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Yes. We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very

Yes. We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at. But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business. Well, here is the wake up call. No, we are not paid to rate the best cappuccino of the valley, converting the most stable software of your org to Elm nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set. We are paid to solve problems. If you don't solve problems, when the hard times come, and they always do, you become part of the problem.

grumple 4y ago
Are we overpaid? The average software company is pulling in half a million per employee. That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people. Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses on their own without any of those people. Software and the engineers that make it proves itself to be very valuable, engineers should be compensated accordingly.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Apparently, thousands of "engineers" were deemed not that valuable in the last 12 months.
- IneffablePigeon 4y ago
  Individual engineers who start multi million dollar businesses also prove over and over again that they need those “worthless” other business people by immediately hiring them once they get to a certain size. Not to mention that the engineers who do manage to start these companies are usually not top of the engineering field but rather the ones who are also good at sales and marketing and product management. Software is a team sport.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people" Well, if those people are allmost worthless, then why not proof that, by making a buisness that thrives without them?
- linkdd 4y ago
  > Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses Beware of survivor bias, for every successful business, there might be a 1000 failed ones.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > there might be a 1000 failed ones. For example, me. (Hmm, perhaps I should try to use GPT to turn my old desktop Java shareware into browser-based Javascript freeware).
    - linkdd 4y ago
      It's kinda the same for me, our product solved a problem that was not enough annoying to people for them to consider buying it, so we never had the product market fit, and never managed to sell a single license. The company still exists today, but it's mainly surviving with us doing freelance work and hoping one of our side project might generate some revenue. Maybe as open-source, the product could have some success, but I don't know how to "sell" open-source or make a revenue from it.
ownagefool 4y ago
I think you're right and you're wrong. For sure, there's a lot of bullshit, drama and fud regarding our place in the world. But when companies are making bank on your labour, despite the fact you have above average rewards, you aren't overpaid. The question becomes who's contributing and who's changing the window dressing, and are the latter a neccessary expense to find the former.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  I have been coding for 20 years now, pretty much on every continent, in many different projects. At least half of them have failed. I've seen NGO moving to docker based micro services for their data collection tools and burn the donators money for 2 years before dying under the weight of the complexity they just created. I've seen start up working on ideas for months that made no sense, only to run out of cash but the belly full of useless lines of code. I've seen corporations hiring 7 people to do the work one single senior dev could do, then from meetings to audits, proceed to ensure the budget would explode and the product never released. I've seen fancy operations, with free food and fashionable people full of colors and style. And they spent 2 third of their day virtue signaling, fighting over how to do thing, what should have been done instead, and what we should do in the future. But certainly doing nothing right now. I don't believe the free market is pricing the value of most things fairly. Just like I don't believe diamonds have much value, and never did, even before when people were still buying them for their wedding ring. Yes, most of us are overpaid, given the problems we actually solve. But we are in the IT golden age, if you throw computers at things, you get a 100x return. And money was cheap for so long. So it was ok, to hire 100 people, and have 12 of them being actually useful, because you didn't have time figure out which ones. However today the economy is contracting. The low hanging fruits have been harvested. And it's no longer economically viable for the companies (that were never our friends in the first place) that they care about how special devs are. And so we get fired.
  - mech422 4y ago
    man - if you've been at it 20 years, this isn't your first rodeo... I've been working 40 years in Tech.. Saw the Wall St. ups/downs in the 90s - NYC was feast/famine back then Saw the Y2K 'end of the world' ... We're still here Saw the 'dot com' bust ... Tech/Internet didn't die Saw the 2008 crash ... We're still here and thats just what I can remember at 2 am :-) I fully expect us to be here after this current stuff blows over. And I expect there to be a bigger shortage of programmers due to retirement, changing careers, etc. edit: fix formating
DeathArrow 4y ago
>We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas Tell that to this guy: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Love it. And a good explanation of why so many devs reach burn out. But two things can be true.
- luckylion 4y ago
  It's hard to read because of the lack of structure, but in the end they're complaining that some code golf competition's winner wasn't legible code that's great to maintain. If your job is to work on code that looks like that, that really sucks and I'm sorry for you, unless you love doing it, in which case cool. But for most of us it's really not and while I often feel close to being broken, I'm 100% convinced that plenty of jobs are much more taxing, and if I reduced my hours, it would be a breeze. But there's features to build and bugs to fix, and I'm going to retire in a year or three in my forties because that's how good tech pays even people like me who can figure stuff out but are by no means geniuses.
- cmollis 4y ago
  "..so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots." Man, I've written a lot of programs..
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    Well don't know if I'm a dick, but my code have proven its author to be an idiot many times :)
danwee 4y ago
IT workers are as divas as Basketball players (to some extent): why on earth Lebron James earns millions? Answer: because the team that owns him makes much more than that by selling his image. Easy. Same of IT workers: IT companies make millions per employee, so they pay us hundred of thousands in exchange. Easy.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Oracle makes millions, but is it because of their amazing devs? Doctors don't make millions, is it because saving human life is not valuable? Correlation is not causation. Not to mention Lebron James actually ships. Indeed, he plays the matches he is paid for. And doesn't cry on TV the coffee is not good enough in the stadium.
  - danwee 4y ago
    > Oracle makes millions, but is it because of their amazing devs? Meaning? If it's because of their sales people, they are making a good salary as well. > Doctors don't make millions, is it because saving human life is not valuable? As you pointed out, we don't value them enough. People nowadays prefer to spend their time thinking TikTok/Twitter/GitHub... so that's where the moneys goes. > Not to mention Lebron James actually ships. Indeed, he plays the matches he is paid for. And doesn't cry on TV the coffee is not good enough in the stadium. It's not about shiping. It's about selling. Sad, but true.
  - alenmilk 4y ago
    I don't understand. You complain about coworkers getting high pay and complaining while not producing any value. Do you think a downturn and potentially getting fired will educate them in this matters and getting less pay will make them solve actual problems?
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    Re: Oracle, yes actually it is due to amazing devs. OCI paid FAANG salaries so they could get FAANG talent. Now they're the only cloud provider with robust growth in their cloud products
danjac 4y ago
A lot of exaggeration going on here. Most developers don't live in the Valley, most of us didn't earn astronomical salaries during the past decade, most of us didn't have to run code reviews past a "diversity committee". We mostly just got on with our job like everyone else. Of course we debated languages and frameworks but so what? Every profession has its arguments over tools and processes. Everyone complains about their manager and endless meetings.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Of course, It's a caricature dedicated to HN readers. I have met plenty of competent devs, working seriously and providing values to humanity, well enough to justify the not so huge salary they get. But stating the obvious is not going to make people think. However, the message that part of the community is growing into entitled spoiled kids, shocked that their shinning arses can even be touched by a lay off, is something I did want to convey :)
  - danjac 4y ago
    Sure of course some may be entitled spoiled kids. But do you know who is even more entitled and spoiled? The VC investor and C-Suite class, who are driving these layoffs. We saw a bit of this entitlement over the weekend as these armchair libertarians bleated for a government bailout. By feeding the narrative that tech workers are spoiled, entitled divas who exactly are we helping?
