14 ms·

Programmers should plan for lower pay (2019)

• yumindev 4y ago
  we are still hiring and it's hard to find a suitable candidate who is willing to take the offer and join our company.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Sebguer 4y ago
  Have people ever stopped saying this, since the first tech bubble?
  • MarkMarine 4y ago
    Nope. But I suppose if you say it enough people think we’ll believe it. Not sure what it is today, but a company like Microsoft was making somewhere around a million dollars a year per employee, and obviously those aren’t all software engineers, but it put into stark relief how much those software engineers are actually making vs. the value they create.
  • ellisv 4y ago
    Tech bloggers and pundits have predicted 12 of the last 3 bubbles.
• londons_explore 4y ago
  [2018]
• chrsig 4y ago
  should have a [2019] on it
  • dang 4y ago
    Thanks! Year added by a volunteer year editor. If anyone else would like to be a volunteer year editor, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
• imglorp 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/nab8U https://archive.ph/nab8U
• bigtoe416 4y ago
  I’ve seen entry-level McDonald’s jobs paying $20, surely a programmer that can automate countless things is worth 5x that ($208k annually)
  • myth_drannon 4y ago
    They pay that much because it's very difficult to find local employees to work for McDonalds, you can hire hordes of great developers for half that salary in India or LATAM.
    • throwaway675309 4y ago
      Oh yeah? they pay US$20 an hour at a local fast food equivalent in India?
      • 8note 4y ago
        McDonald's is location dependent. The people you hire actually have to be able to show up
• kodah 4y ago
  > Programmers are paid surprisingly well given how much work it is to become one This is really only true in parts of the US and within specific domains of programming. Parts of the US and domains that Jeff has continually worked in. Anecdotally, when I was working as a programmer in Dallas my take home wasn't near what it is in the Valley, but I do the exact same thing out here and make 3-4x what I did there. There's some class-bias going on, in that companies in the Valley somehow justify subsidizing home prices with salary and stock despite Valley programmers being no better than any other programmer. Some other part of that has to do with companies inability to embrace remote work and satellite offices being expensive to build and expensive to coordinate work. There's also some unfairness that has to do with intentionally putting lots of programmers in one spot and having a lower order of them that can accomplish the hard things. That's to say, not all programming jobs are overpaid, but if you got paid $600k+ (I know, an arbitrary number), then yeah, you probably shouldn't plan for the skies to be so sunny forever with the particular domain that you got that pay in. > Specifically, I'd recommend living on a small portion of your income and saving a multiple of your living expenses. This I think is just very good general life advice. Never plan for eternal sunny skies.
  • ip26 4y ago
    It makes the most sense to me as multiple distinct labor markets. It’s easy to find skilled programmers in the Silicon Valley labor market, so that’s where a lot of hiring happens even if the prices are higher. Equally talented programmers can be found in other markets, but it’s more difficult to locate them. Part of why it persists is because the gravitational pull of Silicon Valley became self sustaining. Programmers move to that market because that is where the hiring happens. The hiring happens there because all the programmers move there. I don’t live there, but that’s how I make sense of it all. It’s the same reason I shop at Target instead of Amazon despite higher prices.
  • maximus-decimus 4y ago
    > Specifically, I'd recommend living on a small portion of your income and saving a multiple of your living expenses. General life advice? This implies everybody should save at least 66.6% of their post-tax salary.
• civicsquid 4y ago
  archive.org mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20221105194440/https://www.jefftk.com/p/programmers-should-plan-for-lower-pay https://web.archive.org/web/20221105194440/https://www.jefft... Additionally I'll note this is an article from 2019. Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904070
  • dang 4y ago
    Thanks! Macroexpanded: Programmers Should Plan for Lower Pay? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904070 - Dec 2019 (492 comments)
• ben_w 4y ago
  And this was written before GPT-3 etc. started producing… well, it's not amazing code, but I've certainly seen worse from professionals. I was expecting programming (from natural language instructions) to be the last job that gets automated. Some of us and our jobs may yet survive to the final stage of automation, but I think the minimum bar for skill is rising, even if the market hasn't priced that in yet. For those of us that remain in the sector, things could go either way; but for new grads? I remember a few years ago a story about software solutions in law that were automating the jobs that taught fresh law graduates how to be good at law, and I think even the current state of generative language models is sufficient to replace many fresh graduates in software.
  • ResearchCode 4y ago
    Copilot hardly replaces a human. It might replace making a Github search manually.
    • undoware 4y ago
      in 2015, Deep Dream hardly replaced artists. Five years later, and Imagen/Dall-E/SD are on the cusp of blowing up the entire field. Sure, the celebrity artists will be fine, but the twenty-somethings who took out 90K of debt to attend SAIC are in for a miserable five decades. Coding, like illustration, will evolve, or die, or both.
      • ResearchCode 4y ago
        In 2015, fully autonomous driving was a year away. We will see. Though I don't mind copilot automating simpler plumbing tasks personally. To replace human programmers, it'd have to replace mathematicians first.
        • ben_w 4y ago
          Perhaps (though I'm not as certain as you about sequencing) but my original claim was about junior devs, not all devs. How do fully autonomous driving AI compare to the motor vehicle accident rate of teenagers with less than 6 months experience?
• _fat_santa 4y ago
  One of the things that I think is unique about programming is unlike being a lawyer or a doctor, the difficulty of programming is not "front loaded" and lies beneath the surface, not easily visible to the average person. It's easy to see why a doctor gets paid so much after you see the brutal hours they put into residency, the difficulty of becoming a doctor is out there for everyone to see in the form of med-school and residency programs. It's different with programming because on the surface level it just looks like guys playing on the computer all day, to the average onlooker it doesn't seem that difficult. But most of that difficulty is hidden under the surface. It might be easy to become a programmer, but to get to the level where you are an Senior SWE making what doctors make will take you quite some time and effort. While I wouldn't put programming on the same difficulty scale as becoming a doctor, I think it would be far to say it's about as hard becoming a Senior SWE (in terms of years of experience required) as it is going through law school.
  • woodruffw 4y ago
    > unlike being a lawyer or a doctor, the difficulty of programming is not "front loaded" and lies beneath the surface, not easily visible to the average person. I think this is very much like those professions, especially law. Lots of people think they can be their own medical professional or lawyer, to inconsistent (at best) results.
  • WWLink 4y ago
    Not to mention with exceptions - a good programmer in my particular niche is someone who probably spent YEARS fucking around with embedded devices and Linux machines. Most of the hardcore nerdy types had at least 10 years of experience with the technology they're working on before they even graduated college. It's not impossible to do the same in medicine or law....
