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Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

226 points by AjJi 14y ago

yashchandra 14y ago
I used to be a programmer who transitioned into BA/PM role lately. I see and understand the pains of both sides. Sometimes, I want to switch into the technical/programmer mode where I want to solve/code the thing myself. The point is that these 3 roles even though not necessarily mutually exclusive, are very difficult to do at the same time especially in large corporate environments. At a startup, I am not sure if do need a separate BA/PM but when you have to deal with 100s of business users across multiple countries, get everyone to agree on scope/requirements, keep effective communication with all stakeholders etc. etc., you need people who can do all these. This is where a good BA/PM comes in. The value of a good BA/PM can never be undermined even though it can be argued that a developer usually fills these roles many times in certain circumstances. To summarize, a good BA/PM is not someone who only is good at business/domain knowledge or a set of tools, but is someone who can deal with people, glue teams together and is not afraid to wear many hats which could include cold calling team members, pestering business users to confirm things etc. etc.
gouranga 14y ago
They get paid the same as junior programmers where I work. They are deemed as equal value to the company. To be 100% honest a good developer should be able to take on all three roles. PM and BA are skills which should be built in as well along side other basics.
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
  Where is this "good developer" exist? Most good developers that I know of don't communicate as well as BA or PM when it comes to interfacing with non-technical people. NB: Not to say that these developers are bad communicators. They're less patient, they tend to have an "ideal" picture, and they work better with computers than a normal human being.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    they're usually contractors these days to be honest. I always sit in the middle between humans and machines and am quite happy getting my hands dirty with both sides. Communication and management is part of the job.
    - edwinnathaniel 14y ago
      Your reply made my day. Typically HN-ers would reply with something out of the ballpark of Reality. This one is an honest, down to earth, reality reply. Contractors, on the other hand, have to deal with Accounting department, BAs, PMs, etc and then ship something... :D
- yashchandra 14y ago
  "a good developer should be able to take on all three roles" I generally would agree with you but it is not that simple. A good BA or PM can do lot of dirty work that the programmers can be shielded from in order to focus on their core value: code/build the product. Some of those dirty tasks are: 1. dealing with difficult business users who keep changing their scope and requirements. Can you imagine if you had to develop the product while the scope keeps changing ? A good BA/PM would negotiate that for you and help stop scope creep. 2. Looking at the bigger picture. This includes ensuring all the connected project members are delivering, communication is in place, people are talking to each other and everyone is on the same page. No one enjoys doing this dirty work but it brings tremendous value to a project. There are more like these but you get the idea. Yes there are BA/PMs that do not do their task well but incompetence is not retricted to a particular line of work, is it ?
Karunamon 14y ago
Aside: Yet another useful and thought provoking question and set of answers on SE shut down "because it's not a good fit for the format".
- gouranga 14y ago
  Yes this is getting annoying. I think when a site reaches critical mass, the pedants and moderati (play on illuminati) start screwing it up. Wikipedia is another fine example of this. I've stopped contributing to stack overflow now due to this (I accumulated 20k karma to give you an idea how much I thought the idea was promising)
  - kevinh 14y ago
    It's not really as easy as you make it sound. Incorrect moderation will cripple a site and prevent people from contributing, but moderation is necessary to prevent the site from declining in quality. Without moderation, a site's quality will decline with its increased size. The default subreddits on reddit are a good example of what will happen without sufficient moderation.
    - gouranga 14y ago
      I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.
      - AjJi 14y ago
        AFAIK, SE mods are not picked based on karma, you can nominate yourself to be mod, and users will vote according to many indicators, not karma only. Elections: http://stackoverflow.com/election http://stackoverflow.com/election
        14y ago
ihodes 14y ago
What companies are these people working for? The ones I've looked at and the ones my friends work at pay their programmers significantly more than PMs and BAs.
- thibaut_barrere 14y ago
  For instance, for companies where programming and IT is not perceived as a core competency and asset, but a cost.
- stephencanon 14y ago
  This; in my experience median compensation for programmers is comparable to PMs, and the high-end of programmer compensation is significantly higher than that for PMs.
  - nickbarnwell 14y ago
    A programmer high on the compensation scale will typically have decided to stay on the "Individual Contributor" track and top out as a "Distinguished Engineer" or similar title, but still be considered as a programmer. A PM who has advanced to a similar level, on the other hand, is likely to be some sort of VP or SVP and considered an "executive". That is to say the PM compensation track divergers, while the Engineer's stays the same
    - stephencanon 14y ago
      Let me be more clear: I'm talking about something like an MTS or Senior Engineer, rather than a Fellow or Distinguished Engineer (and FWIW, at many firms, a Fellow/Distinguished Engineer may very well have compensation comparable to a Director/VP).
      - alttab 14y ago
        Only if you are Bruce Lindsay and you invented Joins would it be comparable. Directors or VPs often get quarterly options
thibaut_barrere 14y ago
Good business analysts and PM are more likely (maybe because of the situations they are involved in, or because of their training) to realize and explain what value they bring to the company. For most "regular" programmers, it's not that clear :)
Hominem 14y ago
My PM is on vacation this week and I've had to partially fill in. I have been getting frantic urgent emails from roughly 7 am till 1 am. If this is what the guy puts up with, he deserves a couple bucks.
- zalew 14y ago
  For receiving emails?
  - yashchandra 14y ago
    sure. try to be the first point of contact for a massive project for anyone under the sun including fellow developers, business users, IT heads, business heads, internal consultants, external consultants, SMEs etc etc. If you can handle all their queries (email/in-person/phone call/video conference), you certainly sir do not need your BA/PM.
  - joshAg 14y ago
    No, for making it so that the rest of the team doesn't have to deal with emails from 7am to 1am. Part of the PM's or manager's job (at least if they're a good one, anyway) is shielding the rest of the team from administrivia, so that they can be productive.
- maudineormsby 14y ago
  I crossed over from Project Management into Engineering, and my experience was that as a PM my job was to be bothered from Sunup til Sundown and periodically in between. I was expected to know everything about anything that I was asked about, and I was responsible for a large number of people's output without having any authority over them. It was horrible. I think the issue with the SO question is simply the view that what PMs and BAs do isn't 'real' work. They might not write code, but sometimes they're the only ones making it so the engineers can.
  - jshen 14y ago
    What you describe is a dysfunctional organization, not a justification for PMs.
timsally 14y ago
The top rated comment on this question asserts that the reason why programmers have lower salaries is because they are logical, intelligent individuals who refuse to play the politics game and thus are hated by executives. Not only it this incorrect (have you seen the politics in certain open source software projects ?) but it plays into a narrative that programmers want to believe: business people are corrupt and programmers are superior to them morally if not in compensation. You're doing yourself a disservice if you follow this line of thinking. On the other hand, the top rated answer has a pretty elaborate and abstract theory about widgets and film makers. I make no assertion about the accuracy of this abstract theory, but I can summarize reality in a much simpler way: many programmers work in businesses where software is a cost center. If you want to make money as a programmer, you need to work at a company where software is a generator of profit and negotiate compensation aggressively after demonstrating your value. The following is required reading if you'd like an algorithm for doing the above: Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro... Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
- dpeck 14y ago
