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How Long Will Programmers Be So Well-Paid?

• skennedy 14y ago
  A succinct quote and something I had never really put thought into. Nicely said. It’s not until you reach a near First-World level of development that pursuing your passions rather than escaping poverty seems like a reasonable and/or admirable thing to do.
  • rezendi 14y ago
    Thanks.
• rrouse 14y ago
  I would say likely forever. Programming is a commitment. Many people will just not be able to sacrifice other things in life to keep up. Programming isn't a "learn it once and you're good for life" sort of career. Programmers have to keep learning every day to stay relevant.
  • byoung2 14y ago
    That is a good point, and most other professions that require continuing education are similarly well-paid (healthcare, law, accounting, engineering). What sets programming apart is that in these other fields, continuing education is compulsory in many cases, so everyone has to do it (license renewals may depend on it). In programming, if I don't keep learning, I won't get better jobs or salary increases.
    • tayl0r 14y ago
      Plus, the amount of things in our world that will be controlled and performed by software is only going to grow. While more exposure to technology and better education will create more programmers, I think the demand for programmers will always outstrip the supply.
    • Evbn 14y ago
      Specifically, when cont ed is required by law, most people fulfill it by attending bagel eating sales seminars and not learning. Where not required by law or custom, these things don't get attendance and smart growing people pursue actual learning instead.
• berntb 14y ago
  Just a note: In 1999, before the jobs disappeared, it was the same articles...
  • randomdata 14y ago
    Does that suggest indefinitely? "Bubble 2.0" was already being talked about by 2004. Which puts only a 2-4 year lull in incomes out of a 15-20 year span.
    • berntb 14y ago
      I do think there are parallels between when mainstream magazines write about X as a good profession and when mainstream magazines write about investment and shares. (The latter case is infamous for predicting bubbles.) But sure, the work market did come back. Just pity the people coming out of university at the wrong time.
      • randomdata 14y ago
        Was it really that bad? I did not have the opportunity to go to university, but I did come out of high school right after the burst and while I wasn't making $100K for just knowing HTML, I was able to do alright. And by the time the market started to recover, I had some amazing experience under my belt allowing me to leverage the upswing in ways someone just graduating wouldn't be able to do.
        • georgemcbay 14y ago
          Depends where you live, like anything else, but in California there was a really bad stretch around late 2000 to early 2002 where it was pretty damn difficult to find new work as a developer. Even companies doing relatively well were so worried about the future that hiring freezes were the norm across the board. If you were really exceptional and really well connected or had very attractive experience, you could still find something, but it was certainly a very difficult time for a lot of people I know working in the industry in CA around that time.
      • 14y ago
• drivebyacct2 14y ago
  If only there were a guiding economic principle that could be applied that would relate the supply of skilled workers with the need or demand for them. God with such a framework, we might even accidentally elevate the discourse beyond that of a comic-laden TC "article".
  • seiji 14y ago
    We need multidimensional labor pool analysis though. There isn't "programmer" vs. "non-programmer." There's a stair step pool from "programmer who is among the best in the world in multiple areas" to "programmer who posts every minor problem on stackoverflow for free answers because they can't think." The problem isn't the supply of people who believe they are programmers. The problem is the supply of amazing people who do things we don't even have words for, but we end up calling "programming" anyway.
• paulhauggis 14y ago
  Open source will eventually kill wages. Why? Why would I pay a software engineer lots of money to write an entire system when I can get the engineered parts for free and hire a software mechanic (IE: less skill and less pay) to make the changes? I've already worked at a few companies where we should have had 3 or 4 developers and only had me because of open source software. This is why I plan on running a business that utilizes it rather than a career that depends on it.
  • nitrogen 14y ago
    Assembling components into a working system can require just as much of an engineering mindset as designing the components in the first place.
    • paulhauggis 14y ago
      In many cases, you don't need to assemble any pieces. There are entire open source apps out there that are 99% of what you need. You just need to make a few changes here and there.