  • JamesianP 4y ago
    As the article said it's a cartel limiting entry into medicine. The cartel places an artificial barrier in terms of a giant hurdle requiring uncompromising quality. Much like the FAANG interview process limiting who they hire, (and thereby inflicting the need to pay high salaries upon themselves). Just south of the border doctors make a fraction as much. Perhaps the quality can't compete in certain areas like the ICU, but I'd also bet their care is fine for most things. But overall there's no cartel that can stop salary arbitrage for programming. Variants of IT/Engineering are most of the top majors in India, and they don't need to immigrate here to be hired, though whatever cartels do exist in tech are working hard to help programmers do so.
• popotamonga 4y ago
  Bad prediction i guess? Since 2019 my pay has gone up by triple digit %, at the age of 45.
  • M4v3R 4y ago
    The article didn't explicitly talk about near future, even from his advice (that you should save several years worth of your expenses) you can see that it's something for the long-term. Ironically, reading what you just wrote ("Since 2019 my pay has gone up by triple digit %") and considering that it's the same case for me - we should probably ask ourselves - is that kind of growth healthy, and can it be sustained? While I obviously do enjoy the benefits of it, I have to say that I'm afraid the answer to both of these questions is "no". The only question that remains is when it will stop and collapse.
    • popotamonga 4y ago
      Fair point. I actually never expected to make this kind of money so i'm just buying real estate for a rainy day.
• zug_zug 4y ago
  Eh, I'm not particularly convinced. I'll buy that being a Lawyer/Doctor are overpopulated professions and offer terrible ROI on investment comparatively. But I get the impression most of us could do blue collar jobs for less hours, less stress, and still pull 6 figures. I would love to have an auto-mechanic who was as organized and pragmatic as a top software engineer. The person switching my sink is going to be getting paid at least $100 an hour.
• z9znz 4y ago
  Nah, sorry. Like it or not, virtually every aspect of life now is dependent on software. A CEO without developers is nothing. A manager without developers is nothing. In fact, I would argue that we are paid comparatively more than other careers because to be successful in our work we must take the confused requests or requirements we are given and make sense of them, make them fit into the actual business need, and then execute on that improved understanding. Some might point at recent articles about developers who do little and get paid a lot, but that is not as much an argument against paying developers well as it is evidence that most management is poor. Bad or underperforming developers would not have jobs if management had adequate supervisory and leadership skills. Regarding lawyers (TFA), one does not need to go to an Ivy League school and land in a top firm to make bank. There are many small firms doing big business. One must just do reasonably well and get lucky with connections along the way. Of course hard work is required, but the same is true of many software developers. The difference is, there's rarely a path to becoming a partner or owner of the firm if you're a developer; but there often is if you are an attorney. I think given what I know now, I might trade with my good friend who makes 8 figures per year doing "boring" (reliable, methodical, and predictable) contract law.
  • endisneigh 4y ago
    > Like it or not, virtually every aspect of life now is dependent on software. A CEO without developers is nothing. A manager without developers is nothing. Lol this is not true at all. Maybe if you replace developers with employees
    • z9znz 4y ago
      Every employee of every modern company is dependent upon software built by developers of that company or integrated/managed by developers. Most of the productivity gains of the last 20 years can be attributed to software, and the only employees writing software are software developers.
      • yummypaint 4y ago
        This seems like saying that because all modern businesses depend on electricity, working in the utilities sector will always be lucrative. It's true that developers are necessary, but it doesn't mean they are important, or that they will always be in high demand.
• svnpenn 4y ago
  [2017]
• eagsalazar2 4y ago
  I think this is the year this finally comes to pass. The US demand for devs has grown so much faster than our own ability to supply that demand, even with bootcamps and exploding CS dept sizes, that this hasn't been an issue. But if that demand is met somehow, things will change. 10 years ago Asia tried to supply that demand but for a variety of reasons it didn't really work. 5 years ago it was eastern Europe and it worked a lot better, but still companies that wanted the best team environment possible wanted people in the US and since many had the money to pay for it, demand remained above supply. Now South America is taking their turn and I think they can actually finally pull off being an outsource or remote-office option that has very few downsides and the enormous upside of being 1/5th the cost. Combine that with everyone going remote, removing the last of the two big differentiator between US and offshore employees (timezone and being on site), and I think in the midsts of these layoffs we're going to see a shift of a lot of that work to SA. Unless demand continues to explode, outstripping even the supply of SA, I think we should all expect lower wages and fewer jobs in the coming years.
  • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    I used to be in the camp "let's outsource it" and I found out, it is not working. Code which you get is mostly useless and needs to be integrated into whole solution and you are potentially letting others to stole your IP and sell it to somebody else.
    • eagsalazar2 4y ago
      Just because it didn't work for you once doesn't mean it can't work. I know of many US companies using Eastern European and south American people very successfully and getting high quality contributions.
    • nootropicat 4y ago
      From all anecdotal reports of 'not working' I noticed all think of outsourcing as something they contract a middleman foreign company for, rather than hire individual remote developers. That company then hires locally. Then they wonder why it doesn't work. That's because no good local dev wants to work for an outsourcing company like that.
• ativzzz 4y ago
  > What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well I understand why developers are paid this well. The marginal cost of software is (close enough to) zero [0]. This means that once you make software once, you can sell it infinitely - minus some scaling costs, hence being close enough. We don't pay people based on how hard they work. If we did, stay at home parents would be filthy rich. Sure the very very top end pay will fluctuate depending on stock market conditions since those include a significant portion of equity, but the reality is programmers deliver expensive products that businesses can sell easily that pretty much everyone wants. Trends will come and go, but making high quality tech products will continue to be profitable in my lifetime (barring WW3) and thus programmer salaries will stay high. [0] https://ckluis.com/the-marginal-cost-of-software-approaches-zero-7fda166f219f https://ckluis.com/the-marginal-cost-of-software-approaches-...
  • eagsalazar2 4y ago
    I can probably afford to pay 200% of what I currently pay to go out to dinner, but I don't because there is sufficient supply and competition. The lack of supply is why you are paid more, not because startups are rich.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      It is both. A buyer needs to have the funds to be able to pay.
    • shrimpx 4y ago
      > The lack of supply is why you are paid more, not because startups are rich. It's both. If software companies were poorer across the board, without changing the supply/demand ratio, salaries would be lower.
