programs and systems. Impossible to achieve with hardware alone obviously, you need operating systems, you need data centers, need custom dashboards and BI, you need ACH/SWIFT routing interfaces to make payments go through, you need file management, you need chat software to communicate with employees and customers, you need software nearly every step of the way. It's complex as hell. And the complexity of making all those systems work together just compounds that complexity.
- jfim 4y ago
  Most of that is software glue, and not particularly challenging. It's necessary to run a modern company to have this kind of glue to connect systems together, but at the same time EE and ChemE are much more challenging.
  - lumost 4y ago
    Consider that the space shuttle was considered one of the most complex projects in history with around 1 million parts. 1 million loc projects are common, a large tech company like google likely has billions of loc. Putting all of this together sensibly is hard.
    - imgabe 4y ago
      A line of code isn't really equivalent to a physical part of a space shuttle.

antoniuschan99 4y ago

There's a huge demand for Software Developers in every industry in the last few years. Retail, Finance, Marketing, etc. Also, looking at a Marketing Company for example. There would be a ton of need for Software Developers, but generally no need for an electrical engineer.

api 4y ago

If there was tremendous demand for ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well. How hard something is has nothing to do with it. If the current supply and demand stays the way it is eventually things will even out. Programmer salaries will stagnate as more people enter the field and other fields may have salaries go up if there are not enough candidates. This process is very slow though. It’s not a very efficient market due to opaqueness and the fact that people don’t like to change jobs too much. A huge reallocation can take a generation or more.

robocat 4y ago
> ditch diggers in excess of supply, digging ditches would pay very well Only if ditches are valuable enough. Otherwise everyone does without ditches (long drop, sump hole), or find solutions that don’t need ditches (eg wireless or overground cables), or invent new ways of making ditches that are not digging (ditch witch, suction vacs), or other smart workarounds (trenchless water pipe, fibre optic horizontal drilling).

Spooky23 4y ago

Because real engineers become hyper-specialists and get trapped. My one my high school classmates was a mechanical engineer who was one of the top guys for some semiconductor process that failed to scale and got abandoned. Got laid off and was unemployable. He sold herballife to go back to school and is a physical therapist now. It happens in software too. Plenty of sad tales of geezers let go from banks and government who have legacy mainframe or middleware skills.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bumby 4y ago
This doesn’t ring true to me, especially for an ME which is one of the broadest disciplines. I know one who had a BS and has worked in construction on building automation and energy systems, automotive robotics, healthcare as a process engineer, aerospace software, and finally as a data scientist.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  It's probably true but the ME in question chose to go a different route probably because they deep down did not like the job. No doubt they could have retooled their skillset and kept reapplying at various places or move elsewhere if they were inclined.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Some people struggle with reinvention. I tend to branch out every 4-5 years. I think this person thought he had the one true career and had difficulty with reality. Our high school cohort was just old enough to see the end of the “dinosaur” tech company era. This guy was a few years older than me (his younger brother was my age), I think he thought he was retiring with a gold watch or whatever. It seems quaint now, but it was a thing. My dad’s friend was a GE lifer, they moved around the world like they were in the army to the next posting. Today, we’re all more paranoid and mercenary, even govenrment workers jump ship.
raverbashing 4y ago

colinmhayes 4y ago

The most you can get paid is the amount your company thinks it would cost to replace you. The difficulty of your job has absolutely nothing to do with how much you’re paid, other than maybe reducing labor supply a bit. But there are tons of smart people, if the opportunities exist people will come. Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Their options mean that if a company doesn’t want to pay much they’ll work somewhere else. Expert machinists using fancy equipment in a factory don’t really have the same ability to just go to a competitor, so they can’t negotiate a raise.