  "many programmers work in businesses where software is a cost center. If you want to make money as a programmer, you need to work at a company where software is a generator of profit and negotiate compensation aggressively after demonstrating your value." This is right on. Looking back to when I was finishing my degree an older friend of mine advised that if possibly you shouldn't work for a company who's primary income stream isn't what you do. I still think this is a fantastic suggestion. Not everyone can be an important member of the R&D group for their employer, but if you've got the chops why shouldn't you be? I find that doing that you get the best of both worlds. You're valued enough that you get shielded from most of the office prattle and politics, you usually report very high up the hierarchy ( I've never reported less than one level down from executive team, and usually its been directly to a C-level position), and these teams tend to be full of others who know their shit and will make you better. Of course the compensation is usually quite good too, and bonus you're unlikely to be held to a standard soul sucking 9-5 schedule, or God forbid have to be on call.
sardonicbryan 14y ago
I'm a little surprised that the top answers on Stack Exchange accept the premise that analysts and PMs get paid higher salaries. That is certainly not the case at my company (mid sized tech startup), nor I would imagine at most other tech companies.
- joshAg 14y ago
  this is the case for many larger organisations.
- eitally 14y ago
  I'd argue that most programmers don't work at tech companies.
pumblechook 14y ago
The easy answer is: because that is what the market dictates. Programming may be difficult, but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot more programmers out there than people willing to be a PM (and stick with it).
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  Yep. And notice you got down voted for saying so. It happens to me every time. Programmers don't want to hear that in many industries (those that aren't pushing cutting edge tech) their skills are a commodity. It's just a fact, and globalization is making it worse.
  - andr3w321 14y ago
    This. Programming is skilled labor which is why they make more than the guys that work at McDonalds but there's still a ton of programmers out there. There's a lot fewer people out there that know what to create, when to create it and how to get the right team together to accomplish it than there are people who know how to program. For every Elon Musk how many aerospace engineers are there out there?
- zem 14y ago
  precisely so. and i don't care - no, actually i'm glad that PMing pays more than programming, so that it will attract people willing to do it and let me concentrate on the things i find fun.
pumblechook 14y ago
The easy answer is: because that is what the market dictates. Programming may be difficult, but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot more programmers out there than people willing to be a PM (and stick with it).
rwhitman 14y ago
This is a rerun on HN. It's also untrue - analysts and PMs don't typically make more than engineers, this is a bit of programmer urban legend. I actually took a paycut for my stint as a PM
nicw 14y ago
I view the PM role akin the role a sweeper plays in curling. A good PM will clear the path for others on the team to do what they do best. Sometimes that's wrangling with devops so the developers can keep programming, or it's calling a meeting with stakeholders to brief them on potential issues before they get out of control. A good PM is offensive, not reactive and thats why a lot of times it seems like they're just calling meetings. They're generally the only person that interacts with all the different teams (management, QA, dev, IT) and so they can see the upcoming roadblocks. IF they get those solved beforehand that's worth some $$$ :)
- otoburb 14y ago
  I always think of "hand-eye coordination". Hand = Developers Eye = Customers, Marketing, C-staff (read: stakeholders) Coordination = Project managers
- patrickyeon 14y ago
  Just a tip, if you want to keep with your sports metaphors, and meant to say "a good PM is on the offensive", you probably meant "a good PM is proactive (acts to solve a problem before it shows up)". Describing someone as 'offensive' is saying there is something about them that offends you.
  - nicw 14y ago
    ha, you're right, thanks. I'll leave as-is so your comment doesn't look garfield-minus-garfield.
  - roel_v 14y ago
    "To be on the offensive" means "attacking something" or "being aggressive towards something", not that the person who is "on the offensive" offends somebody in the sense that that somebody's feelings are hurt - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/go+on+the+offensive http://www.thefreedictionary.com/go+on+the+offensive . It's arguable whether or not a PM should be that aggressive, but I'd say his expression made sense.
    - 14y ago
gte910h 14y ago
They're not? I've seen very few places where PMs and analysts even get on par with normal engineers (aka, non junior).
imgabe 14y ago
Long story short, PMs are closer to the money. When you're managing a project, you know you have a budget of X dollars to get it done. If you get it done in X-P dollars, you can take that to your boss and immediately show that you made, or saved, the company P dollars. As a programmer or engineer, you may not even be directly aware of what the project's budget is, so it's harder for you to demonstrate how much value you're providing.
- kyt 14y ago
  100% agree. It's always about how close you are to the money. The more direct value you provide, the more you get paid. This is why lawyers get paid so much, because firms know that for every hour they bill the firm makes $X dollars. Programmers provide indirect value. If you architect a system that saves months and months of time later down the line, how do you value that?
  - joshAg 14y ago
    with hugely inflated numbers that assume the best case scenario for time-savings, fancy charts and graphs, and perhaps even a buzzword laden powerpoint presentation during your annual review.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  Accountants are even closer to the money. That does not make accountants to earn more.
sidcool1234 14y ago
Any discussion on this topic always leaves me more confused than I was before reading it.
zerostar07 14y ago
I believe its similar to what happens in other sectors: PMs have to deal with people, do lots and lots of schleps without the constant rewards of creating something, designing something beautiful or the serendipitous discovery of something remarkable. As a developer I m not jealous of their position, I know they get paid better for doing what i Don't want to do
- yashchandra 14y ago
  "I know they get paid better for doing what i Don't want to do" You summed it up well. BA/PMs do the dirty work that developers can be shielded from. Dealing with people is always a dirty work but extremely difficult to master. A good BA/PM is one who does this well. If you can tell me that you can get anyone to do anything in a project by your people's skills, power of communication, aggression, I would pay you well and would not want to lose you.
bmj 14y ago
In my engineering group, we don't have project managers or analysts. We have product managers (who are responsible for much more than a project manager, and make more than the average PM, methinks). The lead engineer on each project does some PM-y tasks, but it's generally up to the product manager to produce the documentation/charts/spreadsheets. In our operations group, there are PMs, but they are responsible for more than managing programmers on projects--they oversee the whole project, and must manage the resources from several sub-groups. Additionally, they are the first point of contact for the client. They are well-compensated, but they are also responsible for the whole of a client project.
- otoburb 14y ago
  Depending on the aggressiveness of the corporate culture, the first point of contact also gives the client one non-sales throat to choke.
- jbl 14y ago
  I just transitioned from an engineering role to a product management role. Product management means different things in different companies, but generally a product manager will interact directly with every other part of the company and "own" the product plan ---- what needs to get built and when. Engineering owns the how. That said, I think project managers can really help things flow. If you've got a process you are sticking to, a project manager can help make sure things get done when they need to. This is especially important when lots of things are happening simultaneously (lots of clients and client requests, lots of business development effort, lots of growth, technical challenges).
mrgreenfur 14y ago
Why do you think BAs and PMs get paid more? Is there any evidence? Anywhere I've worked they are very comparable for experience levels or the programmers get paid more. I think this is an inferiority complex based on not feeling 'cool' like the business guys. Other business roles likes sales and management (both tech and biz) get more because they have more responsibilities.
yashchandra 14y ago
after almost 50 comments, I say let the developers, BAs,PM, QAs all win. After all, we all want to get the project out of the door, make some money on the way and go home.
- nodemaker 14y ago
  >After all, we all want to get the project out of the door, make some money on the way and go home. This is Hacker News, not Project Manager Forums. I am sure most of us just want to create awesome things and not "go home"!
  - yashchandra 14y ago