      • randomdata 4y ago
        If the supply/demand ratio stayed the same, salaries couldn’t go lower. But you are right that if software companies were poorer that there would be a necessary reduction in demand.
• saddd 4y ago
  I wish articles like this would reference the antitrust lawsuit over collusion to artificially keep software engineer salaries low in the 2000s. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-google-settle-antitrust-lawsuit-hiring-collusion https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo... I also don't see any references to scale. Your labor can impact the lives of x people as a lawyer, where you're constrained by the amount of hours in a day and geographical location. As a software engineer, your labor can easily impact x^6, or even more if you work for a technology market leader.
  • godelski 4y ago
    What I find weird about these conversations is that it never discusses what the higher ups and the companies are making. If CEOs were taking cuts and big corps were losing money, then yes, this conversation about paying employees less makes sense. But when the CEOs are still making record incomes (at least according to Forbes) and companies are increasing (or holding constant) evaluations (baring some noise), this doesn't make sense. It just comes off as "We're going to take a bigger part of the cake now and you're going to like it." But for some reason the conversation is about who deserves more of a shrinking slice of a cake that's growing. Somethings not right here.
  • nadieyninguno1 4y ago
    FWIW, a lawyer can achieve results in some circumstance. I paid $52 for an “NFA Gun Trust” from National Gun Trusts. It’s literally just a templatized PDF with “Settlor Name Here” and “Trust Name There” across a few pages.
    • nadieyninguno1 4y ago
      I can't understand why the above would be down-voted... There exists fields of law where the income earning capacity goes beyond a function of (HOURLY_RATE * HOURS_WORKED) that can approach something more of a SaaS function. Another example is all those drive-time radio ads you hear - these lawyers often do not work in your area or state but work as a "Name you can trust" and refer on to local attorneys of variable quality. Franchise operations... not all law is a billable hour.
• mcs_ 4y ago
  > we don't understand why programmers are paid so well Isn't it for the high demand?
• thrown_22 4y ago
  >Summary: we don't understand why programmers are paid so well. If you're a programmer, there's enough of a chance that this is temporary that it's worth explicitly planning for a future in which you're laid off and unable to find similarly high-paying work. Because to be a good programmer you need to be at least somewhat autistic and the number of high functioning autistic people is incredibly small.
• dbreunig 4y ago
  Doctors and lawyers have to sacrifice more for similar pay because their work doesn’t scale. A lawyer and doctor serves one customer at a time. A programmer at your average SaaS app produces work that serves many, many customers at once. And for long after they performed the labor. This effect is also very apparent when you look at the avg cost of goods and services by category over time. Things that don’t scale — legal, healthcare, education — have skyrocketed in price relative to everything else. So long as this state of affairs doesn’t change, programmers and anyone else whose work can be replicated and distributed effectively infinitely for no cost will continue to make more, more easily.
  • kazinator 4y ago
    A lucky lawyer can serve a large group in a class action suit. Or serve one client, but one that is a huge corporation.
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Then why are journalists not paid well?
    • kinkrtyavimoodh 4y ago
      Unlike programmers, their work doesn't generate revenues as easily, otherwise every blogger would be rich.
      • aksss 4y ago
        And we’re arguably far more tolerant of broken journalism than we are of broken code.
        • luckylion 4y ago
          Maybe we could try labeling broken code "opinion".
      • WWLink 4y ago
• pr337h4m 4y ago
  Programmers are highly paid because of the value they bring to their employer, like every other profession, not by how much effort they put into their work. This is also why stuff like the lawsuit against GitHub Copilot is extremely counterproductive. If AI enables you to build a full-fledged Google Docs clone in one day, your value in the labor market will go up by a lot, certainly not down. Edited to add: Every company where layoffs have happened recently were cases where management largely squandered the value of their developers (Stripe, Lyft, pre-Elon Twitter, etc). They had the ability to build 1000x more stuff than they actually did, and are now simply paying the price. Truly innovative companies that use their developers properly will never see layoffs - I can guarantee Replit won't see any layoffs at least for the next four years.
  • epicureanideal 4y ago
    Yes. See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  • nicolashahn 4y ago
    If you can do more with one programmer, then you need less programmers, and demand for programmers goes down.
    • pr337h4m 4y ago
      Did demand for programmers go down in the transitions from pure binary to assembly language, and from low-level languages to high-level languages? It just became more feasible to build profitable products/services that solve larger products, which would increase the demand for programmers. As long as people/companies want to make more money, they will keep moving on to more ambitious projects that have just become technologically/economically feasible. In aggregate, they will not stop at the previous technological/profit level, downsize by firing all but the absolute minimum of programmers, and stay content with their stagnating income.
    • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      It's not about "more", it's about accessibility. If AI makes creating software products more accessible, the demand for programmers will increase. If programming was niche and hard to capitalize on then yeah the demand wouldn't increase if you could do "more". HW engineers seems like a good example of this. HW has gotten tremendously better, but HW engineers haven't seem a commensurate increase in demand.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bunkertor 4y ago
  When I started programming in the 90s I made 30k. Its so much more important now. Add experience and skill and most are underpaid for return on value
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  >What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well Because what we do offers MULTIPLES in earnings and it's all for free. Zero margins. It isn't confusing to me. When we build something exquisite and people love it, the company can sell it infinitely. Forever. With no cost. We take dreams and wahoo ideas and turn it into tangibles. That's art. Contrary to what bootcamps sell you, it's difficult to get right.
  • undoware 4y ago
    I have a friend who is a composer for film. She has made some of the most exquisite thought products I've ever experienced (a strange way to talk about music, but I'm trying to cleave to the OP.) She works 90 hours a week, has been well-regarded in her industry for 10+ years. I've seen her drop everything, on any night of the week, to hit the deadline for wrap, dozens of times in the last year alone. She has $400CAD to her name, has no car, and rents. If she weren't in a housing co-op, she'd need to move out of the city -- and as it already stands, she lives in the roughest neighbourhood in town. The moral of this story is that enjoyable, well-regarded work where you feel a deep connection to the end-product almost inevitably becomes part of its own compensation package. There will be people who will code for free, for 'exposure', and there will be a lot of them, not too long from now at all, because coding is a delight, and is becoming more delightful every day (cf CoPilot). I think a lot about how the romanticization of coding as a profession parallels the romanticization of the music industry in the 80s and 90s. People work cheap for hallowed dreams. Pride goeth before the fall.
