22 ms·

Are coders worth it?

• mathattack 13y ago
  Holy moses that was a long article. I couldn't get to the end to see if the punchline was different than, "Yes, we get paid for hard work, but we also get paid for having rare skills. Some think it's fair, some don't. The folks doing the paying seem to think it's reasonable, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it."
  • Peroni 13y ago
    That's a reasonable summary however the comments that will fill this thread will inevitably focus on the "developer == plumber" analogy.
• jezclaremurugan 13y ago
  Not all web developers are "plumbers". If you are working on websites with heavy traffic, then you need to use complex algorithms to scale. That needs someone who is comfortable with algorithms, and that needs a quite lot of thought. The author describes simple CRUD websites and then equates all of web development to trivial tasks like that. Even scaling simple CRUD needs a lot skills, intelligence and ingenuity. And talking of design, there is a reason some pieces of art are valued so much. A designer who designs a great website is an artist too, and deserves as much compensation.
  • dhimes 13y ago
    I agree. There are some that are worth a lot of money. But to be worth that kind of money you need deep domain knowledge. I won't pay $120/hr for someone to tinker with jQuery. I will pay that for a machine learning specialist. The fact is that 'coders' are today's version of auto mechanics in the 70s. The barrier to entry is low- an old box, a linux distro, google- and off you go. So everybody who can't do something else can give it a try. Some will fail; some will succeed at a low level, and a few may find their calling. And a lot of people will pay for it because they don't know the difference. But the one's who are truly good- who obtain that domain knowledge- are valuable. In their domain.
    • drunkpotato 13y ago
      Perhaps you've been very lucky or found some especially naive people (right out of grad school, perhaps). Your rates immediately struck me as the kind of rate you would quote if you'd never, in fact, tried to hire somebody skilled. I allow the possibility you have been lucky and successful. In general you'll be paying upwards of $250/hr for a machine learning specialist (sometimes upwards of $500/hr if they have a modicum of talent and experience) and more than $120/hr for a front-end webdev who can claim anything more than "I've heard of jQuery." Those are contracting rates of course; hiring somebody at salary has its own costs.
      • dhimes 13y ago
        You caught me: I've not hired a domain expert coder. But I've also not paid $120/hr for front-end coders. I over-paid for one guy who knew far less than I did- horrible coding practice, always thought he was farther along on the project than he really was (and wanted money), and, in fact, never got far enough to even understand the problem before I terminated the agreement. For $120/hr the person isn't fiddling- they've done it before, probably have a personal library they can pull, and a basic shell of a website can be ready pretty quickly. Their time is almost entirely spent on the custom part of the site.
        • drunkpotato 13y ago
          Fair enough. I think my response was biased towards professionals who you can be sure will do the job quickly, not learning on your dime.
          • gte910h 13y ago
            Still it doesn't necessarily pay. There is a very large productivity gap between different people, for different tasks in software development (in the 1-50x range).
      • jiggy2011 13y ago
        You can get people competent with jquery for much less than $120/hour. Much much less if you are willing to look at remote workers overseas.
  • jiggy2011 13y ago
    The analogy is still apt. I imagine plumbing the Burj Khalifa needs a different and more advanced set of skills than plumbing a prefab home.
    • stephencanon 13y ago
      Engineering the plumbing systems for the burj requires a different set of skills, but it's not done by plumbers. The actual plumbing part is pretty much the same as in any structure.
  • randomdata 13y ago
    I'm not sure using increasingly complex algorithms makes a programmer move into some kind of new title bracket. You are still a "plumber", you just have to use more complicated distribution systems to deal with the increased building size (to stick with the analogy).
• deleted 13y ago
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• jumblesale 13y ago
  Very well written article, I always enjoy reading stuff from the intersection of writers and coders. What I found startling was how different my experience has been to that of the author's at the start of the article. I've put up with some horrific jobs paying miserable money in some of the most uninspiring industrial parks you could imagine. I've taken work in dingy Victorian offices so cold that I've had to program through thick gloves. I've accepted commutes taking up to three hours and incorporating four different kinds of transport. More than once I've spent 18 hours on Saturday and Sunday circulating my CV to every job opening and recruiter even slightly relevant to web development. Reverse interviews? People clamouring to have coffee with me? Beer constantly close to hand?? These are unheard of things. Conditions are definitely better for me now but my skills certainly don't mark me out as a celebrity. Maybe the financial bubble of the dot-com era has been replaced by a cultural bubble, one that I'm definitely not part of.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    The problem is that it's hard to show your real skill level (especially on back-end work) so getting access to these better jobs is 90% how you market yourself and where you are (New York and Silicon Valley rents are horrid, but worth every penny in comparison to 95% of places) and only 10% based on your skill level (much less unrealized potential). You don't have to be a celebrity, but you have to be some combination of accessible and validated. The good news is that marketing yourself is actually a lot easier than programming. You don't need a natural social acumen to do it. I know this because I'm pretty good at it and certainly do not have natural social talents. If you want to experience "reverse interviews", you have to be in a technology hub. That said, the dynamic is not as engineer-favorable as people make it out to be. Sure, a good engineer can get 5 in-bound contacts from recruiters per week-- again, that has more to do with self-marketing than skill level-- but most of those don't mean anything. Most often, it's just an invitation to send a resume into the normal process.
    • daned 13y ago
      As a reasonably competent unemployed technologist I would be interested in hearing more about how you go about marketing.
• mvikramaditya 13y ago
  TL;DR version (Taken from the article): A CFO is paid more than the coal miner because the skills required to be CFO of a Fortune 500 company are scarcer, and more wanted, than the skills required to be a coal miner. It’s the combination of scarcity and wantedness that drives up a salary. Coders (Read web-developers in the authors case) are paid more because of a demand for them which the author tries to understand.
• leoedin 13y ago
  I think the real issue is that there's people with lots of money that are willing to fund a lot of different companies in the hope of stumbling across the next facebook. Result? A whole host of well funded but ultimately useless apps and websites. Meanwhile, the people who can make these websites are making lots of money. It's probably a bubble to some extent. Eventually, if the return from all these web apps is less than the money spent on them, the money will dry up. (I'd imagine that this will be the case - most of the value of the most-recent crop of high-value tech startups seems to be based on hype and even bigger companies buying them, rather than profitability or revenues). In the mean time, there's still people queuing up to fund things they don't understand. The biggest thing to remember about bubbles is that they always seem to keep growing far longer than any sensible person would expect. Will the money run out eventually? Probably.
  • jacques_chester 13y ago
    People with lots of money have been disappointed by the performance of traditional investment vehicles for the past 5 years; meanwhile a lot of extra money has been put into the financial sector. If you're a fund with $100 billion under management, dropping $2 billion into various venture funds is a reasonable part of the mix. Multiply that by the fact that several hundred funds, banks, trusts and companies collectively control trillions of dollars and these little 1 or 2 percent investments pump billions of dollars into tens of thousands of companies with collectively perhaps a few hundred thousand employees. When every buyer is cashed up, prices for sellers rise.
    • iaskwhy 13y ago
      (I don't know much about this but) I kind of believe it is a good thing that the traditional investment vehicles are not that good anymore. That was like betting on the outcome of the players of the roulette, right? Money against money against something that may make money. This last bit, investing in something that might make money, brings the world new ideas. It's probably a completely incorrect picture I'm drawing here though.
  • erikj54 13y ago
• rdouble 13y ago
  TL;DR Rap Genius pays $150,000 + $10K signing bonus, dude feels kinda weird about it.