    You took it literally when i said "go home". Fine I will refine it for you. Go home as in go build the next product.
dpcheng2003 14y ago
This is a true statement for any industry with a highly skilled labor force, whether you write code, run excel models at a bank, or make jet engines. From my observations/experiences, these three things are consistent (and it's mentioned throughout the thread): 1. Be closer to the money: There's a reason why sales people make more money than marketers. Look at Salesforce.com's operating statement and they spend >3x more money on sales and marketing than R&D. 2. Never be the best at making a widget or they'll have you make the widget forever: If you're the best at something highly technical, the management would be crazy to promote you to something more client facing or more managerial. There are some organizations that truly value technical skill on a meritocratic basis (think traders at a hedge fund or rockstar developers), but they are more rare. 3. If the boss/rest of the company doesn't know what you do, you won't be compensated for it: I wonder if the reason why Codacademy/Udacity is important is because it starts to teach non-technical people like me the value of good code. I have far more appreciation for my technical co-founder now that I've tried to code than I did before (and I thought I already had a lot). In the end, my suggestion is to gain a broader set of skills that make you more marketable to your company or join a company that appreciates your ability.
njharman 14y ago
As a developer of 20 yrs I dispute the claim "Programming harder than project management". Pming is hard, stressful, and often thankless. And I've seen multitudes more good devs than good PM. Finally, I'm not sure pms do get paid more.
perfunctory 14y ago
This has been pointed out already in several comments, but it can never be stressed too much -- because programmers can't negotiate! Want to get a higher salary? Do yourself and a broader programming community a service. Learn to negotiate! Learn to negotiate! Learn to negotiate!
Tycho 14y ago
I think the fact that bad programmers can have such a negative impact has a lot to do with it.
sparknlaunch 14y ago
From BA/PM perspective here are some possible reasons (with no disrespect to programmers): 1 BA/PM generally spend most of their time dealing with politics, governance and bureaucracy. 2 BA/PM spend a lot of time trying to elicit requirements and deal with scope creep. 3 BA/PM act as a conduit between parties and stakeholders who rarely agree. They attempt to gain compromise and keep the show on the road. 4 BA/PM take some risk and responsibility for things going wrong. And need to fix these things. 5 BA/PM act a managers, managing people, strategy, finances. There are more but you get the context. There are lots of intangibles (or BS) needed to manage a project. You need someone to deal with it. In certain industries BA/PM with a mixture of business, technology and BA/PM skills can demand more pay. I was a doubter before but seeing the daily issues that come out on a challenging project, these BA/PM are probably underpaid.
robmay 14y ago
There is a great book called "Management by Baseball." The author of the book points out that baseball managers are typically former players, and they usually believe that the most important position on the team is whatever position they used to play. I doubt PMs regularly make more than engineers across all levels at all companies, but in general the outcry you are seeing about this isn't limited to engineers. In my experience, almost everybody at almost every company thinks the thing that they do is the most important. I can tell you that I have worked in 4 major roles: - engineer - sales engineer - business development - CEO In my experience, the pay is directly tied to the need of the position to manage uncertainty and ambiguity, and evaluate difficult risk/reward tradeoffs. As you move up the hierarchy, you do more of this.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  You can form a baseball team entirely out of players. They might even play pretty well. You just can't form a baseball team entirely out of managers. If the upper levels are in more uncertain and ambiguous situations, that makes it even harder to judge performance, which will give even greater weight to wild heuristic guesses in hiring, and more cover for things like nepotism.
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
As an employee working at a consulting firm, I understand the difference in a contract environment. Me, as a programmer, charge a client for my time. The most money I can possibly make is my charge rate times however many hours. But, I have a manager, they are in charge of several, perhaps 20 programmers, working on various tasks for various clients. In reality, my salary is only about 50% of what my company charges for my time. In this scheme, money goes towards overhead, and the rest to management, whom I do agree, do a good job keeping us programmers employed, and winning contracts to work on. could I do this all myself and charge more money, sure. But in a bigger consultancy, there is a great network effect, and more jobs to be done, thus I will less likely be out of work. Is it a pyramid scheme? yes. Do I hope to be on top at some point? yes.
horsehead 14y ago
I always laugh when people question why others make more than them. Standard salary for mid-level journalists is around $27k a year. Teachers are around $35k. I don't know about other careers, but there's always somebody making less than you.
Devilboy 14y ago
Ours do not.
padobson 14y ago
There's a reason why we all aspire to be Rock Stars in our respective crafts and why the entrepreneur in us wants to hire the Rock Star. Give me a business analyst who knows his marketplace inside and out. Who can break down the value proposition our business offers to 25 different demographics the same way John Madden breaks down a cover-two defense. Who can see where the market is going before the market knows its going there, and gets the team ready and motivated to get us there before any of our competition even realizes they're behind. Give me a project manager who can see fires before they start; who can guide 30 people to do the work of 300 and can keep 300 people working efficiently toward the same goal. I want a project manager who craves efficiency in their process like an addict craves meth. Give me a project manager who obssessively clicks the refresh page on O'Reilly's website waiting for updates on books about continuous integration, issue tracking, and version control practices. And give me a programmer who knows the entire stack like the back of their hand. Who can program Ruby, Python, Java, Haskell, Clojure, Objective-C, C++, C#, Go, Scala, and every kind of Javascript. Who understands what the different hardware constraints on a desktop application and a web application. Give me a programmer who writes elegant unit tests for all of his code, and evey algorithm is the minimum O. Give me a programmer who happily mentors every other developer in our shop and, like Michael Jordan, makes everyone else better. Give me these three, and I'll change the world, and I'll pay each of them far more than my competition.
- codeonfire 14y ago
  Your view of business roles is flawed. The programmer has to do those things but also know the marketplace better than the business analyst. the programmer has to guide the less capable and new programmers on the team. The BA can't. The programmer has to set up the Continuous integration server, issue tracking system, source control repository, and use all of these things that the PM is reading about with amazement. In fact these things are an insignificant afterthought to the programmer, who has learned how to set up administer and use multiple tools of each.
  - scottbruin 14y ago
    I think you're giving "programmers" too much credit or "project managers" not enough. I'm the product guy at a small-ish company and my main dev-side pet projects are deployment/CI and development workflow, and I've implemented 95% of the solutions for these as well as architecting our overall system. Some would just say I'm a programmer then, but I think what padobson was getting at is that good people in any of these roles get their hands dirty in optimizing their area of concern, even if that overlaps in other areas.
asreal 14y ago
Because bullshit baffles brains
jsmcgd 14y ago
I think that people higher up the chain get more money because that's how ultimately they are given authority. If someone who earned 25% of what you did, continually told you to do something that you disagreed with, you would probably think 'why am I listening to this guy telling me what to do?' This organisation doesn't value you as much as me, therefore I think my opinion is worth more than yours. Therefore I'm not going to do what you say. Consequently you don't have that much authority. Something like that.
justin_vanw 14y ago
The assumption that PMs, or anyone else, get higher salaries is just wrong. Depending on the company, pay scales are all over the place. At the company I am at now, 'Engineers' (valley speak for programmer) have the highest pay scale, meaning an Engineer is paid more than any other role at the same career level. Some businesses see programmers as replaceable cogs. Some don't. If you are a really good developer, and you want to be paid well, one sure fire way to do it is to physically move to an area where great developers are in short supply. Silicon Valley is the nexus of demand in the US, for programming talent. If you do our engineering challenge at http://www.codeeval.com/public_sc/48/ http://www.codeeval.com/public_sc/48/ , we'll immediately get back to you. We are always looking for talented people, and working here is awesome.