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Tech workers themselves. Hear me out for a minute. Tech workers have been partially insulated from the hard-nosed realities of “They pay me $5 because I make them $6 or $7.” “They pay me because I know how computers work and computers make them $100K times N somehow, and someone else can make $500K per SWE, so that company established the SWE comp at $300K, but I don’t want to work at that company because they turned evil and have a hiring system that would take me unpaid time on my own to crack, so I’m willing to work at this other company I believe in more for only $150K, and since they make $100K times N from software, they’re able to hire N/2 of us and barely scrape by. Then, when my company profits take a hit from soaring input costs and we pull back on advertisements as a result and the $500K company sees a drop in as revenues and they cut back on their employees as a result, making that $300K reference now up for debate, and these other places pop up on the radar where people just as good as me are eager to work for half of what I cost, that possibility is appealing to businesses who are struggling with uncertain demand from their customers who are stretched from their own soaring life costs for energy, food, and housing. Hmm, maybe as a tech worker, I should try to understand whether this is another temporary tech recession and, if it is, how I should react to position myself and protect myself, my family, and my friends.” This tech recession won’t last forever; we’re not going the way of ice harvesters or buggy whip makers, but I think we’re going to see a large scale re-alignment and even if tech salaries merely fall back to 2015 levels, it’s going to feel catastrophic to many. 2020 and 2021 were outlier years. Expect more non-outlier years than outlier years and expect a reversion back to needing to connect value to costs and if you don’t know how your company makes money by employing you, try to figure that out, try to increase it, and try to be sure that they know how they make money from you. We all do better when we create $X of value and take a high but fair fraction of that home for ourselves, leaving everyone in a nice, durably desirable trade of our skills for their needs.
hasa 4y ago
I love this comment. But this phenomena of first world problems and whiners spreads to whole western civilisation (I'm part of it).
ddalex 4y ago
> for incredible working conditions I find that what dev experience should be normal working conditions for everybody, not just devs. > We are paid to solve problems. > If you don't solve problems, when the hard times come, and they always do, you become part of the problem. Totally agree. But this shouldn't prevent us from solving problem working in good conditions.
- eru 4y ago
  Well, that's the way of progress. Normal working conditions these days used to be close to the best imaginable working conditions in the 19th century. Even for someone bagging groceries at Walmart.
onion2k 4y ago
We are overpaid... Pay is a function of value. If you produce a lot of value, you get paid a lot. This is true for all jobs unless the business has figured out a way to get away with keeping most of the value for itself. When a dev is producing code that generates $x millions either they're going to end up getting paid a lot or the business is going to end up making more profit. To suggest that a dev is 'overpaid' is just saying that you think tech companies should keep more profit from the value they create instead. It's important to remember that despite all the layoffs, talk of recessions, and 'bad news' around at the moment, company profits and revenues are still way up. Meta's revenue went up $30bn in 2021 ($85.96bn in 2020, $117.92bn in 2021). It fell to $116.6bn in 2022. Maybe the revenue will plunge back down to 2020 levels again this year which would justify slashing the headcount, but I doubt it. I think it's a lot more likely that Meta will announce record profits at the end of the year.
- sweezyjeezy 4y ago
  A very free-market take. Do you believe that a fresh graduate at FAANG is really generating 6 figures in value? Do you believe that US employees on average generate 3x the value of their European counterparts?
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    > A very free-market take. Do you believe that a fresh graduate at FAANG is really generating 6 figures in value? On average no; but it's the easiest way to get to the front of the line for finding the ones that do justify it. > Do you believe that US employees on average generate 3x the value of their European counterparts? Yes.
    - kingboss 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - edu 4y ago
        I thought about the age indicator maaaaany times
ryan_lane 4y ago
Boomers were able to work minimum wage jobs and buy houses and live comfortable lives. We don't make too much, everyone else makes too little.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Boomers existed in a society were everything were not sold yet. Were every pieces of land was not occupied and optimized yet. Now the theater is full. It's not that boomers earned much and today a lot of people earn too little. Is that then things were less rare than today compared to the demand. Also, I earn way more than my father and grand-father, and my life style just cannot be compared, nor the energy I consume or waste I produce. So as an IT guy, no, this is not enough to explain it. And boomers were certainly not divas. Their working conditions were definitly not as good as in IT today.
  - rhino369 4y ago
    The country isn’t really full even if the Bay Area, NYC, and other large metros are. At a certain point the cost of living disparities will move people to up and coming cities. Some of the teleworking gains from the pandemic are being wound back. But it’s still a view of the future.
amelius 4y ago
* divas that have to attend meetings several times a week, that is
whstl 4y ago
Well, yes. But the solution to most of the stuff you point to is to have better management to rein in the divas, better hiring, better training for those managers and developers, more stable stacks so there's no excuse to rewrite into Elm, etc. Which our industry also seems to have given up on, because it costs money. So we'll have divas, bad devs, wasted resources, Elm. Of course, the alternative to spending money on fixing this is much more expensive: just hire more devs... but who said our industry is rational.
Yoric 4y ago
I mostly agree that we are divas and that 2023 is a wake up call. I agree that tech stack churn is a big problem, although I feel that it's a sign of immaturity of the industry and domain themselves rather than an issue with individual developers. Much of our job is to find more efficient/robust ways to fix issues, progressively compressing the job of N people into something that can be done by o(N) people. That means that we are trained and selected to spot inefficiencies and take them personally. That also means taking new technologies for a drive. I'm sure that there are better ways to do this than trying them in production, but as long as we operate in an industry that cannot differentiate between self-training-for-next-job, research, industrial prototype and industrial product, we won't be able to fix this problem. I hope that, as the industry matures, this dust will settle a bit. Perhaps one aspect of this will involve letting developers take a few paid weeks once in a while to work on prototypes with whichever technology they want, as a form of self-training. Another will be making companies actually liable for the damage they cause when they try and pass early prototypes as products. As for diversity, I tend to disagree. In my experience as both a dev, tech lead and sometimes CTO, diversity is not just a political choice, it is also practically useful, for the same reason nepotism and consanguinity are bad. Diversity is what saves you from blind spots (aka "acquired stupidity"). Diversity is also what lets you hire brilliant people who have been overlooked by other companies.
- cpursley 4y ago
  What’s your definition of diversity?
  - Yoric 4y ago
    Basically, in my book, it means "don't build a team of clones of yourself", because everybody having the same profile is how you create blind spots. Hire people who are going to have a different perspective, perhaps because they have a different reasoning (e.g. neuro-divergent candidates), different origins, different curriculum, different life experience, etc.
    - cpursley 4y ago
coldtea 4y ago
>But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business. Aren't you seeing it backwards? Other professions should have the same "luxuries", in a humane working world. Instead people are treated like cattle. IT being an "amazing productivity" boost, means those "divas" you describe just get small part of the value they create, especially since a heck of a lot of the rest ends as unprecedented profit levels... Under a capitalistic labour market theory, employees are not and can't be "overpaid" (and surely not for decades on end). They are paid exactly what they are worth, as price is based on supply and demand equilibrium. Under a marxist labour market theory employees still can't be overpaid if the company makes a profit on top of what it would re-invest in itself (infrastructure, etc.). So, under neither theory workers can be overpaid under any normal circumstances. At worst, under capitalism there can be a higher market rate that gets adjusted to a lower one, but at each point in time none of those was "overpaid", it was the best the market knew to set. The higher rate was appropriate supply-and-demand-wise for when it was applied (and it might raise again as IT companies compete for developers, and so on). Let's not forget the "US/Europe needs X millions more developers" reports churned out every few months...
