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Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and p

Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year. Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more than the aforementioned lawyers. These pros can demand hourly rates of anywhere from $60-$80, but more often will make $250-$500/hr by quoting a job price and doing it quickly. And it's no problem for them to drive to all their appointments in their 1997 Ford E series wearing flannel and jeans. I could also introduce you to janitors that make six figures a year because they know how to penetrate insurance bureaucracies and get black mold cleanup jobs. If money is your aim, pick a job out of a hat and be excellent at it - and not just the actual execution, but the promotion, estimation, and pricing of your talent too. If you can get into the 25th percentile of solving problems in your expertise, you'll be well compensated for it no matter what it is.

bjourne 14y ago
Hogwash. For every skilled craftsman you can find, I can find ten other idiots making ten times as much money thanks to being born in the right family. Skilled developers recognize that rockstar developers can be ten times as productive as average ones. I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average. Stock brokers are regularly getting beaten by monkeys when it comes to betting on the stock market, yet they are among the top earners in society. It's just insane to suggest that salaries are fair or that skill is in any way correlated to income. Unless you believe that making lots of money proves that you are good at what you are doing, which makes the whole argument a tautology. Edit: Also, the best work I've done is all open source. It isn't all very good stuff (far from it!), but it certainly is both more valuable and better than the corporate code I write for a living. Then there is http://www.ohloh.net/ http://www.ohloh.net/ that tries to estimate the labour costs of various open source projects. People have plowed thousands of hours of unpaid work into some of the highest regarded software projects on earth just for fun. They will never get properly compensated for their work. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work." is the famous slogan of Socialism, but it certainly isn't how the world currently operates.
- rayiner 14y ago
  To be fair, compensation in banking is very related to performance. Investment bankers get paid on the size of their deals, traders get paid based on how much they make, money managers get paid based on how much they bring in. The majority of people get pushed out within a few years if they aren't top performers. The key thing to realize is that value to the customer isn't part of the performance equation. It doesn't matter if a hedge fund manager is beating the market. His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on. Which brings me to your point--it's not that pay isn't correlated with skill. It's that the skill it's universally correlated with is salesmanship.
  - joe_the_user 14y ago
    His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on. Indeed, and if these people are his high school friends, then the task of bringing them in the door "just got a whole lot easier"... So going back to a parent's point, it seems being born into wealth just happens to give certain valuable, uh, "skills"...
  - dhugiaskmak 14y ago
    compensation in banking is very related to performance The last four or five are conclusive proof that this is not even remotely true.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Those bankers that helped caused the collapse were making money hand over first for their companies, and even with the reduced profitability during the recession the banks came out way ahead.
  - sesqu 14y ago
    There's a quote I can't quite place right now (maybe from a TED talk?), but a metrics-oriented guy went to one of these top salesman companies and calculated the inter-year correlation of performance bonuses. Most of the salesmen figured it would be low - it turned out to be almost exactly 0.
UK-AL 14y ago
Money is about the market rate. If your good at something, but there lots of people similar to you then you're gonna have a bad time.
jkimmel 14y ago
As a biologist, I'm going to have to object. No matter what level of talent and competence you have, there are very few opportunities in this field to make a nice living. You're pretty much relegated to becoming a tenured professor (good luck) or working your way up in an established biotech firm doing work many would consider mind-numbing. At best, you're looking at the low-end of six figures for someone with decades of experience and an amazing track record, and there are very few of those positions. You can go the entrepreneurial biotech route, this is HN after all, but considering the small number of successful firms we can safely leave that option out for the purposes of salary estimation. I think this is a factor of latency in added value. It seems to me that higher salaries are often given to those who can provide immediate usable value in the short term (lawyers, stock traders, some programmers). Long-term value-add professions, such as biology and many other R&D fields, tend to get the short end of the stick salary wise. Perhaps this is tied into the immediate gratification complex of western culture; professions with a significant value-add prospect >~5 years in the future have a difficult time arguing their own worth.
- gaius 14y ago
  The point of tenure is that it's well tenure. There is actual value attached to a sinecure. What would it cost right now to buy an investment that would pay you a six figure salary for the rest of your life, no strings attached? That's what tenure is worth. Now tell me profs aren't well rewarded.
  - jkimmel 14y ago
    By no means was I trying to say that professors aren't well rewarded, if that's how I came across, I didn't communicate very effectively. My point was mainly that there aren't very many of those high paying positions relative to the number of graduates in the field. The ratio of graduates : professors is not too different than the ratio of CS grads : CS professors, but unlike CS, biology doesn't have nearly as many high paying positions outside of the professorial field. Even within education, many very good life scientists have a hard time obtaining tenure. Most jobs outside of education pay somewhere around 60k, and there isn't a whole lot of room for growth unless you move up into management at a biotech firm. This is in contrast to CS, where a non-manager software engineer has a pretty decent opportunity to make 6 figures if he works hard enough and has a decent level of talent.
_yosefk 14y ago
Do you seriously claim that janitors in the 25th percentile make about the same as programmers in said percentile, on average - that the average is the same for all occupations? I rather doubt it. I mean, it makes sense that return on all sorts of investment should be about the same once the respective markets stabilize, but some things aren't investment, they're luck. Being good at something that is in demand is more like sitting on a gold mine than buying stock.