hurshp 14y ago
The reason is just culture there is nothing else. When the major professions Lawyers, MBA's, Doctors, Engineers became part of the majority work force a culture emerged. Somehow the people who in aggregate create the most value in the working world as far as dollar is concerned started to under bid each other for competition, you look at any software/engineering contract there is always and under bidding war going on, always. But with Doctors, MBA, Lawyers they are always looking to get the most personal financial benefit, and even put in laws and other policy to assure they will, hence the prestige. It has gotten to the point where engineers are seen as cogs as I can hire someone else to do the same thing, plus they are paid the least anyway so they are easy to replace. I think it is just starting to change if you go in the tech/startup world you can make more money ,developers are paid even over $500k, the difference is the culture they value your work.
bigsomar 14y ago
This is a very general comment. Not all programmers and Analyst/PM are of same quality. Check niche area's - e.g. HFT programming, can PM/Analyst get close? No way. A programmer who updates his skills frequently have a good chance of staying on top.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
We make money in technology by making computers do things for people. This means there are two, equally-important pieces: computers and people. PMs and BAs are supposed to be able to both understand and bring these two elements together. Of course, whether it works that way in reality is another story.
lnanek2 14y ago
I'm a programmer and I think they are worth more too. It's a disaster when you have a bad business person and lose investors because there is no one to meet them, or it takes several months longer than expected to hire a desperately needed graphics designer, etc.. I've heard managers of mine mention getting 1400 emails a day, and I bet a lot of it is bitching they have to put up with about budgets and timelines, and business considerations - not fun coding stuff like I work with all day. You couldn't pay me to take a business job, but I acknowledge it is more essential to the actual business.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  If importance were gauged by doing dirty work without which things would fail, then the janitor is also more valuable. But janitors are cheap because they are easy to get. If good* PMs are paid more, it is because they are harder to get. That doesn't mean they are more important, just that the company believes them to be worth it and does not believe it can get a better deal without paying unreasonably for it. * good means whatever the person hiring thinks it means. If the hiring manager believes in auras or psychoanalysis or nepotism, then those things will determine the hire.
tsotha 14y ago
Heh. Where I work business analysts and PMs make substantially less than the developers.
kgen 14y ago
Well, who should get paid more, the getaway driver, or the guy who orchestrated the bank robbery?
johnobrien321 14y ago
I think I may be due to supply and demand. PM's tend to be local, which isolates them from outsourcing salary pressure (decreases supply). Programmers can be outsourced which exposes them to more salary pressure (increases supply).
codeonfire 14y ago
Business analysts and PMs stay at corporations longer and build salary through promotions. Programmers leave every couple of years and build salary by going to more elite and richer corporations. So a new programmer may be working at a low programmer-pay corporation early at which PMs are paid more than programmers. Eventually programmers will end up at a place where they are paid more than PMs and BAs. Even the most die hard programmer-hating director or VP can't justify paying $150k for 'people skills'.
adrianhoward 14y ago
When I'm in the mood to wear my extra cynical hat I quite like the developers who think good business analysts and project managers don't add significant value. Gives me a heck of a competitive advantage :-)
Produce 14y ago
It's simple, really. The core of society is composed of... You guessed it! Social shit! So why do lawyers, politicians, lawmakers and managers get the most money even though they do nothing useful? Because we do not reward what we do not understand. Engineering, the sciences and the arts are esoteric enough that only a small collection of people 'get' them. Arguing a criminal case, promising to fix society for the billionth time, drawing up a law or telling people that they should do what you say because everyone says that you're the person to listen to is something that everybody can understand. Every person on this planet understands that a new law will affect them just as they appreciate that the country going in a different direction will do the same. In comparison, few people know what goes into making the world tick and how much of their lives are supported by IT infrastructure. Ofcourse, everybody can understand cleaning, cooking and chopping wood too, so why do those professions pay so badly? This is where supply and demand come in - one needs higher education to perform bureaucratic functions; this is not so for cleaning and cooking. Since getting that education costs money, motivation and time, most people cannot afford it, hence it is in comparatively low supply and therefore more expensive. In other words, it's a combination of how easy it is to understand and relate to the profession coupled with the barrier to entry. In my not-so-humble opinion, the fact that we live in a society which values talking over walking is completely and utterly idiotic. We've all been had and we're having ourselves for doing so little about it. However, I feel no resentment towards people in these professions - the game is broken, the players are only doing what they can. The best we can do to fix this situation is to educate ourselves and each other. When the older generation dies out, the ideas in our heads will become the status quo.
WaylonKenning 14y ago
I can always tell I'm in a room full of programmers when they say "coding" is the most important part of making software. Oh really? That's a bit like saying the person laying asphalt on the road is the most important part of making the road. Oh, hey, what about the Engineers who designed the roading material? The Planners who decided where the road should go. The Project Manager who actually gets people to do things, and stops management from changing their mind about where the road should go, and when it should be created. Nope, just the guy physically laying the road. I had a big debate with a programmer about why Business Analysts, Project Managers, and even Enterprise Architects get paid more than programmers. Programmers create something from nothing. Without them, there would be no software. And that's indeed correct. But has the problem of getting software working in large enterprise environments been down to a lack of technology? Generally not. It's more down to those human factors like what are the requirements, who is the stakeholder, who has responsibility for this project, who's got the budget, what are we doing, when is this ready, why did we build this when we could have bought that, all of these soft skills, they're the reasons why software projects fail. Not the software (generally, don't find an edge case and be all Aha!). That's why I'm working on becoming an Enterprise Architect. I can barely code, and I'm OK with that. Because I do know about the structure of the business, the canonical data model with an organisation, the high level enterprise applications that support that information, and the infrastructure that support the applications. Sure I'm not an expert in any one of those areas, but being knowledgeable combined with being able to talk to the CIO and the CEO with them understanding what I'm saying, that's a rare skill indeed.
ap22213 14y ago
In my opinion, it's because, outside a few rare companies, programmers are generally viewed as mental laborers: the digital, modern equivalent of blue collar workers. Some comments above seem to rationalize this by saying that software development is viewed as a cost center. Perhaps that's part of it. But, there are many types of cost centers but which aren't viewed like programming.
donnyg107 14y ago
Programmer for Citigroup here, Computer Science and Financial Engineering major- At citigroup, entry level programmers are paid just as much as entry level business analysts. In a large company, no one needs "great" programmers. They really jsut need capable programmers to get everything executed correctly in such thick beurocracy. The reality is that good MANAGERS are much harder to come by, so whenever anyone, business side or technical side, proves to be a good manager, they move up and get paid more. So it's not that the programmers are paid less, it's that they don't really look like programmers once the company wants then to manage programmers, which is much much more valuable. Bottom line, being a "good programmer" won't get you paid more. Anywhere. Not even at google. Showing that you can make a company productive and be a good manager will always get you paid more, because those are fewer and far between.
known 14y ago
Writing software != Selling software

