10 ms·

Are coders worth it? (2013)

146 points by lingz 12y ago

mbesto 12y ago
"“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” -- Peter Drucker Are coders valuable? F ya. The reality is that almost every start up today is on a chase to grab people's attention with the glittering lure of technology. Why? Because once you get someone's attention, you can basically sell them anything. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Pinterest, etc etc the list goes on...valuations are all based on one metric - DAU. Why? Because DAU means any business can market and innovate their product, which as per my Drucker quote, are the only two basic functions of a business. PS - If the OP reads this, the "artform" of journalism is no different than a coder writing pinterest. Coding just scales WAY better.
- hollerith 12y ago
  DAU == daily active users.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  love the quote - have you got a citation (not challenging the provenance, just want to know)
  - mindcrime 12y ago
    You got me curious as well, so I went looking. According to Michael Port in his own Beyond Booked Solid, the quote is from Drucker in Drucker's The Practice of Management. http://books.google.com/books?id=gyKbgTCs2e0C&pg=PT10&dq=%22purpose+of+business+is+to+create+a+customer%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_wt4U-OfB-2nsASVu4DQBw&ved=0CJMBEOgBMA8#v=onepage&q=%22purpose%20of%20business%20is%20to%20create%20a%20customer%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=gyKbgTCs2e0C&pg=PT10&dq=%22...
    - mbesto 12y ago
      Yup - awesome book, it's timeless.
mantrax5 12y ago
Good designers, good developers, good <insert profession here> have an acute sense of where their role is in the business. Employees who have an unclear idea of what they're doing or why they're doing it, also don't have their focus on improving their company and the lives of their customers. Hence they'd often make arbitrary decisions regarding how to prioritize their limited resources (time, money, which features go into the next milestone etc.). And in this way they may end up dragging the company down. An employee asking themselves "am I worth it" can be a sign of a dysfunctional company culture, or the problem may lie with the employee, but wherever the blame lies, people who don't know their worth are in the long run not worth that much to their company, fad and cargo cult caused disbalances notwithstanding.
- kevinwang 12y ago
  It looks like the title question posed by the author is more about "worth" to improving society as a whole, rather than "worth" of improving the business of the company.
  - mantrax5 12y ago
    If those are in opposition, the author should probably quit his job. There's a good number of companies whose basic purpose lies in improving society.
jqm 12y ago
Are computers worth it? Well then... there is your answer!
onedev 12y ago
I hate the term "coder". It's like calling a designer a "drawer".
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  I actually find the term useful, when not applied to the entire field. "Coder" seems like a more polite and less derogatory form of "code monkey", as in someone who "just" writes code and nothing else.
- jcrites 12y ago
  I agree. I prefer the term software engineer. Terms like "coder" and "programmer" (when referring to job roles) trivialize the profession; they set low expectations for the contributions an effective engineer will make to a business. Programming, the art of writing code, is just one piece. I wrote a comment a while back attempting to capture and explain my thoughts on the greater responsibilities and competencies of a software engineer [1]. The effective engineer has a holistic approach to software and business: > Engineering in the software field isn't /always/ about building super-reliable things. That is one factor that I think differentiates it from other engineering fields. Engineering in the real, physical space has safety implications that typically require a high level of rigor at minimum. If a bridge fails or a building collapses, that's catastrophic. Physical products are only useful if engineered to a high level of quality. However, software is useful across a wider spectrum of reliability: if a back-office web app used by the recruiting team has to come down for maintenance for 2 hours on Sunday, that may not be a showstopper. > Consequently, part of software engineering is understanding what level of robustness is needed to meet business goals, and building to it appropriately, with appropriate costs, and understanding the properties of the built system. Controlling the [tradeoffs] is what makes it engineering. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809358 Furthermore, the effective software engineer, who in a corporate environment is also an effective businessperson, understands and influences the strategy of the business, and breaks down that strategy into goals which then influence the design and implementation of software. (Regarding earlier threads about whether programming is a dead-end job:) A wider perspective on what constitutes software development, and its role in business in general, also yields better long-term career development opportunities than focusing on being solely a "programmer".
NhanH 12y ago
The essay starts out with a good premise, but in the end, he seems to have conclude that "fair market price" is equivalent to the added value to the society of the job. That seems quite a bit off of a conclusion to me.
- orborde 12y ago
  Not exactly. I read "I know this because of all the money they give me" as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, like he's saying something he wants to believe, that the world tells him to believe, but cannot help questioning the truth of.
qwerta 12y ago
Free soda and beer are worth a few dollars a month. Just compare dollar evaluation; managers, salesman or even HR are more valuable.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
krapp 12y ago