  • tibbon 14y ago
    Off the shelf problems may have off the shelf solutions. However, solving unique problems (which may have value in solving them) do not have off the shelf solutions. Valve just launched a beta of their Steam client for Linux. There was nowhere for them to just download and use it from- since it was a unique problem.
  • CodeCube 14y ago
    First time I've heard the term software mechanic ... interesting, I've always thought there was a missing classification for someone who is good at reading specs/documentation and getting something configured and working (even if it takes writing a bit of code), but could never write or architect such a solution themselves.
  • YokoZar 14y ago
    Open Source Software may be drastically cheaper compared with hiring programmers to reinvent the wheel, but that very fact also enables a lot of projects that otherwise wouldn't have happened. For every company that's not hiring 3-4 engineers in favor of just one guy, there may be another 3-4 companies hiring one person instead of not doing a project entirely. This is similar to what happened to the demand for computer skills when computing itself got drastically cheaper: the increase in usage more than made up for the fact that an individual task was cheaper. Now maybe the act of tying disparate open source products together isn't the same sort of programming we did in the past (though it is software engineering). And maybe some day we'll actually finish writing all this software we're working on and it'll be good enough.
• ExpiredLink 14y ago
  I make less than in 2007. I must be doing something wrong.
  • linuxlizard 14y ago
    It's the president's fault! The TV said so.
  • seiji 14y ago
    If you aren't 25 and living in San Francisco making over $125,000 per year, then yes, you are doing something wrong. Get younger, move, and/or compromise your beliefs to work on moronic projects throwing money to the wind.
  • lkrubner 14y ago
    It depends where you are. I made very good money 2003 to 2008, and I was living in Virginia, in the USA. Then the recession hit. I had 6 months of no work. Then I moved to New York. I have made good money since the beginning of 2010. There is high demand in New York, but I know my friends in Virginia still have to struggle. This recession has redistributed the jobs geographically.
• johnnyjustice 14y ago
  I didn't find much of this article very stimulating but the last comment made a very good point about fields in general: "So why aren’t there more people drawn into the[any] field out of sheer interest? Because when you’re poor, which most of the world is, money is more important than passion. It’s not until you reach a near First-World level of development that pursuing your passions rather than escaping poverty seems like a reasonable and/or admirable thing to do."
  • nodemaker 14y ago
    Maslow's hierarchy of needs!
• camus 14y ago
  As long as Tech Company are not willing to out-source them (which is already happening, everything can be outsourced). there is not one profession that cannot be out-sourced. Is it good on the long run? well global business are not tied to a local consumer base anymore , so i guess it is for them , and consumers do not care.
  • seiji 14y ago
    Good morning. You've triggered my "I have a political stake in my comment stance" detector. Are you perchance someone residing in not-U.S. who wants these magic outsourced jobs?
    • olalonde 14y ago
      camus' comment didn't trigger any detector here but yours clearly did.
    • camus 14y ago
      no ,off course , not , but these are just facts. In my company , Accountency has been out-sourced to eastern europe, and my job may be next , no matter how good i am at my task. It is not something i want of course , but it is something that might happen in the future.
      • seiji 14y ago
        If your company treats you as a cost and wants to unload you, then you are probably in trouble. Maybe try to find a place that sees you as an asset? In SF, the fancy programmers are entire products and personality cults by themselves. Saying everything can be outsourced would lead to all American actors being replaced by Bollywood or Korean or Chinese actors. There are forces other than price of labor acting in the market.
  • tomkinstinch 14y ago
    Let's not be naive; there are most certainly jobs that cannot be outsourced, either for legal or for practical reasons: Jobs involving state secrets (military, intelligence, etc.--plenty of technologists in those sectors), jobs where shipping the poduct is infeasible or where the service must be performed locally (restaurant cooks, plumbers, ER doctors, etc.), and then the vast number of professional occupations that have legal barriers to starting practice in a particular jurisdiction (doctors, lawyers, accountants, the list goes on).