226 points by AjJi 14y ago

I used to be a programmer who transitioned into BA/PM role lately. I see and understand the pains of both sides. Sometimes, I want to switch into the technical/programmer mode where I want to solve/code the thing myself. The point is that these 3 roles even though not necessarily mutually exclusive, are very difficult to do at the same time especially in large corporate environments. At a startup, I am not sure if do need a separate BA/PM but when you have to deal with 100s of business users across multiple countries, get everyone to agree on scope/requirements, keep effective communication with all stakeholders etc. etc., you need people who can do all these. This is where a good BA/PM comes in. The value of a good BA/PM can never be undermined even though it can be argued that a developer usually fills these roles many times in certain circumstances. To summarize, a good BA/PM is not someone who only is good at business/domain knowledge or a set of tools, but is someone who can deal with people, glue teams together and is not afraid to wear many hats which could include cold calling team members, pestering business users to confirm things etc. etc.

gouranga 14y ago

They get paid the same as junior programmers where I work. They are deemed as equal value to the company. To be 100% honest a good developer should be able to take on all three roles. PM and BA are skills which should be built in as well along side other basics.

edwinnathaniel 14y ago
Where is this "good developer" exist? Most good developers that I know of don't communicate as well as BA or PM when it comes to interfacing with non-technical people. NB: Not to say that these developers are bad communicators. They're less patient, they tend to have an "ideal" picture, and they work better with computers than a normal human being.
- gouranga 14y ago
  they're usually contractors these days to be honest. I always sit in the middle between humans and machines and am quite happy getting my hands dirty with both sides. Communication and management is part of the job.
  - edwinnathaniel 14y ago
    Your reply made my day. Typically HN-ers would reply with something out of the ballpark of Reality. This one is an honest, down to earth, reality reply. Contractors, on the other hand, have to deal with Accounting department, BAs, PMs, etc and then ship something... :D
yashchandra 14y ago
"a good developer should be able to take on all three roles" I generally would agree with you but it is not that simple. A good BA or PM can do lot of dirty work that the programmers can be shielded from in order to focus on their core value: code/build the product. Some of those dirty tasks are: 1. dealing with difficult business users who keep changing their scope and requirements. Can you imagine if you had to develop the product while the scope keeps changing ? A good BA/PM would negotiate that for you and help stop scope creep. 2. Looking at the bigger picture. This includes ensuring all the connected project members are delivering, communication is in place, people are talking to each other and everyone is on the same page. No one enjoys doing this dirty work but it brings tremendous value to a project. There are more like these but you get the idea. Yes there are BA/PMs that do not do their task well but incompetence is not retricted to a particular line of work, is it ?

Karunamon 14y ago

Aside: Yet another useful and thought provoking question and set of answers on SE shut down "because it's not a good fit for the format".

gouranga 14y ago
Yes this is getting annoying. I think when a site reaches critical mass, the pedants and moderati (play on illuminati) start screwing it up. Wikipedia is another fine example of this. I've stopped contributing to stack overflow now due to this (I accumulated 20k karma to give you an idea how much I thought the idea was promising)
- kevinh 14y ago
  It's not really as easy as you make it sound. Incorrect moderation will cripple a site and prevent people from contributing, but moderation is necessary to prevent the site from declining in quality. Without moderation, a site's quality will decline with its increased size. The default subreddits on reddit are a good example of what will happen without sufficient moderation.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.
    - AjJi 14y ago
      AFAIK, SE mods are not picked based on karma, you can nominate yourself to be mod, and users will vote according to many indicators, not karma only. Elections: http://stackoverflow.com/election http://stackoverflow.com/election
      - 14y ago

ihodes 14y ago

What companies are these people working for? The ones I've looked at and the ones my friends work at pay their programmers significantly more than PMs and BAs.

thibaut_barrere 14y ago
For instance, for companies where programming and IT is not perceived as a core competency and asset, but a cost.
stephencanon 14y ago
This; in my experience median compensation for programmers is comparable to PMs, and the high-end of programmer compensation is significantly higher than that for PMs.
- nickbarnwell 14y ago
  A programmer high on the compensation scale will typically have decided to stay on the "Individual Contributor" track and top out as a "Distinguished Engineer" or similar title, but still be considered as a programmer. A PM who has advanced to a similar level, on the other hand, is likely to be some sort of VP or SVP and considered an "executive". That is to say the PM compensation track divergers, while the Engineer's stays the same
  - stephencanon 14y ago
    Let me be more clear: I'm talking about something like an MTS or Senior Engineer, rather than a Fellow or Distinguished Engineer (and FWIW, at many firms, a Fellow/Distinguished Engineer may very well have compensation comparable to a Director/VP).
    - alttab 14y ago
      Only if you are Bruce Lindsay and you invented Joins would it be comparable. Directors or VPs often get quarterly options

thibaut_barrere 14y ago

Good business analysts and PM are more likely (maybe because of the situations they are involved in, or because of their training) to realize and explain what value they bring to the company. For most "regular" programmers, it's not that clear :)

Hominem 14y ago

My PM is on vacation this week and I've had to partially fill in. I have been getting frantic urgent emails from roughly 7 am till 1 am. If this is what the guy puts up with, he deserves a couple bucks.

zalew 14y ago
For receiving emails?
- yashchandra 14y ago
  sure. try to be the first point of contact for a massive project for anyone under the sun including fellow developers, business users, IT heads, business heads, internal consultants, external consultants, SMEs etc etc. If you can handle all their queries (email/in-person/phone call/video conference), you certainly sir do not need your BA/PM.
- joshAg 14y ago
  No, for making it so that the rest of the team doesn't have to deal with emails from 7am to 1am. Part of the PM's or manager's job (at least if they're a good one, anyway) is shielding the rest of the team from administrivia, so that they can be productive.
maudineormsby 14y ago
I crossed over from Project Management into Engineering, and my experience was that as a PM my job was to be bothered from Sunup til Sundown and periodically in between. I was expected to know everything about anything that I was asked about, and I was responsible for a large number of people's output without having any authority over them. It was horrible. I think the issue with the SO question is simply the view that what PMs and BAs do isn't 'real' work. They might not write code, but sometimes they're the only ones making it so the engineers can.
- jshen 14y ago
  What you describe is a dysfunctional organization, not a justification for PMs.

timsally 14y ago

The top rated comment on this question asserts that the reason why programmers have lower salaries is because they are logical, intelligent individuals who refuse to play the politics game and thus are hated by executives. Not only it this incorrect (have you seen the politics in certain open source software projects ?) but it plays into a narrative that programmers want to believe: business people are corrupt and programmers are superior to them morally if not in compensation. You're doing yourself a disservice if you follow this line of thinking. On the other hand, the top rated answer has a pretty elaborate and abstract theory about widgets and film makers. I make no assertion about the accuracy of this abstract theory, but I can summarize reality in a much simpler way: many programmers work in businesses where software is a cost center. If you want to make money as a programmer, you need to work at a company where software is a generator of profit and negotiate compensation aggressively after demonstrating your value. The following is required reading if you'd like an algorithm for doing the above: Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro... Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

dpeck 14y ago
"many programmers work in businesses where software is a cost center. If you want to make money as a programmer, you need to work at a company where software is a generator of profit and negotiate compensation aggressively after demonstrating your value." This is right on. Looking back to when I was finishing my degree an older friend of mine advised that if possibly you shouldn't work for a company who's primary income stream isn't what you do. I still think this is a fantastic suggestion. Not everyone can be an important member of the R&D group for their employer, but if you've got the chops why shouldn't you be? I find that doing that you get the best of both worlds. You're valued enough that you get shielded from most of the office prattle and politics, you usually report very high up the hierarchy ( I've never reported less than one level down from executive team, and usually its been directly to a C-level position), and these teams tend to be full of others who know their shit and will make you better. Of course the compensation is usually quite good too, and bonus you're unlikely to be held to a standard soul sucking 9-5 schedule, or God forbid have to be on call.

