6 ms·

And yet, if you read HN, most developers make over $100k and can find a new job that pays more overnight if their current employer does anything that offends th

And yet, if you read HN, most developers make over $100k and can find a new job that pays more overnight if their current employer does anything that offends them. What's the reality?

cobookman 13y ago
The reality is that there's a shortage of highly qualified STEM majors. As an ECE student, if I were to ask students in my major to code a linked list, or binary node tree, a good 25-50% would fail. And this is at a Top 10 program.
- smileysteve 13y ago
  There was a post this week about a Ruby on Rails contractor who helped with a talent search. He didn't recommend people that didn't know what Ruby Gems were or what Active Record was... They got hired anyway.
  - agildehaus 13y ago
    I don't know Ruby, but I know what these things are from osmosis (running into them whilst searching for other things). If you don't know what Ruby Gems or Active Record are, you've likely not touched any web technology in depth.
  - matwood 13y ago
    Amazing. Another reason to still ask 'senior' developers a fizzbuzz type question. Above is also the reason good (not great or rockstars) developers are in high demand and almost never on the open market. Once you work with people and vet yourself with other good developers, new jobs are usually just a phone call away.
    - logfromblammo 13y ago
      Again, it depends on where you live and who you know. Every job I have ever landed, I've had to go through the full HR rigamarole, from finding the posting through multiple rounds of interviews. I've never quite been able to make a friend--or even acquaintance--that has subsequently been able to backchannel me into a job. I've had several interviewers say directly that I appear to be one of the most technically qualified candidates they have, but after I walk out the door, I never hear another word from them again, not even to say they picked someone else. The hiring system is broken. And the damage is at least in a load-bearing member, if not the foundation itself. There is no financial pressure for anyone capable of fixing it to actually do so. And so we suffer as entities with far more political experience glide smoothly among the sharks, depressing our wages today, and tomorrow, they quietly dismantle the dreams of young people passionate about our field. It sickens me to the point that I feel like there are no good employers left in the U.S., in any field. I have no reason whatsoever to buy a house, befriend my neighbors, and invest in my local community, because at any moment my gracious employer (or their new owners) could decide to fire everyone and move out. That would leave me again in the position where I have to also move, just to find a job not quite as good as the one I just had. And now that I am in one of the few locales recognized as a "tech center" in the U.S., I find that most of the jobs here are military-industrial complex tax-leeching jobs, where industry best practices are routinely ignored, because the primary goal of the contractor is to produce billable hours instead of permanent solutions, and the overseer-boss got his job via military good-ol'boy networking rather than having one inkling of competence. What's the solution? I don't know. But making me retype my entire resume into your stupid web forms to better facilitate its automatic rejection for lack of required hidden keywords is completely antipodal to it.
- giardini 13y ago
  Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. Do students get an extra 10 points if they use a debugged tested solution from a library? e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmers-use-stl-or-write-their-own-code http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmer...
  - jordanthoms 13y ago
    Yes, in production code you'd usually use a library implementation - although if you had specific requirements you would still need to build your own. That's beside the point though - any decent engineer should still understand how they work and be able to write a implementation of them fairly easily.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. But if you can't code common data structures on your own, you'll probably have trouble coding the more advanced data structure that you found a paper on describing (possibly described in part by replacing parts of a more common data structure) with some code, but not in your language of choice, that would be, from its description, far better than the common data structure for your problem, for which there is not a debugged library for your platform of choice.
    - doktrin 13y ago
      You're describing an edge case. While certainly true, it doesn't represent the current needs of the job market or the realities of the industry.
      - hajile 13y ago
        80/20 It's the edge cases that separate a good engineer from an average engineer. When that good engineer runs into that problem, he/she will solve it quickly and move on. An average engineer will spend days or weeks struggling with the solution -- costing lots of money and potentially delaying schedules.
- doktrin 13y ago
  I'm fairly certain their career prospects don't hinge on whether or not they can perform a few job interview parlor tricks. If I were to poll all my SE colleagues, present and former, and ask them when they last manually coded a linked list or b-tree - I can assure you the answer would not be "on a product we shipped".
  - waps 13y ago
    B-trees with augmented information are very fast, and I know of no generic augmented B-tree. So I've contributed to a program that shipped a custom augmented b-tree. I assume the same goes for other types of augmented data structures. Is that so rare ? Or do most people simply not know how/why to augment data structures ?