t-3 4y ago
The machinist actually probably can move around relatively easily (and a good machinist isn't much cheaper than an engineer, if at all). The engineers are going to be both more specialized and less in-demand. They work at a higher level where less people are needed, and due to specialization, can often be contracted out.
yobbo 4y ago
> Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work. Not sure this is reality; or that a meritocracy for webdevs exists. In recent years, it seems the quality of big "prestige brand" websites (not exactly big tech) is declining, to the point of being unusable on mobile browsers or throttled connections. Not because of technical trade-offs, but reliance on frameworks to achieve "demoable effects" instead of real world features or usability. We're more than fifteen years into "ajax" and today's kids simply can't do it without burning 10x the cpu cycles and bandwidth. To me it seems there is a decoupling between the utility of webdevs and their pay, and some sort of market failure is occurring.
- galdosdi 4y ago
  I think this is analogous to and is happening for similar reasons as the airline customer experience gradually went from being very "classy" to increasingly "cheap" all at the same time as the market for air travel expanded tremendously.
4y ago

scruple 4y ago

I left embedded for web in 2014 and I doubled my salary overnight. My experience from embedded translated to an ability to troubleshoot problems that baffled others and has led to a lot of personal career growth that I suspect I wouldn't have otherwise seen. Wish it wasn't like this, because I quite miss what I was doing in that previous life, but it is what it is.

dougmany 4y ago
I have an EE degree and was in embedded for a few years. I kept getting hired for that one problem, then was no longer needed. All the jobs I could find were short term contract work or "Thanks for fixing that, now we don't need you" situations. I still get emails about short term, in office work in the Midwest. I enjoyed the work but I couldn't find stable employment. Embedded worked out to be a good transition to software and then web development though.
joezydeco 4y ago
I'm considering the same. Out of curiosity, did you jump into front end or back end dev?
- scruple 4y ago
  Primarily backend... But I had a 2 year stint as a data engineering lead and then led a ReactJS SPA product development team for 18 months. I'm back to the backend now, though, and I'm very happy with it.

MonkeyClub 4y ago

> compared to people who change colors on a webpage every once in a while. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but that being said... Finally someone said it! Ok, I understand that we’re in some anal-retentive age as humans, where we’re discovering our new digital medium and whatnot, but enough with the fixation on small shiny digital bullshit - it’s robbing us of real depth and wonder. And if it’s reached to the point where real engineering is depreciated, I wonder what carcasses lie ravaged in fields no one looks at until it’s too late. > It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? I think it’s understandable if you explain it using the same reason that mushrooms are clearly the better drug, but cocaine is the more popular one (our dopamine wiring? idk), criss-crossed with an actively pushed economic bubble that’s high on the rise, and will be for a long while.

galangalalgol 4y ago
Not sure that bubble is long for this world. Scarcity called, it said "remember me? Ive been on vacation to everywhere but the west, now I'm back!". What makes shrooms better than coke? Never tried either one, probably not stable enough to risk it, so curious what your valuation criteria are.
- achenet 4y ago
  not the person you're responding to, but I suspect it would be due to life outcomes of both - mushrooms have been shown to help people resolve past trauma and change their habits for the better, whereas cocaine tends to be habit forming and cokeheads are generally pretty unhappy people.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    Yep that’s pretty much what I meant, plus that psychedelics in general have wider dimensions while cocaine is sort of a dumb drug. Not judging, just saying.
Consultant32452 4y ago
Software development is completely abstract and is one of the most difficult things humans do. An average codebase can easily hold millions of lines of code with millions more hidden in libraries that all have to work together. The complexity is incredible really. This post in no way diminishes the complexity of the hard sciences.

WalterBright 4y ago

Because picking the right colors on a website brings in more money.

mbrodersen 4y ago

It’s all about demand and supply. It has nothing to do with how hard/easy anything is. So it actually makes perfect sense. Everybody needs web software. Very few needs hard engineering skills.

airocker 4y ago
There is some correlation if price keeps high for a long duration

david38 4y ago

You are not paid by the difficulty of your work. You are paid according to how much the hiring manager thinks he can replace you for. Sometimes this creates falsely inflated salaries- like when a company insists on hiring Harvard MBAs. Often it creates lower than expected salaries. People forget just how many Asian EEs there are.