>In today’s world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect. But is there value in what we do? Sorry, no. The author needs to pull his head out of the bubble. In today's world (the actual world), web developers and programmers are given less credence than assembly line workers, and are considered at best a necessary evil in businesses where the actual product, itself, is something other than code. Money? As little as possible. Perks? Perks go to sales. Respect? It's not even considered real work. Granted, it's not flipping hamburgers but let's not pretend what the author describes is in any way the norm.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  Are you kidding me? I think maybe you need to get out of your bubble and go work a real job for a while. Go work in food service, construction, or retail, which is what most of America is doing. Then maybe you'll appreciate the marvelous advantages you have as somebody who gets paid pretty damn well to sit in front of a blinky box and think about elegant abstractions.
  - krapp 12y ago
    I've worked in all of those fields. I know exactly how much easier programming is than roofing and sanding boats and unloading trucks. Nevertheless, outside of a select few, most programmers are assembly line workers with better chairs.
    - thinnerlizzy 12y ago
      Agree. It's why I got out of full-time, on-site programming. If I'm going to be doing it, it's going to be on my terms. And the freelance market has been pretty responsive to that.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    I know plenty of people who wouldn't want to touch an office job with a ten-foot pole. It's not like the creature comforts of a nice office environment is the end-all-be-all for every person and their respective inclinations.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Junior programmer (22): makes $80-100k, 120k in the Bay Area. Easily gets jobs. Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three-month job searches. Expert programmer (37): 3-5 times as valuable as the senior, so 15-50 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $150-200k. Leaves the Bay Area/NYC because he can't afford to raise kids there. Has a defined specialty. Job searches take 6-8 months because he's overqualified for everything but high-level positions, and those in his specialty number in the single-digits nationally. Master programmer (45): TO;DH. This industry pays well at the entry-level (if you went to a reputable college, live in the right city, know where to look and how to play the game) but doesn't have a clue when it comes to rewarding excellence. Getting better tends to backfire when this industry (being run by dumbass MBA types) continues to insist on structuring itself like a pyramid.
- sklivvz1971 12y ago
  I would qualify myself as an "expert programmer" given your scale, and it actually took me 2-3 weeks to find a job last year. It did take me six months to find a "senior level" job two years back though. My point is that it mostly depends on the economic circumstances and it's not quite correct to assume that people will specialize as they grow older - differently from the past, where IBM was giving away 10-year and 20-year presents, nowadays the average tenure at a company is about 3 years, and much shorter in younger companies and startups. The economic incentive is to be versatile, so that's what people get good at.
  - leafartist 12y ago
    I totally agree.
- notduncansmith 12y ago
  The salary depends a lot on where you are. Junior programmers in my area can't expect to make more than ~$40k (just below Alabama's median income). I would love to have the $80k salary that you claim "junior" programmers make (and like to consider myself closer to senior, given the options you presented). Maybe it's because I live in the wrong city, or didn't go to a reputable college, or am looking in the wrong places. My point is, it's difficult to feel privileged with a below-average income. There's something to be said for the environment: the (average quality) office chairs, the incredibly smart people I get to be around on a daily basis, having a job that allows me to prop my feet up and work off my laptop all day. It's not something I take for granted, don't get me wrong; I just have a hard time feeling like I have it so much better than the guy who cleans the floors. Considering that I probably only make ~10-15k more per year and had to work considerably harder to get where I am, and that I have to work much harder day to day, we're probably about even.
wonnage 12y ago
You will always have the nagging guilt of passing by the janitor, whose job exists because cleaning bathrooms is dirty and time-consuming, and wondering why your work has more value than theirs. But what if there is no logic to the system, that it's arbitrary, and random, and has simply found an equilibrium at the moment? You could drive yourself crazy thinking about it. Why are writers valued as they are? Because that's what people are willing to pay them. Why don't they just rise up and demand better pay? Who knows. Maybe people just don't value reading that much. Is it because they're uneducated? etc. ad infinitum. Why does a web developer making to-do apps lead a better a life than someone researching cancer cures? Beats me. But it would be a complete waste of their good fortune, to be at the right place at the right time, if they didn't use this advantage. Already the system is saturated with hacker school grads, and the buzz is moving towards mobile, I can easily imagine a day where knowing Rails is no longer a golden ticket. It's as silly as wondering why you got to cross the Atlantic on the luxurious Titanic, while everyone else is scrambling to the life boats. If you truly think that your present value is purely a matter of luck or a bubble, that it's illusory, then there is no why, you'd damned better make sure you find something concrete before everything goes to shit.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Why don't they just rise up and demand better pay? Because unions are bad and the Free Market will magically fix everything with its magical, invisible hand. Haven't you heard? (though I don't know if a union would make sense for writers in general.)
  - toyg 12y ago