    • pcthrowaway 4y ago
      I suspect this is enough info about your friend to identify them (assuming they live in one of the population hubs of their country). If you switch to they/them pronouns and drop the reference to the specific currency their assets are in, it'd provide a good cloak of fuzz to prevent them from being identified by the description. I don't know your friend but I think most people would prefer to avoid being called out as being nearly one step away from homelessness (even though I suspect I live in the same city, and the same is true of many hard-working people here)
• fellowniusmonk 4y ago
  I say this as someone who has cultivated a very low cost of living (very nearly 0.) For every 100k I have been paid by organizations to create & program out marketing automation code I have made those organizations 1mil in recurring revenue. It's no mystery. Code is compounding. Why do authors and musicians with a proven financial impact get huge advances? Until any one company has a monopoly on a given business niche/vertical/whathaveyou you code has compounding value. If anything engineers need to band together as small groups and start cloning out business models for any company with a relatively traditional business model that tries to have a time wasting faang level interviewing process. The moment the salaries drop there will be an army of software devs moving back in with family and cloning any business they can aquire basic knowledge of...
  • yuppiepuppie 4y ago
    Curious about your cost of living statement being zero. How did you do that? What kind of life style is that?
    • notch656a 4y ago
      Relatively easy if you're single and employed. Buy a van, park it in the company parking lot. Use kitchen at work and drive to a remote area during the weekend and use solar shower, etc. Might spend $300-500 a month that way.
      • joeman1000 4y ago
        That’s cool if you want people knowing you live in a van in the company parking lot… that would seriously bust your reputation.
        • aksss 4y ago
          It’s also an easy way to ensure you remain single. Self-reinforcing. “Remote area” = down by the river.
      • randomdata 4y ago
• larrymyers 4y ago
  All measured data points suggests developers should expect to continue high paying wages. Wage growth continues to rise: https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker Unemployment is still low: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate While it's true that many tech companies are doing layoffs right now or having some form of a hiring freeze in place, it is likely to be temporary as the excess hiring from the past two years unwinds a bit. Many public tech companies with high P/E ratios are just finally having to face the reality that profitable business models must emerge from high growth markets eventually. In general the US economy is still doing well, despite persistent inflation, and historically high demand jobs that require a college education have weathered negative economic trends better than most professions. If you are an experienced, competent software engineer I would expect there will be more jobs than candidates for quite some time, and as a career will continue to be a quite lucrative.
  • pevey 4y ago
    I suspect in 5 years we will look back and see a trend that all of these tech layoffs supercharged the current crop of tech startups. Seed and series A stage companies have been starved of talent for a long time now.
• manesioz 4y ago
  I think that in the short-term there will definitely be a shock to the system and there may be less lucrative and easy jobs, but long-term software is going nowhere and the fundamental value proposition of software engineers hasn't changed. The only thing that changed is that due to increasing rates companies are tightening their CapEx and focusing on profit over growth.
• cortesoft 4y ago
  > What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well, and especially why this has persisted. Isn't part of this just how valuable software work is? Unlike almost every other industry, there is very little marginal costs to growth and a huge demand for new software based products. This means a large chunk of the value created is captured by the developers, since they are the limiting factor. Even with that large chunk of value going towards developers, they still only get a small fraction of the total value created by the software industry. It is simply such a valuable industry with such small marginal costs, that developers are still able to be so valuable in the market.
• scrozier 4y ago
  > we don't understand why programmers are paid so well Then proceeds to explain exactly why programmers are paid so well.
• godelski 4y ago
  Ah yes, I'm going to make software for trillion dollar corporations with record profits and record salaries for CEOs and fat cats and take a pay cut because ,,I'' am being over paid. 5 of the top 10 companies with highest profits are tech, most of the others are banks (which highly rely on tech). What a joke. This feels like propaganda to make me happy to just get paid while fat cats still get fat.
  • skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    Almost all of the highly profitable companies have one monopoly product and a massive associated bureaucracy doing nothing...and that is a handful of companies. The rest are setting fire to money. Google is the worst example, they have one product that is probably 150-200% of profit, 99% of staff do nothing, and they believe they have a right to harvest income from a search product they don't work on. The economics of this system make no sense at all. Part of it is VC culture, part of it is massive corporate governance breaches, part of it is QE...it is just multiple things that defy logic. I don't think anyone should be surprised that shareholders ask questions when they see individual companies with thousands of staff who do nothing, that is normal. The bezzle of 2021 was the exception.
    • steve1977 4y ago
      I had the same thoughts now in regards to the Twitter layoffs. I mean Twitter still looks like a pretty trivial product that some nerds could hack together in a garage. So why more than 7000 employees? What were all these people doing?
• maxrev17 4y ago
  Nah...
• tenpies 4y ago
  > What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well It's very easy. Look at any tech company's stock price and you have a very good proxy for programmer compensation. When government and central banks worked together to create a bubble in the monetary base, valuations went nuts and so did job creation. Many of these jobs are useless or unnecessary. Many of them are completely discretionary. Many of them have a negative effect on the bottom line. Many of them employ people who we would normally consider unemployable. Many of them offer the employer atrocious returns. In classic government fashion, they realized they made a mess, so now they are doing their best to correct this by pulling on every lever they have: * Wage suppression through record immigration * Under-representing inflation so that CPI-driven wage adjustments do not rise enough to sustain demand * Outright job destruction by trying to destroy certain key industries (e.g. oil and gas) * Making money very much not free, so companies suddenly have to think about costs. Unfortunately this trend has only begun and technology has been generally fast to act, but mass layoffs are coming to almost every industry, especially if you were not characterized as "essential" during the pandemic. Inflation isn't just fought through interest rate increases and quantitive tightening, it's fought by ensuring you can no longer afford your current quality of life.
• TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  The moment you will get from US centric and Silicon Valley centric view, you will find out that programmers are paid fair wages but not eccentric 100-300k USD a year. For example embedded programmers in Eastern Europe have 30-60k USD wage a year. So it really depends what do you imagine under "lower pay"
• wonnage 4y ago
  A lot of the pay inflation in recent years comes from inflated stock values; cash comp at big companies tends to plateau after 200k and a larger portion of your comp is in stock. Hot stock market + stacked refreshers calculated from previous lower values = programmers making $1m a year temporarily, but it doesn't last; new refreshers will be calculated at market highs, and when the market inevitably recedes, the stacking effect works in the opposite manner. On the plus side, the techtok trend died a quick and ignoble death.
