11 ms·

It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that

It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer.

kragen 4y ago
Anyone can learn to read and write, but Stephen King and J.K. Rowling still make bank.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.
- jshen 4y ago
  There are not more than enough decent developers.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick. I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here. I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.
  - est31 4y ago
    I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
    - askafriend 4y ago
      There is a difference between building a react app for your local bakery and building Facebook.com to scale. The experience in scaling products that big and that fast is concentrated and not evenly distributed.
      - pedrosorio 4y ago
        The average SV developer knows nothing about building Facebook.com to scale. More precisely, the number of people who were there when "scaling products that big and that fast" applied to Facebook (or other comparable companies) is a tiny fraction of all SV developers.
      - est31 4y ago
        You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them. But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good people from outside the US who don't make 250k+ total comp in basically any benchmark. Most SV employees never have to solve these problems. I picked frontend intentionally because it's probably the area that's the furthest away from these problems, but still compensated at 250k+ levels, if you work in SV for the right employers. But even among backend engineers, most have never touched hard to parallelize problems. I'd argue that most (definitely not all) FAANG backend tasks are easily scalable. Implementing them still takes work, whch is done by most FAANG engineers. FAANG level tooling definitely helps, and while developing that tooling is hard, the people who have built such tooling are only a tiny subset of FAANG employees (regardless whether they are more skilled than the average FAANG employee or not).
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
    - bumblebritches5 4y ago
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      And yet, I show up at a company as a consultant and in two weeks I singlehandedly take care of something ten people have been struggling with for a year
      - dghlsakjg 4y ago
        Has it occurred to you that hiring a consultant is, by definition, an unusual situation? That, perhaps, you have never had to come in and save any team at my company, or thousands of other companies, because we are competent developers? Being able to do the work of 10 people once, does not mean that you are able to take 10 people from any company outside of a specific geographic area and replace them with one of you.
      - 88 4y ago
        Have you considered that a consultant hired to fix a specific problem, and salaried employees seeking to justify their existence, may have slightly misaligned incentives?
- RestlessMind 4y ago
  If you know "more than enough" decent developers, you can make a great business connecting them to prospective employers.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    Who will then fuck up the interview process and then return to complaining that there are no decent developers. There isn't a lack of them, there's a lack of being able to identify them.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Thanks for this. It's not just the interview process either, it's the entire industry which works against utilizing decent developers. If we really needed more decent developers, we've got thousands of companies pushing them into management, obtuse hiring practices and wades of middlemen to account for.
- lysergia 4y ago
  Small startups need to be poaching ‘Big Boys’ employees, not the other way round. I see many boutique shops offering (nearly) the same pay, and poaching from FAANG+M (The M is Micro$oft)
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    They have to because that's the status quo now. Go back a few decades and ask yourself who started this trend. If paying 250k+ for a developer is insane, then so is a company able to pay 250k+ without running huge losses. Those developers still make peanuts compared to what the stakeholders and executives do, despite these salaries. It's ignoring the elephant in the room which is fat profits being with a few companies, subsequently making it tougher to compete for anyone not born in wealth or able to get VC money to play with. SV could both bankrupt dozens of companies outside SV, slash that 250k locally and up to ante globally if it had a mentality shift, in less than a few years. That's how insane the profits are.
jahnu 4y ago
It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.
- washbrain 4y ago
  100k - accounting for pay, benefits, office space, training, hiring, computing equipment, support services (hr, etc)? In the States, those things can exceed the salary cost of the engineer.
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Plus if you are US based communicating in real time with Europe is a pain. And many EU countries have strict labor laws that limit working hours. Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports.
  - guiriduro 4y ago
    > Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports. Should be outsourcing at the programme or project level, not hiring employees to add to US teams, then.
    - justinlloyd 4y ago
      Well then we should just keep moving Eastwards from California until we find the cheapest teams we can and outsource to those, right? Let me know how that works out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Hire Canadians. Currency conversion advantage. Same time zones. Same language. Mostly same culture. Very well educated. Cheaper health care benefits. And $150k USD is a generous compensation level, and $250USD is about what a Canadian Googler @ L4 gets paid. $100-$125k USD gets you reasonable non-senior talent.
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  Canadian here, and this checks out. I think the reason this isn't more popular is that our talent pool is small enough that unless you already have a Canadian presence it's not really worth opening up a business unit/office/whatever here. Obviously some big players have done it (MS, Amazon, EA) but if you're a medium sized company it may not be worth it. I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Yep I had a job offer fall through after several months of verbal offering & negotiation because the company was acquired and the new parent company had logistical problems hiring Canadians. Though mostly due to their own incompetence, it sounds like (their employer of record situation was charging insane overhead for Canadians). So I'm also working as a contractor for a US (well, international remote but US incorporation I guess) company right now. And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. Also a bit of a bummer that CRA has tightened up incorporation stuff a bit since the last time I did this. Given I have a single client only right now, I'll just be doing sole proprietorship.