boppo1 4y ago

>It makes no sense. Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? Interest rate intervention (making them lower than equilibrium) changed the DCF valuation that is the fundamental way of evaluating business (i.e. people working together on large endeavors) to one where promising massive returns in the future(20+ years) made low returns in the near term (x<20 years) acceptable. Investment dollars chased growth and VC and PE grew. Meanwhile, in order to compete for capital, all businesses focused on delivering value now had to adjust their income statements (try to grow revenue, or more likely cut expenses) as hard as possible to compete with businesses that aren't delivering on much now but seem like they will change everything in the future. Google "DCF Valuation" and model out 100 years in excel. Add a row that divides the PV of each year by the NPV so you can see the % it contributes to the NPV. Then setup a bar chart so you can visually get a vibe for the integral of different time periods. Once that is all setup, try a real simple assumption: 0 growth for CF and .5% for your Risk Free Rate. Then try it at 5%. If the Federal Reserve sticks to its guns and gets rates up, and keeps them there, it will be unsurprising to see "hard" engineering jobs be valuable again, while all the CSS people suddenly can't find two pennies to rub together.

_vdpp 4y ago
I’ve been wondering if SWE pay rates have been artificially high for a while due to easy lending - it will be interesting to see if your prediction comes true. Probably a lot of SW companies out there right now are dependent on discretionary income which puts them at risk in a tough market.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  SWE salaries are also very high because right now it's cheap as hell to run a software company leading to huge returns. Overheads are miniscule. The salaries can take a larger slice of the pie. A lot of people in the comments are talking about how EE work is comparatively much harder. But that's irrelevant. SWEs simply make businesses more money.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

honkycat 4y ago

Nerd trap. It is hard science, and interesting so people are more willing to deal with bullshit to get close to it. Engineering processes are very well developed and therefore less leadership is expected out of the ICs. I mostly troubleshoot this dreadful old C# application these days. At this point, you almost couldn't pay me to do it. And I don't have any better prospects with the great depression 2 coming up

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jpnx 4y ago

I guess this has something to do with a lot of manufacturing having moved to Asia. Here in Germany it is flipped arround. As a software developer in Berlin I can only dream about the salaries I could get as mechanical / electrical engineer in South Germany at one of the big car manufacturers.

antoniuschan99 4y ago
Guess it’s all about supply and demand since Germany is the Mecca for Process Controls and Automation. There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software
- t-3 4y ago
  > There’s like no ecosystem for Hardware in North America. Definitely primarily software Not "in North America". On the coasts, in attractive big cities, sure. The midwest is still full of manufacturing though, and they still hire engineers (but they're going to make $100,000+, not $300,000+ like software devs in CA).
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Perhaps those manufacturing jobs could pay closer to software if the employers were willing to give more equity.
  - antoniuschan99 4y ago
    That Manufacturing is more light and heavy industries though? Like Automotive and the like? When I mean hardware I mean Electronics and PCB - like Apple or Internet Connected Electronics.
    - t-3 4y ago
      There are lots and lots of electronics in automobiles, industrial machinery, and robots. They need engineers of all kinds to design products, processes, equipment, etc.

hellohowareu 4y ago

Supply & Demand (aka Market Economics) dictates pay rate. Not difficulty, danger, or years spent studying challenging topics. Changing a color... that's basic html/css-- that's the lowest pay rung of front end developers, which is the lowest paid occupational field within the occupation of full stack web app engineers. So, you're grossly exaggerating. People who just change colors of a web site might make $15-20/hr in the US. The folks making $150-$200k+ have skills in frontend development, serverside development, databases, plus often things like data engineering or setting up/maintaining cloud computing infrastructure. From there, add in specialty Security knowledge or Machine Learning or highly efficient massively global scale+speed programs, and you'll begin to understand how they're making $400k-$600k+ For example: Go have a look at kubernetes (combined with Docker, Helm, and a Cloud provider + all the various underlying technologies which involve an OS and 2+ programming languages and/or frameworks) and tell me how difficult it is compared to machining + CNCing + welding a metal part. Not to knock machinists-- I've worked on metal machines and I understand why master mechanics make $100k/year. But I also see why they don't make $200k/year (exception for luxury vehicles)-- there's only so much to learn and only so many dimensions of complexity, especially in terms of continuing education on new technology.