    > I don't know if a union would make sense for writers Writers have unions, and quite a few of them (remember the Hollywood strike?). Some work, some don't; but generally speaking, they did improve compensation and arrangements for the profession. The problems of the writing world are well documented, and mostly common to other creative fields: oversupply, intrinsic difficulty in quality judgement, and output that can be hard to monetise. I honestly don't understand why they were dropped with janitors, which have a completely different set of problems (mostly related to social status).
Im_Talking 12y ago
The most valuable developers are the ones that also have a good understanding of the business-side. A very valuable skill is the ability to talk to the business-types in their language. You become their conduit into the tech-world and they trust you. Most business-types are scared of the technical world.
pytrin 12y ago
The article is technically well written, but somewhat uninformed which stems from the author's limited experience and what he sees in popular media. I thought the top comment below reflected what I have seen in my 10 years in the industry, much better: " This is a very well written piece, but it's only covering the frothy tip of a very deep phenomenon. I too am a Rails developer, have been coding professionally for 15 some odd years, and I too find what VCs are chasing nowadays to be mostly time wasting crap. But that's not what software, even web software, is really about right now. It's just the glam side of the game. The real folks making real things happen are building tools and technologies that literally could not have existed 10 years ago. In my personal experience, I've built integrated web portals that show real-time electricity usage for factories, saving them 10-50 grand a month by lowering usage during peak hours. I've built sales management tools that allowed a 2 man company to scale to a distributed team of dozens. Online rental advertising systems to cut out costly newspapers. Medical order management systems. It's not glamorous, it doesn't get on TechCrunch or Hacker News, but it's real value, delivered by real professionals. And that, more than the stupid photo sharing cruft, is what's really driving developer salaries. During the late 90's, the joke/threat was "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" - the point being that lots of human work could be automated by a savvy developer. That threat has become a promise, and we (costly) web developers are the ones fulfilling that promise across a huge range of industries." - Rob Morris
- lelandbatey 12y ago
  Wow that quote is totally spot on. It's interesting, because I am experiencing this first hand. I just started an internship working inside a large DOE facility, PNNL. The team I'm working on just makes sites for other large projects, sites to allow scientists and researchers to communicate with each other, share data, manage content, etc. It's very much not sexy work. But it's work that keeps thousands of others productive. So that quote really hits close to home.
- dpweb 12y ago
  Devs getting paid well is nothing new. If you look at enterprise apps, we're making good money, but not more (or much more) than 10-15 years ago. Salaries have been pretty stagnant just like the rest of the middle class. The 21 yr old with 6 month experience making 100k. That is a newer development I think. Bubble.
nmac 12y ago
First, I agree with the sentiments of some of the above commenters, "coders" just sounds ridiculous. Now, this question is ambiguous between two different interpretations of being "worth it". Clearly engineers are "worth it" by any economic metric--viz. high employment rates and high salaries (when mean rates are compared to other disciplines/jobs). But I take the OP to have an existential dimension built into the query. Meaning: does a hacker value what she does when contrasted against what she could be doing? So, whether or not hackers value what they do is completely different from what they do being worth while. Perhaps someone working on something at Google may value what she does less than working on her own startup idea. In this respect, to each his own.
rchiba 12y ago
Thanks for sharing the article, I think it was a pretty thought provoking read. I do think that this guy has impostor's syndrome, and feels like his accomplishments are not worth what society says they're worth. But I disagree with his woebegone attitude about it as if it is his responsibility for the market's behavior. And I disagree when he tries to pin the pulse of American thought in 2014. For example, when he says that we're slowly turning to a society where > "I do this enough times each day that a simple association has formed in my mind: if you’re not technical, you’re not valuable." That kind of mindset is abnormal, a sign that he needs to diversify his media intake, and I don't think that represents the mainstream. If all you consume is TC, VentureBeat, Silicon Valley, and Betas, you'll end up thinking something along those lines. But I can tell you that out of all the people I know, that is not what they believe. In real life, you learn that people in sales, people in social work, people doing non-programming things in life are just as important. As for market behavior, there are probably unfair events happening. But I wouldn't beat myself or anyone else up about what the market does. And maybe the whole tech scene is more and more part of the news but I think that it's no reason to feel doubtful about the things programmers do everyday and their purpose no matter how mundane it may seem. The whole idea of purpose in my mind is a bit pretentious. Why does it always seem like purpose is equated to the lowest tier on maslow's hierarchy of needs? Is a doctor in a hospital more morally purposeful than a programmer at Snapchat? We're living on a rock in the middle of space, on a speck of dust. Purpose is what you make of it. Snapchat helps me keep in touch with my sister. Facebook lets me keep track of my friend's birthdays. I met my girlfriend of 7 months on Coffee Meets Bagel. I'm achieving self-actualization though these mundane products. I'm grateful for everyone working on those products. And I feel appreciated by customers of my social media marketing software, marketers who have just saved themselves a boatload of time and hassle. So I don't beat myself up because I work in marketing and advertising because I know that I helped someone. And as long as you too feel appreciated and help another human being out, I think the whole moral argument is bunk.