sardonicbryan 14y ago

I'm a little surprised that the top answers on Stack Exchange accept the premise that analysts and PMs get paid higher salaries. That is certainly not the case at my company (mid sized tech startup), nor I would imagine at most other tech companies.

joshAg 14y ago
this is the case for many larger organisations.
eitally 14y ago
I'd argue that most programmers don't work at tech companies.

pumblechook 14y ago

The easy answer is: because that is what the market dictates. Programming may be difficult, but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot more programmers out there than people willing to be a PM (and stick with it).

tatsuke95 14y ago
Yep. And notice you got down voted for saying so. It happens to me every time. Programmers don't want to hear that in many industries (those that aren't pushing cutting edge tech) their skills are a commodity. It's just a fact, and globalization is making it worse.
- andr3w321 14y ago
  This. Programming is skilled labor which is why they make more than the guys that work at McDonalds but there's still a ton of programmers out there. There's a lot fewer people out there that know what to create, when to create it and how to get the right team together to accomplish it than there are people who know how to program. For every Elon Musk how many aerospace engineers are there out there?
zem 14y ago
precisely so. and i don't care - no, actually i'm glad that PMing pays more than programming, so that it will attract people willing to do it and let me concentrate on the things i find fun.

pumblechook 14y ago

rwhitman 14y ago

This is a rerun on HN. It's also untrue - analysts and PMs don't typically make more than engineers, this is a bit of programmer urban legend. I actually took a paycut for my stint as a PM

nicw 14y ago

I view the PM role akin the role a sweeper plays in curling. A good PM will clear the path for others on the team to do what they do best. Sometimes that's wrangling with devops so the developers can keep programming, or it's calling a meeting with stakeholders to brief them on potential issues before they get out of control. A good PM is offensive, not reactive and thats why a lot of times it seems like they're just calling meetings. They're generally the only person that interacts with all the different teams (management, QA, dev, IT) and so they can see the upcoming roadblocks. IF they get those solved beforehand that's worth some $$$ :)

otoburb 14y ago
I always think of "hand-eye coordination". Hand = Developers Eye = Customers, Marketing, C-staff (read: stakeholders) Coordination = Project managers
patrickyeon 14y ago
Just a tip, if you want to keep with your sports metaphors, and meant to say "a good PM is on the offensive", you probably meant "a good PM is proactive (acts to solve a problem before it shows up)". Describing someone as 'offensive' is saying there is something about them that offends you.
- nicw 14y ago
  ha, you're right, thanks. I'll leave as-is so your comment doesn't look garfield-minus-garfield.
- roel_v 14y ago
  "To be on the offensive" means "attacking something" or "being aggressive towards something", not that the person who is "on the offensive" offends somebody in the sense that that somebody's feelings are hurt - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/go+on+the+offensive http://www.thefreedictionary.com/go+on+the+offensive . It's arguable whether or not a PM should be that aggressive, but I'd say his expression made sense.
  - 14y ago

gte910h 14y ago

They're not? I've seen very few places where PMs and analysts even get on par with normal engineers (aka, non junior).

imgabe 14y ago

Long story short, PMs are closer to the money. When you're managing a project, you know you have a budget of X dollars to get it done. If you get it done in X-P dollars, you can take that to your boss and immediately show that you made, or saved, the company P dollars. As a programmer or engineer, you may not even be directly aware of what the project's budget is, so it's harder for you to demonstrate how much value you're providing.

kyt 14y ago
100% agree. It's always about how close you are to the money. The more direct value you provide, the more you get paid. This is why lawyers get paid so much, because firms know that for every hour they bill the firm makes $X dollars. Programmers provide indirect value. If you architect a system that saves months and months of time later down the line, how do you value that?
- joshAg 14y ago
  with hugely inflated numbers that assume the best case scenario for time-savings, fancy charts and graphs, and perhaps even a buzzword laden powerpoint presentation during your annual review.
dennisgorelik 14y ago
Accountants are even closer to the money. That does not make accountants to earn more.

sidcool1234 14y ago

Any discussion on this topic always leaves me more confused than I was before reading it.

zerostar07 14y ago

I believe its similar to what happens in other sectors: PMs have to deal with people, do lots and lots of schleps without the constant rewards of creating something, designing something beautiful or the serendipitous discovery of something remarkable. As a developer I m not jealous of their position, I know they get paid better for doing what i Don't want to do

yashchandra 14y ago
"I know they get paid better for doing what i Don't want to do" You summed it up well. BA/PMs do the dirty work that developers can be shielded from. Dealing with people is always a dirty work but extremely difficult to master. A good BA/PM is one who does this well. If you can tell me that you can get anyone to do anything in a project by your people's skills, power of communication, aggression, I would pay you well and would not want to lose you.

bmj 14y ago

In my engineering group, we don't have project managers or analysts. We have product managers (who are responsible for much more than a project manager, and make more than the average PM, methinks). The lead engineer on each project does some PM-y tasks, but it's generally up to the product manager to produce the documentation/charts/spreadsheets. In our operations group, there are PMs, but they are responsible for more than managing programmers on projects--they oversee the whole project, and must manage the resources from several sub-groups. Additionally, they are the first point of contact for the client. They are well-compensated, but they are also responsible for the whole of a client project.

otoburb 14y ago
Depending on the aggressiveness of the corporate culture, the first point of contact also gives the client one non-sales throat to choke.
jbl 14y ago
I just transitioned from an engineering role to a product management role. Product management means different things in different companies, but generally a product manager will interact directly with every other part of the company and "own" the product plan ---- what needs to get built and when. Engineering owns the how. That said, I think project managers can really help things flow. If you've got a process you are sticking to, a project manager can help make sure things get done when they need to. This is especially important when lots of things are happening simultaneously (lots of clients and client requests, lots of business development effort, lots of growth, technical challenges).

mrgreenfur 14y ago

Why do you think BAs and PMs get paid more? Is there any evidence? Anywhere I've worked they are very comparable for experience levels or the programmers get paid more. I think this is an inferiority complex based on not feeling 'cool' like the business guys. Other business roles likes sales and management (both tech and biz) get more because they have more responsibilities.

yashchandra 14y ago

after almost 50 comments, I say let the developers, BAs,PM, QAs all win. After all, we all want to get the project out of the door, make some money on the way and go home.

nodemaker 14y ago
>After all, we all want to get the project out of the door, make some money on the way and go home. This is Hacker News, not Project Manager Forums. I am sure most of us just want to create awesome things and not "go home"!
- yashchandra 14y ago
  You took it literally when i said "go home". Fine I will refine it for you. Go home as in go build the next product.