  • jacques_chester 13y ago
    One more reason why moving to NYC or SV is in my future. I wouldn't feel weird at all.
    • anonyfuss 13y ago
      I hope you do. If more of you move out here, the price might deflate to something less completely ridiculous.
    • nissimk 13y ago
      Taxes and cost of living are very high. It doesn't go as far as you think. But there are a lot of beautiful people and culture.
      • jacques_chester 13y ago
        Yeah, I'm already on a fairly sweet local maxima. I mostly want to move to do more interesting work in more interesting places.
      • cuttooth 13y ago
        Definitely agree with this -- the cost of living in NYC/SF is absurd, and there's not really much of a market elsewhere. A few choice cities (Austin, Chicago, maybe Atlanta?), but the entire market everywhere else is dead in the water by comparison. There are certainly jobs in those places, but it's going to be very scary if this bubble bursts again because a lot of people are going to be out of work, and I don't know if the smaller markets are going to grow enough to compensate for everyone going back home.
      • rdouble 13y ago
        Personally, I found it did go as far as I thought it would, in NYC. It might even seem like a bargain if you're coming from Australia. You finally get to live large, banking the same sums as an apprentice electrician from Perth.
• lmm 13y ago
  I often worry that my job is, well, not that hard. The thing is, if it were as easy as it seems, more people would be doing it - or it would be automated - and either way the price will drop pretty soon. So either what we do really is that hard, and worth that much, or there's a crash coming.
• darrellsilver 13y ago
  The irony of James' point – that engineers are in such high demand because of how cheap it is to start a startup – is that engineering salaries are actually being prevented from going up as a result. There's too little supply of qualified engineers, but startups can't afford to compete in salary with the big guys (basically Facebook, Google, Amazon and the financial sector). So we compete on cheaper things like nice offices, gym memberships, etc. Basically, feel good stuff that doesn't cost much. Facebook's budget for engineers is a good 20-50% higher than the salary a startup can pay. Thus, it's not actually crazy that a law school student can become an engineer worth $80,000/year in only eight months. It's the startup's only option. And that's a good thing: Companies like ours (http://www.thinkful.com/ http://www.thinkful.com/) are finding a way to build products in a way that doesn't break our budget. We're also providing great opportunities to people who want to become engineers. The only caveat is for companies greater than 50 or so people – they're struggling most of all: Too small to attract great talent that wants stability, too large to attract hungry new talent or accept junior talent that needs to learn on the job. There's an upper limit, but our research indicates that there's a durable demand for engineering. This demand will look decidedly less sexy once startups become less cool, but software engineering will be an in-demand skill well beyond the current hype cycle.
  • omegote 13y ago
    I'm sorry, but a law school student cannot "become an engineer" in only eight months. That's an insult for people that either have studied an engineering degree (like I have) or have earned enough experience through the years to call themselves an engineer, experience that can't be earned in eight months. That's ridiculous.
    • darrellsilver 13y ago
      Sorry – should be more clear: What I mean to say is that there isn't a fixed definition of becoming "an engineer." One's level of expertise and proficiency is defined by the hirer... It's not for me to judge, especially in the abstract, what it takes. If an employer thinks you're qualified, then you're qualified. What's happening in the market right now is that people who may not have previously been considered qualified are now considered qualified. This is because there's so much demand.
• mseebach 13y ago
  I think the point about code being cool is rather shortsighted: Code has only been cool to anything like mainstream youth for maybe five or ten years. In US high school as an exchange student in 1999, the computer science class/team/whatever most certainly wasn't "cool" - and this was on the tail of the .com boom. In high school in Denmark 99-02, I saw the first general recognition that while "being able to make websites" was probably a useful skill, it certainly wasn't cool. Of course, the view changed at university, but then we're pretty far down the selection-bias rabbit-hole. Given those 15 years of experience, I am not very surprised that I am in short supply. But now that coding is beginning to be cool, I'd also not be surprised if not too many years from now, basic computer literacy at the end of secondary education (or even earlier) includes the ability to crank out basic RoR-style apps.
  • gambomb 13y ago
    I think you may be overestimating the capacity of the education system to change. I'm now a year removed from High School, but in my class of 350 there were maybe 10 who could program proficiently. Only two (myself and a friend) knew what linux was. I would say it wasn't treated as "cool", but certainly regarded with a wierd respect.
    • mseebach 13y ago
      I'm not talking about education (admittedly clouded by my anchoring my post in school experiences), I'm talking about kids picking these things up on their own because it's easy, fun and useful. Nobody would learn Word in school for the sake of learning Word, they learn it because it's a useful tool - the fact that there's a class is helpful, but mostly tangential.
    • digitalsushi 13y ago
      I don't accept that anyone can know how familiar everyone else is of a thing. It's possible that you're perfectly correct, but how you arrived at this was assumption. What if, out of the 348/350 other students you claim were unaware of linux, there were more than 0 of them that were happy to play with linux on their own without broadcasting it to you? My point in this is that hobbies may seem unique, and it's great that we can motivate the growth of our identity in this, but to take it to the extent that you and your friend were the only kids that knew linux is blissful ignorance. No offense to you, it's just your assumption that I feel compelled to respond to.
• chrisbennet 13y ago
  What wonderful writing. This is a great reminder that the "just world" fallacy [successful people deserve their success because they worked hard and that the less fortunate/unemployed somehow deserve their failure] is just that, a fallacy.
  • mseebach 13y ago
    > This is a great reminder that the "just world" fallacy is just that, a fallacy. Where do you see that? He specifically concludes that he's making the right (ie "just") amount of money for writing and coding, and that it's "just" that the CFO makes more money than the coal-miner because his skills are more specialised and in higher demand.
    • chrisbennet 13y ago
      He points out that he got lucky in his choice of professions (or one of his professions) and that it's easy for people to conflate that sort of luck (being in the right profession at the right time) with somehow being deserving of all the rewards associated with it. I know I don't work any harder than say a mechanical or chemical engineer, I'm just better paid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
• jacques_chester 13y ago
  Virtue is not value. Value is not virtue. What you consider virtuous may produce no economic value. Or maybe it does. There's no rigid formula that connects them and the Just World Hypothesis is an illusion that traps fools and wisemen alike. Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures and I retain every confidence that it will be ever thus. James Somers might find Hayek's writing to be a bit repetitive and languid; but he will find the ideas illuminating. It seems like his father tried, but failed, to make the insight really stick. There has never been a Just World where Virtue = Value. No matter how badly we want it, there can't be. And trying to forcefully make one generally just makes it much worse.
  • stdbrouw 13y ago
    I didn't feel like the author was trying to prove anything, or was trying to get people to pursue more "virtuous" pursuits. It is simply a personal reflection on the state of the startup ecosystem and what it means to be a computer programmer.
    • jacques_chester 13y ago
      I'm trying to save him some angst. Trying to reconcile the virtues of what he does with his economic value is pointless. They're just not connected. Demand for Ruby on Rails plumbing is ultimately connected with the current wishes and desires of most of the planet's population and has nothing whatsoever to do with how he, or anyone else, feels about it. In literary terms: he's tilting at windmills.
      • stdbrouw 13y ago
        Well, sure, but there's a difference between understanding this on an intellectual level (which he already does) and coming to terms with it on an emotional level.
        • jacques_chester 13y ago
          Granted. But if the existentialists taught us anything, it's that if you stop and look, I mean really look at your life, you'll find how thoroughly inconsequential it is. Which is no comfort at all. Quite the reverse. Ignorance really is bliss. I find the intellectual argument comforting because I can focus on the things I can control, the things that are within my sphere of power. I used to be very interested in politics. These days I either ignore it or treat it as entertainment. Because I have no control over it, why drag myself down with it?