• marshallp 14y ago
  Programming bubble will pop. Automated Machine learning is taking over. Even at google, Jeff Dean has recently stated that his Perceptual AI project is aimed at reducing feature engineering in their machine learning projects. In plain terms this means eliminating the need for programming in their search engines and other machine learning focused projects like google now and google goggles (the mobile app, not google glass). The only programmers left will be to manage cloud computing infrastructure and front end programmers. As things like siri and google now take off, front end programmers will also be in less demand. Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are also increasingly focusing on machine learning. Automated analysis of text will take over the role of sql databases as demonstrated in IBM watson. In manufacturing, the role of programming also diminishing as vision guided robots like Baxter by Rodney Brooks's team take off. All this is a good thing though, programming is slow and data is agile, as talked about by Peter Norvig in his startup school 2008 speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNjJTgXujno http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNjJTgXujno Startups should aim at doing as little programming as possible and leaving it to data crunching.
  • seiji 14y ago
    The current incarnation of machine learning is nothing more than an ultra high dimensional two year old. "Here's a new item. Which pool of millions of items is this new thing like?" "Is the red square more like these other red squares or the green triangles?" You can get pretty far extracting the math behind the meaning, but lack of meaning is still deathly apparent. We should fix that sometime.
    • paulgb 14y ago
      Yeah, but the two-year-old scales to huge datasets and doesn't cry a lot.
    • marshallp 14y ago
      I think most people are interested in practically solving problems. If the black box can solve it, there's no reason to care about "meaning". Once the machines have taken over all jobs, you can sit around and understand the meaning of things to your satisfaction at your own leisure surrounded by the luxury the machines have created for you.
• markoa 14y ago
  The author glanced over the fact that "software is eating the world", and I think that therein lies another factor - the constant demand for more software. As software becomes more complex and critical, more companies need not just people who can code, but mature engineers (http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/ http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...). Meanwhile the path for more of those to appear in the global economy involves waiting for the standard of living to rise across the world, more people to grow up in such an environment, get their education and at least 10,000 hours of experience.
• andrewcooke 14y ago
  as a "senior" se in latam, what i see as the biggest problem is the separation in location. i tele-commute, but it takes luck, experience and a shared culture to make it work. thankfully, i am english so share a little more, culturally, than most chileans when it comes to dealing with gringos. even so, most job offers i receive drop as soon as i mention telecommuting. and i don't think the problems of telecommuting are going to change for a while - reproducing physical presence is hard. what will change sooner is the rise of internal markets (and development) in these countries. the people there want software too, and local companies may be able to win out in some way (eg more sensitive to market requirements, lower prices). once that happens, then the same software may start to be sold in the usa. so demand will be lowered, eventually, but the process is indirect. cheaper programmers will write code for local companies; competition from the code they write will drive down the demand for code produced in the usa, and so lower programmer demand and salaries there. the "passion argument" is bullshit. i know plenty of passionate chilean programmers. they're not just in it for the money.
• jere 14y ago
  Regarding the author's company, HappyFunCorp, perhaps they should do a little bit more moderation on their site if they're really trying to hire. They have a section of their site called "happy thoughts" where anyone can submit text. Here are a few gems: >when one black guy does something and then other black guys go "OH DAMMMMNNNNN" >blowing my load in someone's mouth >jiggly breasts
  • rrouse 14y ago
    I got: "Watching each of the drown"
  • zem 14y ago
    i would hope that a tech-savvy person in 2012 wouldn't lend any weight to stuff random strangers left on a graffiti board when deciding whether a company is a good place to work at.
    • eropple 14y ago
      I wouldn't work at a company that thought a "graffiti board" was a good thing to have on their corporate website.
    • jere 14y ago
      If it was a comment section I wouldn't care but each submission is highlighted individually.