krick 12y ago
I feel that after removing all unnecessary words from the essay, the rest 10 would be make something either trivial or arguable.
gfodor 12y ago
I've decided to "rotate out" of CRUD-ish web and app development for these very reasons, after doing it for about 15 years. I can't help but feel most of the skills that developers have that get them showered with high paying, high security jobs are on a crash course with being commoditized. It's only going to get easier to develop networked data-flow oriented applications that solve business problems, so if you want security in your career you should be working on things that are, at least for now, deeply challenging and have a reasonably high knowledge barrier to entry. Particularly things that require some serious domain knowledge that your average software engineer won't pick up naturally in a short time on the job. Rails app development is not that.
- thatthatis 12y ago
  Whether the wave of abstraction drowns you or propels you depends on whether try to fight it or learn to surf it I personally love that about every year or 18 months the time it would take me to build a particular feature set drops by about half (either because libraries have arisen, I gained experience, or I have code that does half of it already). If you're not putting yourself out of a job every six months or so, someone else will.
  - gfodor 12y ago
    web developers like the OP can very easily go the way of any other field that has been killed by sufficient automation. i don't see CRUD-app development as a robust, long term skill, despite how well paying it has been the last decade. if you consider 'surfing' to mean always being up on the latest web framework or library, as many do, then I think that is too narrow a scope to consider yourself immune from being automated out of a job. if you consider 'surfing' to be looking at broader strokes in other areas of computer science and software eating the world in general, then that's a different story. you have to diversify.
    - thatthatis 12y ago
      I agree that broader software is one way to surf. I also think writing the automation that puts you out of a job is another way. Crud is never going to go away but the disequilibrium will, and many use cases will get reduced to libraries or packages.
kevonc 12y ago
Yes, there are a ton of tools that help us software engineers, but to put together a software it still takes a ton of expertise to piece it together. Let's talk about Finance, are traders not provided with excellent tools? Are analyst not provided with Factset or Bloomberg to give them insights? The whole world works like that, not just software development.
emsy 12y ago
In Germany there is a lot of talk about a "Fachkräftemangel", meaning a lack of specialists, especially for IT jobs. Many IT professionals assume that the reason is that the companies want more IT professionals so they can drive the wages lower. I find it amusing that the author of the article talks about a secure future, when there are so many "everyone should code" initiatives. It seems pretty obvious that the economy tries to drive the supply of devs high so they can lower the wages. Also, are developers (or "coders") really so highly paid in the US? In Germany, the wages for devs are relatively low, despite the often summoned "Fachkräftemangel".
noir_lord 12y ago
'Coders' who knows. Programmers are definitely worth it, if you spend $10K on a programmer to build a system who writes a system that makes a process that used to take 3 people 2 days and now takes 1 person an afternoon to complete then the RoI is clear (the last system I put into production actually saved that amount of time). Silicon Valley and the start-up scene grossly distorts the whole argument because of the insane salaries paid to developers on "It's facesmash right..but for dachshunds". Outside of the reality distortion field, there are thousands (if not millions) of developers building unsexy workmanlike products that supply a need for a business and reduces costs by more than they cost to develop. My "startup" is not sexy, I don't care about j-curves, accelerators, user trends or anything else, it is simply a well engineered (hopefully!) solution to a regulatory requirement for a specific industry, in theory I can reduce several days worth of tedious and error prone paperwork to an hour at most and make it an intrinsic part of the company and project. When it comes to hiring I won't by hiring "coders", I'll be hiring programmers. Now get off my lawn ;).
Htsthbjig 12y ago
The writer talks about Hemingway, he should learn from Hemingway to express himself in less words. Hemingway learned from news reporting. I personally know people that writes professionally, including Nobel prices in Spanish literature(I organized writers meetings, specially promising young people with already famous ones). Most of them do not believe writing is hard. In fact I remember Francisco Umbral being asked about it, how he could write something everyday for the newspaper. He said it was extremely easy, you could always find something interesting if you think about it. Thinking writing is hard is a self fulfillment prophecy. About working hard, coders do not do all the work, that is the question. Most of the work is done by a machine, the computer, like current coal miners, they use machines for doing 95% of the work, from drilling holes for explosives to removing material. They(the miners) also earn lots of money, and breathing issues are improved with machines too(full masks). The reason the retired at 40(with full pension) in places like Spain. So working hard is not that important anymore, when machines are the ones who work hard. Those do not suffer or feel bad or exhausted. Some people believe that work for being worth something needs tears, sweat and blood. Martyr psychology.