dpcheng2003 14y ago

This is a true statement for any industry with a highly skilled labor force, whether you write code, run excel models at a bank, or make jet engines. From my observations/experiences, these three things are consistent (and it's mentioned throughout the thread): 1. Be closer to the money: There's a reason why sales people make more money than marketers. Look at Salesforce.com's operating statement and they spend >3x more money on sales and marketing than R&D. 2. Never be the best at making a widget or they'll have you make the widget forever: If you're the best at something highly technical, the management would be crazy to promote you to something more client facing or more managerial. There are some organizations that truly value technical skill on a meritocratic basis (think traders at a hedge fund or rockstar developers), but they are more rare. 3. If the boss/rest of the company doesn't know what you do, you won't be compensated for it: I wonder if the reason why Codacademy/Udacity is important is because it starts to teach non-technical people like me the value of good code. I have far more appreciation for my technical co-founder now that I've tried to code than I did before (and I thought I already had a lot). In the end, my suggestion is to gain a broader set of skills that make you more marketable to your company or join a company that appreciates your ability.

njharman 14y ago

As a developer of 20 yrs I dispute the claim "Programming harder than project management". Pming is hard, stressful, and often thankless. And I've seen multitudes more good devs than good PM. Finally, I'm not sure pms do get paid more.

perfunctory 14y ago

This has been pointed out already in several comments, but it can never be stressed too much -- because programmers can't negotiate! Want to get a higher salary? Do yourself and a broader programming community a service. Learn to negotiate! Learn to negotiate! Learn to negotiate!

Tycho 14y ago

I think the fact that bad programmers can have such a negative impact has a lot to do with it.

sparknlaunch 14y ago

From BA/PM perspective here are some possible reasons (with no disrespect to programmers): 1 BA/PM generally spend most of their time dealing with politics, governance and bureaucracy. 2 BA/PM spend a lot of time trying to elicit requirements and deal with scope creep. 3 BA/PM act as a conduit between parties and stakeholders who rarely agree. They attempt to gain compromise and keep the show on the road. 4 BA/PM take some risk and responsibility for things going wrong. And need to fix these things. 5 BA/PM act a managers, managing people, strategy, finances. There are more but you get the context. There are lots of intangibles (or BS) needed to manage a project. You need someone to deal with it. In certain industries BA/PM with a mixture of business, technology and BA/PM skills can demand more pay. I was a doubter before but seeing the daily issues that come out on a challenging project, these BA/PM are probably underpaid.

robmay 14y ago

There is a great book called "Management by Baseball." The author of the book points out that baseball managers are typically former players, and they usually believe that the most important position on the team is whatever position they used to play. I doubt PMs regularly make more than engineers across all levels at all companies, but in general the outcry you are seeing about this isn't limited to engineers. In my experience, almost everybody at almost every company thinks the thing that they do is the most important. I can tell you that I have worked in 4 major roles: - engineer - sales engineer - business development - CEO In my experience, the pay is directly tied to the need of the position to manage uncertainty and ambiguity, and evaluate difficult risk/reward tradeoffs. As you move up the hierarchy, you do more of this.

slurgfest 14y ago
You can form a baseball team entirely out of players. They might even play pretty well. You just can't form a baseball team entirely out of managers. If the upper levels are in more uncertain and ambiguous situations, that makes it even harder to judge performance, which will give even greater weight to wild heuristic guesses in hiring, and more cover for things like nepotism.

ImprovedSilence 14y ago

As an employee working at a consulting firm, I understand the difference in a contract environment. Me, as a programmer, charge a client for my time. The most money I can possibly make is my charge rate times however many hours. But, I have a manager, they are in charge of several, perhaps 20 programmers, working on various tasks for various clients. In reality, my salary is only about 50% of what my company charges for my time. In this scheme, money goes towards overhead, and the rest to management, whom I do agree, do a good job keeping us programmers employed, and winning contracts to work on. could I do this all myself and charge more money, sure. But in a bigger consultancy, there is a great network effect, and more jobs to be done, thus I will less likely be out of work. Is it a pyramid scheme? yes. Do I hope to be on top at some point? yes.

horsehead 14y ago

I always laugh when people question why others make more than them. Standard salary for mid-level journalists is around $27k a year. Teachers are around $35k. I don't know about other careers, but there's always somebody making less than you.

Devilboy 14y ago

Ours do not.

padobson 14y ago

There's a reason why we all aspire to be Rock Stars in our respective crafts and why the entrepreneur in us wants to hire the Rock Star. Give me a business analyst who knows his marketplace inside and out. Who can break down the value proposition our business offers to 25 different demographics the same way John Madden breaks down a cover-two defense. Who can see where the market is going before the market knows its going there, and gets the team ready and motivated to get us there before any of our competition even realizes they're behind. Give me a project manager who can see fires before they start; who can guide 30 people to do the work of 300 and can keep 300 people working efficiently toward the same goal. I want a project manager who craves efficiency in their process like an addict craves meth. Give me a project manager who obssessively clicks the refresh page on O'Reilly's website waiting for updates on books about continuous integration, issue tracking, and version control practices. And give me a programmer who knows the entire stack like the back of their hand. Who can program Ruby, Python, Java, Haskell, Clojure, Objective-C, C++, C#, Go, Scala, and every kind of Javascript. Who understands what the different hardware constraints on a desktop application and a web application. Give me a programmer who writes elegant unit tests for all of his code, and evey algorithm is the minimum O. Give me a programmer who happily mentors every other developer in our shop and, like Michael Jordan, makes everyone else better. Give me these three, and I'll change the world, and I'll pay each of them far more than my competition.

codeonfire 14y ago
Your view of business roles is flawed. The programmer has to do those things but also know the marketplace better than the business analyst. the programmer has to guide the less capable and new programmers on the team. The BA can't. The programmer has to set up the Continuous integration server, issue tracking system, source control repository, and use all of these things that the PM is reading about with amazement. In fact these things are an insignificant afterthought to the programmer, who has learned how to set up administer and use multiple tools of each.
- scottbruin 14y ago
  I think you're giving "programmers" too much credit or "project managers" not enough. I'm the product guy at a small-ish company and my main dev-side pet projects are deployment/CI and development workflow, and I've implemented 95% of the solutions for these as well as architecting our overall system. Some would just say I'm a programmer then, but I think what padobson was getting at is that good people in any of these roles get their hands dirty in optimizing their area of concern, even if that overlaps in other areas.

asreal 14y ago

Because bullshit baffles brains

jsmcgd 14y ago

I think that people higher up the chain get more money because that's how ultimately they are given authority. If someone who earned 25% of what you did, continually told you to do something that you disagreed with, you would probably think 'why am I listening to this guy telling me what to do?' This organisation doesn't value you as much as me, therefore I think my opinion is worth more than yours. Therefore I'm not going to do what you say. Consequently you don't have that much authority. Something like that.

justin_vanw 14y ago

The assumption that PMs, or anyone else, get higher salaries is just wrong. Depending on the company, pay scales are all over the place. At the company I am at now, 'Engineers' (valley speak for programmer) have the highest pay scale, meaning an Engineer is paid more than any other role at the same career level. Some businesses see programmers as replaceable cogs. Some don't. If you are a really good developer, and you want to be paid well, one sure fire way to do it is to physically move to an area where great developers are in short supply. Silicon Valley is the nexus of demand in the US, for programming talent. If you do our engineering challenge at http://www.codeeval.com/public_sc/48/ http://www.codeeval.com/public_sc/48/ , we'll immediately get back to you. We are always looking for talented people, and working here is awesome.