  • combray 14y ago
    Couple of points (I'm a cofounder of happyfuncorp) The box is for happy thoughts. Most people find sex a pretty pleasant topic, even if occasionally juvenile. We filter out hateful or racist things. (I.e. those aren't happy things.) We also filter out the random letters, though I like to leave in the JavaScript injection attempts. Jon writes on behalf of himself for techcrunch. As I'm sure you realize, we aren't interested in "locking things down". We are always looking for good people, as is everyone else. The level of skills and capabilities out there is much lower than the demand, and given how much money is involved it is pretty surprising that we aren't, as a society, as the globalized interconnected species we are, training more people to develop the skills. Especially when the tools are so in reach and you don't need formalized training or get licensed or whatever. We hire between 2-4 people a month, whenever we find a good fit. We are especially looking for team leads and technical project managers, but if you are good then we find a way to make it work. Engineers who can communicate and lead are the limiting resource. And if you don't think that "jiggly breasts" qualifies as a "happy thought" on a corporate homepage then it's probably not a good match...
• xyproto 14y ago
  As long as only about 20% of the population has the ability to learn to program, programmers won't have to worry.
• kamaal 14y ago
  This really should be 'How long will 'some' Programmers Be So Well-Paid'? C'mon lets be frank not all programmers are well paid, You really have to be working at Google or other big place or make it big in the start up area. None, of that is any different than any other profession I know of. In fact even the author seems to be talking of 'Google and Facebook' employees, the number of people working at Google and Facebook are small enough to consider them a clear exception. What you really must be talking about is of a time around a decade and a half back when programmers seem to be paid well. And even they were paid well not because they were programming, its just that the IT sector grew so rapidly there was a immense demand in the middle level management areas that caused a impression of rapid career progress in the software industry. That is what made people to 'come in the game for the money'. The only distinction that I see programming has compared to other professions is programmers tend to think of themselves as people 'who solve problems' and not just people who write code. No other profession, I know of carries that tag line.
  • threejay 14y ago
    Well, the most successful people in any profession are "the people who solve problems". That isn't something inherently unique to programmers.
    • kamaal 14y ago
      They solve problems in their professions. But we programmers poke our nose in everything we see around.
    • seiji 14y ago
      The special thing about "solving problems" is you usually create many more problems in the process. That's the definition of a startup: a company, when solving one problem, creates five new problems in the process due to imperfect foresight because everything hasn't been done before. Hence, hiring, growth, jobs, expansion, .... Startups could be called "things that didn't exist before that are creating more problems to solve than existed before."
  • jiggy2011 14y ago
• gidan 14y ago
  That's a bit frustrating to read a post like this one. There's lot of good developers and very few good coding jobs. Why does everybody still claim it's hard to find good developers?, we're everywhere.. Maybe i'm missing the point or i don't know how to find a coding job..
  • mattdeboard 14y ago
    I suspect the article is very US-centric despite giving a little bit of lip service to European devs like yourself. I live in part of the American midwest not known for its tech companies; I work at a startup doing very fulfilling work that fits the definition of "changing the world for the better" (and getting paid for it) very well. Despite the latter and probably due to the former, it's extremely hard to find the right people.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
    Are you in the Minneapolis, MN area? Do you have a technical degree (CS, CE, or other science or engineering degree?) Are you a skilled developer? Not just a coder who can patch together bits of code and read an API, but someone who can take a requirement and talk to the users and understand what it is they really want, then architect, design, code and test a subsystem that is not allowed to fail in its operating environment. I don't much care what languages you know, although knowledge of C++ would be nice. Can you demonstrate to me in a 1 hour interview that you are good at what you do? I'm not going to read your github code, but if you can demo a working application you wrote on your own I will look at it and ask design & implementation questions. That's basically what we look for, and trust me, it's very difficult to find someone who comes close. Code monkeys, OTOH, are easy to find.
