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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

• 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.
      • sdenton4 4y ago
        Electricity is a commodity, though, and software is very much not.
        • JamesianP 4y ago
          Indeed this is the whole game. Turn everyone else's contribution into a commodity and eat their lunch. Not just the energy, but the hardware (e.g. Microsoft vs IBM) and even the libraries they provide (e.g. app developers versus apple). I think software has gained a disproportionate advantage because tech has been changing so fast and software can adapt the easiest (which matters more than it should perhaps due to software patents).
    • rileymat2 4y ago
      Every modern company is dependent on a lot of things due to interconnections in the economy, that is nearly irrelevant. Pay is about supply and demand in the labor force. Necessity will help hold up one side of the equation, but not the other.
    • closewith 4y ago
      > Most of the productivity gains of the last 20 years can be attributed to software, and the only employees writing software are software developers. While I agree with this, I think it's also true that most of the software responsible for those productivity gains were written by a relatively small subset of developers.
      • Consultant32452 4y ago
        My conspiracy theory is that less than 100 people in the US actually know what they're doing and wrote the important code doing all the work and/or are keeping all of global IT sort of running. I am not one of those 100.
  • agilob 4y ago
    How do you respond to the below? “Every business is a software business”, as Watts S. Humphrey, the father of quality in software and CMMI, said two decades ago. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, repeats the message: “all companies are software companies”.
    • endisneigh 4y ago
      It’s obviously wrong. Is a restaurant a software business? Ridiculous. Software is great but there are other businesses. I could be convinced that all companies are energy companies, though.
      • croes 4y ago
        Nowadays most of them are. The whole payment system largely depends on software.
        • siquick 4y ago
          But they would still be restaurants without software.
          • croes 4y ago
            But much fewer
          • nvader 4y ago
            Not for long. I think the point op is trying to make is without the investments in software to support business modeling, procuring supplies, scheduling staff, payroll, online marketing and all of the front of house functions like reservations, online menus and what have you, your steampunk restaurant is going to be outcompeted eventually.
            • endisneigh 4y ago
              It’s not true though. If you go to Kenya restaurants exist without computers.
• svnpenn 4y ago
  but considering the law profession (AFT), an Ivy League school is required.
• lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >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. Considering the percentile of people who earn 8 figures, what makes you think you would have been capable of being in that percentile had you done law? If your 8 figure lawyer friend was friends with a tech company founder, would they also say “given what I know now, I might trade with my software developer friend who makes 8 figures per year just from investment returns after going public”?
  • godelski 4y ago
    > Considering the percentile of people who earn 8 figures, This is a wild jump and distraction from the actual conversation. I think very few people here are talking about top executives and stuff but rather your SWE making 100k-300k/yr. We're not even half way to 7 figures and you jump to... 8? The title of the article even indicates that it is about programmers, not execs. There's very few people programming and making tens of millions a year. Let's be real here too. These companies are making record profits and the top execs are also making record salaries and you are defending them to pay the average worker... less? It's like you just called billionaires and hundred millionaires middle class. This is propaganda straight out of the Tea Party. Come on. (Same with the article itself) We're talking about SWEs here and if ,,they'' are worth 6 figures.
    • squeaky-clean 4y ago
      lotsofpulp is not the one who originally mentioned 8 figures, the top-level comment did.
  • Der_Einzige 4y ago
    Not the person you're responding to, but anyone in America who was reasonably competitive at American competitive debate (esp policy) could easily push themselves into 8 figure lawyer territory. In fact, I've never seen a more robust and potent pathway from high school to law than debate. Not even mock trial is this powerful. To be fair, there is a lot of mentorship in the form of active lawyers who coach or judge at these debate tournaments.
• cozzyd 4y ago
  Given that software engineers tend to be paid more than hardware engineers, things being dependent on software isn't a very good argument.
  • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Software scales. Hardware does not. That's the reason why JavaScript developers are paid more than embedded C developers.
    • elforce002 4y ago
      This is a sick burn tbh. There should be a parity between software and hardware engineers but it isn't.
      • colordrops 4y ago
        At a place like SpaceX, software engineers working on internal corporate software make far more than the mechanical engineers in propulsion doing things that have never been done before. It's just a function of the market. You'd never be able to hire any software engineers if you paid them the same.
    • Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      Well, but design a great widget and a manufacturer can scale production as high as necessary.
