8 ms·

She runs a shop that employs 300 people; needs to worry about short-term and long-term logistics and planning; works cross-functionally with the trades; probabl

• varispeed 2y ago
  > Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job. Wow, this is such a nonsense view. Software development may seem easy to you, because you know how to do it and probably have been doing it for a long time. But I can assure you, software development is a hard job. If it was easy, everyone and their dog could do it. Have some respect to your profession!
  • heisenbit 2y ago
    Yes SW development is a hard job but she is doing a lot more than one job and the skill set required (not just knowledge but also behavior) to cover so many roles is a lot broader than most developers and also many managers in the software industry require to do their job.
    • pavlov 2y ago
      On the other hand, there are a lot of Walmarts and similar stores, and a lot of people who have managed these in the past. There are many people who she can turn to for reliable advice. I'm assuming one Walmart is not fundamentally different from another. It's hard work, but it's essentially predictable. Software developers are often called to do work that's not predictable. At the top of the pay grade we're generally asked to design something novel, because it's obviously not worth paying $240k / year for a developer whose work could be replaced by off-the-shelf software. (Sure, there are many exceptions and cushy jobs where people are raking in the cash with few risks. I'm thinking there are probably less of these around than a few years ago, though.)
    • varispeed 2y ago
      The SW development is not just knowing the programming language, you also have to cover many roles, you need to understand and have the domain knowledge of the thing you are developing, you need to have communication skills to coordinate with other developers and stakeholders and many more (like developing intuition to know when to stop manager from making a mistake - e.g. you know this and that idea won't actually work in practice or it will have problems down the line adding to technical debt and so on).
  • prh8 2y ago
    If both options paid you 240k a year, would you rather be a software engineer or do the exact job the Walmart manager does? I'm guessing you'd rather do SWE
    • evan_ 2y ago
      and plenty of people would rather do the job where you walk around and talk to people all day, folks are different
    • zeroonetwothree 2y ago
      I would imagine most people would rather do the Walmart job. It would probably be like 90/10 or something.
    • angmarsbane 2y ago
      Depends. Walmart manager could be one of the highest salaried roles in a LCOL area enabling an early retirement or better quality of life than a SWE stuck in a HCOL.
    • varispeed 2y ago
      I think you misunderstood my point. I actually had a conversation about it with my friend who was a manager of a private health clinic. She had a moment of massive burnout and was looking to switch profession to something else. She was particularly tired of abuse she was getting from employees she had to manage and patients, unrealistic targets, overtime and relatively poor pay. The prospect of sitting in a cubicle, with noise cancelling headphones, minding own work and having similar pay while being surrounded by like-minded professionals was really enticing. Her understanding of programming was very much that you type in commands so the computer does things you want, easy. When she was this motivated, I asked her to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOjov-2OZ0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOjov-2OZ0E She managed to watch about 20 minutes and from there she couldn't focus. Then she asked to stop and asked me: "Do you know all of this? Do you have to know this?" I said that this is just the basics. That was very much the end of it. She changed her career later and she is managing construction projects. Something I wouldn't like to do. It would be a hard job, because that's not something I am interested in.
• unclebucknasty 2y ago
  No doubt she earns it. But, we're probably all doing some form of the above in one way or another. A few minor edits may make the list a little more familiar to more software folks: >worry about short-term and long-term [...] planning; works cross-functionally...;... manage upwards; interacts directly with customers
  • amelius 2y ago
    Salaries are awkward. I personally believe someone who collects the municipal garbage should make more than someone who sits in an office all day and solves logic puzzles. Because I wouldn't want to do it.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      You'd probably be amazed to know how many smart people wouldn't want to sit in an office all day and solve logic puzzles.
    • unclebucknasty 2y ago
      Yeah, anyone who is paid well enough for something they enjoy is certainly fortunate. OTOH, there are people who would be driven crazy by sitting in an office all day and wouldn't do it, even for more pay.
    • sitzkrieg 2y ago
      i agree. waste management of all kinds is huge
• switch007 2y ago
  Not to detract from her performance (I've made a top comment about how she's giving CEO vibes), but we software engineers worry about short-term and long-term, do planning, work cross-functionally, manage upwards, focus on the customer's requirements. And way more.
• newsclues 2y ago
  I think there are lots of hard jobs that go under appreciated in our society. I think about people playing pro sports for millions and then minimum wage labourers, drivers clerks, cleaners and cooks who make minimum wages. One group are celebrated and the other are essential to society continuing to function.
  • lawgimenez 2y ago
    My parents currently works at Walmart, they’re the one restocking supplies in the shelves. They are in their 60s and 70s, immigrants that became US citizens just last year. Also, they work night shifts. Based on their feedback, Walmart is a very kind and good employer.
  • listenallyall 2y ago
    Right, this was made pretty clear during the first few months of the pandemic in 2020.
  • conductr 2y ago
    I think about this frequently. I hire day laborers occasionally and it’s actually quite astonishing at how much physical labor most those folks can perform and rather quickly and cheap. Yet when I get to know them the reality is most of them exist in an unfamiliar and invisible to society type way.
• stefan_ 2y ago
  It's hard work keeping the staff below the full time limit where they get benefits, squeeze suppliers and ensure the reliable flow of inane corporate directives downwards. Has everyone completed their mandatory union training yet? I don't know man, I'd rather make new stuff, ya know.
• breck 2y ago
  > more than a lot of us software developers. A big question I've tried to answer in my life is whether the high pay in the software world has an intelligent economic explanation, or maybe a more sinister explanation involving false models encoded in the law.