    • rrouse 14y ago
      Is physical presence a requirement? You could try looking outside the area. My current job is with a distributed team. I'm in St. Louis. Others are in Toronto, New Jersey (previously was in Spain), and South Carolina. It works well for us since we don't have "must-be-locked-down-on-site" sorts of projects (e.g. government contracts)
    • 14y ago
• rayiner 14y ago
  I think the premise that professional salaries are determined entirely or even primarily by supply and demand is weak. When you can't measure a workers quality easily, all sorts of other issues influence salary. I think the more interesting question is: how much higher can programmer salaries go if they play their cards right? Programmers seem to have positioned themselves as a step above IT. But there is money in perception and the perception you want is to be just a notch below the "real men" (execs). This is particularly true in places that aren't software houses, but have programmers internally. What's important is not just supply and demand, but the perception that quality matters, as well as having easily digestible signals of quality. Compare programming to accounting. I don't think the intellectual horsepower necessary for the two jobs is that different. But accountants at big companies make more money, and external accountants at accounting firms make even more. Why? The demand is obviously there--everyone needs accountants. Supply is limited--accounting takes some mental horsepower. The same things are true for programming. Do what's different? The difference is that there is a perception that quality matters, and there are proxies for quality (association with a big firm, education, CPA) that are easily digestible by C-suite execs. Companies don't cheap out on their accountants or their lawyers because there is a perception that executives will be held accountable if the company suffers problems related to that choice. But companies aren't afraid to cheap out on programmers. If a project fails or is late, there is a perception that that's just how software goes, no decision they could have made could have changed the outcome. I think programmer salaries are going to continue to go up. First, Google and Amazon, etc, are creating a perception that quality matters. They aren't hiring the cheapest people they can get. Second, the next generation of F500 execs will have grown up with their friends taking a gig at Facebook instead of going to Barclays or McKinsey. That's extremely important for the profession. Programmers want the industry to be seen as being in competition with banks, consultancies, etc, for "talent." Third, I don't think supply is going to expand, and I feel like industry groups may move to create certifications (rigorous ones like CPA or Series 7) to create indicia of quality.
  • iProject 14y ago
    > But companies aren't afraid to cheap out on programmers. If a project fails or is late, there is a perception that that's just how software goes, no decision they could have made could have changed the outcome. I'm in no position to judge this, but I wonder: With increasing visibility for the cost of digital security/privacy to a corporation, isn't there hope for better valuation of programming by the "C-suite execs"?
• elrodeo 14y ago
  Apparently, the author doesn't really has an overview, how the programmers are paid outside of Google and Facebook. Lets take a look on Germany. Lots of lots of IT companies here. I was looking for a development position one year ago and got about 7 offers. Basically, I wasn't rejected even once. But the problem was, that the offered salaries were not even close to those in Silicon Valley. The salaries are not significantly different from other (non-IT) engineering positions here. And it's not a matter of being A or B player. All interviews were so ridiculously easy and non technical, that the companies aren't even able to distinct between bad and good programmers. There is no notion of A or B players here. A software developer here is basically the lowest level of the hierarchy of the R&D department and are merely considered as code generators. A new tendency here -- to hire remote "code generators" in India or East Europe and to manage them having only managers or architects on site. So, this transition of development jobs to East the author doesn't see, has already started here in Germany. And as a programmer you never get rich in Germany, you have to move to management.
  • queensnake 14y ago
    Wow, you give me hope I could land a job in Europe!
  • queensnake 14y ago
    Wow, you give me hope I could land a job in Europe!
  • Inufu 14y ago
    this is why I'm going to the US, in a nutshell. Sadly, there are not a lot of options at that level here.. (aside from working in a local Google office)
• lmirosevic 14y ago
  The $500 or so you need to buy your first computer is too much of an upfront investment for a lot of people in the world. And the time required to learn how to program, time you could be spending making money at a local job putting food on the table, is an insurmountable investment. Part of my family is from a small fishing town in Croatia, I go the their every year on holiday. And every year I see so many intelligent and hard working people there who walk around with that lost expression on their face, longing for a way to make a good living. But there's no role models, no people to set an example. The wealthiest guy in town owns a cafe. To them, what is programming? How do you convince someone like that to spend a month's salary and many more months of hard work learning something when they have no sense of the implications or the benefits of it. A lot of this world doesn't even know what programming is or why we need it, no wonder programmers are in short supply.
