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> programmers weren't a well paid or well regarded job...and programming was considered "for nerds" It was similar in the US in the 90s. The pay was OK but not

> programmers weren't a well paid or well regarded job...and programming was considered "for nerds" It was similar in the US in the 90s. The pay was OK but nothing compared to the past 15 years or so, and socially it was not well regarded at all. The movie "Office Space" depicts what it was like pretty accurately.

ralusek 3y ago
Do you mean Office Space?
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  Yeah…
yterdy 3y ago
High incomes in tech were a symptom of the money printing that was supposed to keep the economy afloat largely never reaching past the ranks of the alumnae of certain colleges and universities. They exploded from the liquidity surplus that, in a more sane world*, would have gone towards lifting, say, service and retail wages (which instead languished for the better part of a decade). Six-figure SWE salaries have less to do with expertise than QE. *One where restrictions on advertising and data collection/sales kept software as a pay-to-play enterprise, necessitating higher wages among those who would be users.
- est31 3y ago
  High tech incomes don't come from empty money printing, but they come from the value that automation at scale unlocks for societies. To stay with the service industry analogy, in a service industry job you can only make X burgers an hour, but you can make software that runs on a billion computers and makes the lives of billions of people better. Tech incomes got high precisely when Google etc. started making big money from their super scalable services. It also very happily coincided with the age of (well networked) college dropouts being able to found billion dollar companies within just a few years. So the established companies had to dry up the market and make it less profitable to join a startup, on average, than to stay at your FAANG job. You rather have an engineer develop a service at your FAANG that will never see customers than have them build the competitor to your core money maker. That, and the demand created by digitalization literally outpacing the number of graduates joining the industry.
  - yterdy 3y ago
    Incorrect. As GP pointed out, tech salaries were relatively in line with other mid-level professional roles until the late 2000s, well after software and networked automation had transformed many industries. This was because, at the time, tech companies had to actually have a business plan that sought and gained profits relatively early in the company's life. What changed - what allowed college dropouts to become billionaires - was first the pre-GFC bubble market (making their net worths essentially inflated). Afterwards, the endless rounds of money-printing used to escape a depression and then sustain growth drove high tech salaries themselves. Without this liquidity, startups would not have had access to VC money and would have had to turn a profit (not just attract further rounds or a successful IPO) or perish within the first few years of existence, kneecapping competition for workers. This is also why tech salaries in Europe and Asia have stayed relatively sane. Save Japan, they didn't run massive QE regimes and so did not see the same VC environment develop. Why do you think tech companies were the first to see large layoffs after the FFR started rising? It wasn't just that they'd overhired during COVID; that personnel was genuinely needed for the projects they'd had planned. High interest rates screw mightily with their business model, particularly labor pay. You say that demand outpaces the supply of workers, so how could we see layoffs at all? Simple: it's the only alternative to salaries falling when the labor budget is shrunk (through a complex chain of knock-on effects that turn monetary policy into fiscal consequences) by the money printer getting turned off. As for why tech, and not other industries: in software, networking, etc., it's easy to obfuscate costs and value, particularly when it's unclear what can or has been automated, what a service is worth to a customer, what that customer is actually paying with and for, etc. Arbitrage opportunities abound, and all you have to do is set up shop and choose a growth metric that you can sell the market.
skippyboxedhero 3y ago
In Europe, it was nothing like the US. In the UK, which was nowhere as bad as Spain or Italy, programmers were making £17k/year pre-08 outside London. IT was just a cost base, minimized at all costs, the main job for programmers was academia, most people working in companies were hired out of high school. A job in IT or even a CS degree was career suicide, employment rates were one of the lowest of any degree and if you got a job you were just a cost. It is hilarious to see the change. Companies that have tried to re-sell themselves as tech companies when ten years ago all their "IT" staff were just working on managed services. The reason why this is relevant is because most of the change recently has been spillover from the US. If that spillover stops, there are no jobs domestically, you are a mechanic living in a horse-drawn society. The advantage the US has is compounding rapidly.
- sirsinsalot 3y ago
  Not sure this is true. I started contracting in the UK as a programmer in 2001, no qualifications, a high school drop out. Outside London (the north) I could make £300 a day back then pretty steady. Never been short of work for long, always contracted. Not needed my CV for 15 years at this point and £800-£900 a day is common amongst peers. My story also doesn't feel unusual amongst people I work with. Subjective account, but I've personally only felt the curve going up. Perhaps I'll have my shock one day.
  - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
    Most aren't making £300/day today. Average salary is probably less than half that.
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  I've spend the past 7 years living in about 25 or so countries around the world and one thing that really surprised is how far most of the world is behind the US in terms of business digitalization at a process level. You don't necessarily notice it at first as a visitor because these companies all have websites and apps and whatnot, many of which are nicer than their US counterparts, but these are often just a superficial gloss and fundamentally there's a lot more companies either literally paper driven or who have created a digital copy of the same paper process they've been using for decades and called it a day without really changing anything at all. Japan in particular stood out because I'd always thought of it as the ultra futuristic land of robots, but a lot of simple tasks I'd expect to do on an app or website involve sending a fax or an in-person visit. This type of approach doesn't add much value to the business. They still employee the same people doing the same work to accomplish the same result in the same amount of time, but now they need to pay a programmer as well. Again, we had this problem in the US in the 90s, people would make jokes about how tech had promised a "paperless office" but they had more paper than ever--but that was only because the old dudes working back then insisted on printing every damn thing they received digitally! So much work at that time used to go into making printer friendly versions of every piece of information, experience with Crystal Reports was always an important box to tick on any job application. I do wonder how willing EU countries would be to do this though, with an older population and a lot more sensitivity to preserving jobs at any cost.