• bakuninsbart 4y ago
  The comparison with law is interesting, because there are a lot of low-paid lawyers. This is true of programmers, too. In many countries, the average programmer makes about the average salary, often even with a CS degree under their belt. (Ie. most of western Europe) Even in the US, salaries are highly dependent on your region, and on your skill. Doctors are outliers compared to basically every other profession; no one that highly educated gets exploited as brutally, virtually across all systems and countries. My personal guess is that this is due to their passion and specific character traits being easily exploitable. I doubt that programmer salaries will fall across the board, although it might be true that low-to-mid-tier skill levels will become almost redundant. The programmers I know in great positions are generally highly intelligent and put in way more hours than the average person, they are simply irreplaceable without great AGI, and they are quintessential to the modern economy.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > The comparison with law is interesting, because there are a lot of low-paid lawyers. Yeah, my parents have both been lawyers in a (rich) European country for more than 20 years and they tell me new lawyers earning close to minimum wage are legion. This blog post was written by a guy than doesn't understand how anything works outside of software engineering and outside of the Silicon Valley.
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    One similar group has it slightly worse than [people] doctors: veterinarians.
• ilyt 4y ago
  Just after CEO and management does
• gigatexal 4y ago
  With the crazy economy and layoffs I think companies will use this as a time to say they are focusing on keeping expenses low and use that as an excuse to suspend or delay raises. I wouldn't put it past them.
• cellis 4y ago
  Now, do CEOs.
• jleyank 4y ago
  Programmers are paid well because vc money is cheap and available and selling ads and collecting data is considered important. If there’s enough of a downturn to torpedo one or both of these conditions, salaries will collapse. Or, if they truly make an effort to use remote work they’ll go down on geographic cost arguments. As the original article states, things are really good. Layoffs are approaching but they’re not assumed to be a concern. Saving some bucks for a rainy day is prudent, or just phrase it “save so you can retire at 40”. There’s a whole world of programming out there that handles niche markets or odd geographic areas and doesn’t make the big bucks. Keep that in mind. And lots and lots of people in cheaper areas than SV. And maybe ai or other programming assist will eat some of your lunch?
  • skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    A large component of pay was also "funny money" shares. You have all these companies that say they are free-cash flow "profitable" and they are still losing hundreds of millions in GAAP terms a quarter. That system relies on employees taking non-cash remuneration, and when share prices collapse it all falls apart. Devs are uniquely unable to understand the system they are part of because the system has had no basis in economic reality. Most of the public companies, the best of the best that VCs managed to cash out through, are going to fail (without significant changes to how they do business). And devs carry on like they are a Hollywood actor: I don't get out of bed for less than $500k/year. No-one is profitable paying the big salaries of 2021. The majority of the big salaries were due to extremely inept management at tech companies.
• moomin 4y ago
  Funny way to say “Programmers Should Unionize”
• myspy 4y ago
  Medical doctors don‘t need to work 80 hour weeks. These exploitative systems need to be abolished. These should be basic human rights.
  • LarsDu88 4y ago
    The supply of medical professionals is constrained by cartel-like economics around medical school entry (which also prohibits foreigners from entering the market). This creates a glut of supply.
• zan2434 4y ago
  I think programmer salaries have been so high because FAANG companies were willing and able to pay through the nose to hoard talent. This is changing.
• doener 4y ago
  (2019)
  • dang 4y ago
    Thanks! Year added by a volunteer year editor. If anyone else would like to be a volunteer year editor, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  This isn't a prediction about the future per se, not in the sense of "hey there's a recession, hey there's AI, hey there's X... programmers beware!" Rather, this is saying "we cannot think of a logical reason why programmers are paid as much as they are in comparison to other skilled fields, thus it is possible we're living in a salary bubble, and it makes sense for programmers to save as much money as possible."
• DebtDeflation 4y ago
  "Programmers" who work for non-tech Fortune 1000 companies probably won't see any reduction in pay, particularly if they've been with their employer for more than a few years. The 26 year olds who work for FAANG and adjacent big tech who have job hopped every year to get their "TC or GTFO" cred on Blind are about to see their dreams end in tears. Big tech comp packages from around 2017 on became completely untethered from historical reality.
  • undoware 4y ago
    Why is this downvoted? Are we really at the stage where we simply downvote people who say things that are hard to hear? Parent is right: there's an imminent correction, and it will be unevenly distributed, because so is everything else.
    • Nicksil 4y ago
      >Are we really at the stage where we simply downvote people who say things that are hard to hear? This behavior is ubiquitous and has been for some time. Though the frequency has seemed to have increased exponentially somewhat recently. It's a form of punishment.
      • undoware 4y ago
        I have the following argument, applying market principles to discourse. There are four categories of claims: 1. Easy to hear and false 2. Easy to hear and true 2. Hard to hear and false 3. Hard to hear and true The first category is the domain of spin doctors and marketers. Let's ignore it for now. The second category encompasses a lot of facts, but generally these won't show up in discourse. Because they're easy to hear, they are already known to both parties and agreed-upon. Let's call these "common knowledge" or even (more tendentiously) common-sense. The third category show up in discourse as "things you want to make your opponent believe about themselves or their worldview." These are your psyops, basically. Finally, the fourth category is pretty much every true thing that you need to actually point out. They need pointing-out because of a natural (and relatable!) human tendency to avoid discomfort. If they weren't hard to hear, you would have let yourself hear them already. Thus, most of discourse takes place here. If the foregoing breakdown is correct, it also suggests that the *hardest-to-hear truths* are going to be the ones which are most significant, because of all the truth claims, they are the ones which have not yet been universally admitted. HN's current posture toward discourse seems to encourage making hard-to-hear truths even harder, by literally fading them. And moreover, the guidelines prohibiting the discussion of our collective moderation decisions in-thread is itself a way of figuratively moving *even the awareness of the problem itself* from `color: #000` to `color: rgb(130,130,130)`. This is why I now try to read the greytext first. For every one comment faded because it was offtopic or whatever, there are three which were faded for telling us emperors about our new clothes.
• s3p 4y ago
  > If you look at law, you have to win the prestige lottery and get into a top school, which will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you have to win the grades lottery and get good enough grades to get into a top firm. And then you have to continue winning tournaments to avoid getting kicked out... This is just not true. My parents and grandparents were all lawyers. They went to law school in their home city (around 600k population) and made a living for themselves. At the time of his retirement my grandfather was very well off and had savings for college for both his parents and their kids (me). You can get by just fine without winning a "prestige lottery" and going hundreds of thousands into debt just to attend a 'top' law school.