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  If US/EU get just a significant fraction of those developers needed, software dev salaries will go to the level of other engineering, say mechanical, construction or material one. Employers would be very happy with that. And lets be honest here, its not that different job despite what some bigger egos think about their work and echo chambers that keep them in that dream. I don't agree those other engineers are treated as cattle, merely as normal employees. IT, mostly in SV and other places cargo-culting ie Google is often really treated like divas. Bear in mind that this was never true in corporations where IT was treated as a cost center, ie banking. But from various HN posts it seems that typical young SV dev has no experience with that and many feel they are changing the world for the better, when reality its at best a zero sum game, and often not even that (ie optimizing ad revenue stream for your corporation is definitely loss for mankind as a whole, or anything that makes societal parasites who breed depression like facebook/insta/tiktok more effective at their goals). But folks for some obscure reason need to feel that their work has a good purpose and high moral ground, hence sometimes quite advanced mental gymnastics seen also here.
yokoprime 4y ago
This reads like someone who hasn’t experienced working in the industry first hand, but rather has made up an opinion based on Twitter and Tik-Tok.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  And yet that's written by someone who is working for 10 times minimum wage from his home on his adjustable motorized standing desk. While ordering sushi (because I can afford to every day and the maid is off, because I can afford a maid) for lunch, I received a text message from my friend, a nurse, saying that she will do 50 hours this week and she can't come to the diner we plan. I'm French, lived in Africa, worked in Asia and the US, and, no, this is not a twitter thing. I already considered myself amazingly lucky just for having hot water, electricity, and always have heat/sleep/food. But this life a lot of us enjoy in 202*? It's damn luxurious.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    And yet you still write like your opinions are based on Twitter and Tik-Tok
    - theknocker 4y ago
      [dead]
- metalspot 4y ago
  > 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones i think this guy understands the industry very well. maybe you are the one with tik-tok opinions?
urbandw311er 4y ago
This is a great answer. And there's a niggling worry in my mind as to whether the sudden capability explosion of LLMs might eliminate the bottom 50% of us completely.
- coding123 4y ago
  Yes but that may take 5 years as everyone learns the OpenAPI API (to call it) and integrate the response in a text box and release the AI autocomplete features around the product suite.
gumballindie 4y ago
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions I have to disagree with this for a number of reasons. By and large in tech people work overtime meaning per hour pay is lower than what you think. To be decent at your job you need to constanty learn, also not factored into wages. The working conditions are horrible. You sit at a desk, usually in a crowded lowd office, which is highly detrimental to your health. Often you need to commute long hours meaning you are detached from social and family life. Many struggle with starting a family. Moreover, you have to constantly chase small tasks, constantly shifting focus and have to deal with obnoxious managers. All things considered, tech is not a well paid job. Not by a long shot. While we "enjoy" sitting in offices and an apparent high income - at an enormous cost for us - the guy next door owning a corner shop enjoys a family life, likely owns a property and doesn't need to worry about keeping pace with daily changes.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Why do it then? Why not open a corner shop instead?
  - gumballindie 4y ago
    My side gig which is not tech made more money than i ever did as a tech “worker”. That’s when i realised that we are living in a bubble. Step outside of it and you’ll be surprised at how much your mind’s being wasted by sitting on a chair all day chasing jira tickets like a drone (no insult intended). Our minds are designed to be analytical and organised. That’s precisely what can give you a massive competitive edge. We like to discover, learn and master. Just as you learn a new technology in no time so can you learn how build a small business and be damn good at it.
  - avidiax 4y ago
    Risk/reward/opportunity The big tech giants are paying enough that most engineers don't consider the risk of opening their own business to be worth it. Owning the shop provides intangibles like being your own boss, somewhat less sedentary lifestyle, more community interaction, etc. But the financial rewards are most likely no better than being a developer at a FANG. That corner shop may have been started decades ago. The opportunity to buy it at a reasonable price has probably long past.
Jochim 4y ago
We made a small group of people incomprehensibly wealthy. In return we were granted a little more freedom than the average worker.
testbjjl 4y ago
> nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set. Maybe part of these repetitive problems repeating themselves stems from the sameness.
mmarq 4y ago
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. Maybe in the US, but in the UK a highly paid software developer can barely buy a 2 bedroom flat in a suburb where 30 years ago the salary of a junior factory worker was enough to buy a house. > If you had any professional doing the same Other professionals are less productive by orders of magnitude, just check what’s going on in the accountancy department of a random company. You can double their productivity introducing Excel’s pivot tables a V-lookup. Or try to get a plumber to fix your toilet within time and budget.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I’ve never met a plumber who couldn’t fix a toilet in the quoted time and budget.
  - beardedetim 4y ago
    Where do you find these plumbers? When we owned our house, we never were able to find any contractor that was reliable, upfront about costs, etc. Hell, getting them on the phone and to show up was hard enough.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Word of mouth from neighbors and colleagues, mostly. I mostly DIY small things around the house, but when I have a plumbing task I can't or don't have time to do, I've had good luck in calling those plumbers, getting an upfront quote (often, "here's our trip charge and hourly rate, and a toilet repair is going to be less than the one-hour minimum and around $75 in parts") The reason I do it myself is that $75 in parts is actually $20-30 in parts and I can order parts and then do 45 minutes of plumbing work faster than I could figure out what plumber to call, arrange a time, and then stay home to let them in.
  - nikau 4y ago
    Those plumbers probably don't have to deal with a "not invented here" cistern and related plumbing with bespoke thread pitch and piping diameter either.
joeblubaugh 4y ago
> nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set. Oh give me a break
Lutger 4y ago
Let me put it this way: why should companies use value based pricing and extract ridiculous amounts of profits from consumers for their mediocre services, that goes into the pockets of just a few shareholders, whereas the labor of workers who actually produced the stuff be rewarded by a completely different logic (akin to cost based pricing)? When workers have some actual leverage, suddenly the free market is a problem and not a magical fairy anymore. If companies on the market can sell overpriced garbage to enrich their shareholders, surely you can't seriously complain about laborers being overpaid, even if they are. Its all the same game. The whole system is totally unfair and unreasonable, developers being overpaid is not the problem and such a minor thing to focus on.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Stating those people are overpaid doesn't negate the fact that dev is incredibly well paid position with luxurious work conditions that people manage to complain about while being bad at it. If you accept the premise that we should mock incompetent divas shareholder and CEO, then you should accept the premise we should mock our own community. Plus a bit of self-deprecating humor is good for the soul.
epicureanideal 4y ago
> We are overpaid Compared to what? Directors of HR, product managers, lawyers, managers of all kinds, etc. all make similar money. Software engineers are paid what they're paid because their work allows companies to scale their products to serve more users. This "paid too much" is nonsense, we can barely (if at all) afford houses where near where we work.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Everybody agree that there are several of overpaid BS jobs out there. Two things can be true.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    If almost all the skilled jobs are similarly “overpaid”, maybe that’s just what ordinary good pay looks like. Some people might be underpaid, and that would be a different angle. As it is, in the Bay Area, a typical startup software engineer only earns 4-5x what a person that makes burgers at a fast food restaurant makes. (Typically they make $20+ per hour, so $40k+ per year). Despite years of education, monetary investment in education, constant re training, long hours, etc. It doesn’t seem an unreasonable multiple to me, just trying to get a sense of the situation. Those arguing that we should make less than or around $100k, are we really producing no more value than 2 people making burgers, or one especially fast burger maker? Also note that wait staff at good restaurants in SF can earn $80-100k. And even decent outsourced developers in low cost of living countries charge $30-50 per hour (60k-100k per year). With again, less impressive education, and assuming a 40 hour work week which is lower than many engineers in the Bay Area work, and that’s not even for top skilled outsourced work. Try paying less than this now, you’ll pay for it multiple times over later.