• fhd2 13y ago
  Is it just me, or is the photo a rather unlucky pick? I'm seeing roughly 20 people, sitting in what is essentially a dark cellar. It would be completely colourless, if it wasn't for a handful of bizarre, childish gadgets here and there. I couldn't imagine working in such a crowded, depressing environment, let alone feel relaxed. And from what I've seen, that's one reality for many programmers: The offices are often quite bad. Open plan offices are popular (it's not like developers need to phone or anything, right?), developers are put in basements, under the roof, or into an unattractive second building. And home office is generally more difficult to pull off for programmers than for other knowledge workers, which I think is mostly caused by a general lack of trust. Sure, the salaries are pretty good lately (although it's pretty much at the level of other professions requiring degrees, isn't it?), but I don't see much appreciation of programmers in most settings. The startup world is different (from my experience), but it's a very small part of our industry.
  • rdouble 13y ago
    It's a valid observation, but does anyone have nice offices? My parents are medical professionals, their offices were terrible. My sister runs a government org in Australia, has horrible office. One of my old bosses was the head of a department at Harvard, also had a disgusting office. I personally am not a fan of the open space bullpen, but almost every other professional I have met had an office that was worse. The only people I know with legitimately cool offices are interior designers.
    • fhd2 13y ago
      It's not really about the office, more about appreciation and respect. I've been in only one big company so far, but anecdotal evidence suggests many are similar. It was a software company. Software was it's core business. Yet the programmers, about 10% of the employees, where kind of the lowest in the food chain. Sales got all the money and a lot of attention. Professional services and product management got a lot of attention, shiny offices and regular praisings. The developers were all but ignored. I stuck to smaller software companies (mostly startups) again ever since. I always felt valued there, and that's important for my overall job satisfaction.
• blunte 13y ago
  You lost me at "In today's world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect."
  • dsego 13y ago
    Yeah, but even in poorer countries there's always a demand for programmers, because there's a global market for software. A lot of my friends in other professions have been jobless or taking shitty part-time jobs. Even the ones that have a job are scared of losing it. Me? I had the audacity to quit my job just because I didn't like it enough. Other people in my country can only dream about it. And every month now I get one or two job offers, usually when a friend or former colleague recommends me.
• dschiptsov 13y ago
  Bad programming (coding) is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are Dummies. -- HtDP2 btw, 5 opening paragraphs with so many Is and numbers hardly could be considered a good writing. I guess that the word for this (writing style and the content) is hipsterism.)
  • rtperson 13y ago
    I'm not sure if English is your first language, but the writing in this article is actually very good. I don't have any problem believing that people are willing to pay Somers for his writing. (And $10K is, by magazine standards, a princely sum.)
• nish1500 13y ago
  This was a depressing article. Sometimes, I often think of this myself. And then I think about investment bankers and what they do. That makes me feel better.
• alexjeffrey 13y ago
  interestingly in my experience in the north of England this culture is much more applicable to designers - web development doesn't pay very many standard deviations above the average wage, where designers can command high freelancing rates and comfortable working conditions.
• BerislavLopac 13y ago
  "In today's world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect." This might be true only by a VERY narrow definition of "world", specifically Silicon Valley. Or maybe I live in a very peculiar place, but the developers (Web or otherwise) here are in the low to mid income range, regardless of their skills and experience. And don't even get me started on freedom and respect...
  • guard-of-terra 13y ago
    You are. Why don't you move? Metaphorically speaking, don't be Steve Jobs in Syria, be Steve Jobs in the USA.
    • vinceguidry 13y ago
      I got a call from a poor recruiter in Chattanooga, TN trying to fill a Rails job. Seemed to be getting a little desperate. Being in Atlanta, I have no trouble finding stuff right here. When he tried to punk me by saying, "Well, if you have roots I can understand," with a tone like I'm hurting my career prospects by not being willing to move, I asked, "Well, just for kicks, what kind of compensation is being offered here?" When he said $60-70K I almost laughed in his face. "Yeah that's not nearly enough to get me to move. Oh well, good luck!" You don't have to be in a startup hub to find work, just willing to move somewhere. That makes you much more marketable.
      • gte910h 13y ago
        Yeah, I feel a bit bad for the recruiters trying to get senior/lead level guys for "fresh from GT CS program" wages. Or trying to hire iOS devs for $50 an hour.
        • BerislavLopac 13y ago
          I know a lot of (iOS and other) developers who would kill for a chance to work for $50 an hour...
• SethMurphy 13y ago
  We are not the shovel, we are the ditch diggers, just slightly better paid. Either way, who wants to be a commodity. Your analogy doesn't make me feel lucky, but like I need to get out of the ditch.
  • skaevola 13y ago
    Nothing wrong with labor. Dirty hands make clean money.
• einhverfr 13y ago
  There is a lot to this piece. I do think good coders are worth it, but I also think the current social/mobile bubble will burst (not that there aren't important gains to be had in those spaces but that the gains do not live up to investors' expectations). It seems to me so many businesses are chasing playthings because solving the real problems of the day are hard. To be sure not one of us can solve any of them, but if we build our businesses with the problems in mind (rather than the hype), then we are all doing our part. That isn't a lot to ask but it seems like too much. For my money the businesses I am starting (including the new cloud ERP start-up Efficito (http://www.efficito.com http://www.efficito.com) are intended to continue to chip away at real problems. They may not seem like much but they will hopefully contribute in one way or another to helping support small businesses, the self-employed, and such against the leviathan multinational companies. Some problems (like too much corporate control) are bad matches for venture-capital backing. Other problems though may not be.
  • nfoz 13y ago
    > It seems to me so many businesses are chasing playthings because solving the real problems of the day are hard Not only are they hard, it's that they're not obviously monetizable.
    • einhverfr 13y ago
      Monetizable to whom? Too much corporate control over our lives as individuals is a problem a small family business can monetize a small piece of a solution for, but is not a problem a VC can, because the problem goes contrary to any VC exit strategy. Now the second point though is that corporations may end up doing some of that anyway. The movement towards open source/free software and open data is helping establish that in at least some cases this problem is monetizable even on a corporate level if one realizes that the corporation is subject to the same restrictions as an individual. If we look at software or data as potential means of production, then this is a welcome way in which the industry is moving towards spreading around control over means of production. But what I am advocating is not solving the important problems but building business with the important problems in mind, seeing what one can do to help with them in one way or another, either through operations or through product development. They don't need to be the primary focus (and maybe shouldn't be the primary focus) but the idea that we are living in a new world where virtue is not a prerequisite to value suggests two words to me "speculative bubble."
• uokyas 13y ago
  The question is not if its worth, i'm a programmer, and i do believe that construction workers and lady cleaners should earn more then me, since they are forced to do their job, and generally don't like it. I in the other hand, i like my job. yet i earn more for doing more easy stuff (for me ), seams unfair, this has struck me some time ago. But what we have to accept is that, our income, or the income of a general profession, is based purely on supply and demand, and little more.