ralusek 3y ago

Do you mean Office Space?

throw__away7391 3y ago
Yeah…

yterdy 3y ago

High incomes in tech were a symptom of the money printing that was supposed to keep the economy afloat largely never reaching past the ranks of the alumnae of certain colleges and universities. They exploded from the liquidity surplus that, in a more sane world*, would have gone towards lifting, say, service and retail wages (which instead languished for the better part of a decade). Six-figure SWE salaries have less to do with expertise than QE. *One where restrictions on advertising and data collection/sales kept software as a pay-to-play enterprise, necessitating higher wages among those who would be users.

est31 3y ago
High tech incomes don't come from empty money printing, but they come from the value that automation at scale unlocks for societies. To stay with the service industry analogy, in a service industry job you can only make X burgers an hour, but you can make software that runs on a billion computers and makes the lives of billions of people better. Tech incomes got high precisely when Google etc. started making big money from their super scalable services. It also very happily coincided with the age of (well networked) college dropouts being able to found billion dollar companies within just a few years. So the established companies had to dry up the market and make it less profitable to join a startup, on average, than to stay at your FAANG job. You rather have an engineer develop a service at your FAANG that will never see customers than have them build the competitor to your core money maker. That, and the demand created by digitalization literally outpacing the number of graduates joining the industry.
- yterdy 3y ago
  Incorrect. As GP pointed out, tech salaries were relatively in line with other mid-level professional roles until the late 2000s, well after software and networked automation had transformed many industries. This was because, at the time, tech companies had to actually have a business plan that sought and gained profits relatively early in the company's life. What changed - what allowed college dropouts to become billionaires - was first the pre-GFC bubble market (making their net worths essentially inflated). Afterwards, the endless rounds of money-printing used to escape a depression and then sustain growth drove high tech salaries themselves. Without this liquidity, startups would not have had access to VC money and would have had to turn a profit (not just attract further rounds or a successful IPO) or perish within the first few years of existence, kneecapping competition for workers. This is also why tech salaries in Europe and Asia have stayed relatively sane. Save Japan, they didn't run massive QE regimes and so did not see the same VC environment develop. Why do you think tech companies were the first to see large layoffs after the FFR started rising? It wasn't just that they'd overhired during COVID; that personnel was genuinely needed for the projects they'd had planned. High interest rates screw mightily with their business model, particularly labor pay. You say that demand outpaces the supply of workers, so how could we see layoffs at all? Simple: it's the only alternative to salaries falling when the labor budget is shrunk (through a complex chain of knock-on effects that turn monetary policy into fiscal consequences) by the money printer getting turned off. As for why tech, and not other industries: in software, networking, etc., it's easy to obfuscate costs and value, particularly when it's unclear what can or has been automated, what a service is worth to a customer, what that customer is actually paying with and for, etc. Arbitrage opportunities abound, and all you have to do is set up shop and choose a growth metric that you can sell the market.

skippyboxedhero 3y ago

In Europe, it was nothing like the US. In the UK, which was nowhere as bad as Spain or Italy, programmers were making £17k/year pre-08 outside London. IT was just a cost base, minimized at all costs, the main job for programmers was academia, most people working in companies were hired out of high school. A job in IT or even a CS degree was career suicide, employment rates were one of the lowest of any degree and if you got a job you were just a cost. It is hilarious to see the change. Companies that have tried to re-sell themselves as tech companies when ten years ago all their "IT" staff were just working on managed services. The reason why this is relevant is because most of the change recently has been spillover from the US. If that spillover stops, there are no jobs domestically, you are a mechanic living in a horse-drawn society. The advantage the US has is compounding rapidly.

sirsinsalot 3y ago
Not sure this is true. I started contracting in the UK as a programmer in 2001, no qualifications, a high school drop out. Outside London (the north) I could make £300 a day back then pretty steady. Never been short of work for long, always contracted. Not needed my CV for 15 years at this point and £800-£900 a day is common amongst peers. My story also doesn't feel unusual amongst people I work with. Subjective account, but I've personally only felt the curve going up. Perhaps I'll have my shock one day.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  Most aren't making £300/day today. Average salary is probably less than half that.
throw__away7391 3y ago
I've spend the past 7 years living in about 25 or so countries around the world and one thing that really surprised is how far most of the world is behind the US in terms of business digitalization at a process level. You don't necessarily notice it at first as a visitor because these companies all have websites and apps and whatnot, many of which are nicer than their US counterparts, but these are often just a superficial gloss and fundamentally there's a lot more companies either literally paper driven or who have created a digital copy of the same paper process they've been using for decades and called it a day without really changing anything at all. Japan in particular stood out because I'd always thought of it as the ultra futuristic land of robots, but a lot of simple tasks I'd expect to do on an app or website involve sending a fax or an in-person visit. This type of approach doesn't add much value to the business. They still employee the same people doing the same work to accomplish the same result in the same amount of time, but now they need to pay a programmer as well. Again, we had this problem in the US in the 90s, people would make jokes about how tech had promised a "paperless office" but they had more paper than ever--but that was only because the old dudes working back then insisted on printing every damn thing they received digitally! So much work at that time used to go into making printer friendly versions of every piece of information, experience with Crystal Reports was always an important box to tick on any job application. I do wonder how willing EU countries would be to do this though, with an older population and a lot more sensitivity to preserving jobs at any cost.