  • rhelz 2y ago
    Its just supply and demand, like anything else.
    • kenjackson 2y ago
      And ability differences. For example there is a ton of supply for basketball players. But the product is magnitudes better with Lebron James than it is with me on the court. Is the best garbage person in the world that much more productive than your average person (not even versus another garbage person, but someone you randomly pick and train them for a couple of weeks)? Based on my years interviewing there are huge levels between the best SW engineers and even those with CS degrees, much less randomly selected people.
      • no_wizard 2y ago
        So much of being good at software engineering is non technical though, in ways I sometimes don’t feel things like how interviews are conducted don’t do a good job of screening for.
    • breck 2y ago
      Are you sure there's no artificial government intervention?
      • rhelz 2y ago
        There's much less government intervention in hiring programmers, than there is, in hiring teachers (you need a state certificate) or CPAs (same). Even if you want to be a hairdresser you need a state certificate.
• blinkingled 2y ago
  I don't about others but based on past experience if one really attempts to do their $240k software / IT job well they ought to encounter similar if not in some ways worse challenges - some just realities of the tech industry/stack/complexity and some injected by bureaucracy, incompetence, mismanagement and not to mention the ever hanging sword of change in technology and possibility of layoff for no fault of yours. It adds up. When you are signing up for a job it's not just the money and the physical things you do - it's also the intangibles, the time spent in unproductive meetings, time spent afterwards feeling unproductive and worried, the resulting stress you have to manage etc, it all adds up and takes away something more than the money. I would argue that well managed jobs with some semblance of stability, human connection and predictability/routine are quite pleasant and easier to do compared to Software/IT.
  • doytch 2y ago
    Oh for sure, the intangibles kind of /are/ the job once you're past a mid-level position. But think about her job in the context of your description. You think she doesn't have useless meetings she's invited to that every manager in the region needs to attend even though it could've just been an email from the regional director? The stress from the lights busted in the parking lot brought on by worries that a darkened parking lot and a random crime that night might trigger a spurious lawsuit? Doomscrolling about physical retail being replaced by online? That she's falling behind in understanding where robotics might move? That if that particular store was shut down in a strategic shift, she's wedded her entire marketability as an employee to a single company on a single ladder and that she can't really just easily grab a job from a company across the country? We're not so unique!
    • blinkingled 2y ago
      Yeah, I used the word similar but sure! Just to be even more clearer I wasn't at all saying her job wasn't hard - I was merely saying IT jobs paying that can be equally hard.
  • listenallyall 2y ago
    No. Your job as a software developer may be stressful (as every job is) but her everyday challenges are way worse than yours. She has hundreds of actual people to manage, mentor and motivate, many with little education and lacking resources. Which means lots of absences, low-effort work, health issues, high turnover, and sometimes even theft. Plenty of issues dealing with customers as well. And then the managerial issues related to meeting revenue targets, implementing health care plans, managing inventory, putting on a good face for the bosses, as well as intense competition to be elevated to regional manager against a bunch of other colleagues in the exact same role. And her salary is only $120, there's a whole lot of stress when half your annual comp is bonus-driven.
• threatofrain 2y ago
  It's easier to find revenue streams that scale horizontally by the number of programmers and servers. It's hard to open new Walmarts. This won't always be true for either case, so make well of your situation regardless of whether you think there's some kind of difficulty or effort moat.
• deleted 2y ago
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• paulpauper 2y ago
  Devs are paid so much because the skills they posses are precise, not fluid. managing a store is more fluid not precise. Coding, like surgery, requires precision, like the syntax. Get one character wrong and the whole thing fails. This entails having a high IQ. Being a store manager is hard work, no doubt ,but the skill set is less IQ dependent, so it can be done by more people. A dev is paid so much because when you need a product to ship, the syntax has to work, and finding someone who can do it is hard.
  • beej71 2y ago
    The best devs I know possess the skills to be both fluid and precise in the proper circumstances.
  • listenallyall 2y ago
    Lol, as if no software developer has ever released code with one character wrong. Does your "syntax" ever call in sick? Steal from the loading dock? Get punched in the face by an angry customer?
• cscurmudgeon 2y ago
  If salaries are based on effort and not on what *relative* value they produce, people can just move rocks up and down a hill all day and become billionaires.
• zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  Pay isn’t really based on how “hard” a job is (and I don’t think we would want it to be!) It does factor in to the demand side but clearly it’s not the primary factor or else there wouldn’t be any high-paying “easy” jobs.
  • VS1999 2y ago
    I consider pay more like a caste system in the US. It's a way to separate people who "deserve" to be highly paid and people who don't. Working in software, it always felt odd that I make 3x as much as the guy making my food and have 10x the expendable income, even though they work harder at much more miserable work. The first degree of separation is whether you can afford to do a 4-6 year take home test that's getting more and more expensive each year.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > consider pay more like a caste system in the US Caste != social hierarchy. It's divinely-attributed, multi-generational, immutable social hierarchy. What you're describing is bog-standard social stratification. We aim to do it by economic utility. But even though we're not good at economic mobility [1], in a caste system that mobility is near zero. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#Worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#Worldwide
      • VS1999 2y ago
        Caste is absolutely about social hierarchy. At least half the definitions I've looked at mention both those words.
        • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
          > Caste is absolutely about social hierarchy Caste is a specific system of social hierarchy. What you're describing--some people having it better than others--is common to all systems of social hierarchy.
• deleted 2y ago
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