• grey-area 13y ago
  Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you, as expressed in the salaries for various jobs, which vary wildly without much sign of reason or relation to what society ostensibly values. I think what he's trying to get at is why we overvalue these jobs, which on the face of it are not particularly rewarding either to society or the individuals doing them (apart from monetarily). If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no, and yet we have hundreds of inchoate and uninspiring replacements being worked on and funded right now, so it's hard to see where the demand is coming from, or why this work is valued so highly, and whether it is in fact a bubble which will burst. Going back to 17C Holland there was probably a huge demand for market traders able to distinguish fine differences in and trade tulip bulbs, until all of a sudden there wasn't - this is the kind of illusory value the writer posits for today's fêted startup web workers. I'm not sure I entirely agree, but it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, because he's not just saying it's unfair, but that it may be unjustified. The price of a word is being bid to zero. This sentence near the end cuts to the heart of the matter for me - for writers or other producers of original content like photographers there is a cruel and dismal comparison to be drawn between the wages of those paid to frame content and present it to the world, and the wages of those who produce the content. The creative content (writing, photography, art, travel guides etc) is all in demand, but no-one wants to pay for it, perhaps because it's so easy to produce something yourself, and so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre.
  • twistedpair 13y ago
    >so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre I just paid several thousand dollars to a wedding photographer for my wedding. That is pretty standard from what people tell me. I wouldn't say that no one is willing to pay for content. It depends on the content.
• delinka 13y ago
  ‘What about somebody in a coal mine — wouldn’t you say he works as hard as you? Why should you get paid so much more than that guy?’ If this is a question to yourself, then my response is: start sending part of your paycheck to the guy in the coal mine. Don't blame someone else for society's ills and not be willing to fix such problems yourself. Find a miner, adopt him, send him half your paycheck, keep tabs on him: how the job's going, how the family's doing, etc. If this is a question for me, a creator of software, then my response is: I build things that enable new activities, I don't perform a task that maintains someone else's status quo. I (as a freelancer) or my employer (when I'm an employee) have found someone willing to pay what we charge. Period. How am I able to do that? By learning. Continuously. By adapting to changes in technology and the market. Why do I get paid more than the coal miner? Because he has settled for that life. If he needs something more, he needs to learn how to attain it. But maybe, just maybe, our coal mining friend is doing what he loves. If he's happy ... leave him alone.
  • erikj54 13y ago
    >I build things that enable new activities I would be cautious with this callous mentality towards the miner. I wouldn't jump so quickly to the conclusion that he/she is not "learning. Continuously" as you say you are. The miner may very well be. The issue the article raises is a good one, what validity is there that someone can put the value they create so much higher then another. What happens one day when your profession is no longer well paid? Think for a minute that you did not have the mental capacity to compete in the new 'tech world' in 20 years. Would you expect that you are paid in accordance with your lack of ability, or would you hope you are still given an equal shot. Personally this article hits at the heart of the somewhat libertarian style commentary on Hacker New. One that I myself am all too engulfed in as well. Perhaps we aren't as valuable as we may think?
  • nemo1618 13y ago
    >start sending part of your paycheck to the guy in the coal mine ...that sounds incredibly insulting. It's not like he's homeless. >Why do I get paid more than the coal miner? Because he has settled for that life. bullshit. This is exactly the kind of attitude that the article is criticizing. >maybe, our coal mining friend is doing what he loves Maybe, and that's great. But for most people, "doing what you love" is simply not viable, at least career-wise. Don't forget how incredibly fortunate you are to love doing a job that also happens to pay extremely well.
• coldcode 13y ago
  He either lives in NY or Silicon Valley. In middle America there is no such frenzy.
  • erikj54 13y ago
    There does seem to be the same sort of frenzy in Canada. You can hear it in normal conversations all the time: 'Wow I can't believe you do that, it's so confusing to me. I could never write code.' It seems this mystique is what is paying us so well.
    • canadiancreed 13y ago
      Depends on where you are. Toronto? Definitely. I get recruiters every day asking if I want a job (always onsite though, never contracts). Anywhere else I've found salary and perks drop quickly. Case in point, my last location (PEI) the salary was barely above minimum wage (35-50k/year), even though they keep complaining about shortages in skilled IT folks
      • resu 13y ago
        Out of curiosity, how do the numbers in Toronto compare to PEI? Do the jobs you've seen offer some mix of in-office/remote schedule? -Canadian working overseas
        • canadiancreed 13y ago
          Well I put it this way to friends of mine out in the Maritimes. Back in 2012 I was laid off due to government cutbacks (the company I worked for did the Tourism site), and in the three months afterwards I had three interviews across the maritimes. In a week visit to Toronto, I had twenty five interviews. And salary is like night and day. The highest PHP salary I heard of out there in my interviews and travels was 55k. Toronto PHP jobs start at 60k and many are in the 70's and 80's. I've heard an even larger gulf for Java devs, especialy as you get up to the senior ranks. I don't know about salarys for other languages, but if you don't know Java, .Net, or PHP in the maritimes, you'll be waiting a long time to be employed. There's the occasional C++ or Python gig, but youd' make twice as much in Toronto. And remote jobs, in Canada, in my experience, do not exist. I've seen maybe five in the last five years. Meanwhile I see remote gigs in the States daily. Basically if your'e looking for remote work, you're looking in the US. Canadian employers I've found are leery to openly hostile about folks working remotely. Now things could have changed in the last year, and that's just my own experience, but if your'e looking for solid work, and good pay, and in Canada, it's effectively Toronto or bust.
• sjs1234 13y ago
  I'd love to read the piece on Douglas Hofstadter.
• d4nt 13y ago
  The value of a lot of these apparently lightweight B2C apps is derived primarily from the attention that they get from their users. If you can build something that gets attention, then that's worth a lot of money. In a world where people are spending less and less time watching TV there is now a huge imbalance between corporations who have lots of money and want attention, and huge numbers of people with smartphones and limited attention spans. It's like a thunderstorm, all these electrons trying to get to Earth, then suddenly, Bang! Instagram. These valuations, and the developer salaries they fuel are just a by-product of all that money trying to get from point A to point B. Google got huge by inventing one new channel for that money to flow through. And a pretty brute force one at that: You searched for "laptop" here are some ads for laptops... It's still ahead of everything else though, which is basically a re-implementation of the old TV campaigns but on the web. If someone could only figure out how to show you laptops just before you thought of searching for laptops, then they would be even bigger than Google.
  • waterlesscloud 13y ago
    "In a world where people are spending less and less time watching TV there is now a huge imbalance between corporations who have lots of money and want attention, and huge numbers of people with smartphones and limited attention spans. It's like a thunderstorm, all these electrons trying to get to Earth, then suddenly, Bang! Instagram." Wow. That's the most vivid explanation for it all that I've ever seen. Thanks for that.
  • ippisl 13y ago
    Yes, new advertising innovations have power. Partially positive, partially negative. But most new startups don't invent new advertising techniques. They don't grow the amount of attention. They just fight for the piece of the current attention pie. And In similar fashion to reality TV relative to game of thrones, they offer crappy but addictive products.
  • dhruvmittal 13y ago
    "If someone could only figure out how to show you laptops just before you thought of searching for laptops, then they would be even bigger than Google." Unless, of course, Google Now gets there first.
• bergie 13y ago
  One reason for how much software developers are valued is how big part of modern business it is. From the Steve Jobs Lost Tapes in mid 90s: So software is infiltrating everything we do these days. In businesses, software is one of the most potent competitive weapons. One of the biggest business wars was "Friends and Family" in the last ten years. And what was that? It was a brilliant idea and a custom billing software. At&T didn't respond in 18 months, yielding billions of dollars of market share to MCI -- not because they were stupid but because they couldn't get the billing software done. At the moment there are about three times as many programming job openings in the US as there are programmers graduating from universities. No wonder developers get paid well.