  - danielrpa 4y ago
    True. But interestingly, few of these people believe that THEIR job is one of the "BS jobs out there"
- usrnm 4y ago
  > Compared to what? Nurses? Our job is a lot easier and less important and working conditions are much better. And yet, a fresh grad straight out of school gets a few times more money than an experienced nurse. And, what is worse, a lot of devs honestly believe that they deserve it.
apercu 4y ago
> changing part of the tech stack every month Still happening. Everything must be REACT now. For reasons.
goodpoint 4y ago
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. You forgot to write "in the US".
theknocker 4y ago
[dead]
Ensorceled 4y ago
> nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set Why does every tech bro rant these days include a section blaming "diversity" for a bunch of problems? Did renaming master to main really fuck up the system that badly?
- zarathustreal 4y ago
  Frankly, because the meaning and purpose of "diversity" has been corrupted to the point that it actually causes issues like the one described. Similar to the corruption of the word "racism". I think you're missing the point by assuming git branch renaming is the primary (only?) cost. Diversity (meaningful diversity of thought and opinion, that is) actually has business value. That's the reason it was pushed so hard from the top way back in the day, it was seen as a means to improve product offerings and problem solving processes. These days "diversity" is nothing more than a euphemism for weird racial, sexual orientation, and gender fetishes. These "diverse" workplaces are, ironically, echo chambers for the same patterns of thought based around the idea that superficial characteristics like gender and skin color are meaningful predictive traits
  - throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
    Every new movement has a hype cycle. It's fine. The hype will eventually die down, the useful stuff will remain, the rest will go. I still can't find any black people to hire for some basic positions. This is a problem. Research continues to show ML models to be biased in favor of the people who create them, and against the people who were never in the room. This affects society in a huge way when that model is used for law enforcement, health care, education, etc.
    - hdisllcn 4y ago
      Why is that a problem? If you can’t find black people to hire, it means black people are not having problems finding employment. Why do we expect the population to perfectly segment itself in such a way that every workplace has the correct percentage relative to some interpretation of the population? This idea that black people are needed to provide some sort of black perspective on every team is so weird to me. You’re not your race and the type of black people who are qualified to work in top tier tech companies have more in common with the upper classes and college elites than they have with the stereotypical inner-city poor kid raised by a single mom.
nomy99 4y ago
I work like a dog and have been since engineering school. Actually was working like a dog in school too. I think I genuinely deserve the pay considering the day to day stress of the job and the complex workload.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  Lots of people work like dogs and it seems to have no strong correlation with their pay. It's never been about "deserving", it's just supply and demand.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lukas099 4y ago
    > It's never been about "deserving", it's just supply and demand. This is the basic fact that so many people just fail to grasp.
- nomy99 4y ago
  Daily Responsibilities: Developing code (duh), leading a team, reviewing PR's monitoring the continuous release pipelines, providing production support, recruiting (takes a surprising chunk of my time), sprint ceremonies, Fixing bugs and talking to QA
wootland 4y ago
Developers are dramatically underpaid, just like all non-exec labor. It's ridiculous to complain about devs making 300k-500k a year when execs are pulling in millions or tens of millions a year with 10M-100B worth of equity under their belt. Focusing on anything other than that is a complete distraction and counterproductive. Devs should be getting 10X their current salary and execs should be getting 1/100th theirs. I'll add that if you can't easily afford a family house next to your office, you're not overpaid.
- golergka 4y ago
  If you truly think that this radical change will make the company more productive, what's stopping you from raising a seed round for your new company built on this innovation as competitive edge?
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    > what's stopping you from raising a seed round for your new company Knowing what’s true and being able to convince some investors, who are not universally omniscient and reasonable and open to conversation from people they don’t already know, are different things.
  - wootland 4y ago
    I have done that and it's a great management strategy. You can hire world class developers and talent if you just treat them as peers and don't jack your own compensation up to astronomical levels. It's like a "cheat" to win at management. People will also be less likely to quit and much more likely to join you at your next role.
- AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
  They (well, we) are not underpaid. Some time ago I used to work in a large organization on the very bottom of the food chain. I was making, say, $100k a year, which was quite decent money. Sitting there, doing same thing I could've grown to a "senior bottom of the food chain" of $150k. That was the limit. A soft one, but still the limit. The organization was quite picky in selecting their workforce. Think FAANG. So in every team you have a bunch of quite smart opinionated folks, who somehow have to be steered in the same direction. With that I see it kinda reasonable for the team lead to make at least $200k a year. Give or take. Now we move one step up. Someone has to pull all these "creme de la creme" cats together and herd them, so that at the very minimum teams don't work against each other. Ideally work together for some common goal. And I can understand team leads who is not willing to go to this snake pit for 30% salary increase. Why would they? 50% - may be. 70% - that sounds interesting and worth consideration. Bottom line: according to my humble experience in "the organization", the salary roughly doubles each time you get up the ladder. And being on different steps of this ladder I can understand why.
lazypenguin 4y ago
While your post was certainly hyperbolic I was uncomfortably surprised by how many people disagreed with you. For me the thing that disappoints me today in our industry is the number of mediocre professionals who give themselves too high of an elevated status just because they get paid more than the average person in their society. At the end of the day we’ll have bigger problems if the trash doesn’t get picked up or if that power line doesn’t get fixed than we will if some developer doesn’t solve some abstract problem. We don’t “deserve” anything and maybe we earned it through hard work but not enough of us appreciate our good fortune of being professional programmers.
janalsncm 4y ago
I mean no disrespect but a lot of this sounds like stereotypes of what software engineers do. Yes having free coffee and maybe even free lunch are nice perks, but those are very small compared to salary + office space cost. And RTO has shown the latter to be negligible anyways. 200 years ago it would’ve been crazy talk to get Saturdays off. In some countries it still is. I don’t think not having to work 996 is a sign of waste or laziness, it’s a sign of progress.
mykowebhn 4y ago
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. I once had a job where we created and supported a bunch of Golang microservices in the backend. Like you alluded to, I couldn't help but feel that I was a glorified, overpaid plumber.
908B64B197 4y ago
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. Overpaid relative to what? Certainly not the value created. There's this meme that software engineers are just capricious and don't "deserve" the money (often it's a weird form of jealousy from other fields who simply can't match an engineer's output) but it completely ignores the enormous gains in productivity enabled by the field. Is there any other field where such an impact can be had by a small team in the Valley? > If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at. You seem to have a very particular view of the profession. > But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business. Is it luck? People saw the writing on the wall decades ago.
deepnet 4y ago
In the often adverserial world of exchanging labour and creativity for money, shares, prestige, and because we programmers care please don't blame us for not being able to assess how much the business should pay us. Our job is attempt to know our expected potential worth and then negotiate for that recompense. There are things we often don't know, i.e. megacorps may hire us to stop us working elsewhere. If a business chooses to neglect to know this because it is either not worth it to them find out or they are incapable that is not on the worker. This is esentially an attempted value crash or hyperdeflation of the monetary value of labour. This meme of we can do more with hugely vastly less talent is a spreadsheet fancy of MBAs far from the coal face of code or customers. The real cost is all the top talent people bail and only those who can't or won't leave remain. But management think they can properly assess the value of people finessing a process they can't do and little understand and probably are insulated from and only see through metrics to which Goodhart's law means the stats are juked.