sgarland 4y ago
I've met precious few devs of any flavor who understand databases. Not just "how do I write SQL," but actually understand what the query optimizer is doing, minor but infuriating differences between DB flavors, and critically, troubleshooting them. ORMs and cloud DB providers have enabled people to charge ahead without understanding the consequences of their actions, and when latency starts climbing, just scale vertically! Re: Kubernetes, again, managed services and package providers like Helm have made it easy for anyone to spin up a K8s cluster and even successfully run things on it, without having the underlying ability to fix or maintain it when things go awry.
noasaservice 4y ago
> and tell me how difficult it is compared to machining + CNCing + welding a metal part. Not to knock machinists-- I've worked on metal machines and I understand why master mechanics make $100k/year. > But I also see why they don't make $200k/year (exception for luxury vehicles)-- there's only so much to learn and only so many dimensions of complexity, especially in terms of continuing education on new technology. I can simplify k8s down to "this is just a bunch of containers that run small pieces of software that talk to each other and autoscale up and down as you tell it to", and naturally that doesn't scratch the surface of what's going on. In 4+ DoF metal manufacture, there's so many things to keep mind of. Basically, those people are metallurgical-based materials scientists. They'd be in charge of helping choose the materials for the application, billet sizes from the ingot factories, QA at all levels, impurity calculations from the ingots, grain structure sizes, can even be radioactivity measurements. And then there's the actual machining process. If you've ever used a 6DoF mill, its nowhere near idiot-proof. And one improperly tightened part = damaged 6DoF head. That's a sad day indeed. And you're not done after the part completes. There's also post-processing all the way on up. And I didn't even discuss metrology - or the study of measurements. Measuring what you're doing is the difference between a passed part and a failed part. And your failures may be caught upstream. And depending on some parts, you may also be doing xray spectroscopy to determine voids and other subsurface defects with the machining type you used. You also mentioned welding. That's its own massive area of tons of failure modes, not all which also can be seen by the naked eye. Or, imagine doing underwater welding in a water tower that sprung a leak because someone shot at it. You're going up with 200 lbs of equipment, including SCUBA gear and thermite or a thermic lance. To be honest, I have it easy. I work remote as systems engineer. I thought about switching to EE if the economy cools. But the "blue collar" (Read: tremendously skilled roles) are looked down on because they mess with physical stuffs. And the EE's do physical but are considered white collar, so they're "more acceptable". But I try to see them as the fellow professionals they truly are. The end of the day, they can hold their stuff and go "I made this". I certainly can't hold up an EC2 and say the same. Doesnt have the same feel.

jollybean 4y ago

This is mostly do to a 'proximity effect'. The close a business or individual is to justifying their salary, the more they are paid. It's why bankers are often paid more than they are worth. This is an industrial effect: 'hardware' is moving to China, because VC doesn't like long business cycles. And so the jobs shift there etc..

dcolkitt 4y ago

If you think that’s bad, just wait until you see what salaries look like for postdocs in theoretical physics. The economy does not reward people for how smart they are, how impressive their credentials are, or how hard their skills were to learn. It rewards people who solve problems. Preferably problems that other rich people have. Many, many, many more rich people have website problems than PCB circuit board problems. Ergo those that can solve website problems make more money. Doing something difficult can be a way to make a lot of money, because it restricts supply and is a competitive moat. But low supply is a winning recipe when coupled with high demand. The supply of string theorists is low, but so is the demand. If you’re going to do something difficult make sure that it’s something that lots of rich people need. For example being a hedge fund quant is a really well paying job because it’s both difficult, and highly in demand because every rich person on the planet wants higher returns on their portfolio.

smilekzs 4y ago
Nit: Printed Circuit Board circuit board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome
plaguepilled 4y ago
Was going to post almost the exact same thing. Income is, sadly, an exchange of assets and services, not a reward for being good at a thing.