• gersonaya 13y ago
  First of all, the plumbing analogy can be made to many professions. From a certain point of view, engineers, doctors and lawyers are all plumbers too - it's just silly. Said that, I think the author bought the propaganda that want to make us (web dev) feel special and valuable. But hey: that in no way means that the whole world - or even our bosses - think that we are very special and intelligent people. That means they know we produce more and get more creative when in certain environments and being well treated: so they provide. It seemed to me that the author climbed out of the propaganda and now thinks that the whole industry is pointless. He is on the other extreme of the very motivated hipster developer. Don't buy it too: we are needed (now) and our jobs are valuable. So are teachers, cops and many other jobs.
• calinet6 13y ago
  I think this is a good observation, that the interest in this market as a whole creates a dearth of really poor business ideas. I think this is natural. But if you're in a startup incubator especially, you have to remember that those aren't the cream of the crop. They're people who will most likely fail, and the world will be better if they do (if the world wanted their product, and they're the right ones to build it, they would surely succeed). I've sat in tech incubators and overheard direction discussions and software discussions, and just laughed. My overwhelming thought was simply "That is the worst idea I have ever heard in my life." There were one or two companies that had good ideas, good people, and did well. They quickly moved out of startup kindergarten.
  • mercutio2 13y ago
    "Dearth" means scarcity. I had to read your post over a few times to understand that you (probably) meant an abundance of poor business ideas. An enjoyable word to use, though!
    • calinet6 13y ago
      Oops! You're absolutely right. Just had a word meaning dyslexia moment.
• fieryeagle 13y ago
  I stopped reading about 1/2 way into the article. Brace yourself, the rant is coming... <rant> Too many red flags springing from a delusional, narrow-minded view which looked no further than the bloated world of Valley startups. Hope mr. Author could cast his eye to some other corners of the world (no, even other parts of the States) and witness the bleak reality of a career called web development. Startups are just a small part, albeit the highlighted part of the system. What would you then call those developers who do back-breaking work, with a fraction of your starting salary, in a dead-end career path surrounded by an equally depressing environment? Low-class web developers? They are just like any other programmers out side, people who chose coding as a profession. Before all the perks, freedom and fun, this is a job. You work for your pay, period. I am sick and tired off seeing another article with a viewpoint through rose-tinted glass about values of coders. Enough is enough. </rant> <conclusion> There are overpaid programmers and there are underpaid programmers, everywhere in the world. I probably fall into the underpaid camp, that's why I feel annoyed seeing way too many articles with BS about the cool $100k IT jobs for fresh graduates. Where I stay, it probably takes an above average fresh grad 5-6 years of doing good jobs while hopping around (startup/MNC/whatever) to come somewhere close to $100. The media just does not ever cover the average Joe programmer's career path, but this is the reality. </conclusion>
  • krallja 13y ago
    Your rant agrees with the article. What a waste of a rant.
    • fieryeagle 13y ago
      Well, I didn't even read through the whole article. Your comment prompted me to go back and read everything, and I failed to see where the agreement lies. My point was that the author questions the values of his work from a rather high vantage point, which may be valid but it annoyed me. For a well-informed opinion to be made, I'd think that it takes an amalgamation of different viewpoints, not just from the high medians. Besides, one must see how everyone else in the same profession has it in other areas. $80k for the 1st job? Not many places around the world, seriously. Based on how much underpaid/overpaid you are comparatively to your responsibilities plus where you stay, each combination forms an entirely different set of values to question, different set of objectives to purse. That is why I found the article well-intentioned but not well-informed and in a way, misleading as most articles involving start-up programmers.
• mk3 13y ago
  This article made me laugh. As with .COM bubble many people jumped compsci ship and when it sunk left that ship. People who really admired it stayed, now the same story repeats itself. The same with this articles' author who's reaping benefits by learning ROR, and being patient enough to read Manuals and Stack Overflow. P.S. Also I'm quite sick of people building things which are targeted against huge sale later. Build software/website/app which solves some kind of problem you are passionate about. Also people who are into programming just because it pays well.
• anuraj 13y ago
  People with general skills like web development may not be worth much - You need to have advanced knowledge and ability to do large scale systems to be worth something as a technologist. Or you need to have business acumen to make it big.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• wittysense 13y ago
  "All you can do in life is a lot of work" -- Ira Glass Most people simply fear us because of the way media portrays us as Zuckerberg, and our most persistent topic of discussion outside the GitHub world is Zuckerberg or surveillance, which is just another route to Zuckerberg.
• tcfunk 13y ago
  A bit off-topic here but I am not sure where folks find these mystical $100,000+ web development positions. I am paid $40,000 a year with virtually no benefits to be a web developer.
  • fennecfoxen 13y ago
    I've had luck at places like careers.stackexchange.com, but that's me coming into the picture with four years of intensive real-world object-oriented programming experience in the likes of Ruby and Perl, and a smattering of exposure to Big Data. Also, you need to live in New York or Silicon Valley or a close equivalent.
  • arcosdev 13y ago
    Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Montreal, San Diego...these are the cities where you can handily make that kind of money. If you are getting paid 40k per year, it is time to move my friend.
  • staticfish 13y ago
    Where do you live?
    • tcfunk 13y ago
      Central Illinois
    • tcfunk 13y ago
      I live in Central Illinois.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• jorgeseagull 13y ago
  this guy's a moron. the price of content hasn't gone to zero -- the price of quality content has gone to the moon, and the price of the bs he writes is going to zero as it should.
• djangodev17 13y ago
  So is it worth learning RoR to get a salary jump? Django developer in DC area here.
• theZaporozhian 13y ago
  This article is horrible. 3,500 words of overwrought circuitous handwringing about the frontend dev job market. I wonder if his code is as self indulgently bloated as his prose.
• simonh 13y ago
  Are any of us worth it? In the developed world we all, from bus drivers and waitresses to software developers, earn 10x what anyone in, say, China would earn for the same work. First world problem. As for writing as a career, most writers have earned very little for a very long time. It's always been an incredibly tough profession to crack. Yes it's being disrupted and is in a transitional phase, but life is change, it's not the end of the world or a crisis in social values. Plenty of people are still making a living out of it.
• Tomis02 13y ago
  > Web development is more like plumbing than any of us, perched in front of two slick monitors, would care to admit. Not only web development, but programming jobs in general. To be honest, after going through a couple of 'real' jobs, I am at the point where I'd rather do some plumbing rather than write another rpm spec or see why a bash script is misbehaving.
• graycat 13y ago
  One reaction: Routine Web site "plumbing" is not nearly all there is to the Web now or its potential in the future. If the OP wants work more advanced, significant, powerful, valuable, meaningful, etc., then he should try to think of a Web site that needs more than just routine plumbing.
• halis 13y ago
  No we're not worth it. We should just go back to pencil and paper.
• joshdance 13y ago
  Kind of a link bait title. The real question the author is digging at is value of work, what others are willing to pay, and how it affects your self esteem. But it worked because I read it.
• axus 13y ago
  Prices are set by supply and demand. Right now, coders are worth it, if they aren't the price will go down. If you want to take a longer term view and question the impact on the world, well, the galaxy will be gone in a trillion years.
