Pricing Programmers
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Pricing Programmers
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Re: Pricing Programmers
#2Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy.
Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
Re: Pricing Programmers
#3Or a wanker.
Re: Pricing Programmers
#4Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
Technical writers, human language translators, lawyers, and many other professions are primarily about "active literacy" as much or moreso than software developers.
Do you feel they are all worth $0 too, or just programmers?
Re: Pricing Programmers
#5Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
At one point in history, knowing how to use a typewriter was itself a marketable skill, because few actually had access to one and knew how to use it. These days, most people in the developed world know how to type, but still only a small portion know how to write programs. Saying that this is worthless is silly at best; someone is willing to pay someone else to turn their ideas into code, so it must be worth something.
Re: Pricing Programmers
#6Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
If you need someone with programming skills and are willing to pay them, and someone with those skills will work for that amount, that's the price of a programmer. Asserting that the skill is worthless doesn't make sense as long as people will pay for it.
Even if you just consider it a form of literacy, scribes absolutely were paid to do their work before literacy was as widespread
Re: Pricing Programmers
#7Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
Technical writers, human language translators, lawyers, and many other professions are primarily about "active literacy" as much or moreso than software developers. Do you feel they are all worth $0 too, or just programmers?
The screenplay for The Hunger Games has value. A shopping list also has value. However, their values are very different.
Sure, each was created by a pencil user. But they don't actually have anything in common, so asking how much money pencil users 'should' make doesn't even make sense as a question.
Re: Pricing Programmers
#8Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
If you need someone with programming skills and are willing to pay them, and someone with those skills will work for that amount, that's the price of a programmer. Asserting that the skill is worthless doesn't make sense as long as people will pay for it. Even if you just consider it a form of literacy, scribes absolutely were paid to do their work before literacy was as widespread
People don't pay for "programmers" they pay for people to make products.
Re: Pricing Programmers
#9Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
> Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job.
Programming absolutely is a job. Its a thing people pay people to do for them.
> It's not even a skill;
Its absolutely a skill.
> rather, it's more of an active literacy.
Literacy is a skill. It becomes less of a notable skill when its common enough (near universal) in society, fading into the background. But programming absolutely isn't that common of a skill.
> Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
You might have a case if you were talking about a "computer user" rather than a "programmer", but as it is, that's just silly.
Re: Pricing Programmers
#10For years, from one job in the bay area to the next I worked on products that never made any money and ended up being canceled. Even when I worked on a project that ended up making money I spent a year working on a version that was rebooted from scratch before customers ever saw it.
At a couple of startups that never took of afterward I could clearly see the impact that code I wrote was making on sales and value. It wasn't very much.
I'm not sure why people pay me so much, but I'm glad they do because I get to do what I love (programming, not not shipping), and I get to live off of that at the now rare and fading middle class standard of living.