7 ms·

I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely agree that over the past 30-40 ye

by dvt 4y ago

I mean, apart from the highfalutin class warfare nonsense and generally bad advice, this is a pretty decent post. I completely agree that over the past 30-40 years, companies have been pushing down engineering salaries. It's not really as incendiary as the author might have you believe, though. Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. I haven't researched it, but I imagine railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic reality in the early 20th century. What the author doesn't really get, is that there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. The party is over. Salaries will never be as comparatively high as they were in the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to sabotage (weird "advice," by the way). In the capitalist game, being an employee is never going to be a way to garner any real amount of wealth, so expecting to be a 1%'er while working for BigCo as engineer #23435 is an unrealistic expectation to have.

bediger4000 4y ago
Offshoring and H1-Bs have definitely kept programmer wages lower than they would have been otherwise.
- treeman79 4y ago
  I make better than 3x times my wife’s teacher salary. If I really pushed hard career wise I could probably get to 6x.
  - bediger4000 4y ago
    I'm not sure how this is relevant to the market distortion caused by offshoring and H1-B. Could you explain further?
  - primeblue 4y ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
etothepii 4y ago
Do you have any evidence that tech salaries were high in the 80s and 90s? I thought Apple, Sun et al conspired to keep salaries down. As the son of an electrical engineer with a 45 year career in software we never lived, and he doesn't have the pension, that a junior engineer at Meta or Google would be able to provide today.
- dvt 4y ago
  There's plenty of evidence[1]; but more importantly, when putting stagnating salaries in the context of housing prices, CPI, and inflation, it becomes even more jarring. Today, as an engineer making 125-175k in LA, for example, you will literally never be able to purchase a home near to where you work. [1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    There are plenty of nice cities in the developed world where people making a third of that have no trouble buying homes. California is expensive, because people oppose building new housing in sufficient quantities. They may support it in principle, but they oppose what it means in practice. Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by car and too sparsely populated to support good public transport. Building new housing is difficult due to the traffic it generates.
    - carlosjobim 4y ago
      Where? Can they buy homes without entering into lifelong debt?
      - jltsiren 4y ago
        At least in Finland, home ownership seems to be common among the people in their 30s and 40s I know, regardless of what they studied or didn't. The most common reasons for renting appear to be being single and relocating often for work. Typical mortgage duration is 20-25 years, which means that if you are in your 30s or 40s, you are probably about halfway through. At least if you didn't switch to a bigger home recently.
georgeoliver 4y ago
> Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. Did it start that way though? I feel like from the 50s-70s, outside of a narrow slice of academia, companies were mass hiring (and training!) people to program.
- Animats 4y ago
  Yes. Companies used to send people to "IBM School", to learn COBOL or Job Control Language. If you have to pay to train people, the technology tends to be kept simple and understandable.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    If I parsed that correctly, you're using JCL as an example of a technology that was kept simple and understandable. That, um, is not the way I think about JCL...
    - Animats 4y ago
      Good point. I used UNIVAC mainframes, not IBM. They had a different control language which wasn't too bad.
Animats 4y ago
> railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic reality in the early 20th century. Yes, they did. Being a locomotive engineer was a high-status job around 1900 or so. It was a union job. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was the first major union in the US. The same thing happened to electricians (heyday around 1920), radio engineers (peaked a bit later), and television engineers (peaked around 1970). Being a printer was once a good unionized job. I've seen homeless printers talking about the good old days at the Burger King near the Civic Center cable car turntable in SF. Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler?
- rexpop 4y ago
  > Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler? There are plenty of unhoused tech workers, already.
  - ggm 4y ago
    See! They pre optimised.
- qualudeheart 4y ago
  Eagerly the awaiting the age of the homeless current googler. I would let them stay on my couch.
jjav 4y ago
> Salaries will never be as comparatively high as they were in the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to sabotage In the 80s and 90s programming salaries were not very high, it was a decent middle-class job. Sure, there were outliers if you hit a big IPO as always (e.g. Sun in the 80s, Netscape in the 90s, among others). But salaries? No, they were generally in line with other white-collar middle-class jobs like accounting or such. It's only in the later 00s and particularly the 2010s that mean programmer salaries exploded to the point that now entry level jobs in SV can be 180K+. It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce.
- dvt 4y ago
  > It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce. The last 10 years of ballooning salaries are a mirage perpetuated by the FED's irresponsible quantitative easing. Who cares if you're making $180k when an entry-level house in your area costs $2 million. Not to mention that the people making that much in the first job is a fraction of a fraction of the workforce.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. People keep saying this, and people who own software companies REALLY seem to want it to be true, but as far as I can tell, it's the opposite. I occasionally work with kids fresh out of college and they find themselves completely lost in the maze of modern software stacks that abstract distributed file systems and dependency management and security that fail for what seem like incredibly arcane reasons ("what the heck is a trusted certificate authority and why doesn't it like mine?"). Developing software today requires fairly deep knowledge (or access to somebody with deep knowledge) of nearly the entire history of software development.
unity1001 4y ago
> class warfare nonsense Its only nonsense in the mind of plebs. For the class that's waging that war, its quite real. They are aware of what they are doing.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  So if we disagree with you, we're a "pleb". Nice. Personal attacks are against the site rules, by the way.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    You absolutely have not understood the comment that you replied to.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      You know, if you actually think that, instead of are just using it as a cheap rhetorical trick, you might supply some explanation of the comment I was replying to...
jojobas 4y ago
They would want it to be like a plumber but it turned out 95% of people just cant hold a wrench and no amount of boot camps can change that.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. That's quite a dramatic change. Maybe it is inevitable because most jobs not involve computers. > In the capitalist game, being an employee is never going to be a way to garner any real amount of wealth In the capitalist game, being an employee is the only avaliable starting position to 95% of the population. It it does not allow a way to garner any real amount of wealth, then we cannot have social mobility and best people getting to the top. Then we are all poorer.
kyletns 4y ago
Sure, but the point is that you have to fight now. Personally, I think a union would be a GREAT move, and I'm surprised he didn't stress that more.