• ianbutler 4y ago
  Thing is, I don't really support the idea that the supply of good, functional, productive devs has increased that much. I'm over here just throwing out more resumes and giving no goes after interviews than ever. It's apparently pretty difficult to be a good developer. Barrier to entry is low, but just because you can tap some code out doesn't make you competent. My friend is still telling the story from two years ago when he went to interview some devs and even though their resumes looked good they couldn't even write a for loop to parse some lines from a file. I'm as of this moment pretty secure that my pay will remain high for a while. Edit: I want to clarify that the low barrier to entry is good, we do actually need more devs, but plenty of people don't take advantage of the tons of resources (online tutorials, bootcamps, hacker communities etc) out there to skill up and become productive and then expect to make lots of the monies.
• slantedview 4y ago
  I agree with the author that there are no signs of pay collapsing anytime soon, but living below your means is always great advice.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  Programmers are incredibly productive. An hour of a doctor's time, an hour of a lawyer's time an hour of an investment banker's time only help one person. An hour of a programmer's time impacts tens of thousands of people. Programming at a high level which gets good money is hard. It's hard to reach that level, it takes lots of time learning, reading and practicing, it's hard to do the work. Also many programmers work more than 40 hours weeks. If a good programmer helps a company win a few millions per year or he helps the company to make economies of few millions per year, then he deserves a share of those money. The demand is larger than the supply and it is likely to stay so since all sectors of the economy demand more automation and not many people like to code or are willing to become programmers. The "winter of programming" might never come. Even if it comes it is likely that won't happen during our lifetimes, even if we live a lot. People said long time ago that software is a fad or a bubble that will burst. Still software continued to rise year after year.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    > Programmers are incredibly productive. Some developers are. Most aren't. If you work in a startup, or on some new project within some big company, you are very likely to be producing vaporware that will impact zero users, either because the software is bad or because of some issues in marketing or management beyond your control. In either case, your real economic productivity is negative.
  • exmadscientist 4y ago
    This argument rings hollow when you look a level down. You couldn't do your work without your keyboard. Why doesn't your keyboard's designer deserve a share, too? What about the EE who designed the CPU in your machine? The physicist who came up with the process to manufacture the CPU? The mechanical engineer who built the machine that implements that process? The chemist who invented the solder that connects it all together? Every single one of those people gets paid less than the programmer, their work affects millions, and without them, the programmer could not affect the same number of people or indeed could not work at all. So why should the programmer get all the cash? (This is kind of a strawman argument, and is meant to be a little provocative. There are some pretty obvious holes in it. But I do think it is a real argument and you cannot dismiss it entirely. There is something here.)
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  This is three years old, but is kind of prophetic. As far as I'm concerned, the money has been fairly corrosive. It's a damoclean sword, bringing manna, but levels of avarice and corruption that are just heartbreaking. But I suspect that I'm in the minority in my opinion. I just love the craft of software development, and find it hard to adjust to the new rat race for money. I do get treated fairly badly, when I mention that money just isn't that important to me. I love coding and architecting. In fact, I do it for free, these days, which was always my dream.
• furyofantares 4y ago
  Industry standard has been over a million dollars revenue per year per employee. That includes non-developer roles, which all exist either to support or sell what developers make, or to enable you to hire more developers (management). So these companies have had high margins on hiring developers. I think this also makes sense of "why does company X need so many developers to make product Y?" The answer is they don't need that many developers to make product Y. But companies have largely seen that the more developers they hire the more money they make. Or course that's a statistical phenomenon, it doesn't happen right when you hire a developer, it isn't guaranteed to happen at all. You're hiring as many developers as you can because it increases the chances that some of them will make money printing machines for you or improve your existing money printing capabilities. I can see salaries going down if revenue is dropping across the board and companies switch to focusing more on making money right now and less on maximizing these chances. I don't think it is likely to drop like a rock, though. Between being roughly zero margin once produced and being general purpose, software does promise to eat everything. But not everyone can afford to pay developers. Prices going down means more people looking to hire.
  • skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    Very few companies make more than a million per employee. And that is inherently deceptive because you have products (FB and Google Search) that could actually make a lot more but don't. And you need to consider the return, NFLX has the highest revenue per employee and likely isn't profitable once you actually look at capitalized costs. Their spending on tech is certainly very profitable, but that is because they are a media company...not because they are a tech one (the same is true at Disney, at Warner Discovery, etc. This kind of measure overstates the economics because they have huge non-employee costs)...so that leaves AAPL (profitable, but also substantial non-employee costs), GOOGL and FB...both protected by corporate governance abnormalities that allow insiders to skim off huge amounts from monopoly products. Ultimately, your salary is limited by what you are able to charge. Most devs do not have real agency with the product, that is why salespeople make more. It isn't like finance where you can get paid based on revenue. > But companies have largely seen that the more developers they hire the more money they make. I haven't seen this. Almost every tech company I have researched (I worked as an equity analyst for a decade) is massively overstaffed. Sales spending is far more accretive. Devs and cloud are a black hole caused by the lack of business knowledge amongst senior managers (even in the C-suite, tech companies have unusually bad managers). The industry is nowhere remotely close to where it needs to be, and won't be for a long time because most people don't have skills that will generate profit. Prices going down won't mean more looking to hire because the market is going to shrink overall. I think one area that is severely under-penetrated is tech spending by legacy companies, but that won't make up the gap. At large individual companies, the numbers are insane...some companies will cut thousands, and still need to do more (it isn't just devs either, it is data, managerial, support, project management, marketing...there is just bloat everywhere).
• s3p 4y ago
  > What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well Are you kidding? Computer programmers have extremely high burnout and surprisingly low job satisfaction. People are eager to rush in to the field but they slowly realize how tiring the work becomes. I chose industrial engineering in college as my computer science friends would constantly tell me about just how much programming they had to do as part of their internships. I can't even recall a person who said they loved programming for 8 hours a day and wanted to do it for the rest of their life. The pay is deserved. Case closed.
  • xur17 4y ago
    Do you have data to back this up? It seems like an absurd claim based on the developers I know.
    • Viliam1234 4y ago
      As an anecdotal evidence, my wife told me that she first considered my complaints about work a red flag, but that happened when I was the only programmer she knew. As her social circle expanded to contain more programmers, she realized that all of them, without exception, were complaining about their jobs. (To compare, the people happy about their jobs are mostly teachers. Possibly a selection effect, because teachers who are not happy about their jobs simply quit; they can get a better paying job anywhere.) The part about "programming for 8 hours a day" only makes sense to me if I interpret it as doing the stuff the programmers do at their jobs: the dark Scrum, Jira tickets, endless meetings, open spaces, etc. Most programmers hate that with a passion; that is why many of us were so happy about Covid allowing us to work from home. Actual coding is quite fun, if it comes without the baggage.