146 points by lingz 12y ago

"“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” -- Peter Drucker Are coders valuable? F ya. The reality is that almost every start up today is on a chase to grab people's attention with the glittering lure of technology. Why? Because once you get someone's attention, you can basically sell them anything. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Pinterest, etc etc the list goes on...valuations are all based on one metric - DAU. Why? Because DAU means any business can market and innovate their product, which as per my Drucker quote, are the only two basic functions of a business. PS - If the OP reads this, the "artform" of journalism is no different than a coder writing pinterest. Coding just scales WAY better.

hollerith 12y ago
DAU == daily active users.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
love the quote - have you got a citation (not challenging the provenance, just want to know)
- mindcrime 12y ago
  You got me curious as well, so I went looking. According to Michael Port in his own Beyond Booked Solid, the quote is from Drucker in Drucker's The Practice of Management. http://books.google.com/books?id=gyKbgTCs2e0C&pg=PT10&dq=%22purpose+of+business+is+to+create+a+customer%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_wt4U-OfB-2nsASVu4DQBw&ved=0CJMBEOgBMA8#v=onepage&q=%22purpose%20of%20business%20is%20to%20create%20a%20customer%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=gyKbgTCs2e0C&pg=PT10&dq=%22...
  - mbesto 12y ago
    Yup - awesome book, it's timeless.

mantrax5 12y ago

Good designers, good developers, good <insert profession here> have an acute sense of where their role is in the business. Employees who have an unclear idea of what they're doing or why they're doing it, also don't have their focus on improving their company and the lives of their customers. Hence they'd often make arbitrary decisions regarding how to prioritize their limited resources (time, money, which features go into the next milestone etc.). And in this way they may end up dragging the company down. An employee asking themselves "am I worth it" can be a sign of a dysfunctional company culture, or the problem may lie with the employee, but wherever the blame lies, people who don't know their worth are in the long run not worth that much to their company, fad and cargo cult caused disbalances notwithstanding.

kevinwang 12y ago
It looks like the title question posed by the author is more about "worth" to improving society as a whole, rather than "worth" of improving the business of the company.
- mantrax5 12y ago
  If those are in opposition, the author should probably quit his job. There's a good number of companies whose basic purpose lies in improving society.

jqm 12y ago

Are computers worth it? Well then... there is your answer!

onedev 12y ago

I hate the term "coder". It's like calling a designer a "drawer".

JoshTriplett 12y ago
I actually find the term useful, when not applied to the entire field. "Coder" seems like a more polite and less derogatory form of "code monkey", as in someone who "just" writes code and nothing else.
jcrites 12y ago
I agree. I prefer the term software engineer. Terms like "coder" and "programmer" (when referring to job roles) trivialize the profession; they set low expectations for the contributions an effective engineer will make to a business. Programming, the art of writing code, is just one piece. I wrote a comment a while back attempting to capture and explain my thoughts on the greater responsibilities and competencies of a software engineer [1]. The effective engineer has a holistic approach to software and business: > Engineering in the software field isn't /always/ about building super-reliable things. That is one factor that I think differentiates it from other engineering fields. Engineering in the real, physical space has safety implications that typically require a high level of rigor at minimum. If a bridge fails or a building collapses, that's catastrophic. Physical products are only useful if engineered to a high level of quality. However, software is useful across a wider spectrum of reliability: if a back-office web app used by the recruiting team has to come down for maintenance for 2 hours on Sunday, that may not be a showstopper. > Consequently, part of software engineering is understanding what level of robustness is needed to meet business goals, and building to it appropriately, with appropriate costs, and understanding the properties of the built system. Controlling the [tradeoffs] is what makes it engineering. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809358 Furthermore, the effective software engineer, who in a corporate environment is also an effective businessperson, understands and influences the strategy of the business, and breaks down that strategy into goals which then influence the design and implementation of software. (Regarding earlier threads about whether programming is a dead-end job:) A wider perspective on what constitutes software development, and its role in business in general, also yields better long-term career development opportunities than focusing on being solely a "programmer".

NhanH 12y ago

The essay starts out with a good premise, but in the end, he seems to have conclude that "fair market price" is equivalent to the added value to the society of the job. That seems quite a bit off of a conclusion to me.

orborde 12y ago
Not exactly. I read "I know this because of all the money they give me" as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, like he's saying something he wants to believe, that the world tells him to believe, but cannot help questioning the truth of.

qwerta 12y ago

Free soda and beer are worth a few dollars a month. Just compare dollar evaluation; managers, salesman or even HR are more valuable.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

krapp 12y ago

>In today’s world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect. But is there value in what we do? Sorry, no. The author needs to pull his head out of the bubble. In today's world (the actual world), web developers and programmers are given less credence than assembly line workers, and are considered at best a necessary evil in businesses where the actual product, itself, is something other than code. Money? As little as possible. Perks? Perks go to sales. Respect? It's not even considered real work. Granted, it's not flipping hamburgers but let's not pretend what the author describes is in any way the norm.