• sologoub 13y ago
  This article seems to be missing a parallel that was drawn previously many times. PG has written on the subject, and so have others. The closest parallel we can draw between "coders" and the distant past, is that with the artisans of the middle ages. Aside from the landowning nobles, the artisan class was probably the closest thing to a true middle class. Many advanced to upper-middle and later became the industrial nuevo rich. The reason that this parallel works, is that the artisans were able to make something coveted out of what looked like a pile of junk (or less usable) to others. What a software developer creates with a few keystrokes looks to the lay person now as "magical" as creating a sword out of a pile of rocks looked to a lay person a thousand years ago. They get the general concept and see the value, but they have no idea of how it actually happened and cannot repeat it themselves. By today's standards, most of what artisans of old made is not very desirable if it is made today (antiques not withstanding), hence only very few "artists" are actually paid well. Most people engaged in artisanal work are now in what we call 3rd world countries and make zilch. The reason behind this, is that technology has progressed and most of this stuff can be made faster, cheaper and more consistent by a manufacturing process. Today, we can take the best artisan of old, and copy him/her a million times over to produce the same trinket, with little extra expense. Software engineering has not yet gone through a true manufacturing disruption. We cannot put software on the kind of assembly line/stamping process we can with say door hinges or other metal works that used to require a skilled blacksmith. That doesn't mean it won't happen some day. We are constantly trying to go the direction of commoditizing complex problems. Looking back 30-40 years, the efficiency of tools we use has gone way up. Today, a developer doesn't have to write many components from scratch (unless he or she wants to). Most of what makes an application can be taken of the shelf, and modified to fit. For consumer apps, design is also where a lot of work goes in to. This modification or molding process is a major barrier to having a true manufacturing process in place because the quality of the modifications depends on the individual skill of the person making it. A mistake made early on can bring a future company to it's knees and derail projects years after it was made. For example, a faulty data model that is let to grow to terabytes of information. Many companies choose to through money and computing resources, rather than risk a costly migration. When we have sufficiently advanced to the point where such mistakes do not depend on an individual and the automation process can take care of it, the value of the software engineer as we know the profession today will diminish greatly. But then again, I'm sure the profession will evolve as well.
• lqdc13 13y ago
  I'm not sure if my case is very strange, but it took me a good 5 months to find a job after having designed a website and having a masters in math with many comp sci classes. I think it's not that easy for everyone to find a job.
• moreoutput 13y ago
  Two things about this article (which are really more prominent in the comments and on twitter) bother me. First, and perhaps this is because I am of lower working-class roots, whats actually wrong with being a plumber? I believe its fairly common to ask good programmers how they view the task -- generally speaking framed as a carpenter, a writer, or a mathematician. Second is the ending: "Am I paid too much to code? Am I paid too little to write? No: in each case, I’m paid exactly what I should be." which I find important in tone but redundant. Generally speaking in America the idea is you take the pay you agree to -- which to me inherently means "I’m paid exactly what I should be".
  • rocky1138 13y ago
    "What's actually wrong with being a plumber?" Nothing is "wrong" with it, but the skill required to be one is much lower than it is for other vocations. This means that there are more of them and so they are lower paid. The perception in society is one that because of this they have a lower value. From my perspective, people who choose low-skill, low-pay work aren't pushing themselves hard enough. It's great if you're good at it and you are low on money, but if it's your life goal to be a plumber you may be setting the bar too low.
    • malyk 13y ago
      But what if being a plumber gets you all of the things you want in life? What is this bar you are talking about? Not everyone wants to be or has to be at the absolute top of their potential. There's a huge disconnect between economic value and, well, humanity, frankly. Somehow we've come to worship the economic return of everything over the actual experience of living.
      • hackula1 13y ago
        ok... he op said there was nothing wrong with it, just that it usually required less skill.
• willholloway 13y ago
  Am I the only one that wants coders to stop feeling guilty and devaluing themselves? The plumber analogy is off base. Web development is incredibly more complex than plumbing in a home. Importantly, web development changes extremely fast while plumbing is largely the same as it has been for decades. The web and the developers that have created all of the sites and apps on top of it has added tremendous value to our economy and world. Web developers have streamlined almost the entirety of our lives and created enormous productivity gains. The things that we create may seem trivial to us, but are fantastically valuable to society. Jet packs and flying cars were always a terrible benchmark to measure human technological progress against. Iterative improvement has created a world of fantastic possibilities. Good development is hard, and requires a lot of knowledge. Value yourself and feel good about what you are doing.
  • oblique63 13y ago
    This isn't a negative, self-worth thing, it's a perspective thing. What the OP here is describing, is exactly the mentality that leads to this nonsense: http://programmingisterrible.com/post/50421878989/come-here-and-work-on-hard-problems-except-the-ones http://programmingisterrible.com/post/50421878989/come-here-... A lot of people would agree that empathy is one of the large components of what makes us "human", and that's rather vague, but it does make evolutionary sense for why empathy is useful for societal progress. And guess what, perspective is crucial for empathy. If we assume for a minute that almost nobody really lacks empathy, then what could be the only possible factor that produces an outcome like the one described in that link above? I'm sure most of us tech people aren't narcissists/sociopaths, so the only thing that could explain it is a skewed perspective that makes it permissible to rationalize a lot of the nonsense around us as being 'okay', or 'not relevant' to us. Empathy is a function that takes perspective as an argument, and if we assume that our empathy functions are correct (no reason to think they aren't usually), shouldn't it be good when we realize it's giving us the 'wrong outputs', and then do something actionable about it like try changing our perspective (or input)? I've battled with a lot of self-criticism and depression myself, but I see nothing wrong with this. On the contrary, it seems like the healthiest thing we could do as we approach a possible 'bubble' scenario. I think the problem is that the OP is labeling what he's arguing with as "web development" when it's really more of a subset of startup culture that he's referring to, not all web developers (he lauded the 'adults' that created Rails remember? I'd say they're 'web developers'). Also, it isn't that things are trivial to us, it's that they can be trivial, period. It just doesn't look that way from the outside, so we benefit (and are congratulated) for "daring" to look into the black art that is computer programming and actually producing something, anything... imagine if it were socially deemed adventurous to look into plumbing, it would have a similar outcome (albeit without all the VC nonsense probably). Also: > Jet packs and flying cars were always a terrible benchmark to measure human technological progress against. Not really, because we do have jetpacks (albeit not exactly efficient/affordable ones), and lets not forget that Google is developing self-driving cars! I'd say the notaion that any vehicle could drive itself is an even crazier idea than having something that's redundant with a small glider/aircraft at this point, and I'm sure people from the 1930's would probably agree. So then why wouldn't it be good to use existing ground-breaking projects as benchmarks for human progress and value? A lot of web startups sure do fall short of that benchmark too.
• beat 13y ago
  Once you've learned a complex skill, it can seem very easy to you - and you no longer see that it's not-easy to the point of impossible for many others. Most people don't have the talent or patience to learn it at all. Besides software, I play guitar. I've played guitar for over 30 years now. I long ago passed a level of mastery on the instrument, and my attention is focused on expression rather than technique. When working with other guitarists, it can be difficult to even comprehend that they haven't mastered their instruments technically, that things I do without thinking are hard for them to even understand, much less do. And frankly, most of them will never, ever master their instruments. Software's the same way. It takes, at least, several years to really master it to the point where the act of coding itself no longer gets in your way and dominates your thinking, and you can focus on problems of expression rather than technique. The value of tools like Rails is that they further reduce the technical friction, getting you closer to expressiveness. And THIS is why coders are worth it. There's work that needs to be done, work that has real market value, and a very limited number of people with the mastery needed to perform the work. And yeah, most startups are crap, but the big wins are big enough to justify risk on a bunch of small losers, so the market is there. I just wish I could make a living as a guitarist. It's more interesting and challenging.