    • cheesedoodle 4y ago
      As an embedded C developer that just moved to JavaScript, this is very true.
  • godelski 4y ago
    Markets work differently for the two. There hasn't been much development in hardware because it is hard to get a good profit from it. You make something and it is very easy for someone else to directly copy that physical device. The "source code" is all there for you (especially if you send it to a country that doesn't respect IP to manufacture that product for you). And once you sell the piece of hardware, your sale is done. On the other hand, that's harder to copy software, especially since many modern tools rely on having data. In addition to this, your sale can be reoccurring and you have a clear and more predictable revenue stream. This is a much safer business. I'm not saying that things should be this way, but that's definitely the way that they are. Given that it makes sense to pay these people differently. If you resolved these issues I think it would be easier to argue for higher pay (not that they don't deserve it in the first place)
• Seanambers 4y ago
  The most important "developers" in most businesses in non tech industries as in most businesses does not program at all - they use excel. They have to do scope, development, ux, testing all by themselves and rarely has anyone to ask for help except google. Oh and they have to do their normal job as well. In order to have a developer provide value there needs to be quite the system of support around that job function. From a value perspective developers are valuable, but only in the right environment.
  • z9znz 4y ago
    > they use excel Indeed, many companies make great progress because of this. But inevitably they reach a point where it is unamanageable or unmaintainable. Then who do they depend on to keep their business operating (as it is now overly dependent upon Excel)? I'm glad you mentioned it though, as it is something I have direct experience with. The firm I worked for several years ago was full of very sharp people, such that they made great money on mortgage related debt trading before, during, and after 2008. They did it by applying their effort and knowledge and depending on complex spreadsheets their people had made. But it reached a point where Excel would regularly corrupt the file; and opening the spreadsheet would take 10 minutes on modern hardware. And many activities were ungodly slow. Who might you imagine took their Excel VBA and rebuilt it (still in Excel, and still with VBA) so it took an order of magnitude less disk space and launch time, and also a fraction of the file space? Yes! A software engineer. Also, as most of us SWEs do, I didn't know VBA before being given the project and producing a very successful new version. How much money did they make using my version in the following years? I assure you it was enormous compared to what they paid me to do it. A good developer is a force multiplier. Our salaries, if we actually do a reasonable job, should be large.
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• johnwheeler 4y ago
  I like this. It makes me feel better. Dunno if it’s true.
• eesmith 4y ago
  Your comment "Like it or not, virtually every aspect of life now is dependent on software" reminded me of Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll". In the story, the road technicians were the linchpin to a system that millions of people depended on daily. Some of the technicians decided to go on strike, owning to their beliefs in the "functionalist revolution": > Concerning Function: A Treatise on the Natural Order in Society, the bible of the functionalist movement, was first published in 1930. It claimed to be a scientifically accurate theory of social relations. The author, Paul Decker, disclaimed the "outworn and futile" ideas of democracy and human equality, and substituted a system in which human beings were evaluated "functionally" - that is to say, by the role each filled in the economic sequence. The underlying thesis was that it was right and proper for a man to exercise over his fellows whatever power was inherent in his function, and that any other form of social organization was silly, visionary, and contrary to the "natural order." > The complete interdependence of modern economic life seems to have escaped him entirely. ... > Functionalism did not take hold at once-during the thirties almost everyone, from truckdriver to hatcheck girl, had a scheme for setting the world right in six easy lessons; and a surprising percentage managed to get their schemes published. But it gradually spread. Functionalism was particularly popular among little people everywhere who could persuade themselves that their particular jobs were the indispensable ones, and that, therefore, under the "natural order" they would be top dog. With so many different functions actually indispensable such self-persuasion was easy. The subtitle of the original 1940 publication: "The higher civilization becomes, the more it is dependent on each unit — and the more it is at the mercy of a few!" - https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v25n04_1940-06_SLiV/page/n3/mode/2up?q= https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v25n04_1940-06_SLiV/p...