samfisher83 13y ago
How much of the population is represented by HN. If you have a bell shaped curve and only people on one extreme are commenting then you can't create a curve based on those samples. Also people who aren't doing that well aren't bragging about how bad they are doing.
- philwelch 13y ago
  It's been a long time since Hacker News was one side of the bell curve.
- Dewie 13y ago
  > Also people who aren't doing that well aren't bragging about how bad they are doing. Well they don't want to brag, but an online community where you can be anonymous if you want seems like a good place to reach out for help if you're in trouble.
Dirlewanger 13y ago
Good times are over. All the tech people behind that vile FWD.us site fighting for immigration reform are slowly getting their wishes, opening the flood gates for cheap South/Southeast Asian labor. CS/ECE are over in being lucrative majors to pursue. It'll only be a matter of time before most engineering degrees go the same way.
- davidw 13y ago
  > Good times are over Beyond the lump of labor fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy , did you consider that those people have every right to do their best in this world as anyone else, no matter where they happen to be born? That might mean coming to the US or Germany or whatever. If that's easier for them, fine by me.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    >those people have every right to do their best in this world as anyone else, no matter where they happen to be born? Nobody's proposing any anti-"doing-your-best" legislation, nor blaming the cheap Indian labor, who is often exploited terribly.
    - davidw 13y ago
      Sure they are. They want to keep those people where they were born and do not want to let them into the US. Say you're born in someplace really bad like the Congo, as an extreme example. No matter how you try, you are not going to do your best there.
      - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
        Why shouldn't the current residents be right to selectively exclude people? To think otherwise seems ignorant of basic human nature and thousands of years of history.
- philosophus 13y ago
Pxtl 13y ago
Depends where you live. Some places are tech hubs that are always craving new manpower, and some places are university towns without much private industry of their own, and some people have ties to an area. I live in Hamilton (which is Canada's Pittsburgh). We've got a great STEM-oriented school here, and Waterloo (RIM's home) is only an hour away... it took a long time to find a job that didn't involve suffering through a two-hour commute in some of the most miserable traffic on the continent (Ontario's corporate tech-hub is Mississauga).
- ben336 13y ago
  As an original Pittsburgh native, I'm curious which attributes of Pittsburgh you're thinking of when you say "Canada's Pittburgh"?
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Hamilton is a steel town. Blue collar workers, steel mills, dense century construction, etc. Or, rather, was a steel town. Our steel industry hung on about a decade or so longer than Pittsburgh, so we're going through the same crap Pittsburgh did when it had to go through that confused process of trying to find its place now that all the jobs are drying up... that's where the similarities end though, Pittsburgh had to stand on its own while we're close enough to Toronto that our answer to the problem might be turning into a bedroom community of a bedroom community instead of a Tom-Murphy-esque revitalization.
- agentultra 13y ago
  I just moved to Hamilton! Ontario is rough. Most job offers are in the range of 65-75k for 10+ years of experience and highly-specialized skills. The cost of housing and living in Toronto and surrounding regions has sky-rocketed in the last 10 years. And the traffic is terrible. All of the STEM grads get shipped off to SF or the Valley. There are American recruiting agencies on the campus' of every major STEM-focused university in Canada and are at every job fair. The choice for these grads is pretty easy: stay here and make Wordpress themes for a social media marketing agency and get paid 35-45k or go work at Google/Twitter/Whatever and work with the best-of-breed tech, get paid 90k to start and be making 120-130k within a few years. We could do better up here. The visa situation is much more permissive here and there are a plethora of grants and tax benefits for tech companies available. VCs are even finally starting to warm up a bit too.
collyw 13y ago
most developers in the US make over $100k
- Dewie 13y ago
  I've heard that $100k might not even be typical for the US in general, but for Silicon Valley specifically.(?)
- dagw 13y ago
  If these[1] numbers are anywhere near accurate that simply isn't true. Median income is $72,630 and 75th Percentile income is $92,510. So at best you can say that perhaps the 20% highest earning programmers in US make over $100K. [1] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...
  - TheCoelacanth 13y ago
    "Software Developer"[1] is three times as common and has a median income of $89,280. Most programmers are actually classified as software developers. [1] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer
  - vonmoltke 13y ago
    If you dig into the details[1], there are 4 major cities where the average is at or above $100k, and at least one where it is close. [1] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...
- morganherlocker 13y ago
  Even this only applies to SF and NY, if at all.
- eitally 13y ago
  Nope, not remotely true.
lmm 13y ago
"STEM" is a conflation of several fields. STEM on the whole is doing well. EE, one small subfield of it, is doing badly.