grumple 4y ago

Are we overpaid? The average software company is pulling in half a million per employee. That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people. Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses on their own without any of those people. Software and the engineers that make it proves itself to be very valuable, engineers should be compensated accordingly.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Apparently, thousands of "engineers" were deemed not that valuable in the last 12 months.
IneffablePigeon 4y ago
Individual engineers who start multi million dollar businesses also prove over and over again that they need those “worthless” other business people by immediately hiring them once they get to a certain size. Not to mention that the engineers who do manage to start these companies are usually not top of the engineering field but rather the ones who are also good at sales and marketing and product management. Software is a team sport.
hutzlibu 4y ago
"That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people" Well, if those people are allmost worthless, then why not proof that, by making a buisness that thrives without them?
linkdd 4y ago
> Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses Beware of survivor bias, for every successful business, there might be a 1000 failed ones.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > there might be a 1000 failed ones. For example, me. (Hmm, perhaps I should try to use GPT to turn my old desktop Java shareware into browser-based Javascript freeware).
  - linkdd 4y ago
    It's kinda the same for me, our product solved a problem that was not enough annoying to people for them to consider buying it, so we never had the product market fit, and never managed to sell a single license. The company still exists today, but it's mainly surviving with us doing freelance work and hoping one of our side project might generate some revenue. Maybe as open-source, the product could have some success, but I don't know how to "sell" open-source or make a revenue from it.

ownagefool 4y ago

I think you're right and you're wrong. For sure, there's a lot of bullshit, drama and fud regarding our place in the world. But when companies are making bank on your labour, despite the fact you have above average rewards, you aren't overpaid. The question becomes who's contributing and who's changing the window dressing, and are the latter a neccessary expense to find the former.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
I have been coding for 20 years now, pretty much on every continent, in many different projects. At least half of them have failed. I've seen NGO moving to docker based micro services for their data collection tools and burn the donators money for 2 years before dying under the weight of the complexity they just created. I've seen start up working on ideas for months that made no sense, only to run out of cash but the belly full of useless lines of code. I've seen corporations hiring 7 people to do the work one single senior dev could do, then from meetings to audits, proceed to ensure the budget would explode and the product never released. I've seen fancy operations, with free food and fashionable people full of colors and style. And they spent 2 third of their day virtue signaling, fighting over how to do thing, what should have been done instead, and what we should do in the future. But certainly doing nothing right now. I don't believe the free market is pricing the value of most things fairly. Just like I don't believe diamonds have much value, and never did, even before when people were still buying them for their wedding ring. Yes, most of us are overpaid, given the problems we actually solve. But we are in the IT golden age, if you throw computers at things, you get a 100x return. And money was cheap for so long. So it was ok, to hire 100 people, and have 12 of them being actually useful, because you didn't have time figure out which ones. However today the economy is contracting. The low hanging fruits have been harvested. And it's no longer economically viable for the companies (that were never our friends in the first place) that they care about how special devs are. And so we get fired.
- mech422 4y ago
  man - if you've been at it 20 years, this isn't your first rodeo... I've been working 40 years in Tech.. Saw the Wall St. ups/downs in the 90s - NYC was feast/famine back then Saw the Y2K 'end of the world' ... We're still here Saw the 'dot com' bust ... Tech/Internet didn't die Saw the 2008 crash ... We're still here and thats just what I can remember at 2 am :-) I fully expect us to be here after this current stuff blows over. And I expect there to be a bigger shortage of programmers due to retirement, changing careers, etc. edit: fix formating

DeathArrow 4y ago

>We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas Tell that to this guy: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Love it. And a good explanation of why so many devs reach burn out. But two things can be true.
luckylion 4y ago
It's hard to read because of the lack of structure, but in the end they're complaining that some code golf competition's winner wasn't legible code that's great to maintain. If your job is to work on code that looks like that, that really sucks and I'm sorry for you, unless you love doing it, in which case cool. But for most of us it's really not and while I often feel close to being broken, I'm 100% convinced that plenty of jobs are much more taxing, and if I reduced my hours, it would be a breeze. But there's features to build and bugs to fix, and I'm going to retire in a year or three in my forties because that's how good tech pays even people like me who can figure stuff out but are by no means geniuses.
cmollis 4y ago
"..so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots." Man, I've written a lot of programs..
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Well don't know if I'm a dick, but my code have proven its author to be an idiot many times :)

danwee 4y ago

IT workers are as divas as Basketball players (to some extent): why on earth Lebron James earns millions? Answer: because the team that owns him makes much more than that by selling his image. Easy. Same of IT workers: IT companies make millions per employee, so they pay us hundred of thousands in exchange. Easy.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Oracle makes millions, but is it because of their amazing devs? Doctors don't make millions, is it because saving human life is not valuable? Correlation is not causation. Not to mention Lebron James actually ships. Indeed, he plays the matches he is paid for. And doesn't cry on TV the coffee is not good enough in the stadium.
- danwee 4y ago
  > Oracle makes millions, but is it because of their amazing devs? Meaning? If it's because of their sales people, they are making a good salary as well. > Doctors don't make millions, is it because saving human life is not valuable? As you pointed out, we don't value them enough. People nowadays prefer to spend their time thinking TikTok/Twitter/GitHub... so that's where the moneys goes. > Not to mention Lebron James actually ships. Indeed, he plays the matches he is paid for. And doesn't cry on TV the coffee is not good enough in the stadium. It's not about shiping. It's about selling. Sad, but true.
- alenmilk 4y ago
  I don't understand. You complain about coworkers getting high pay and complaining while not producing any value. Do you think a downturn and potentially getting fired will educate them in this matters and getting less pay will make them solve actual problems?
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Re: Oracle, yes actually it is due to amazing devs. OCI paid FAANG salaries so they could get FAANG talent. Now they're the only cloud provider with robust growth in their cloud products

danjac 4y ago

A lot of exaggeration going on here. Most developers don't live in the Valley, most of us didn't earn astronomical salaries during the past decade, most of us didn't have to run code reviews past a "diversity committee". We mostly just got on with our job like everyone else. Of course we debated languages and frameworks but so what? Every profession has its arguments over tools and processes. Everyone complains about their manager and endless meetings.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Of course, It's a caricature dedicated to HN readers. I have met plenty of competent devs, working seriously and providing values to humanity, well enough to justify the not so huge salary they get. But stating the obvious is not going to make people think. However, the message that part of the community is growing into entitled spoiled kids, shocked that their shinning arses can even be touched by a lay off, is something I did want to convey :)
- danjac 4y ago
  Sure of course some may be entitled spoiled kids. But do you know who is even more entitled and spoiled? The VC investor and C-Suite class, who are driving these layoffs. We saw a bit of this entitlement over the weekend as these armchair libertarians bleated for a government bailout. By feeding the narrative that tech workers are spoiled, entitled divas who exactly are we helping?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Tech workers themselves. Hear me out for a minute. Tech workers have been partially insulated from the hard-nosed realities of “They pay me $5 because I make them $6 or $7.” “They pay me because I know how computers work and computers make them $100K times N somehow, and someone else can make $500K per SWE, so that company established the SWE comp at $300K, but I don’t want to work at that company because they turned evil and have a hiring system that would take me unpaid time on my own to crack, so I’m willing to work at this other company I believe in more for only $150K, and since they make $100K times N from software, they’re able to hire N/2 of us and barely scrape by. Then, when my company profits take a hit from soaring input costs and we pull back on advertisements as a result and the $500K company sees a drop in as revenues and they cut back on their employees as a result, making that $300K reference now up for debate, and these other places pop up on the radar where people just as good as me are eager to work for half of what I cost, that possibility is appealing to businesses who are struggling with uncertain demand from their customers who are stretched from their own soaring life costs for energy, food, and housing. Hmm, maybe as a tech worker, I should try to understand whether this is another temporary tech recession and, if it is, how I should react to position myself and protect myself, my family, and my friends.” This tech recession won’t last forever; we’re not going the way of ice harvesters or buggy whip makers, but I think we’re going to see a large scale re-alignment and even if tech salaries merely fall back to 2015 levels, it’s going to feel catastrophic to many. 2020 and 2021 were outlier years. Expect more non-outlier years than outlier years and expect a reversion back to needing to connect value to costs and if you don’t know how your company makes money by employing you, try to figure that out, try to increase it, and try to be sure that they know how they make money from you. We all do better when we create $X of value and take a high but fair fraction of that home for ourselves, leaving everyone in a nice, durably desirable trade of our skills for their needs.