pyuser583 4y ago

My first software engineering job Was creating an internal, CRUD app for a utility company. It allowed tasks to be efficiently given to installers based on their locations. It was a really basic CRUD app, but it increased efficiency dramatically. Insane amounts of value were created. The repairers were experienced professionals. Some had advanced degrees in EE. But that silly little CRUD app made them exponentially more productive. They could have been heart surgeons, astronauts, or anything really.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

With physical products, design is a cost center not a revenue center. They want to pay next to nothing for the design, and then just churn out pieces. You'd think they'd want to pay more for a design that then costs less to manufacture, but it just doesn't work that way. Cheapness all around.

renewiltord 4y ago

Because it's worth nothing in comparison. I'll say the thing others won't: real engineering is about creating value through constraint fitting. Web development is more engineering than this formal engineering. Better constraint fitting. Greater value created. Better engineers. Video game logic leads people to believe hard => valuable. But the real world is different. Valuable => valuable. But that's also kind of gauche to say because it's a bit of punching down. The tradition in society is to say kind things about those who have to work hard and produce little value. "The janitors are the real backbone of America" and so on and so forth. Absent value we must feed them platitudes so that they can clothe themselves in shreds of dignity. Occasionally, though, it's worthwhile to look at the truth. Which is most definitely revealed in our revealed preferences. How much would you spend on this occupation if you started a company?

onion2k 4y ago

Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? What you earn is a function of the complexity of what you do and the value you generate. Web engineers earn a lot because of the second part of the equation.

lordnacho 4y ago

This is basically the water/diamonds question in disguise. You'll find it in any introductory economics textbook: Why does water cost nothing when we all need it, but diamonds cost a fortune when nobody needs it?

znpy 4y ago

> Why is web software so easy to make money in? Why do we value hard engineering so little? low barrier to entry, high potential impact. also web development is trendy and developers in general will make a lot of fuss about pretty much anything (tabs vs spaces? emacs vs vi? xorg vs wayland, "btw i use arch" is literally a meme) and about money in particular... a lot of company finally give up and accept paying more and then a lot more companies have to follow the trends and pay more.

BlackSwanManZ 4y ago

It's because software engineers don't need capital to do their job, giving them a ton of leverage compared to other engineers. Imagine if you make airplane engines for GE as an ME, and you want a higher salary, who else are you going to go to? There's barely any companies in the country that have the capacity to make airplane engines, so there's less competition for your labor. Your work is probably fairly specialized to, so if you transfered into some other engineering domain, you'd start at entry level salary. Now look at a software engineer working for google, if he wants more there's a dozen companies, in silicon valley, FAANG, wall street that will take his services, he and a few friends can even start their own thing with their laptops and a garage. And skills transfer relatively well between different software engineering jobs. Because software as low entry to barrier and many employers and non specialized skillset, the competent generalist has massive leverage in the labor market. Mr PhD in electric optics, has 3 employers in the country that can give an opportunity to actually use his degree.

midoridensha 4y ago
>Imagine if you make airplane engines for GE as an ME, and you want a higher salary, who else are you going to go to? There's barely any companies in the country that have the capacity to make airplane engines, so there's less competition for your labor. Sure, but what happens when you decide you're sick of a poor salary, and you learn Python and CS in your spare time and interview for Google and then quit your airplane engine job to make 3x as much working for Google? Where is GE going to get a replacement with your expertise and experience? What happens if all the engineers at GE do this? It seems like the only reason this doesn't happen is because of inertia: the airplane engine engineers just aren't ambitious enough to leave their field for much higher pay. That doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy for a company making a critical component of a globally-important industry however.
- BlackSwanManZ 4y ago
  Most don't even know that they can leetcode themselves to a way higher salary. And if you got a PhD in something, it's very hard on your ego to leave it behind. Plus the corporate propaganda on taking a paycut to do "cool things" works very well. Look at how many smart people work at SpaceX