• analog31 4y ago
  >>>> 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. It works both ways. From the "other side," communicating requirements to programmers is also hard. The problem is compounded if the requirements involve specialized domain knowledge, including math. And everybody thinks they have the best understanding of business needs. Everybody thinks the "other side" is the problem. There may be conflicting expectations. For instance, when I communicate requirements, I actually try not to precisely specify every detail. I want the programmers to come up with their own ideas and solutions. I think the high pay is just a supply/demand issue. Paradoxically, most of us who program think it's easy, but most people who try to learn how to program find it to be prohibitively difficult. And we don't know why. Also, demand fuels itself in peculiar ways: The visibility and aesthetic appeal of software make it a focal point of the business. Investors are gaa-gaa over it. When the big-wigs review a business unit, they will ask: "What is your digital strategy?" It's hard for an electrical engineer to make their work self-advertising in this way. Second, Brooks' Law suggests that there may be positive feedback cycles in the need for programmers within organizations with large ongoing development efforts. Hiring more programmers makes programming harder. On the other hand, my general advice to all workers is to plan for lower pay. My spouse and I have done this throughout our careers, and I don't regret it an any way. For instance we bought half the house that the bank said we could "afford."
  • z9znz 4y ago
    I'm sorry to be meta, but geez. You make some reasonable points, and while some of your opinions differ from mine, I think they are valid for your experiences. And yet, you had been downvoted. (I tried to help you back up :) ). And now because of that meta stuff, I'll take the time to reply. I already talk too much, so I had skipped this one. But now I must. > communicating requirements to programmers is also hard I absolutely agree. I also wonder: in business school, or management school, do they have classes to teach people how to break down their needs and articulate them to developers? For example, if you want a house built you will talk to an architect who will make a plan, and those plans will be uniform to some standards. The plans will be consumed by some building contractor, and that person will arrange a lot of actual physical work. But in the business world, there is rarely such formality. Probably in high risk domains like air travel and such there certainly is, but in the typical companies it's just some executive or marketer with an idea telling the CIO what is desired, and the CIO passes the concept to the product team. From the dozen or so companies I have worked with or for, I have not seen consistent approaches to this idea->project communication process. And in my case, I have also done several projects, sometimes long term gigs, for small businesses where I will be working directly with the owner. The owners I worked with knew their business domain very well, but they knew very little about software or technology. Success meant me listening to their initial request and then asking a lot of broader questions to ascertain the actual need. For me it's quite fun, because I get to learn about their real problems, and then I can deliver a great solution which makes their lives better. > most of us who program think it's easy, but most people who try to learn how to program find it to be prohibitively difficult I do believe programming is easy, at least in terms of turning a specific need into code. For example, if you have a CSV file that you need ingested into your database, and you know the meaning of each column in the CSV, then it is just a matter of cleaning up the data and type converting it (and having a plan for how to handle fields which cannot be cleaned or are empty). What is NOT easy is taking a big vague idea and programming against it. This I have encountered many times with non-technical people. They just want a "simple" X. So I start asking them questions, and inevitably we reach conditions which could exist but which they don't know how to handle. I politely say, "We have to know what to do when Y occurs, even if we just tell the user to go away." Also, to be fair, big ideas are hard to program because they are logistical or organizational problems. They are not programming problems though. > visibility and aesthetic appeal This is definitely true. People are more motivated (and more willing to pay money) for stuff they can see. However, there are a lot of IT divisions at companies where the IT group is only a cost center. They enable all the other workers, but they are treated as unfortunate costs, like barnacles on a ship. Chances are they are paid much lower than SWEs in companies where software is a first class product. > plan for lower pay Another common version of this is "live below your means". I think most of us have fallen for the opposite. In my early years, I was a moron with money because I knew that every job change meant a 20-50% salary increase. And that was true for several iterations! Then it was no longer true, but I had lived as if my salary was large all the way. It was stupid, and I eventually learned. I think a better approach to living and finances is to budget (rule #1, and it implies tracking expenses and patterns of expenditures) and save so you can weather career/health/financial storms with less stress. Wha† is most perhaps surprising to me is that the biggest driver to me reducing spending is overaccumulation of stuff. Properly getting rid of stuff is a job. Sure we can throw it away or drop it off at Goodwill, but often it will just end up in a landfill. Given the current ecological state we are in, that is practically criminal.