    - ska 4y ago
      > And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. The idea is you scale your rate to include enough for a benefits package. Or they use a POE/EOR service, that's possible in Canada I think. Either way, incorporation still has some advantages, one being that you time shift your pay as needed. It can make it easier to subcontract people too. And it's easy, and only costs a few hundred dollars.
ransom1538 4y ago
You literally can go on indeed.com and check for "$250-500K/yr for a single developer". It. Does. Not. Exist. Yes there are a few at FAANG that do make this, but this isn't the current market.
- dixie_land 4y ago
  Google level (L3/4/5 etc) * 100k is a very realistic expectation for TC. At L7 or above double that number too. Source: recent offers and friends who recently got offers
  - happyopossum 4y ago
    Yeah, not really - L3 and L4 are entry level roles, for folks just out of college. No FAANG is paying a newb college grad $400k/yr. Either your friends didn’t understand the comp plan and how equity is paid out, or they were BSing you.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      Amazon was hiring 5-6 years ago at $160+150 (if you negotiated) for newly grads
    - haliskerbas 4y ago
      In a bull market it’s pretty easy to clear the 3xx/4xx in a single year in those levels at competitive companies. I know many folks who have done so.
      - EddySchauHai 4y ago
        > pretty easy It's not "easy" to achieve this, but it might be possible. One doesn't just wake up and decide to go work at a FAANG and get a >90% percentile salary from them for the level.
    - dixie_land 4y ago
      nope, just cash + RSU / yr. e.g. Amazon was giving out SDE II (google L4 equivlant) @ 400k (first year no RSU but cash bonus paid out monthly) about 2 months ago. re L3 level, if you have a master's or 1+ yr exp, while you're still at the entry level, you are considered "industrial hire" and 300 is very attainable in my current company for new hires (again justed to google's leveling) we have L5 550+ and L6 650+ (200~300 cash + RSU , not pre-IPO bs) In my earlier years I used to doubt those "ridiculous" numbers until I simply asked for more. There are plenty of companies out there, many medium-big sized non-FAANG companies pay just as well.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer. While I think the premise is wrong - not anyone can learn to code - there are also levels of "learn to code" so it's simpler to spin up a create-react-app and modify it a bit for a code school credit compared to advanced Scala - it's also true that learning to code is nowhere near the hardest part of software engineering productivity.
jshen 4y ago
The thing people miss, demand for software is infinite, so demand for software developers will increase to match any increase in supply.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Demand for pretty much anything is infinite, if you assume a price of 0. So in reality we almost always end up with a non zero price where supply equals demand.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    This most certainly is not true. There are plenty of free things that don’t result in 100% consumption. Demand is based on peoples needs and preferences, not on how much is out there already. Think about libraries as an example.
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Agreed. That's why I wrote "pretty much". My go to example is oxygen. There is more than enough of it for everyone, so there is no possibility/need to charge money for it.
      - mym1990 4y ago
        Oxygen is definitely still monetized. Think about the canisters or the tanks that people use to go into high altitude environments. Hell, even in Denver or Aspen or Telluride you can go to an 'oxygen bar' for absurd prices. Hospitals will put you on oxygen and then bill you thousands for the service. Beyond that, I have no doubt that there are some people who would willingly charge everyone for oxygen, if there was only a way. This would be driven by the idea that even though there is plenty in the atmosphere, a person only needs to be deprived of it for a little while before the situation becomes dire.
  - jshen 4y ago
    I hear you, I think software is different because it has very few physical constraints. My appetite for food is not infinite, I can only eat so much. Same, but less so, for cars, clothes, etc. in some abstract sense, maybe, there are people that want 100 cars, but not really. Even with housing, demand is not really infinite. I don’t want to redo my kitchen every year. But software, every company has a backlog far longer than they will ever be able to do, and the ROI is there for the most part.
pharmakom 4y ago
I think software engineering is actually quite difficult. If it feels easy it’s probably because you’ve been at it for a while. This severely constrains supply but demand is huge because even at high cost, software automation can deliver big returns for a company.
philipov 4y ago
Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn to write a decent essay. Not everyone can become a professional author.
rileyphone 4y ago
Learning programming is throwing yourself at a wall until you figure it out, a natural gatekeeping force that is exacerbated by the unfriendliness and complexity of development environments. An intentionally designed tool and system could enable far more developers at reasonable yet respectable salaries.
randomdata 4y ago
Anyone can learn to code. However, few want to and even fewer want to pursue it as a career.
jorblumesea 4y ago
Google's definition of "decent developer" is probably top 5-10% of the industry. At least historically, this has been the case. No one actually believes "anyone can code" when you're at faang level of talent.
wickedsickeune 4y ago
I do believe that everyone should learn to code, but not be a professional software dev. They are vastly different things. Coding can be just automating a task to reduce the human factor or making it more frictionless, with throwaway code of 100 lines.