ForHackernews 12y ago
Are you kidding me? I think maybe you need to get out of your bubble and go work a real job for a while. Go work in food service, construction, or retail, which is what most of America is doing. Then maybe you'll appreciate the marvelous advantages you have as somebody who gets paid pretty damn well to sit in front of a blinky box and think about elegant abstractions.
- krapp 12y ago
  I've worked in all of those fields. I know exactly how much easier programming is than roofing and sanding boats and unloading trucks. Nevertheless, outside of a select few, most programmers are assembly line workers with better chairs.
  - thinnerlizzy 12y ago
    Agree. It's why I got out of full-time, on-site programming. If I'm going to be doing it, it's going to be on my terms. And the freelance market has been pretty responsive to that.
- Dewie 12y ago
  I know plenty of people who wouldn't want to touch an office job with a ten-foot pole. It's not like the creature comforts of a nice office environment is the end-all-be-all for every person and their respective inclinations.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Junior programmer (22): makes $80-100k, 120k in the Bay Area. Easily gets jobs. Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three-month job searches. Expert programmer (37): 3-5 times as valuable as the senior, so 15-50 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $150-200k. Leaves the Bay Area/NYC because he can't afford to raise kids there. Has a defined specialty. Job searches take 6-8 months because he's overqualified for everything but high-level positions, and those in his specialty number in the single-digits nationally. Master programmer (45): TO;DH. This industry pays well at the entry-level (if you went to a reputable college, live in the right city, know where to look and how to play the game) but doesn't have a clue when it comes to rewarding excellence. Getting better tends to backfire when this industry (being run by dumbass MBA types) continues to insist on structuring itself like a pyramid.

sklivvz1971 12y ago
I would qualify myself as an "expert programmer" given your scale, and it actually took me 2-3 weeks to find a job last year. It did take me six months to find a "senior level" job two years back though. My point is that it mostly depends on the economic circumstances and it's not quite correct to assume that people will specialize as they grow older - differently from the past, where IBM was giving away 10-year and 20-year presents, nowadays the average tenure at a company is about 3 years, and much shorter in younger companies and startups. The economic incentive is to be versatile, so that's what people get good at.
- leafartist 12y ago
  I totally agree.
notduncansmith 12y ago
The salary depends a lot on where you are. Junior programmers in my area can't expect to make more than ~$40k (just below Alabama's median income). I would love to have the $80k salary that you claim "junior" programmers make (and like to consider myself closer to senior, given the options you presented). Maybe it's because I live in the wrong city, or didn't go to a reputable college, or am looking in the wrong places. My point is, it's difficult to feel privileged with a below-average income. There's something to be said for the environment: the (average quality) office chairs, the incredibly smart people I get to be around on a daily basis, having a job that allows me to prop my feet up and work off my laptop all day. It's not something I take for granted, don't get me wrong; I just have a hard time feeling like I have it so much better than the guy who cleans the floors. Considering that I probably only make ~10-15k more per year and had to work considerably harder to get where I am, and that I have to work much harder day to day, we're probably about even.

wonnage 12y ago

You will always have the nagging guilt of passing by the janitor, whose job exists because cleaning bathrooms is dirty and time-consuming, and wondering why your work has more value than theirs. But what if there is no logic to the system, that it's arbitrary, and random, and has simply found an equilibrium at the moment? You could drive yourself crazy thinking about it. Why are writers valued as they are? Because that's what people are willing to pay them. Why don't they just rise up and demand better pay? Who knows. Maybe people just don't value reading that much. Is it because they're uneducated? etc. ad infinitum. Why does a web developer making to-do apps lead a better a life than someone researching cancer cures? Beats me. But it would be a complete waste of their good fortune, to be at the right place at the right time, if they didn't use this advantage. Already the system is saturated with hacker school grads, and the buzz is moving towards mobile, I can easily imagine a day where knowing Rails is no longer a golden ticket. It's as silly as wondering why you got to cross the Atlantic on the luxurious Titanic, while everyone else is scrambling to the life boats. If you truly think that your present value is purely a matter of luck or a bubble, that it's illusory, then there is no why, you'd damned better make sure you find something concrete before everything goes to shit.