And yet, if you read HN, most developers make over $100k and can find a new job that pays more overnight if their current employer does anything that offends them. What's the reality?

cobookman 13y ago

The reality is that there's a shortage of highly qualified STEM majors. As an ECE student, if I were to ask students in my major to code a linked list, or binary node tree, a good 25-50% would fail. And this is at a Top 10 program.

smileysteve 13y ago
There was a post this week about a Ruby on Rails contractor who helped with a talent search. He didn't recommend people that didn't know what Ruby Gems were or what Active Record was... They got hired anyway.
- agildehaus 13y ago
  I don't know Ruby, but I know what these things are from osmosis (running into them whilst searching for other things). If you don't know what Ruby Gems or Active Record are, you've likely not touched any web technology in depth.
- matwood 13y ago
  Amazing. Another reason to still ask 'senior' developers a fizzbuzz type question. Above is also the reason good (not great or rockstars) developers are in high demand and almost never on the open market. Once you work with people and vet yourself with other good developers, new jobs are usually just a phone call away.
  - logfromblammo 13y ago
    Again, it depends on where you live and who you know. Every job I have ever landed, I've had to go through the full HR rigamarole, from finding the posting through multiple rounds of interviews. I've never quite been able to make a friend--or even acquaintance--that has subsequently been able to backchannel me into a job. I've had several interviewers say directly that I appear to be one of the most technically qualified candidates they have, but after I walk out the door, I never hear another word from them again, not even to say they picked someone else. The hiring system is broken. And the damage is at least in a load-bearing member, if not the foundation itself. There is no financial pressure for anyone capable of fixing it to actually do so. And so we suffer as entities with far more political experience glide smoothly among the sharks, depressing our wages today, and tomorrow, they quietly dismantle the dreams of young people passionate about our field. It sickens me to the point that I feel like there are no good employers left in the U.S., in any field. I have no reason whatsoever to buy a house, befriend my neighbors, and invest in my local community, because at any moment my gracious employer (or their new owners) could decide to fire everyone and move out. That would leave me again in the position where I have to also move, just to find a job not quite as good as the one I just had. And now that I am in one of the few locales recognized as a "tech center" in the U.S., I find that most of the jobs here are military-industrial complex tax-leeching jobs, where industry best practices are routinely ignored, because the primary goal of the contractor is to produce billable hours instead of permanent solutions, and the overseer-boss got his job via military good-ol'boy networking rather than having one inkling of competence. What's the solution? I don't know. But making me retype my entire resume into your stupid web forms to better facilitate its automatic rejection for lack of required hidden keywords is completely antipodal to it.
giardini 13y ago
Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. Do students get an extra 10 points if they use a debugged tested solution from a library? e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmers-use-stl-or-write-their-own-code http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6831231/should-programmer...
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  Yes, in production code you'd usually use a library implementation - although if you had specific requirements you would still need to build your own. That's beside the point though - any decent engineer should still understand how they work and be able to write a implementation of them fairly easily.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Coding one's own own data structures/routines for common data structures is probably suboptimizing. There are debugged modules available in most languages. But if you can't code common data structures on your own, you'll probably have trouble coding the more advanced data structure that you found a paper on describing (possibly described in part by replacing parts of a more common data structure) with some code, but not in your language of choice, that would be, from its description, far better than the common data structure for your problem, for which there is not a debugged library for your platform of choice.
  - doktrin 13y ago
    You're describing an edge case. While certainly true, it doesn't represent the current needs of the job market or the realities of the industry.
    - hajile 13y ago
      80/20 It's the edge cases that separate a good engineer from an average engineer. When that good engineer runs into that problem, he/she will solve it quickly and move on. An average engineer will spend days or weeks struggling with the solution -- costing lots of money and potentially delaying schedules.
doktrin 13y ago
I'm fairly certain their career prospects don't hinge on whether or not they can perform a few job interview parlor tricks. If I were to poll all my SE colleagues, present and former, and ask them when they last manually coded a linked list or b-tree - I can assure you the answer would not be "on a product we shipped".
- waps 13y ago
  B-trees with augmented information are very fast, and I know of no generic augmented B-tree. So I've contributed to a program that shipped a custom augmented b-tree. I assume the same goes for other types of augmented data structures. Is that so rare ? Or do most people simply not know how/why to augment data structures ?

samfisher83 13y ago

How much of the population is represented by HN. If you have a bell shaped curve and only people on one extreme are commenting then you can't create a curve based on those samples. Also people who aren't doing that well aren't bragging about how bad they are doing.

philwelch 13y ago
It's been a long time since Hacker News was one side of the bell curve.
Dewie 13y ago
> Also people who aren't doing that well aren't bragging about how bad they are doing. Well they don't want to brag, but an online community where you can be anonymous if you want seems like a good place to reach out for help if you're in trouble.