• LarsDu88 4y ago
  There are a bunch of not commonly stated factors for high SWE salaries: - Gender disparity in CS...women tend to avoid CS programs cutting out roughly half the potential talent pool particularly before 2015. - Gender disparity in education. Schooling and college admittance rates up to college tend to skew more female making the actual gender disparity even more pronounced. Software engineering is mostly men who have half the potential job market competition virtually drop out past college! - Programming languages are "English". English is virtually a prerequisite for programming (correct me if I'm wrong). This makes outsourcing to any country other than highly developed parts of India difficult. - It's changing constantly which diminishes the value of higher education and experience. Examples: kubernetes widespread adoption in 2017, JS frameworks that became popular after 2015, HTML5, wasm, transformers after 2018 (in ML). 16 year olds in 2017 can be more expierienced than college profs in newer tech. - American tech monopolies. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon each have in the order of 100,000 engineers. Do they need that many? Probably no. Can they AFFORD that many? Yes. Google makes an avg of 1.6 million in profit per employee. They can do that by charging tax on their network effect monopoly and overwhelmingly hire in the US. This drives wages up across the sector. - Programming is hard for many of the tech illiterate. Many of us grew up with a computer at the center of our homes. For the vast majority of people on earth this was not the case. It's actually getting worse with the usage of tablets and smartphones. Here's a couple of WRONG arguments for high salaries: - Software scales cheaply...this does not matter if you can hire cheap equivalently capable SWEs overseas. A McDonald's employee feeds many more people than a Michelin chef. Doesn't make one get paid more than the other. - "Good" software engineers should get paid more... This is fine, but I see plenty of shitty SWEs getting paid just fine. Wages are set by supply and demand - Programmers produce more value to society. Nope. Vaccine makers, bridge makers, factory builders..take your pick. All of these areas now DO involve software though, so the market for folks with mixed skills is getting ever bigger I expect to see pure SWE jobs diminish in value, but domain expertise SWE jobs increase!
  • jen20 4y ago
    > It's changing constantly which diminishes the value of higher education and experience. Constant change of tools actually improves the value of high quality education on fundamentals.
• aborsy 4y ago
  Developers are paid well in US. In EU, the difference between the salary of a garbage man and a scientist or a software engineer may not be all that much (at least by US standards). So, the salaries may be roughly similar and constant.
  • nephanth 4y ago
    Though in general garbage collecting is well-paid for work requiring no prior qualifications. That's due to the fact that it's hard labour with early hours, and people are in general not thrilled at the idea of working with garbage
• rajin444 4y ago
  The big overlooked thing here is that doctors and lawyers don't really create any value. They extract value from existing systems (not to disparage their professions - they're both very important).
• Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  I have some unpopular opinions about developers, and I'm likely to be downvoted on this site for them, but anyway: * Most developers have negative productivity: they cost the company more money than the company derives from their work * Thanks to the bubble in the tech sector and lavish startup funding, a lot of developers are producing software that brings in no value * Thanks to the bubble in the tech sector, and great pay, a lot of developers have distorted ideas about the value they bring to their companies * Thanks to the bubble in the tech sector, a lot of developers overestimate their productivity and importance * Even if you work really hard, and have great skills, it does not mean you are producing something valuable and demanded by the market * If your company makes more money from your work than it pays you, your job is likely safe * If the company does not make money from your work, you should be thinking about plan B * Sometimes it is very difficult to estimate the impact of your individual work on company performance. Your job is not safe, and you should be thinking about plan B even if you are doing something really important. In conclusion: always be thinking about the real $$$ value your employer derives from your work. If you are paid a lot only because there is a shortage of developers, you might be in a bubble, which can pop.
  • benjaminwootton 4y ago
    A lot of these points would be right if it wasn’t for the fact that software is so damn valuable. In investment banking for instance you are lucky to get 10 lines of code into production per week, but those lines of code can soon add up to replace a trader making $1 million a year or supporting $X million in electronic trading commissions. In Silicon Valley the salaries are breathtaking, but how many $billion and soon $trillion companies are being minted as a result of their efforts? I think that’s the dynamic going on. Many developers are average and overpaid, but they are a scarce resource and look at what they can create in the right circumstances.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      Some software brings in a lot of value, that's true, as evidenced by all the wealthy tech companies out there. But I think I wouldn't be too far off if I will estimate that only about 0.1% of developers create software that results in seven (or more) figure economic gains, 9,9% have moderate productivity that pays back their salary with some surplus and they other 90% of developers have actually negative productivity, and are only paid well thanks to the success of the first 0.1%
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• devnull255 4y ago
  The information technology industry is a disruptive force in this economy. The way it has disrupted the global economy has changed over time as newer generations of technological innovations (e.g., software, programming languages and development paradigms) have overtaken older generations of information technology. As a consequence, these changes have demanded new sets of technical skills from programmers. Those who master the skills (and a lot who learn just enough of them) can command premium pay because of the labor scarcity they now find themselves in. In my own 30+-year career, I've had to continually re-skill and up-skill to keep pace with the changes over the years and stay competitive with new programmers entering the industry. I have also been able to command a premium wage (even through the dot com bust) because I was always watching the industry and was able to anticipate and/or pick up whatever skill I needed to know next to remain in play. I would conclude that the OP is right only if the IT industry itself stops being such a fast-moving, almost COVID variant-like industry disruptor, demanding brand new, rare skills or programmers decide to exit the tech skills arms race. I think I can go for another ten years at least myself.
• sytelus 4y ago
  Recently came in contact with lawyer who charged over $400/hr fees. I was absolutely shocked that they can do that for the trivial work that they do. Most cases are cookie cutter and fill-in-template no-brainers but people tend to go to expensive lawyers just to feel safe and assured in time of crisis in their life. Lawyers take full advantage of this and tend to exploit people in crises to the maximum possible extent. This is not delivering value. Same for doctors. The doctors working in maternity wards routinely charge $500 for coming to you and looking your charts for like 5 minutes and never show their face again. Vast majority of their work is cookie-cutter and would eventually be automated but hospitals take full advantage of people who feel their life is at risk and tend to exploit them at maximum possible extent causing $2000/day maternity bills for absolutely normal pregnancies. Another point is that developer salaries aren't set by charitable donations. They are set by revenues and companies pay according to value people generate. If author doesn't understand market, it doesn't mean market doesn't exist.