kragen 4y ago

Anyone can learn to read and write, but Stephen King and J.K. Rowling still make bank.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

You're projecting a very specific SV bubble. More than enough decent developers exist outside of it, willing to work for a fraction. It's the fat profits and the big boys' eagerness to poach talent that got us this far, which subsequently inflated the QoL in these tech hubs, in turn creating the current standard.

jshen 4y ago
There are not more than enough decent developers.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
Yeah, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I or most silicon valley coders making 250k+ can singlehandedly outperform a dozen "decent developers" by pretty much any metric you can pick. I'm not saying we're smarter or innately better, but coding is a tradeskill and the masters of the trade are almost all here. I'm interested to see how much this changes over the next decade, though, since a lot of people have scattered across the globe thanks to remote work finally catching on.
- est31 4y ago
  I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not because you are more skilled but because your company makes way more money, or is expected to make more money and thus gets funding from rich people. The company makes way more money because of a lot of reasons, e.g. like access to the enormous US single market which is way bigger and more homogenic than the EU single market, or any other market out there except for maybe the chinese one, as well as historic reasons that turned SV into the western world's digital innovation center, and thus turned a lot of funding attention into SV.
  - askafriend 4y ago
    There is a difference between building a react app for your local bakery and building Facebook.com to scale. The experience in scaling products that big and that fast is concentrated and not evenly distributed.
    - pedrosorio 4y ago
      The average SV developer knows nothing about building Facebook.com to scale. More precisely, the number of people who were there when "scaling products that big and that fast" applied to Facebook (or other comparable companies) is a tiny fraction of all SV developers.
    - est31 4y ago
      You are right that in backend, at FAANG scale, you face some unique challenges that smaller shops don't face. And of course, unless you work at FAANG scale, you haven't faced these problems so you haven't learned know how to solve them, so you will lose if you compete with people who know how to solve them. But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good people from outside the US who don't make 250k+ total comp in basically any benchmark. Most SV employees never have to solve these problems. I picked frontend intentionally because it's probably the area that's the furthest away from these problems, but still compensated at 250k+ levels, if you work in SV for the right employers. But even among backend engineers, most have never touched hard to parallelize problems. I'd argue that most (definitely not all) FAANG backend tasks are easily scalable. Implementing them still takes work, whch is done by most FAANG engineers. FAANG level tooling definitely helps, and while developing that tooling is hard, the people who have built such tooling are only a tiny subset of FAANG employees (regardless whether they are more skilled than the average FAANG employee or not).
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
  - bumblebritches5 4y ago
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    And yet, I show up at a company as a consultant and in two weeks I singlehandedly take care of something ten people have been struggling with for a year
    - dghlsakjg 4y ago
      Has it occurred to you that hiring a consultant is, by definition, an unusual situation? That, perhaps, you have never had to come in and save any team at my company, or thousands of other companies, because we are competent developers? Being able to do the work of 10 people once, does not mean that you are able to take 10 people from any company outside of a specific geographic area and replace them with one of you.
    - 88 4y ago
      Have you considered that a consultant hired to fix a specific problem, and salaried employees seeking to justify their existence, may have slightly misaligned incentives?
RestlessMind 4y ago
If you know "more than enough" decent developers, you can make a great business connecting them to prospective employers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Who will then fuck up the interview process and then return to complaining that there are no decent developers. There isn't a lack of them, there's a lack of being able to identify them.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Thanks for this. It's not just the interview process either, it's the entire industry which works against utilizing decent developers. If we really needed more decent developers, we've got thousands of companies pushing them into management, obtuse hiring practices and wades of middlemen to account for.
lysergia 4y ago
Small startups need to be poaching ‘Big Boys’ employees, not the other way round. I see many boutique shops offering (nearly) the same pay, and poaching from FAANG+M (The M is Micro$oft)
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  They have to because that's the status quo now. Go back a few decades and ask yourself who started this trend. If paying 250k+ for a developer is insane, then so is a company able to pay 250k+ without running huge losses. Those developers still make peanuts compared to what the stakeholders and executives do, despite these salaries. It's ignoring the elephant in the room which is fat profits being with a few companies, subsequently making it tougher to compete for anyone not born in wealth or able to get VC money to play with. SV could both bankrupt dozens of companies outside SV, slash that 250k locally and up to ante globally if it had a mentality shift, in less than a few years. That's how insane the profits are.