by dvt 4y ago

bediger4000 4y ago

Offshoring and H1-Bs have definitely kept programmer wages lower than they would have been otherwise.

treeman79 4y ago
I make better than 3x times my wife’s teacher salary. If I really pushed hard career wise I could probably get to 6x.
- bediger4000 4y ago
  I'm not sure how this is relevant to the market distortion caused by offshoring and H1-B. Could you explain further?
- primeblue 4y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

etothepii 4y ago

Do you have any evidence that tech salaries were high in the 80s and 90s? I thought Apple, Sun et al conspired to keep salaries down. As the son of an electrical engineer with a 45 year career in software we never lived, and he doesn't have the pension, that a junior engineer at Meta or Google would be able to provide today.

dvt 4y ago
There's plenty of evidence[1]; but more importantly, when putting stagnating salaries in the context of housing prices, CPI, and inflation, it becomes even more jarring. Today, as an engineer making 125-175k in LA, for example, you will literally never be able to purchase a home near to where you work. [1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional
- jltsiren 4y ago
  There are plenty of nice cities in the developed world where people making a third of that have no trouble buying homes. California is expensive, because people oppose building new housing in sufficient quantities. They may support it in principle, but they oppose what it means in practice. Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by car and too sparsely populated to support good public transport. Building new housing is difficult due to the traffic it generates.
  - carlosjobim 4y ago
    Where? Can they buy homes without entering into lifelong debt?
    - jltsiren 4y ago
      At least in Finland, home ownership seems to be common among the people in their 30s and 40s I know, regardless of what they studied or didn't. The most common reasons for renting appear to be being single and relocating often for work. Typical mortgage duration is 20-25 years, which means that if you are in your 30s or 40s, you are probably about halfway through. At least if you didn't switch to a bigger home recently.

georgeoliver 4y ago

> Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. Did it start that way though? I feel like from the 50s-70s, outside of a narrow slice of academia, companies were mass hiring (and training!) people to program.

Animats 4y ago
Yes. Companies used to send people to "IBM School", to learn COBOL or Job Control Language. If you have to pay to train people, the technology tends to be kept simple and understandable.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  If I parsed that correctly, you're using JCL as an example of a technology that was kept simple and understandable. That, um, is not the way I think about JCL...
  - Animats 4y ago
    Good point. I used UNIVAC mainframes, not IBM. They had a different control language which wasn't too bad.

Animats 4y ago

> railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic reality in the early 20th century. Yes, they did. Being a locomotive engineer was a high-status job around 1900 or so. It was a union job. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was the first major union in the US. The same thing happened to electricians (heyday around 1920), radio engineers (peaked a bit later), and television engineers (peaked around 1970). Being a printer was once a good unionized job. I've seen homeless printers talking about the good old days at the Burger King near the Civic Center cable car turntable in SF. Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler?

rexpop 4y ago
> Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler? There are plenty of unhoused tech workers, already.
- ggm 4y ago
  See! They pre optimised.
qualudeheart 4y ago
Eagerly the awaiting the age of the homeless current googler. I would let them stay on my couch.

jjav 4y ago

> Salaries will never be as comparatively high as they were in the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to sabotage In the 80s and 90s programming salaries were not very high, it was a decent middle-class job. Sure, there were outliers if you hit a big IPO as always (e.g. Sun in the 80s, Netscape in the 90s, among others). But salaries? No, they were generally in line with other white-collar middle-class jobs like accounting or such. It's only in the later 00s and particularly the 2010s that mean programmer salaries exploded to the point that now entry level jobs in SV can be 180K+. It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce.

dvt 4y ago
> It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce. The last 10 years of ballooning salaries are a mirage perpetuated by the FED's irresponsible quantitative easing. Who cares if you're making $180k when an entry-level house in your area costs $2 million. Not to mention that the people making that much in the first job is a fraction of a fraction of the workforce.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. People keep saying this, and people who own software companies REALLY seem to want it to be true, but as far as I can tell, it's the opposite. I occasionally work with kids fresh out of college and they find themselves completely lost in the maze of modern software stacks that abstract distributed file systems and dependency management and security that fail for what seem like incredibly arcane reasons ("what the heck is a trusted certificate authority and why doesn't it like mine?"). Developing software today requires fairly deep knowledge (or access to somebody with deep knowledge) of nearly the entire history of software development.

unity1001 4y ago

> class warfare nonsense Its only nonsense in the mind of plebs. For the class that's waging that war, its quite real. They are aware of what they are doing.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
So if we disagree with you, we're a "pleb". Nice. Personal attacks are against the site rules, by the way.
- unity1001 4y ago
  You absolutely have not understood the comment that you replied to.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    You know, if you actually think that, instead of are just using it as a cheap rhetorical trick, you might supply some explanation of the comment I was replying to...

jojobas 4y ago

They would want it to be like a plumber but it turned out 95% of people just cant hold a wrench and no amount of boot camps can change that.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber. That's quite a dramatic change. Maybe it is inevitable because most jobs not involve computers. > In the capitalist game, being an employee is never going to be a way to garner any real amount of wealth In the capitalist game, being an employee is the only avaliable starting position to 95% of the population. It it does not allow a way to garner any real amount of wealth, then we cannot have social mobility and best people getting to the top. Then we are all poorer.

kyletns 4y ago

Sure, but the point is that you have to fight now. Personally, I think a union would be a GREAT move, and I'm surprised he didn't stress that more.