  • lrobb 14y ago
    Reminds me of the fishermans parable: An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied only a little while. The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs. The American then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time? The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor." The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise." The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this all take?" To which the American replied, "15-20 years." "But what then, senor?" The American laughed and said "That's the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions." "Millions, senor? Then what?" The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."
• tzm 14y ago
  Find a position that supports value-based pricing.
• scotty79 14y ago
  My bet is: till strong AI is developed.
  • Cacti 14y ago
    There is no such thing as "strong" AI.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
• michaelochurch 14y ago
  Programmers aren't "so well-paid". In fact, I think we're underpaid, when you consider that the top technology companies earn several hundred thousand dollars (and sometimes, low millions) per employee, averaged across all employees. I actually think we're underpaid, and that's a problem, because if an engineer only costs $100-200k, then executives can cost-justify using programmer time on a lot of stupid shit that doesn't add any value (the hits, the projects that deliver $1 million per person per year in value, make up for it). The fact that software adds so much value (on average) should give us a huge risk allowance (that startups have visibly capitalized on) but it's only people with VC connections and executive douches, for the most part, who can actually take that risk. It's not even about money, from my perspective. Engineer salaries are low compared to the value we add, but reasonable for the most part (we don't starve). What bothers me is that 90% of software engineers have to do stupid stuff with minimal autonomy or career growth, and I think that engineers (as a class) would be better treated if they were more expensive. Of course, the AbstractVisitorSingletonFactory crowd (who bring down the reputation of the field) would all be fired, but that's a good thing, too.
• witoldc 14y ago
  Programming jobs are not much to brag about. Many IT people don't just check out after 5pm. They are on-call after work, stay up late at night trying to finish X or fix Y. They are expected to show up to the office on the weekends to do Z. In the meantime, the HR people are relaxing at home with their families. As long as programming jobs are worse than regular jobs, people will require higher compensation to take those jobs. More stress, more requirements = higher compensation.
  • Cacti 14y ago
    Um. Then you need to hire people for that. Sorry, but, "i'm not paid to be on call 24/7 but I am anyway" is not a reasonable argument. Fix it or deal with it and move on. And what do you mean, "worse than regular jobs?" Have you looked around much lately? Sitting in front of a computer all day doing what you love pales in comparison to about 95% of all jobs on the earth. And do you really think "HR" people just go home and chill? Everyone has responsibilities that exceed their billed hours. That is part of life.
    • witoldc 14y ago
      You presume that somehow HR/bizdev/whatever people like less what they do. In fact, many of them enjoy the different challenges their job pose as well. The difference is that they leave at COB almost always. Jobs where tech people just check out at 5pm appear to be rare. There are always fires to be put out. There are always harsh deadlines to be met as people scramble burning the midnight oil to put out the latest release and fix whatever comes up at the last minute. Things like that. That's the tech world I know, maybe you're one of the lucky ones where this is not the case. For all these reasons, I would expect tech jobs to be less desirable overall and people to be better compensated.
• wccrawford 14y ago
  >First, you have to grow up wealthy enough to have a decent education, some exposure to technology, and the ability to choose between options in your life, which immediately rules out most of the planet. No, all you need is access to a computer and someone to start you going in the right direction. And the latter is really just a nicety. You can get there without it. I'm largely self-taught, with a little push back in Elementary School. They introduced the ideas and taught us to write Apple II BASIC programs. I took it from there. I eventually got a 2-year degree, but I practically slept through the classes. I learned a bit about database normalization, and nothing else. 4.0 GPA. My first job didn't care about the degree at all. They only cared about my actual skill. I stayed there long enough that any other job would know I had skills. And my career was on its way. There's no need for an expensive education. However, you do need to have a head for logic. Passion for logic helps tremendously. And a computer. But who doesn't have a computer these days? I don't know anyone who doesn't have one. And there are charities that help people get computers if they can't afford them. So no, I don't think rich-poor artificial scarcity is what drives the price at all.