jahnu 4y ago

It doesn’t have to cost that. You probably can hire people remotely. E.g. Almost nobody in the EU will cost you that much. Most good devs are less than €100k total cost.

washbrain 4y ago
100k - accounting for pay, benefits, office space, training, hiring, computing equipment, support services (hr, etc)? In the States, those things can exceed the salary cost of the engineer.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  Plus if you are US based communicating in real time with Europe is a pain. And many EU countries have strict labor laws that limit working hours. Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports.
- guiriduro 4y ago
  > Managers don’t want to have to get up at 6am just to meet their reports. Should be outsourcing at the programme or project level, not hiring employees to add to US teams, then.
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    Well then we should just keep moving Eastwards from California until we find the cheapest teams we can and outsource to those, right? Let me know how that works out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Hire Canadians. Currency conversion advantage. Same time zones. Same language. Mostly same culture. Very well educated. Cheaper health care benefits. And $150k USD is a generous compensation level, and $250USD is about what a Canadian Googler @ L4 gets paid. $100-$125k USD gets you reasonable non-senior talent.

seabrookmx 4y ago
Canadian here, and this checks out. I think the reason this isn't more popular is that our talent pool is small enough that unless you already have a Canadian presence it's not really worth opening up a business unit/office/whatever here. Obviously some big players have done it (MS, Amazon, EA) but if you're a medium sized company it may not be worth it. I work for a US company but I'm a contractor for this reason. It works for me but if you don't have extended health through your partner or don't want to deal with the tax implications of being "self employed", it can be less attractive.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Yep I had a job offer fall through after several months of verbal offering & negotiation because the company was acquired and the new parent company had logistical problems hiring Canadians. Though mostly due to their own incompetence, it sounds like (their employer of record situation was charging insane overhead for Canadians). So I'm also working as a contractor for a US (well, international remote but US incorporation I guess) company right now. And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. Also a bit of a bummer that CRA has tightened up incorporation stuff a bit since the last time I did this. Given I have a single client only right now, I'll just be doing sole proprietorship.
  - ska 4y ago
    > And, yeah, no benefits isn't great. But I have also found that paying out of pocket for dental, etc. is better than buying a plan for myself. The idea is you scale your rate to include enough for a benefits package. Or they use a POE/EOR service, that's possible in Canada I think. Either way, incorporation still has some advantages, one being that you time shift your pay as needed. It can make it easier to subcontract people too. And it's easy, and only costs a few hundred dollars.

ransom1538 4y ago

You literally can go on indeed.com and check for "$250-500K/yr for a single developer". It. Does. Not. Exist. Yes there are a few at FAANG that do make this, but this isn't the current market.