Dewie 12y ago
> Why don't they just rise up and demand better pay? Because unions are bad and the Free Market will magically fix everything with its magical, invisible hand. Haven't you heard? (though I don't know if a union would make sense for writers in general.)
- toyg 12y ago
  > I don't know if a union would make sense for writers Writers have unions, and quite a few of them (remember the Hollywood strike?). Some work, some don't; but generally speaking, they did improve compensation and arrangements for the profession. The problems of the writing world are well documented, and mostly common to other creative fields: oversupply, intrinsic difficulty in quality judgement, and output that can be hard to monetise. I honestly don't understand why they were dropped with janitors, which have a completely different set of problems (mostly related to social status).

Im_Talking 12y ago

The most valuable developers are the ones that also have a good understanding of the business-side. A very valuable skill is the ability to talk to the business-types in their language. You become their conduit into the tech-world and they trust you. Most business-types are scared of the technical world.

pytrin 12y ago

The article is technically well written, but somewhat uninformed which stems from the author's limited experience and what he sees in popular media. I thought the top comment below reflected what I have seen in my 10 years in the industry, much better: " This is a very well written piece, but it's only covering the frothy tip of a very deep phenomenon. I too am a Rails developer, have been coding professionally for 15 some odd years, and I too find what VCs are chasing nowadays to be mostly time wasting crap. But that's not what software, even web software, is really about right now. It's just the glam side of the game. The real folks making real things happen are building tools and technologies that literally could not have existed 10 years ago. In my personal experience, I've built integrated web portals that show real-time electricity usage for factories, saving them 10-50 grand a month by lowering usage during peak hours. I've built sales management tools that allowed a 2 man company to scale to a distributed team of dozens. Online rental advertising systems to cut out costly newspapers. Medical order management systems. It's not glamorous, it doesn't get on TechCrunch or Hacker News, but it's real value, delivered by real professionals. And that, more than the stupid photo sharing cruft, is what's really driving developer salaries. During the late 90's, the joke/threat was "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" - the point being that lots of human work could be automated by a savvy developer. That threat has become a promise, and we (costly) web developers are the ones fulfilling that promise across a huge range of industries." - Rob Morris

lelandbatey 12y ago
Wow that quote is totally spot on. It's interesting, because I am experiencing this first hand. I just started an internship working inside a large DOE facility, PNNL. The team I'm working on just makes sites for other large projects, sites to allow scientists and researchers to communicate with each other, share data, manage content, etc. It's very much not sexy work. But it's work that keeps thousands of others productive. So that quote really hits close to home.
dpweb 12y ago
Devs getting paid well is nothing new. If you look at enterprise apps, we're making good money, but not more (or much more) than 10-15 years ago. Salaries have been pretty stagnant just like the rest of the middle class. The 21 yr old with 6 month experience making 100k. That is a newer development I think. Bubble.

nmac 12y ago

First, I agree with the sentiments of some of the above commenters, "coders" just sounds ridiculous. Now, this question is ambiguous between two different interpretations of being "worth it". Clearly engineers are "worth it" by any economic metric--viz. high employment rates and high salaries (when mean rates are compared to other disciplines/jobs). But I take the OP to have an existential dimension built into the query. Meaning: does a hacker value what she does when contrasted against what she could be doing? So, whether or not hackers value what they do is completely different from what they do being worth while. Perhaps someone working on something at Google may value what she does less than working on her own startup idea. In this respect, to each his own.

rchiba 12y ago

Thanks for sharing the article, I think it was a pretty thought provoking read. I do think that this guy has impostor's syndrome, and feels like his accomplishments are not worth what society says they're worth. But I disagree with his woebegone attitude about it as if it is his responsibility for the market's behavior. And I disagree when he tries to pin the pulse of American thought in 2014. For example, when he says that we're slowly turning to a society where > "I do this enough times each day that a simple association has formed in my mind: if you’re not technical, you’re not valuable." That kind of mindset is abnormal, a sign that he needs to diversify his media intake, and I don't think that represents the mainstream. If all you consume is TC, VentureBeat, Silicon Valley, and Betas, you'll end up thinking something along those lines. But I can tell you that out of all the people I know, that is not what they believe. In real life, you learn that people in sales, people in social work, people doing non-programming things in life are just as important. As for market behavior, there are probably unfair events happening. But I wouldn't beat myself or anyone else up about what the market does. And maybe the whole tech scene is more and more part of the news but I think that it's no reason to feel doubtful about the things programmers do everyday and their purpose no matter how mundane it may seem. The whole idea of purpose in my mind is a bit pretentious. Why does it always seem like purpose is equated to the lowest tier on maslow's hierarchy of needs? Is a doctor in a hospital more morally purposeful than a programmer at Snapchat? We're living on a rock in the middle of space, on a speck of dust. Purpose is what you make of it. Snapchat helps me keep in touch with my sister. Facebook lets me keep track of my friend's birthdays. I met my girlfriend of 7 months on Coffee Meets Bagel. I'm achieving self-actualization though these mundane products. I'm grateful for everyone working on those products. And I feel appreciated by customers of my social media marketing software, marketers who have just saved themselves a boatload of time and hassle. So I don't beat myself up because I work in marketing and advertising because I know that I helped someone. And as long as you too feel appreciated and help another human being out, I think the whole moral argument is bunk.