hasa 4y ago

I love this comment. But this phenomena of first world problems and whiners spreads to whole western civilisation (I'm part of it).

ddalex 4y ago

> for incredible working conditions I find that what dev experience should be normal working conditions for everybody, not just devs. > We are paid to solve problems. > If you don't solve problems, when the hard times come, and they always do, you become part of the problem. Totally agree. But this shouldn't prevent us from solving problem working in good conditions.

eru 4y ago
Well, that's the way of progress. Normal working conditions these days used to be close to the best imaginable working conditions in the 19th century. Even for someone bagging groceries at Walmart.

onion2k 4y ago

We are overpaid... Pay is a function of value. If you produce a lot of value, you get paid a lot. This is true for all jobs unless the business has figured out a way to get away with keeping most of the value for itself. When a dev is producing code that generates $x millions either they're going to end up getting paid a lot or the business is going to end up making more profit. To suggest that a dev is 'overpaid' is just saying that you think tech companies should keep more profit from the value they create instead. It's important to remember that despite all the layoffs, talk of recessions, and 'bad news' around at the moment, company profits and revenues are still way up. Meta's revenue went up $30bn in 2021 ($85.96bn in 2020, $117.92bn in 2021). It fell to $116.6bn in 2022. Maybe the revenue will plunge back down to 2020 levels again this year which would justify slashing the headcount, but I doubt it. I think it's a lot more likely that Meta will announce record profits at the end of the year.

sweezyjeezy 4y ago
A very free-market take. Do you believe that a fresh graduate at FAANG is really generating 6 figures in value? Do you believe that US employees on average generate 3x the value of their European counterparts?
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  > A very free-market take. Do you believe that a fresh graduate at FAANG is really generating 6 figures in value? On average no; but it's the easiest way to get to the front of the line for finding the ones that do justify it. > Do you believe that US employees on average generate 3x the value of their European counterparts? Yes.
  - kingboss 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - edu 4y ago
      I thought about the age indicator maaaaany times

ryan_lane 4y ago

Boomers were able to work minimum wage jobs and buy houses and live comfortable lives. We don't make too much, everyone else makes too little.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Boomers existed in a society were everything were not sold yet. Were every pieces of land was not occupied and optimized yet. Now the theater is full. It's not that boomers earned much and today a lot of people earn too little. Is that then things were less rare than today compared to the demand. Also, I earn way more than my father and grand-father, and my life style just cannot be compared, nor the energy I consume or waste I produce. So as an IT guy, no, this is not enough to explain it. And boomers were certainly not divas. Their working conditions were definitly not as good as in IT today.
- rhino369 4y ago
  The country isn’t really full even if the Bay Area, NYC, and other large metros are. At a certain point the cost of living disparities will move people to up and coming cities. Some of the teleworking gains from the pandemic are being wound back. But it’s still a view of the future.

amelius 4y ago

* divas that have to attend meetings several times a week, that is

whstl 4y ago

Well, yes. But the solution to most of the stuff you point to is to have better management to rein in the divas, better hiring, better training for those managers and developers, more stable stacks so there's no excuse to rewrite into Elm, etc. Which our industry also seems to have given up on, because it costs money. So we'll have divas, bad devs, wasted resources, Elm. Of course, the alternative to spending money on fixing this is much more expensive: just hire more devs... but who said our industry is rational.

Yoric 4y ago

I mostly agree that we are divas and that 2023 is a wake up call. I agree that tech stack churn is a big problem, although I feel that it's a sign of immaturity of the industry and domain themselves rather than an issue with individual developers. Much of our job is to find more efficient/robust ways to fix issues, progressively compressing the job of N people into something that can be done by o(N) people. That means that we are trained and selected to spot inefficiencies and take them personally. That also means taking new technologies for a drive. I'm sure that there are better ways to do this than trying them in production, but as long as we operate in an industry that cannot differentiate between self-training-for-next-job, research, industrial prototype and industrial product, we won't be able to fix this problem. I hope that, as the industry matures, this dust will settle a bit. Perhaps one aspect of this will involve letting developers take a few paid weeks once in a while to work on prototypes with whichever technology they want, as a form of self-training. Another will be making companies actually liable for the damage they cause when they try and pass early prototypes as products. As for diversity, I tend to disagree. In my experience as both a dev, tech lead and sometimes CTO, diversity is not just a political choice, it is also practically useful, for the same reason nepotism and consanguinity are bad. Diversity is what saves you from blind spots (aka "acquired stupidity"). Diversity is also what lets you hire brilliant people who have been overlooked by other companies.

cpursley 4y ago
What’s your definition of diversity?
- Yoric 4y ago
  Basically, in my book, it means "don't build a team of clones of yourself", because everybody having the same profile is how you create blind spots. Hire people who are going to have a different perspective, perhaps because they have a different reasoning (e.g. neuro-divergent candidates), different origins, different curriculum, different life experience, etc.
  - cpursley 4y ago

coldtea 4y ago

>But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business. Aren't you seeing it backwards? Other professions should have the same "luxuries", in a humane working world. Instead people are treated like cattle. IT being an "amazing productivity" boost, means those "divas" you describe just get small part of the value they create, especially since a heck of a lot of the rest ends as unprecedented profit levels... Under a capitalistic labour market theory, employees are not and can't be "overpaid" (and surely not for decades on end). They are paid exactly what they are worth, as price is based on supply and demand equilibrium. Under a marxist labour market theory employees still can't be overpaid if the company makes a profit on top of what it would re-invest in itself (infrastructure, etc.). So, under neither theory workers can be overpaid under any normal circumstances. At worst, under capitalism there can be a higher market rate that gets adjusted to a lower one, but at each point in time none of those was "overpaid", it was the best the market knew to set. The higher rate was appropriate supply-and-demand-wise for when it was applied (and it might raise again as IT companies compete for developers, and so on). Let's not forget the "US/Europe needs X millions more developers" reports churned out every few months...