bjourne 14y ago

Hogwash. For every skilled craftsman you can find, I can find ten other idiots making ten times as much money thanks to being born in the right family. Skilled developers recognize that rockstar developers can be ten times as productive as average ones. I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average. Stock brokers are regularly getting beaten by monkeys when it comes to betting on the stock market, yet they are among the top earners in society. It's just insane to suggest that salaries are fair or that skill is in any way correlated to income. Unless you believe that making lots of money proves that you are good at what you are doing, which makes the whole argument a tautology. Edit: Also, the best work I've done is all open source. It isn't all very good stuff (far from it!), but it certainly is both more valuable and better than the corporate code I write for a living. Then there is http://www.ohloh.net/ http://www.ohloh.net/ that tries to estimate the labour costs of various open source projects. People have plowed thousands of hours of unpaid work into some of the highest regarded software projects on earth just for fun. They will never get properly compensated for their work. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work." is the famous slogan of Socialism, but it certainly isn't how the world currently operates.

rayiner 14y ago
To be fair, compensation in banking is very related to performance. Investment bankers get paid on the size of their deals, traders get paid based on how much they make, money managers get paid based on how much they bring in. The majority of people get pushed out within a few years if they aren't top performers. The key thing to realize is that value to the customer isn't part of the performance equation. It doesn't matter if a hedge fund manager is beating the market. His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on. Which brings me to your point--it's not that pay isn't correlated with skill. It's that the skill it's universally correlated with is salesmanship.
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on. Indeed, and if these people are his high school friends, then the task of bringing them in the door "just got a whole lot easier"... So going back to a parent's point, it seems being born into wealth just happens to give certain valuable, uh, "skills"...
- dhugiaskmak 14y ago
  compensation in banking is very related to performance The last four or five are conclusive proof that this is not even remotely true.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Those bankers that helped caused the collapse were making money hand over first for their companies, and even with the reduced profitability during the recession the banks came out way ahead.
- sesqu 14y ago
  There's a quote I can't quite place right now (maybe from a TED talk?), but a metrics-oriented guy went to one of these top salesman companies and calculated the inter-year correlation of performance bonuses. Most of the salesmen figured it would be low - it turned out to be almost exactly 0.

UK-AL 14y ago

Money is about the market rate. If your good at something, but there lots of people similar to you then you're gonna have a bad time.

jkimmel 14y ago

As a biologist, I'm going to have to object. No matter what level of talent and competence you have, there are very few opportunities in this field to make a nice living. You're pretty much relegated to becoming a tenured professor (good luck) or working your way up in an established biotech firm doing work many would consider mind-numbing. At best, you're looking at the low-end of six figures for someone with decades of experience and an amazing track record, and there are very few of those positions. You can go the entrepreneurial biotech route, this is HN after all, but considering the small number of successful firms we can safely leave that option out for the purposes of salary estimation. I think this is a factor of latency in added value. It seems to me that higher salaries are often given to those who can provide immediate usable value in the short term (lawyers, stock traders, some programmers). Long-term value-add professions, such as biology and many other R&D fields, tend to get the short end of the stick salary wise. Perhaps this is tied into the immediate gratification complex of western culture; professions with a significant value-add prospect >~5 years in the future have a difficult time arguing their own worth.

gaius 14y ago
The point of tenure is that it's well tenure. There is actual value attached to a sinecure. What would it cost right now to buy an investment that would pay you a six figure salary for the rest of your life, no strings attached? That's what tenure is worth. Now tell me profs aren't well rewarded.
- jkimmel 14y ago
  By no means was I trying to say that professors aren't well rewarded, if that's how I came across, I didn't communicate very effectively. My point was mainly that there aren't very many of those high paying positions relative to the number of graduates in the field. The ratio of graduates : professors is not too different than the ratio of CS grads : CS professors, but unlike CS, biology doesn't have nearly as many high paying positions outside of the professorial field. Even within education, many very good life scientists have a hard time obtaining tenure. Most jobs outside of education pay somewhere around 60k, and there isn't a whole lot of room for growth unless you move up into management at a biotech firm. This is in contrast to CS, where a non-manager software engineer has a pretty decent opportunity to make 6 figures if he works hard enough and has a decent level of talent.

_yosefk 14y ago

Do you seriously claim that janitors in the 25th percentile make about the same as programmers in said percentile, on average - that the average is the same for all occupations? I rather doubt it. I mean, it makes sense that return on all sorts of investment should be about the same once the respective markets stabilize, but some things aren't investment, they're luck. Being good at something that is in demand is more like sitting on a gold mine than buying stock.