krick 12y ago

I feel that after removing all unnecessary words from the essay, the rest 10 would be make something either trivial or arguable.

gfodor 12y ago

I've decided to "rotate out" of CRUD-ish web and app development for these very reasons, after doing it for about 15 years. I can't help but feel most of the skills that developers have that get them showered with high paying, high security jobs are on a crash course with being commoditized. It's only going to get easier to develop networked data-flow oriented applications that solve business problems, so if you want security in your career you should be working on things that are, at least for now, deeply challenging and have a reasonably high knowledge barrier to entry. Particularly things that require some serious domain knowledge that your average software engineer won't pick up naturally in a short time on the job. Rails app development is not that.

thatthatis 12y ago
Whether the wave of abstraction drowns you or propels you depends on whether try to fight it or learn to surf it I personally love that about every year or 18 months the time it would take me to build a particular feature set drops by about half (either because libraries have arisen, I gained experience, or I have code that does half of it already). If you're not putting yourself out of a job every six months or so, someone else will.
- gfodor 12y ago
  web developers like the OP can very easily go the way of any other field that has been killed by sufficient automation. i don't see CRUD-app development as a robust, long term skill, despite how well paying it has been the last decade. if you consider 'surfing' to mean always being up on the latest web framework or library, as many do, then I think that is too narrow a scope to consider yourself immune from being automated out of a job. if you consider 'surfing' to be looking at broader strokes in other areas of computer science and software eating the world in general, then that's a different story. you have to diversify.
  - thatthatis 12y ago
    I agree that broader software is one way to surf. I also think writing the automation that puts you out of a job is another way. Crud is never going to go away but the disequilibrium will, and many use cases will get reduced to libraries or packages.

kevonc 12y ago

Yes, there are a ton of tools that help us software engineers, but to put together a software it still takes a ton of expertise to piece it together. Let's talk about Finance, are traders not provided with excellent tools? Are analyst not provided with Factset or Bloomberg to give them insights? The whole world works like that, not just software development.

emsy 12y ago

In Germany there is a lot of talk about a "Fachkräftemangel", meaning a lack of specialists, especially for IT jobs. Many IT professionals assume that the reason is that the companies want more IT professionals so they can drive the wages lower. I find it amusing that the author of the article talks about a secure future, when there are so many "everyone should code" initiatives. It seems pretty obvious that the economy tries to drive the supply of devs high so they can lower the wages. Also, are developers (or "coders") really so highly paid in the US? In Germany, the wages for devs are relatively low, despite the often summoned "Fachkräftemangel".

noir_lord 12y ago

'Coders' who knows. Programmers are definitely worth it, if you spend $10K on a programmer to build a system who writes a system that makes a process that used to take 3 people 2 days and now takes 1 person an afternoon to complete then the RoI is clear (the last system I put into production actually saved that amount of time). Silicon Valley and the start-up scene grossly distorts the whole argument because of the insane salaries paid to developers on "It's facesmash right..but for dachshunds". Outside of the reality distortion field, there are thousands (if not millions) of developers building unsexy workmanlike products that supply a need for a business and reduces costs by more than they cost to develop. My "startup" is not sexy, I don't care about j-curves, accelerators, user trends or anything else, it is simply a well engineered (hopefully!) solution to a regulatory requirement for a specific industry, in theory I can reduce several days worth of tedious and error prone paperwork to an hour at most and make it an intrinsic part of the company and project. When it comes to hiring I won't by hiring "coders", I'll be hiring programmers. Now get off my lawn ;).

Htsthbjig 12y ago

The writer talks about Hemingway, he should learn from Hemingway to express himself in less words. Hemingway learned from news reporting. I personally know people that writes professionally, including Nobel prices in Spanish literature(I organized writers meetings, specially promising young people with already famous ones). Most of them do not believe writing is hard. In fact I remember Francisco Umbral being asked about it, how he could write something everyday for the newspaper. He said it was extremely easy, you could always find something interesting if you think about it. Thinking writing is hard is a self fulfillment prophecy. About working hard, coders do not do all the work, that is the question. Most of the work is done by a machine, the computer, like current coal miners, they use machines for doing 95% of the work, from drilling holes for explosives to removing material. They(the miners) also earn lots of money, and breathing issues are improved with machines too(full masks). The reason the retired at 40(with full pension) in places like Spain. So working hard is not that important anymore, when machines are the ones who work hard. Those do not suffer or feel bad or exhausted. Some people believe that work for being worth something needs tears, sweat and blood. Martyr psychology.