  • tennisflyi 4y ago
    > Most cases are cookie cutter and fill-in-template no-brainers You think the future of no-code/low-code/democratized code isn't the same?
• pmoriarty 4y ago
  One thing that doesn't get talked about enough is the impact of programmers writing software for free[1] on what programmers as a whole are paid. It could be argued that such free labor reduces the value of programming as a whole, because many if not most people would gladly use "free" software than pay for it, so if those "free" options didn't exist then the non-free software which did exist would be both more attractive and more valuable... and so programmers as a whole would be paid more. But it's not so simple, because virtually the entire internet, all the tech giants, and arguably most companies today rely on "free" software, and their success is partially if not largely due to such software.. and, it's because of their success that these companies can afford to pay the relatively large salaries that programmers earn. So the relationship between programmers working for free and programmer salaries is a complex one, but it's still intriguing to wonder what programmer salaries would be like today had the free/open source movements not flourished. The other thing to remember is that programming used to be a pretty esoteric discipline, which was dominated by Americans... who could demand relatively high salaries because they didn't have to compete with the rest of the world. Now there are exponentially more programmers and people from all over the world can program. Not to mention that math education in America is pretty awful compared to much of the rest of the world, and good math skills help people to be good programmers, resulting in even tougher competition from outside the US. If language, culture, and time zones weren't an issue the competition would be even tougher. [1] - the term "open source" is often used as shorthand for this, but it's obviously imperfect as there are many programmers who are paid to write open source software, such as those employed by Red Hat, Mozilla, Google, IBM, etc..
• netmonk 4y ago
  From my French perspective, I would say developers aren’t paid enough. For one reason: market price manipulation. Half the IT market here is handled by service company. Their main business is to hire IT guys and sell them at daily rate to customer (final company). This works very well for market price manipulation when the middle company owners are also the owner of the customer company. Let me explain: let talk about bank. They are the biggest IT service customer on the market followed by military. So in the late 80, when they get bored to be milked by freelancer cobol développers they united and created a service company, which business is to hire IT guys and resell them to themself ( the banks). They hired cobol dev from North Africa, for far cheaper than hire locals, they invented business rules in buyers département, defining that the bank cannot make business with small company (too risky). Most dev freelance run a little company for accounting and billing. Then when the locals were looking for new job, they didn’t have choice, they have to go through the service company which was allowed to make contract with banks (because she is far bigger than one man company) and the poor local dev was pressured to cut by half his price cause he was in competition with the North African dev. We can also talk that as far as the service company and the banks are owned by the sames guys, this eases a lot of accounting and tax optimisation, to say the least. And here in France only a des service companies are managing now half of the IT market. And guess what ? There isn’t any union for IT industry. And also this situation helps to create the fear about not enough IT guys, pushing government to open wide the frontier to allow foreigner to work. How ? Well when a bank open a position to be filled, she sent the proposal to several service companies, and then those service companies publish proposal on job board. So there can be 5 or 6 open position on a job board, for the only one real open position at the final customer. And after médias are writing article about how it is difficult to find people, there is much demand and so few candidates, we must open the border and let all peoples around the globe onboard in France to fill the job market. All that while we almost have 10 000 000 of unemployed. I don’t know how it works in other countries, but this is mostly how it works since late 80 in France. Let’s not forget about the public money (state money from tax) thief scheme. When ministry is opening an it positon around 1500 euros/day rate, and when the final working (the guy doing the job for real) is only able to bill around 600euros/day. 900euros days are going to a multilayer of middle service companies which most merit is to have a guy able to use a phone, and whose boss has often an uncle or similar into ministry or gov.
• tdhz77 4y ago
  Th is article should be ignored. When will the article CEO’s should plan for lower pay happen?
• tyronehed 4y ago
• washywashy 4y ago
  Like any job, it’s probably a small percentage of the workers producing most of the results. I know at my job it’s pretty obvious who is actually consistently working but somehow it isn’t obvious to management or just harder to prove.
• iot_devs 4y ago
  I don't want to sound classist or too entitled. But I am deeply familiar with developers in FANG unable to handle the complexity of a relatively not difficult project. Moreover the time necessary to train a perfectly capable new grand is absurd. I keep thinking that it is a very difficult job, with absurd upside if well done.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  Programmers aren't actually paid all that well. We're paid marginally better than schoolteachers and firefighters. Don't believe me? Look up the salaries for software engineers vs schoolteachers in Boise, ID. Now look up those figures in SF/NYC. They track. People get an incorrect view because they look at the national average, which is skewed because more programmers are forced to move to high-COL areas like SF/NYC just to pursue their profession.
  • AnnikaL 4y ago
    Not quite. Let's compare them with some BLS data. For teachers, I'll pick elementary schoolteachers other than special education, which seem to be in the middle of the pack. In Boise, an elementary schoolteacher earns $52,500 on average, while the computer programmer earns $75,070 - 43% more. "Software developers" (a different BLS job from programmers) are paid even higher: $96,980, or 84% more than teachers. The mean wage for an elementary schoolteacher in San Francisco is $86,920, while for a computer programmer it's $126,220 — 45% greater. For software developers, it's $158,320, which is 80% higher than the teachers. Nationally, this also applies: elementary teachers make $67,080, while programmers make 45% more at $96,650 and software developers 80% more at $120,990. So while it's true that the ratio of software engineer and schoolteacher salaries is similar between Boise and San Francisco, this ratio is quite large (not "marginally better"), and software businesses being in high cost-of-living areas doesn't seem to explain why software engineers are paid so much (they still earn a lot more than teachers even in cheap areas). Data is sourced from the BLS: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_14260.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_14260.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm
    • phendrenad2 4y ago
      Thanks, you're right. But I still think that "programmers are highly paid" is a bit of a myth, and schoolteachers in SF are just under paid.
• cathdrlbizzare 4y ago
  Low-skilled devs should plan for AI to replace them.
• xkcd1963 4y ago
  I've asked myself this question often but each time I look for qualified employees and co-workers I find none. Only thing could attract someone is high pay
• cr4nberry 4y ago
  This post fails to acknowledge cost of living. If you work in SV, you're going to be paid well just because of COL. I've seen programmer jobs only paying 50k (in the US, at large companies, in 2022), all because of low COL. Why is it that there's all this griping about salaries when PMs, EMs, data scientists, etc make similar pay in a similar COL situation? COL aside, imo SWEs could make twice as much and it still wouldn't be adequate. Apple's revenue per employee is over 2 million, their median SWE comp is probably only 1/8th of that We should unionize