saiya-jin 4y ago
If US/EU get just a significant fraction of those developers needed, software dev salaries will go to the level of other engineering, say mechanical, construction or material one. Employers would be very happy with that. And lets be honest here, its not that different job despite what some bigger egos think about their work and echo chambers that keep them in that dream. I don't agree those other engineers are treated as cattle, merely as normal employees. IT, mostly in SV and other places cargo-culting ie Google is often really treated like divas. Bear in mind that this was never true in corporations where IT was treated as a cost center, ie banking. But from various HN posts it seems that typical young SV dev has no experience with that and many feel they are changing the world for the better, when reality its at best a zero sum game, and often not even that (ie optimizing ad revenue stream for your corporation is definitely loss for mankind as a whole, or anything that makes societal parasites who breed depression like facebook/insta/tiktok more effective at their goals). But folks for some obscure reason need to feel that their work has a good purpose and high moral ground, hence sometimes quite advanced mental gymnastics seen also here.

yokoprime 4y ago

This reads like someone who hasn’t experienced working in the industry first hand, but rather has made up an opinion based on Twitter and Tik-Tok.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
And yet that's written by someone who is working for 10 times minimum wage from his home on his adjustable motorized standing desk. While ordering sushi (because I can afford to every day and the maid is off, because I can afford a maid) for lunch, I received a text message from my friend, a nurse, saying that she will do 50 hours this week and she can't come to the diner we plan. I'm French, lived in Africa, worked in Asia and the US, and, no, this is not a twitter thing. I already considered myself amazingly lucky just for having hot water, electricity, and always have heat/sleep/food. But this life a lot of us enjoy in 202*? It's damn luxurious.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  And yet you still write like your opinions are based on Twitter and Tik-Tok
  - theknocker 4y ago
    [dead]
metalspot 4y ago
> 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones i think this guy understands the industry very well. maybe you are the one with tik-tok opinions?

urbandw311er 4y ago

This is a great answer. And there's a niggling worry in my mind as to whether the sudden capability explosion of LLMs might eliminate the bottom 50% of us completely.

coding123 4y ago
Yes but that may take 5 years as everyone learns the OpenAPI API (to call it) and integrate the response in a text box and release the AI autocomplete features around the product suite.

gumballindie 4y ago

> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions I have to disagree with this for a number of reasons. By and large in tech people work overtime meaning per hour pay is lower than what you think. To be decent at your job you need to constanty learn, also not factored into wages. The working conditions are horrible. You sit at a desk, usually in a crowded lowd office, which is highly detrimental to your health. Often you need to commute long hours meaning you are detached from social and family life. Many struggle with starting a family. Moreover, you have to constantly chase small tasks, constantly shifting focus and have to deal with obnoxious managers. All things considered, tech is not a well paid job. Not by a long shot. While we "enjoy" sitting in offices and an apparent high income - at an enormous cost for us - the guy next door owning a corner shop enjoys a family life, likely owns a property and doesn't need to worry about keeping pace with daily changes.

sokoloff 4y ago
Why do it then? Why not open a corner shop instead?
- gumballindie 4y ago
  My side gig which is not tech made more money than i ever did as a tech “worker”. That’s when i realised that we are living in a bubble. Step outside of it and you’ll be surprised at how much your mind’s being wasted by sitting on a chair all day chasing jira tickets like a drone (no insult intended). Our minds are designed to be analytical and organised. That’s precisely what can give you a massive competitive edge. We like to discover, learn and master. Just as you learn a new technology in no time so can you learn how build a small business and be damn good at it.
- avidiax 4y ago
  Risk/reward/opportunity The big tech giants are paying enough that most engineers don't consider the risk of opening their own business to be worth it. Owning the shop provides intangibles like being your own boss, somewhat less sedentary lifestyle, more community interaction, etc. But the financial rewards are most likely no better than being a developer at a FANG. That corner shop may have been started decades ago. The opportunity to buy it at a reasonable price has probably long past.

Jochim 4y ago

We made a small group of people incomprehensibly wealthy. In return we were granted a little more freedom than the average worker.

testbjjl 4y ago

> nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set. Maybe part of these repetitive problems repeating themselves stems from the sameness.

mmarq 4y ago

> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. Maybe in the US, but in the UK a highly paid software developer can barely buy a 2 bedroom flat in a suburb where 30 years ago the salary of a junior factory worker was enough to buy a house. > If you had any professional doing the same Other professionals are less productive by orders of magnitude, just check what’s going on in the accountancy department of a random company. You can double their productivity introducing Excel’s pivot tables a V-lookup. Or try to get a plumber to fix your toilet within time and budget.

sokoloff 4y ago
I’ve never met a plumber who couldn’t fix a toilet in the quoted time and budget.
- beardedetim 4y ago
  Where do you find these plumbers? When we owned our house, we never were able to find any contractor that was reliable, upfront about costs, etc. Hell, getting them on the phone and to show up was hard enough.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Word of mouth from neighbors and colleagues, mostly. I mostly DIY small things around the house, but when I have a plumbing task I can't or don't have time to do, I've had good luck in calling those plumbers, getting an upfront quote (often, "here's our trip charge and hourly rate, and a toilet repair is going to be less than the one-hour minimum and around $75 in parts") The reason I do it myself is that $75 in parts is actually $20-30 in parts and I can order parts and then do 45 minutes of plumbing work faster than I could figure out what plumber to call, arrange a time, and then stay home to let them in.
- nikau 4y ago
  Those plumbers probably don't have to deal with a "not invented here" cistern and related plumbing with bespoke thread pitch and piping diameter either.

joeblubaugh 4y ago

> nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set. Oh give me a break

Lutger 4y ago

Let me put it this way: why should companies use value based pricing and extract ridiculous amounts of profits from consumers for their mediocre services, that goes into the pockets of just a few shareholders, whereas the labor of workers who actually produced the stuff be rewarded by a completely different logic (akin to cost based pricing)? When workers have some actual leverage, suddenly the free market is a problem and not a magical fairy anymore. If companies on the market can sell overpriced garbage to enrich their shareholders, surely you can't seriously complain about laborers being overpaid, even if they are. Its all the same game. The whole system is totally unfair and unreasonable, developers being overpaid is not the problem and such a minor thing to focus on.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Stating those people are overpaid doesn't negate the fact that dev is incredibly well paid position with luxurious work conditions that people manage to complain about while being bad at it. If you accept the premise that we should mock incompetent divas shareholder and CEO, then you should accept the premise we should mock our own community. Plus a bit of self-deprecating humor is good for the soul.

epicureanideal 4y ago

> We are overpaid Compared to what? Directors of HR, product managers, lawyers, managers of all kinds, etc. all make similar money. Software engineers are paid what they're paid because their work allows companies to scale their products to serve more users. This "paid too much" is nonsense, we can barely (if at all) afford houses where near where we work.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Everybody agree that there are several of overpaid BS jobs out there. Two things can be true.
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  If almost all the skilled jobs are similarly “overpaid”, maybe that’s just what ordinary good pay looks like. Some people might be underpaid, and that would be a different angle. As it is, in the Bay Area, a typical startup software engineer only earns 4-5x what a person that makes burgers at a fast food restaurant makes. (Typically they make $20+ per hour, so $40k+ per year). Despite years of education, monetary investment in education, constant re training, long hours, etc. It doesn’t seem an unreasonable multiple to me, just trying to get a sense of the situation. Those arguing that we should make less than or around $100k, are we really producing no more value than 2 people making burgers, or one especially fast burger maker? Also note that wait staff at good restaurants in SF can earn $80-100k. And even decent outsourced developers in low cost of living countries charge $30-50 per hour (60k-100k per year). With again, less impressive education, and assuming a 40 hour work week which is lower than many engineers in the Bay Area work, and that’s not even for top skilled outsourced work. Try paying less than this now, you’ll pay for it multiple times over later.
- danielrpa 4y ago
  True. But interestingly, few of these people believe that THEIR job is one of the "BS jobs out there"
usrnm 4y ago
> Compared to what? Nurses? Our job is a lot easier and less important and working conditions are much better. And yet, a fresh grad straight out of school gets a few times more money than an experienced nurse. And, what is worse, a lot of devs honestly believe that they deserve it.