hurshp 14y ago

The reason is just culture there is nothing else. When the major professions Lawyers, MBA's, Doctors, Engineers became part of the majority work force a culture emerged. Somehow the people who in aggregate create the most value in the working world as far as dollar is concerned started to under bid each other for competition, you look at any software/engineering contract there is always and under bidding war going on, always. But with Doctors, MBA, Lawyers they are always looking to get the most personal financial benefit, and even put in laws and other policy to assure they will, hence the prestige. It has gotten to the point where engineers are seen as cogs as I can hire someone else to do the same thing, plus they are paid the least anyway so they are easy to replace. I think it is just starting to change if you go in the tech/startup world you can make more money ,developers are paid even over $500k, the difference is the culture they value your work.

bigsomar 14y ago

This is a very general comment. Not all programmers and Analyst/PM are of same quality. Check niche area's - e.g. HFT programming, can PM/Analyst get close? No way. A programmer who updates his skills frequently have a good chance of staying on top.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

We make money in technology by making computers do things for people. This means there are two, equally-important pieces: computers and people. PMs and BAs are supposed to be able to both understand and bring these two elements together. Of course, whether it works that way in reality is another story.

lnanek2 14y ago

I'm a programmer and I think they are worth more too. It's a disaster when you have a bad business person and lose investors because there is no one to meet them, or it takes several months longer than expected to hire a desperately needed graphics designer, etc.. I've heard managers of mine mention getting 1400 emails a day, and I bet a lot of it is bitching they have to put up with about budgets and timelines, and business considerations - not fun coding stuff like I work with all day. You couldn't pay me to take a business job, but I acknowledge it is more essential to the actual business.

slurgfest 14y ago
If importance were gauged by doing dirty work without which things would fail, then the janitor is also more valuable. But janitors are cheap because they are easy to get. If good* PMs are paid more, it is because they are harder to get. That doesn't mean they are more important, just that the company believes them to be worth it and does not believe it can get a better deal without paying unreasonably for it. * good means whatever the person hiring thinks it means. If the hiring manager believes in auras or psychoanalysis or nepotism, then those things will determine the hire.

tsotha 14y ago

Heh. Where I work business analysts and PMs make substantially less than the developers.

kgen 14y ago

Well, who should get paid more, the getaway driver, or the guy who orchestrated the bank robbery?

johnobrien321 14y ago

I think I may be due to supply and demand. PM's tend to be local, which isolates them from outsourcing salary pressure (decreases supply). Programmers can be outsourced which exposes them to more salary pressure (increases supply).

codeonfire 14y ago

Business analysts and PMs stay at corporations longer and build salary through promotions. Programmers leave every couple of years and build salary by going to more elite and richer corporations. So a new programmer may be working at a low programmer-pay corporation early at which PMs are paid more than programmers. Eventually programmers will end up at a place where they are paid more than PMs and BAs. Even the most die hard programmer-hating director or VP can't justify paying $150k for 'people skills'.

adrianhoward 14y ago

When I'm in the mood to wear my extra cynical hat I quite like the developers who think good business analysts and project managers don't add significant value. Gives me a heck of a competitive advantage :-)

Produce 14y ago

It's simple, really. The core of society is composed of... You guessed it! Social shit! So why do lawyers, politicians, lawmakers and managers get the most money even though they do nothing useful? Because we do not reward what we do not understand. Engineering, the sciences and the arts are esoteric enough that only a small collection of people 'get' them. Arguing a criminal case, promising to fix society for the billionth time, drawing up a law or telling people that they should do what you say because everyone says that you're the person to listen to is something that everybody can understand. Every person on this planet understands that a new law will affect them just as they appreciate that the country going in a different direction will do the same. In comparison, few people know what goes into making the world tick and how much of their lives are supported by IT infrastructure. Ofcourse, everybody can understand cleaning, cooking and chopping wood too, so why do those professions pay so badly? This is where supply and demand come in - one needs higher education to perform bureaucratic functions; this is not so for cleaning and cooking. Since getting that education costs money, motivation and time, most people cannot afford it, hence it is in comparatively low supply and therefore more expensive. In other words, it's a combination of how easy it is to understand and relate to the profession coupled with the barrier to entry. In my not-so-humble opinion, the fact that we live in a society which values talking over walking is completely and utterly idiotic. We've all been had and we're having ourselves for doing so little about it. However, I feel no resentment towards people in these professions - the game is broken, the players are only doing what they can. The best we can do to fix this situation is to educate ourselves and each other. When the older generation dies out, the ideas in our heads will become the status quo.

WaylonKenning 14y ago

I can always tell I'm in a room full of programmers when they say "coding" is the most important part of making software. Oh really? That's a bit like saying the person laying asphalt on the road is the most important part of making the road. Oh, hey, what about the Engineers who designed the roading material? The Planners who decided where the road should go. The Project Manager who actually gets people to do things, and stops management from changing their mind about where the road should go, and when it should be created. Nope, just the guy physically laying the road. I had a big debate with a programmer about why Business Analysts, Project Managers, and even Enterprise Architects get paid more than programmers. Programmers create something from nothing. Without them, there would be no software. And that's indeed correct. But has the problem of getting software working in large enterprise environments been down to a lack of technology? Generally not. It's more down to those human factors like what are the requirements, who is the stakeholder, who has responsibility for this project, who's got the budget, what are we doing, when is this ready, why did we build this when we could have bought that, all of these soft skills, they're the reasons why software projects fail. Not the software (generally, don't find an edge case and be all Aha!). That's why I'm working on becoming an Enterprise Architect. I can barely code, and I'm OK with that. Because I do know about the structure of the business, the canonical data model with an organisation, the high level enterprise applications that support that information, and the infrastructure that support the applications. Sure I'm not an expert in any one of those areas, but being knowledgeable combined with being able to talk to the CIO and the CEO with them understanding what I'm saying, that's a rare skill indeed.

ap22213 14y ago

In my opinion, it's because, outside a few rare companies, programmers are generally viewed as mental laborers: the digital, modern equivalent of blue collar workers. Some comments above seem to rationalize this by saying that software development is viewed as a cost center. Perhaps that's part of it. But, there are many types of cost centers but which aren't viewed like programming.

donnyg107 14y ago

Programmer for Citigroup here, Computer Science and Financial Engineering major- At citigroup, entry level programmers are paid just as much as entry level business analysts. In a large company, no one needs "great" programmers. They really jsut need capable programmers to get everything executed correctly in such thick beurocracy. The reality is that good MANAGERS are much harder to come by, so whenever anyone, business side or technical side, proves to be a good manager, they move up and get paid more. So it's not that the programmers are paid less, it's that they don't really look like programmers once the company wants then to manage programmers, which is much much more valuable. Bottom line, being a "good programmer" won't get you paid more. Anywhere. Not even at google. Showing that you can make a company productive and be a good manager will always get you paid more, because those are fewer and far between.

known 14y ago

Writing software != Selling software