  • super-serial 13y ago
    I always use the chess analogy. Some people can play chess every day for years and never get past being an advanced beginner. That's over 90% of the population whether it's Chess or programming. It's a very intense mental exercise... even if the author of the article thinks it's just "playing." To get a job programming you have to be better than a mid-level chess player and demonstrate it by 'winning' projects that are relatively difficult. Even by doing that you still have to jump through tons of hoops to get a decent job. The types of perks and jobs the author is talking about sounds like a fantasy to me when I've worked nothing but soul-sucking .NET corporate jobs, and web contract work where I'm always worried about getting paid on time. For me it's come to the point where I'd rather work a part-time job (I'm basically a Janitor) and do programming/startups on the side... than have more soul-sucking code-slave work. So it's almost like this guy lives in an alternate universe to me. I'm trying to make it easier for me though... lately I'm taking a bunch of Nootropics (racetams, fish oil, various amino acids) and I'm getting back on track. I have a friend who takes Adderall every day to keep up with his job. It's great that the author does not have to do these things and everything just falls into place for him... but at least have some perspective that for many people this shit is not easy.
• neopba 13y ago
  As for me, making smarter pill boxes is not much better then designing new deo-spray box or make a new web page or app for a company. Not a big difference.
• abraininavat 13y ago
  the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and says: ‘You have no home to come back to.’ Which, when you think about it, isn’t harsh or discouraging but is in fact the very best thing you could say to someone setting out on an adventure. Only if the only type of adventure you consider is one which aims toward financial success. There are other types of adventures in this world, and other types of goals. There's a place in this world for experimentation, playfulness, and boldness of the type that only is possible when you have a home to come back to. I know that may not ring true in this forum, where the entrepreneurial spirit reigns, or in Japan, where (for many) katagaki (social rank through achievement) brings honor to your whole family, but from my point of view Jiro was sort of a jerk.
• proksoup 13y ago
  It's a trend, fun to argue about if it's going up or down, or when it might go down, but does anyone honestly think it won't?
• mahyarm 13y ago
  Are executives worth it? "In today's world, executives & managers have it all: money, perks, freedom, authority & respect. But is there value in what we do?"
• TWAndrews 13y ago
  I actually think that the current trend of "chasing eyeballs" is really valuable on its own terms. Anyone who wants to start a business to support themselves, or their family will ultimately need customers, and as we continue to move away from the post-war era of people working principally for large companies which make things towards a services economy, a lot of people will need to find ways to communicate with their potential customers. Lowering the cost of acquiring customers makes it much, much easier to start a new business, and to make it successful. Products and platforms that do so are generating real value on human terms. My wife, for instance, is a photographer whose business is driven almost entirely by word of mouth, and twitter and facebook are both important components of enabling her network to share her work with potential clients. It would be enormously more expensive and difficult for her to run her business via traditional advertising, and would probably preclude her from running her own photography business. tl;dr Chasing eyeballs makes small businesses easier to start and that's a real, human good.
• abhiv 13y ago
  Companies in Silicon Valley seem to approach interviews with the idea that the candidate is a blank slate. There isn't a lot of discussion about things you've done in the past; the general approach is to ask you to design for hypothetical scenarios, or to write code on the whiteboard for algorithmic problems. The Silicon Valley approach seems to throw out a lot of good information that could indicate a candidate's quality by focusing only on the now, rather than any historical data. One of the reasons given for this is that a lot of people are good at talking about stuff when they haven't actually implemented anything, but it seems to me that an in-depth conversation about someone's background followed by coding exercises would provide a better indication of their quality than abstract questions in a vacuum. I think another reason why interviewers don't ask a lot of questions about candidates' backgrounds is to avoid potentially hearing something that the candidate's previous employer might consider confidential information. This is a fair concern, but it does lead to what seems to me to be a sub-optimal evaluation process. There also doesn't seem to be as much urgency to hire someone now as the author indicates -- companies can and do take time to schedule interviews and make up their mind. Perhaps it's different in NY.
• tlrobinson 13y ago
  Man I hate the word "coder". It sounds so mechanical. I'm a programmer, hacker, developer, software engineer, but not a "coder". Maybe the people who are handed down requirements and designs to implement with no room for creativity can be called "coders".
• lucidrains 13y ago
  Yes, coders are worth it. I've personally seen medicine up close, and have friends in various industries ranging from law to business. Everything is shit compared to the value software engineers create. Anyways, I don't think people should get their egos wrapped up into their careers, life is more than that. But I wouldn't undervalue what you are doing.
• hackula1 13y ago
  While it is important to keep our egos in check, I think this article leans a bit on the side of discounting modern web computing. Not all of us twiddle around with CRUD apps all day. Running a site with millions of concurrent users is challenging, and useful. Sites like twitter or reddit enable social change and transparency. Running a site with one hundred users doing real work is challenging too. Allowing one or two people to do a job that would have taken 10 people just a few years ago (ie: sales force, accounting systems, gis systems, big data analytics, etc.). Also, he talks about how web devs are like plumbers with toilet fixing robots. This would be true if the plumbers happened to build the robots themselves. Who does he think built Rails, Http, Express, Sinatra, Cake, Mongo, MySQL, and every other open source web technology out there? People like you and me. The web is an amazing thing, quite possibly humanity's greatest achievement so far, and we are still working on making it better. One last thing. The author seems to think web devs just think about colors all day. Is he not hacking, exploring, and building things? Someone who talks about colors all day is a web designer imo. Nothing wrong with that, but entirely different focus.
• EternalFury 13y ago
  When one becomes obsessed with the tool of the trade, one loses sight of the greater end. If the ultimate goal is not worthwhile, it does not matter whether you code it Ruby or Scala. It's busy work and a waste of human energy.
• dabent 13y ago
  As someone who's worked through the dot-com boom and crash of the 1990's, I can offer some perspective. - Everything is relative: My salary is just now what it was at the top of the dot-com bubble about 14 years ago, and I've been promoted twice. That $150,000 offer the author mentions would be $250,000 if we used the wages for 1999, adjusted for inflation. - Like all things, this is cyclical. In 1999, my email was jammed with messages from recruiters. In 2002, I could hardly get one to return my call. The same will happen with this latest enthusiasm for coders. In a couple of years, the startup scene may cool off considerably. You could end up grateful for a job that pays 1/2 the salary at a bank. Enjoy the free Red Bull and flexible hours while they last. - You will be replaced. By someone younger, someone offshore, someone with newer skills. You can't change your age or nation of birth, so keep your skills sharp. I've gone from Pascal to Python in my career and will keep going. If you want money, look for the skills people will pay for. Lisp is a great language, but Java has had this great feature of paying my bills and then some. - Make something people want. If they want you to make a micro social network for an apartment building, do it. Some of my best jobs (and money) have come from the mundane, like software help track toilet paper production costs. One of the wealthiest people I know started as an electrician. He now runs and a company of electricians and has the kind of money us start up folks dream of because he runs wires in houses in a city that went on a building boom. - Realize that how much money people make doesn't relate to the value their job provides to society. Athletes can make incredible money, while people disarming bombs, fighting fires and repairing power lines make little. It's just a fact of life and it isn't fair. Left handed baseball pitchers have inherent value simply due to the fact that they are left handed on top of their ability to throw a ball. Coders make money right now because of the internet and the information age. Make the most of it and make the impact you want to make in the world.