dixie_land 4y ago
Google level (L3/4/5 etc) * 100k is a very realistic expectation for TC. At L7 or above double that number too. Source: recent offers and friends who recently got offers
- happyopossum 4y ago
  Yeah, not really - L3 and L4 are entry level roles, for folks just out of college. No FAANG is paying a newb college grad $400k/yr. Either your friends didn’t understand the comp plan and how equity is paid out, or they were BSing you.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Amazon was hiring 5-6 years ago at $160+150 (if you negotiated) for newly grads
  - haliskerbas 4y ago
    In a bull market it’s pretty easy to clear the 3xx/4xx in a single year in those levels at competitive companies. I know many folks who have done so.
    - EddySchauHai 4y ago
      > pretty easy It's not "easy" to achieve this, but it might be possible. One doesn't just wake up and decide to go work at a FAANG and get a >90% percentile salary from them for the level.
  - dixie_land 4y ago
    nope, just cash + RSU / yr. e.g. Amazon was giving out SDE II (google L4 equivlant) @ 400k (first year no RSU but cash bonus paid out monthly) about 2 months ago. re L3 level, if you have a master's or 1+ yr exp, while you're still at the entry level, you are considered "industrial hire" and 300 is very attainable in my current company for new hires (again justed to google's leveling) we have L5 550+ and L6 650+ (200~300 cash + RSU , not pre-IPO bs) In my earlier years I used to doubt those "ridiculous" numbers until I simply asked for more. There are plenty of companies out there, many medium-big sized non-FAANG companies pay just as well.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> It's kind of insane that on the one hand we have folks playing lip service to "anyone can learn to code" and on the other, decent developers being so rare that to hire one you need to offer compensation equal to winning a minor lottery for just 2-4 years worth of work. I wonder how much more software would get written if it didn't cost $250-500K/yr for a single developer. While I think the premise is wrong - not anyone can learn to code - there are also levels of "learn to code" so it's simpler to spin up a create-react-app and modify it a bit for a code school credit compared to advanced Scala - it's also true that learning to code is nowhere near the hardest part of software engineering productivity.

jshen 4y ago

The thing people miss, demand for software is infinite, so demand for software developers will increase to match any increase in supply.

BurningFrog 4y ago
Demand for pretty much anything is infinite, if you assume a price of 0. So in reality we almost always end up with a non zero price where supply equals demand.
- mym1990 4y ago
  This most certainly is not true. There are plenty of free things that don’t result in 100% consumption. Demand is based on peoples needs and preferences, not on how much is out there already. Think about libraries as an example.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Agreed. That's why I wrote "pretty much". My go to example is oxygen. There is more than enough of it for everyone, so there is no possibility/need to charge money for it.
    - mym1990 4y ago
      Oxygen is definitely still monetized. Think about the canisters or the tanks that people use to go into high altitude environments. Hell, even in Denver or Aspen or Telluride you can go to an 'oxygen bar' for absurd prices. Hospitals will put you on oxygen and then bill you thousands for the service. Beyond that, I have no doubt that there are some people who would willingly charge everyone for oxygen, if there was only a way. This would be driven by the idea that even though there is plenty in the atmosphere, a person only needs to be deprived of it for a little while before the situation becomes dire.
- jshen 4y ago
  I hear you, I think software is different because it has very few physical constraints. My appetite for food is not infinite, I can only eat so much. Same, but less so, for cars, clothes, etc. in some abstract sense, maybe, there are people that want 100 cars, but not really. Even with housing, demand is not really infinite. I don’t want to redo my kitchen every year. But software, every company has a backlog far longer than they will ever be able to do, and the ROI is there for the most part.

pharmakom 4y ago

I think software engineering is actually quite difficult. If it feels easy it’s probably because you’ve been at it for a while. This severely constrains supply but demand is huge because even at high cost, software automation can deliver big returns for a company.

philipov 4y ago

Anyone can learn to code, just like anyone can learn to write a decent essay. Not everyone can become a professional author.

rileyphone 4y ago

Learning programming is throwing yourself at a wall until you figure it out, a natural gatekeeping force that is exacerbated by the unfriendliness and complexity of development environments. An intentionally designed tool and system could enable far more developers at reasonable yet respectable salaries.

randomdata 4y ago

Anyone can learn to code. However, few want to and even fewer want to pursue it as a career.

jorblumesea 4y ago

Google's definition of "decent developer" is probably top 5-10% of the industry. At least historically, this has been the case. No one actually believes "anyone can code" when you're at faang level of talent.

wickedsickeune 4y ago

I do believe that everyone should learn to code, but not be a professional software dev. They are vastly different things. Coding can be just automating a task to reduce the human factor or making it more frictionless, with throwaway code of 100 lines.