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> 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 ec
by breck 3y 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 3y agoIts just supply and demand, like anything else.
- kenjackson 3y agoAnd 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 3y agoSo 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 3y agoAre you sure there's no artificial government intervention?
- rhelz 3y agoThere'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.
- breck 3y agoYes there is no government intervention in who can be a programmer, but that's not what the issue might be. Might it be the stuff that programmers work with, the inputs and outputs of the craft, that are covered by laws that create an unnatural economic disequilibrium?
- AlexeyBelov 3y agoAre you being coy? Is there or isn't there in your opinion?
- breck 3y agoThere certainly is intervention. I'm undecided about whether that intervention is the primary contributor to the high pay.
- Daddy_cat 3y ago[dead]
- michaelt 3y agoA delivery driver who makes 30 deliveries per hour, with senders who pay the business $2 per parcel, is bringing in $60/hour of revenue. That revenue gets split with other workers who collected and sorted the parcels, the fuel bill and van insurance, and the investors who own the parcel-sorting machines and vans. A software developer that saves $0.001 per delivery across 5,000 delivery drivers who make 30 deliveries per hour saves the company $1500 per hour. That gets split with the folks who maintain the CI servers, the Kubernetes cluster, the pen testers and so on. But it's still 25x as much.
- breck 3y agoDiamond is 300x harder than gold. So it goes with ideas. The question isn't whether diamonds exist, it is whether laws artificially restrict the supply of diamonds? If, in your example, these $0.001 savings opportunities were quickly mined, would there remain such high pay for software developers? What if the pricing power comes not as much from the work being done, but from laws that restrict supply?