• dsego 13y ago
  I was thinking for some time about this text and there is one thing that's been bugging me. This is one sentiment that could be applied to most jobs out there: > We call ourselves web developers, software engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, innovators. We’re celebrated, we capture a lot of wealth and attention and talent. We’ve become a vortex on a par with Wall Street for precocious college grads. But we’re not making the self-driving car. We’re not making a smarter pill bottle. Most of what we’re doing, in fact, is putting boxes on a page. Users put words and pictures into one box; we store that stuff in a database; and then out it comes into another box. You can compare this to dentistry. It's a highly regarded profession and the wages are really good. But most dentists just pull a tooth out or drill it and put a filling. It's not rocket science, and when was that last time a dentist made a recipe for a new type of filling? And the profession itself didn't make really huge leaps in the last hundred years. My hour as a programmer in croatia is worth around 10 USD. A dentist gets 20 USD just to look at your teeth and charges 50 USD for a white filling which they can do in under an hour. One more thing. Lawyers, dentists and some other professions have associations that determine minimum prices "to assure high quality of work". Something to think about.
• jokoon 13y ago
  Web developers are not worth very much I'd say. The web is a clusterfuck of pages users can only read and leave comments on. You won't really do anything relevant with the web. It's useless compared to the speed of current internet accesses. The only thing people use are internet browsers, which use HTTP as a basis, which is telnet. The web is still using old techs and no engineers is really trying to make new things, besides to-the-metal tech like bittorrent. The internet is not just a web of websites, the internet is also connections between pairs, which is soooo much flexible. Right now, what does applications do ? They select data from a database, with nice data structures, then they write this huge text file and send it. Your browser then parse this stuff to make some sense of it, you put data in it, and it's sent back. Google then parse aaaaall this, and tries to make some sense out of it. And somehow they manage. The web is like people communicating with mail instead of using real time telephone conversations. It's very inefficient. People try to make real time stuff with it, like facebook and their huge cluster, but it's really a sad show. JS has now almost replaced the role of C and C++ in execution speed. But it's still sent by mail. I thought webrtc sockets would fix that, but in the end it's a huge fail, you can't connect to an IP address directly, it's still that centralized clusterfuck.
• nilkn 13y ago
  Oh boy, I have a lot of comments here, most of them in agreement with the article but not all. According to all the anecdotal knowledge I have, my conclusion has been that currently software engineering and chemical engineering are tied for the locally optimal career choice for those with a four year degree or less. While some college graduates (or dropouts) will go become billionaires, as a general rule, it is quite hard to do better in a career without further education than you can with these two types of engineering. Software and chemical engineering also both have their own "meccas": SV for software, Houston for chemical. Google/Facebook/etc. for software, Exxon/Chevron/etc. for chemical. That said, anyone who thinks software developers are on the verge of being overpaid should consider how low developers (and most workers) are on the overall wage ladder. Maybe $150k sounds high to the typical person born and raised in the middle class, but that's pennies compared to the typical salaries in the true upper class. Moreover, the majority of developers making salaries around that number live in the most expensive cities in the country, not the cheaper ones. As a general rule, software developers are in the middle class or upper middle class, but not the upper class. Of course, it depends on your definition of the various social classes. If you define it as the one percent, you'd need to make about $350k. If you define it as those whose primary income derives from investments rather than salaries, then even that is not nearly enough. What's an example of something close to an "upper class career"? Some but certainly not all doctors would make it. Family physicians wouldn't be close (they're about the same as engineers in the end), but specialized academic surgeons will make $500k-$1M/year. At many universities with medical schools, the top surgical faculty will make about double the president of the university. A successful trader of financial assets can make seven figures. This is almost common on Wall Street, but it happens elsewhere. The youngest billionaire in Houston right now made his fortune from Enron: he was a trader of energy derivatives and after making the company some $75 million one year he was awarded about an $8M bonus. He then started his own energy trading firm and went on to make a few billion. A partner at McKinsey, the management consulting firm, will make seven figures in total compensation. A partner at any major law firm will make the same. These aren't extraordinarily difficult careers to get into. Becoming a surgeon is mostly about planning ahead and dedication. Becoming a partner at a firm is just about putting in the hours for years. Literally anybody on Wall Street will make $100k minimum unless they're like a receptionist, and from there you can work your way onto the trading floor. And let's not even talk about top business executives, who put all those salaries to shame. And contrary to popular belief there is a reasonably effective method towards becoming such an executive: Harvard/Wharton MBA, consultant at McKinsey, eventually hired by a company you consulted for. That's how Skilling got on as CEO of Enron. That's how my friend's dad, a CEO making $4M/year, got his job. Etc. There are tons of examples of it. It happens all the time. Most people just don't know about it. Many people often think it's all luck getting into the upper ranks of the executives, but that's because they think it's done by choosing a company at a young age and working there for 20+ years. That's not how it's done in general. It happens occasionally, but you have to network your ass off for decades to make that work. But if you're a consultant, then you'll be hired by the top executives to help them solve problems. You just skipped all the lower ranks thanks to just a few years of business school. (This doesn't work with an MBA from anywhere but the most prestigious schools.) In short, there are a number of careers where at your peak you'll make not a six figure salary but a seven figure salary. If you think back to how long the phrase "six figure salary" has been in use, you'll realize that, with inflation, a seven figure salary is quite accurately the new six figure salary in expensive cities like SF and NYC. People in these cities who aren't making such a salary are often willfully ignorant of this fact. They want the prestige of a "six figure salary," even though their buying power is an order of magnitude less than what that phrase originally referred to.
• dsrguru 13y ago
  I took away four things from this enjoyable, well-written, but overly long article: 1. The author's sister might not have been crazy to question the fairness of capitalism. 2. The average software engineer in the Bay Area innovates a lot less than the average "real" engineer. 3. Being a web developer in the startup world rocks. 4. Coffee Meets Bagels sounds like a great dating app.
• nighthawk24 13y ago
  You are wrong in generalizing all coders. You may be a "coder" designing web sites, doing repetitive work. But there are many out there working towards improvising the workflow in Healthcare, Manufacturing, Entertainment/Gaming, etc. And as for comparing a coal miner to a coder (personally find that as the best comparison to make when mocking someone who undervalues coders); there is no special added value the miner brings to his workplace compared to a "coder" aka software engineer, whose 1hr's work can make processes efficient and increase productivity for 1000 more people. Overall, I like your style of writing from your perspective. There is the reality part you have added. But as for generalizing coders. Don't. Specially here on HN.
• lettergram 13y ago
  And all lawyers do is translate legal language into common tongue (speaking from experience) I looked up the law regarding my lawsuit and pointed out to my lawyer what he should say and he did so. The judge took it and I won my case. However, the judge would not have done so without my lawyer making a lengthy speech. The point being. We are the only one's who know how to put boxes on a page, so we get paid for it.
• flyinRyan 13y ago
  Oh how I despise the sentiment that if some group with an important function gets low pay that this could only mean other groups with a "less important" function are overpaid. The only people that are overpaid are executives. The rest of us are under-paid (with some exceptions). Yes, even developers. Look how much money a trader makes if they do well. Now compare that with a Quant who will do consistently better and make the company much more money. If you feel like pulling others down into your pit, reach out for executives, not other working class people. FFS.
• _progger_ 13y ago
  "money, perks, freedom, respect" Err... CEOs/CTOs/CFOs have that. You should add "reasonably minimal competitive" in front of each word when talking about web devs at an average company.
• coderguy123 13y ago
  IT/developer scene in big NYC banks is even worse. People with no experience faking up resume get business analyst/QA position cramming some basic skills in few weeks and they are paid $55/hr for doing nothing. This cannot last, can it?