apercu 4y ago

> changing part of the tech stack every month Still happening. Everything must be REACT now. For reasons.

goodpoint 4y ago

> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. You forgot to write "in the US".

theknocker 4y ago

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Ensorceled 4y ago

> nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set Why does every tech bro rant these days include a section blaming "diversity" for a bunch of problems? Did renaming master to main really fuck up the system that badly?

zarathustreal 4y ago
Frankly, because the meaning and purpose of "diversity" has been corrupted to the point that it actually causes issues like the one described. Similar to the corruption of the word "racism". I think you're missing the point by assuming git branch renaming is the primary (only?) cost. Diversity (meaningful diversity of thought and opinion, that is) actually has business value. That's the reason it was pushed so hard from the top way back in the day, it was seen as a means to improve product offerings and problem solving processes. These days "diversity" is nothing more than a euphemism for weird racial, sexual orientation, and gender fetishes. These "diverse" workplaces are, ironically, echo chambers for the same patterns of thought based around the idea that superficial characteristics like gender and skin color are meaningful predictive traits
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  Every new movement has a hype cycle. It's fine. The hype will eventually die down, the useful stuff will remain, the rest will go. I still can't find any black people to hire for some basic positions. This is a problem. Research continues to show ML models to be biased in favor of the people who create them, and against the people who were never in the room. This affects society in a huge way when that model is used for law enforcement, health care, education, etc.
  - hdisllcn 4y ago
    Why is that a problem? If you can’t find black people to hire, it means black people are not having problems finding employment. Why do we expect the population to perfectly segment itself in such a way that every workplace has the correct percentage relative to some interpretation of the population? This idea that black people are needed to provide some sort of black perspective on every team is so weird to me. You’re not your race and the type of black people who are qualified to work in top tier tech companies have more in common with the upper classes and college elites than they have with the stereotypical inner-city poor kid raised by a single mom.

nomy99 4y ago

I work like a dog and have been since engineering school. Actually was working like a dog in school too. I think I genuinely deserve the pay considering the day to day stress of the job and the complex workload.

slothtrop 4y ago
Lots of people work like dogs and it seems to have no strong correlation with their pay. It's never been about "deserving", it's just supply and demand.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lukas099 4y ago
  > It's never been about "deserving", it's just supply and demand. This is the basic fact that so many people just fail to grasp.
nomy99 4y ago
Daily Responsibilities: Developing code (duh), leading a team, reviewing PR's monitoring the continuous release pipelines, providing production support, recruiting (takes a surprising chunk of my time), sprint ceremonies, Fixing bugs and talking to QA

wootland 4y ago

Developers are dramatically underpaid, just like all non-exec labor. It's ridiculous to complain about devs making 300k-500k a year when execs are pulling in millions or tens of millions a year with 10M-100B worth of equity under their belt. Focusing on anything other than that is a complete distraction and counterproductive. Devs should be getting 10X their current salary and execs should be getting 1/100th theirs. I'll add that if you can't easily afford a family house next to your office, you're not overpaid.

golergka 4y ago
If you truly think that this radical change will make the company more productive, what's stopping you from raising a seed round for your new company built on this innovation as competitive edge?
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  > what's stopping you from raising a seed round for your new company Knowing what’s true and being able to convince some investors, who are not universally omniscient and reasonable and open to conversation from people they don’t already know, are different things.
- wootland 4y ago
  I have done that and it's a great management strategy. You can hire world class developers and talent if you just treat them as peers and don't jack your own compensation up to astronomical levels. It's like a "cheat" to win at management. People will also be less likely to quit and much more likely to join you at your next role.
AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
They (well, we) are not underpaid. Some time ago I used to work in a large organization on the very bottom of the food chain. I was making, say, $100k a year, which was quite decent money. Sitting there, doing same thing I could've grown to a "senior bottom of the food chain" of $150k. That was the limit. A soft one, but still the limit. The organization was quite picky in selecting their workforce. Think FAANG. So in every team you have a bunch of quite smart opinionated folks, who somehow have to be steered in the same direction. With that I see it kinda reasonable for the team lead to make at least $200k a year. Give or take. Now we move one step up. Someone has to pull all these "creme de la creme" cats together and herd them, so that at the very minimum teams don't work against each other. Ideally work together for some common goal. And I can understand team leads who is not willing to go to this snake pit for 30% salary increase. Why would they? 50% - may be. 70% - that sounds interesting and worth consideration. Bottom line: according to my humble experience in "the organization", the salary roughly doubles each time you get up the ladder. And being on different steps of this ladder I can understand why.

lazypenguin 4y ago

While your post was certainly hyperbolic I was uncomfortably surprised by how many people disagreed with you. For me the thing that disappoints me today in our industry is the number of mediocre professionals who give themselves too high of an elevated status just because they get paid more than the average person in their society. At the end of the day we’ll have bigger problems if the trash doesn’t get picked up or if that power line doesn’t get fixed than we will if some developer doesn’t solve some abstract problem. We don’t “deserve” anything and maybe we earned it through hard work but not enough of us appreciate our good fortune of being professional programmers.

janalsncm 4y ago

I mean no disrespect but a lot of this sounds like stereotypes of what software engineers do. Yes having free coffee and maybe even free lunch are nice perks, but those are very small compared to salary + office space cost. And RTO has shown the latter to be negligible anyways. 200 years ago it would’ve been crazy talk to get Saturdays off. In some countries it still is. I don’t think not having to work 996 is a sign of waste or laziness, it’s a sign of progress.

mykowebhn 4y ago

> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. I once had a job where we created and supported a bunch of Golang microservices in the backend. Like you alluded to, I couldn't help but feel that I was a glorified, overpaid plumber.

908B64B197 4y ago

> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. Overpaid relative to what? Certainly not the value created. There's this meme that software engineers are just capricious and don't "deserve" the money (often it's a weird form of jealousy from other fields who simply can't match an engineer's output) but it completely ignores the enormous gains in productivity enabled by the field. Is there any other field where such an impact can be had by a small team in the Valley? > If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at. You seem to have a very particular view of the profession. > But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business. Is it luck? People saw the writing on the wall decades ago.

deepnet 4y ago

In the often adverserial world of exchanging labour and creativity for money, shares, prestige, and because we programmers care please don't blame us for not being able to assess how much the business should pay us. Our job is attempt to know our expected potential worth and then negotiate for that recompense. There are things we often don't know, i.e. megacorps may hire us to stop us working elsewhere. If a business chooses to neglect to know this because it is either not worth it to them find out or they are incapable that is not on the worker. This is esentially an attempted value crash or hyperdeflation of the monetary value of labour. This meme of we can do more with hugely vastly less talent is a spreadsheet fancy of MBAs far from the coal face of code or customers. The real cost is all the top talent people bail and only those who can't or won't leave remain. But management think they can properly assess the value of people finessing a process they can't do and little understand and probably are insulated from and only see through metrics to which Goodhart's law means the stats are juked.