Dirlewanger 13y ago

Good times are over. All the tech people behind that vile FWD.us site fighting for immigration reform are slowly getting their wishes, opening the flood gates for cheap South/Southeast Asian labor. CS/ECE are over in being lucrative majors to pursue. It'll only be a matter of time before most engineering degrees go the same way.

davidw 13y ago
> Good times are over Beyond the lump of labor fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy , did you consider that those people have every right to do their best in this world as anyone else, no matter where they happen to be born? That might mean coming to the US or Germany or whatever. If that's easier for them, fine by me.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  >those people have every right to do their best in this world as anyone else, no matter where they happen to be born? Nobody's proposing any anti-"doing-your-best" legislation, nor blaming the cheap Indian labor, who is often exploited terribly.
  - davidw 13y ago
    Sure they are. They want to keep those people where they were born and do not want to let them into the US. Say you're born in someplace really bad like the Congo, as an extreme example. No matter how you try, you are not going to do your best there.
    - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
      Why shouldn't the current residents be right to selectively exclude people? To think otherwise seems ignorant of basic human nature and thousands of years of history.
philosophus 13y ago

Pxtl 13y ago

Depends where you live. Some places are tech hubs that are always craving new manpower, and some places are university towns without much private industry of their own, and some people have ties to an area. I live in Hamilton (which is Canada's Pittsburgh). We've got a great STEM-oriented school here, and Waterloo (RIM's home) is only an hour away... it took a long time to find a job that didn't involve suffering through a two-hour commute in some of the most miserable traffic on the continent (Ontario's corporate tech-hub is Mississauga).

ben336 13y ago
As an original Pittsburgh native, I'm curious which attributes of Pittsburgh you're thinking of when you say "Canada's Pittburgh"?
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Hamilton is a steel town. Blue collar workers, steel mills, dense century construction, etc. Or, rather, was a steel town. Our steel industry hung on about a decade or so longer than Pittsburgh, so we're going through the same crap Pittsburgh did when it had to go through that confused process of trying to find its place now that all the jobs are drying up... that's where the similarities end though, Pittsburgh had to stand on its own while we're close enough to Toronto that our answer to the problem might be turning into a bedroom community of a bedroom community instead of a Tom-Murphy-esque revitalization.
agentultra 13y ago
I just moved to Hamilton! Ontario is rough. Most job offers are in the range of 65-75k for 10+ years of experience and highly-specialized skills. The cost of housing and living in Toronto and surrounding regions has sky-rocketed in the last 10 years. And the traffic is terrible. All of the STEM grads get shipped off to SF or the Valley. There are American recruiting agencies on the campus' of every major STEM-focused university in Canada and are at every job fair. The choice for these grads is pretty easy: stay here and make Wordpress themes for a social media marketing agency and get paid 35-45k or go work at Google/Twitter/Whatever and work with the best-of-breed tech, get paid 90k to start and be making 120-130k within a few years. We could do better up here. The visa situation is much more permissive here and there are a plethora of grants and tax benefits for tech companies available. VCs are even finally starting to warm up a bit too.

collyw 13y ago

most developers in the US make over $100k

Dewie 13y ago
I've heard that $100k might not even be typical for the US in general, but for Silicon Valley specifically.(?)
dagw 13y ago
If these[1] numbers are anywhere near accurate that simply isn't true. Median income is $72,630 and 75th Percentile income is $92,510. So at best you can say that perhaps the 20% highest earning programmers in US make over $100K. [1] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...
- TheCoelacanth 13y ago
  "Software Developer"[1] is three times as common and has a median income of $89,280. Most programmers are actually classified as software developers. [1] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  If you dig into the details[1], there are 4 major cities where the average is at or above $100k, and at least one where it is close. [1] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...
morganherlocker 13y ago
Even this only applies to SF and NY, if at all.
eitally 13y ago
Nope, not remotely true.

lmm 13y ago

"STEM" is a conflation of several fields. STEM on the whole is doing well. EE, one small subfield of it, is doing badly.