• kragen 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. Every aspect of life now is dependent on food and mineral resources, too, but that doesn't mean farmers and miners are rich. Lots of CEOs and managers don't have developers, even today, just like they don't have farmers and miners. So I think your explanation is wrong. > 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 This is not a difference between programmers and maids, taxi drivers, or bouncers. So I think this explanation is wrong too. — ⁂ — My preferred explanation is that people's share of the excess value of an endeavor depends mostly on their bargaining power. The people who have little bargaining power relative to the group, because their BATNA is poor and the group's BATNA is good, tend to earn very little. The people who have lots of bargaining power tend to earn a lot, relative to the excess value. To take an extreme example, a gangster who robs a convenience store is making no positive contribution to the convenience store's value, even making a negative one, but he can still take home a lot of the convenience store's profits, because the clerk's BATNA is a bullet in the head. The store owner's BATNA is to close the store or hire security guards, so the gangster has an incentive to stake out territory to prevent competing gangsters from making the store's profits actually negative. The gangster's BATNA is (depending on factors like murder conviction rates and CCTV resolution) either to spend a couple of bullets and maybe have to wash his shirt, emptying out the cash register anyway, or to walk out of the store emptyhanded. He has more bargaining power when he can more easily choose the first of these. Key employees whose departure would substantially reduce the profits of a business can, in the same way, demand much higher compensation than easily replaced employees. (So, too, unions who can credibly threaten a strike.) With the rise of managers in the late 19th and 20th centuries, many managers became such employees; now, many programmers are as well, for multiple reasons. One is that business processes that were previously carried out manually under management direction are now carried out automatically by computers. Another is that, like managers and unlike taxi drivers, farmers, or assembly-line workers, programmers are not very fungible: the knowledge in their head is what makes the software adaptable. You can easily buy your rides from a different taxi driver or your wheat from a different farmer, but you can't easily buy new GCC features from anybody but the small group of programmers who already know GCC, many of whom are specialized in particular parts of it. When we're talking about your home-grown payroll system, the situation is even more extreme. And of course we have the Fizzbuzz phenomenon, where hiring competent developers is difficult, especially for people who aren't themselves competent. A third reason is that writing more software can vastly increase the profitability of a business, both because the software is a cheaper replacement for workers, and because it enables new productive activities that weren't possible without the software. This doesn't guarantee higher earnings for programmers (or sysadmins, or data center HVAC technicians) but it does increase the size of the pie the different factions are negotiating shares of. — ⁂ — So why are hardware engineers so much worse paid than software engineers? Their contribution to automation and softwarification is, after all, equally critical, and they're doing the same kinds of activities as software engineers, so they're no more fungible. I think it's because the hardware engineer's BATNA is so much worse. If they have ramen money, a software engineer can take six months off to write a game or a web service and make it available to the world. Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin launched The Facebook to students of the entire Ivy League from their dorm rooms after a couple of months. They didn't need any investors or permission. 37Signals had similarly shoestring beginnings. Every company that wants to hire programmers has to compete against the startup ecosystem, both VC-funded and bootstrapped. By contrast, spinning up a production run of a new chip is going to cost you upwards of US$100k, or US$10M for a chip in cutting-edge technologies. You have to convince Samsung and/or TSMC to give you access to their cell libraries, signing NDAs. Even a prototype shuttle run in a last-millennium process node from something like MOSIS or CMP is going to cost you US$3000. Feedback time is measured in months or years, not seconds or minutes. PCB fabrication is not so extreme but there's still no hardware equivalent of a US$5 DigitalOcean droplet where you can try out a web service on 1000 users all over the world. So companies hiring hardware engineers have a lot of bargaining power by virtue of having the capital to put designs into production.
• dasil003 4y ago
  I wouldn't be so cocky about this. I agree with the value that software engineers bring, but you also have to look at the driving factors. Over the last 20 years, the web + smart phone revolution created an unprecedented opportunity whose value was captured by the first wave of companies who figured out how to scale always on services to billions of concurrent customers (Amazon, Google, Facebook). They built their foundations lean in between the dotcom and real estate bubbles, then, over the last 12 years we then had an incredible tech bull run capped off with a pandemic which forced everything online in a way that further ballooned expectations. Ultimately software engineer salaries were driven by the competition for the elite talent, but the ceiling was created by the market dominance and stock performance of the biggest companies. FAANG hoovered up an incredible number of engineers because they could afford it, not because they could productively use all those engineers. The average FAANG engineer can not reliably generate the value they are paid—most of that comes from a tiny fraction of engineers running the revenue engines of the company. While I agree the best engineers will only become more valuable, there is good reason to believe that competition will force margins down and this will put downward pressure on the average engineer salary over time. We may well have already seen the high watermark mid-level software engineer salaries, as we did a while ago for stock options which the investor class has steadily whittled away via financial engineering that consistently stays one step ahead of the historic perception of the rank and file.