Pricing Programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: Pricing Programmers

#71

Post by dasil003 » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:14 AM UTC

gizi wrote: post #26

sl8r wrote: post #25

The labor market for programers in the tech industry has two features (anecdotally observed) that are interesting to me: 1. Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation. This is in contrast to some other professional disciplines (e.g., salespeople often get paid on a percentage or commission, bankers often take a % cut, pe / vc / hf has 2% and 20%, real estate is on a…

You can never make good money as a programmer, if you let non-programmers pick the subject, or let non-programmers monetize the platform in your stead. Google and Facebook are worth hundreds of billions of dollars exactly because there is not one non-programmer with a say in them.

I actually think your first sentence is an interesting thesis that bears examination, but your second sentence is an unnuanced non-sequitur.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#72

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:15 AM UTC

gizi wrote: post #53

mattlutze wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're flooding this comment thread with these posts. A single person didn't build any of these billion dollar companies you're referencing; at some point they had to hire more people, who in turn "sold themselves" by your confused logic, to build the company. Most of these halo companies have non-programmers who were brought in to monetize and grow the value in them. Sheryl Sandberg isn't a programmer nor I think th…

You see, I don't like the mentality that exudes from "How to price a programmer". Furthermore, this site, "Hacker News", is not supposed to be upvoting that kind of posts, because in that case, the people on this site are not hackers at all. The vote here has obviously been subverted. But then again, it does not matter. Making billions is not a matter of voting or misguided pseudo-democracy. Mark Zuckerberg made hund…

How to price a programmer is a legitimate subject of discussion on a website where a large portion of the audience derives their bread-and-butter from being exactly that, programmers.

What 'hacker news' is or is not supposed to be upvoting is only fragmentary up to you, the value of your one vote which you may withhold as you please.

There isn't a day that goes by without some relative newcomer here saying with great authority what HN should or should not be. Hint: HN existed long before you arrived and the charter is broad enough that it is probably not possible for any single individual to pontificate on what HN should or should not be without considerable care about representing viewpoints different than their own. Your comment fails that particular test.

HN is made up from individuals from all walks of life, and some of us are currently in the job cycle where an article that gives information on how to improve their lives is important enough to share with others.

Making billions, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have nothing to do with the subject at hand, and if you recognize that the battlefield is the marketplace then maybe you can also recognize that programmers are active on that marketplace and that tools to help determine their value are in fact useful and worthy of discussion.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#73

Post by stdbrouw » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:36 AM UTC

sl8r wrote: post #46

freyr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation. This is true of pretty much all engineering jobs, and more broadly, most non-sales jobs. Commission becomes feasible when you can directly attribute sales or billable hours to a specific person. > Initial salaries are good, but there is wage stagnation. This is true for all engineering jobs, and also most jobs in general.…

> Care to name some, besides banking and consulting, and possibly corporate law? I'd suggest that in most fields, you don't make significantly more money until you're managing a significant percentage of people, or tasked with making decisions that set the direction the company. This is fair / you're right: I was mainly thinking of banking, consulting, law, and buy-side finance. As you say, though, there are plenty o…

Isn't this just how employment works? If you build something and it turns out to have been a total waste of time and energy, you get paid all the same. If you build something and it turns out to save the company $600k a year, you also get paid, but the surplus value goes to the company in exchange for substantially reducing your financial risk. You can't have it both ways: if you want to capture more of the value, you need to share in more of the risk.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#74

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:38 AM UTC

gsnedders wrote: post #63

gotchange wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why people pay me so much Why is this sentiment in the community common? I can't really find an explanation for it so far.

It's incredibly pervasive—it's essentially one way of imposer syndrome manifesting itself.

It doesn't seem to be so common among marketing people, lawyers, or politicians - all of whom, in increasing order of severity, might benefit from more if it.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#75

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:39 AM UTC

threatofrain wrote: post #16

Alex3917 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you have a specific framework for viewing things, but you are being deliberately obscure rather than just elucidating your thoughts, and so I think the downvotes are just. What would happen if you exercised clarity? Bad things? You are saying that a pencil user isn't worth anything, but you also recognize that a pencil user can write a script. You feel that it is the script which has value, and not the pencil…

Agreed that the presentation does not help but it is an interesting train of thought and by far the most interesting part of this particular thread on HN. Indeed the output has value, the skill by itself is of no value. Just like painting has value and writing have value. There are lots of terrible paintings, terrible programs and terrible books. Those have no value, and then there are some really good paintings, great programs, great books. Those do have value. And the skill that allowed the bad stuff to be created is the same skill that allowed the good stuff to be created. So the skill per-se is not the differentiating factor, the quality of the application of that skill is what allows one to create valuable work and being the intermediary between someones ideas and valuable work is why programmers, writers and painters can make a living.

It's the whole basis of IP law and all the associated bits-and-pieces that allow all of us to make a living. Intellectual property has a shadow side, but this side is the one that keeps the IT world afloat.

The same laws that govern file sharing allow writers, programmers and other people skilled in some art to create enough value that they can make a living, sometimes even a very comfortable one and those writers and programmers that manage to hold on to the fruits of their labor long enough can do very well for themselves indeed.

> What would happen if you exercised clarity? Bad things?

Unlikely, but not everybody is equally capable of expressing their thoughts clearly. I should know, I've struggled with this for many years and only in the last 5 or so I've gotten better at that. HN has definitely been a tremendous aid in learning how to express myself more clearly to avoid being mis-understood.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#76

Post by zo1 » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:45 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #58

meritt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting into YC doesn't guarantee someone isn't a douchebag.

I think both of you are way out of line. If you spent more than 10 seconds thinking about what the guy wrote then you'd see that there actually is a point to it. Calling him a troll and a douchebag is exactly the opposite of what HN is all about. Attack the idea, not the man or downvote and let it go.

This thread looks like it has an unusually high amount of flagged/down-voted comments.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#77

Post by dasil003 » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:47 AM UTC

freyr wrote: post #41

sl8r wrote: post #25

The labor market for programers in the tech industry has two features (anecdotally observed) that are interesting to me: 1. Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation. This is in contrast to some other professional disciplines (e.g., salespeople often get paid on a percentage or commission, bankers often take a % cut, pe / vc / hf has 2% and 20%, real estate is on a…

> Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation. This is true of pretty much all engineering jobs, and more broadly, most non-sales jobs. Commission becomes feasible when you can directly attribute sales or billable hours to a specific person. > Initial salaries are good, but there is wage stagnation. This is true for all engineering jobs, and also most jobs in general.…

> I'd suggest that in most fields, you don't make significantly more money until you're managing a significant percentage of people, or tasked with making decisions that set the direction the company. Why should programmers be an exception?

One way of looking at programmers is that they are managers of an extremely cheap, fast, scalable, yet stupid, workforce. Once that workforce is put into action it can operate indefinitely. The problem is this workforce is very rigid in what it can do, and it must be told exactly what to do. It also requires a certain amount of maintenance due to security issues and ecosystem rot, but even so, the fundamental nature of this workforce has completely changed the landscape of the global economy by discovery of a new type of worker neither human nor animal.

Looking at it in this light, programmers potentially deserve to be paid on the order of top managers and even entrepreneurs and growth-phase directors. But not all of them, because being a programmer entails getting lost deep in the weeds of the mechanics of managing this invisible workforce. So the people who are capable of doing this are not necessarily the type of people who are good at understanding and articulating the business goals. Furthermore, because of the inscrutability of the work to non-programmers it is very difficult to enforce accountability from the outside, and therefore it is all too easy for programmers to become infatuated with operations that actually yield no value to the greater business.

At the end of the day programmers can drive businesses just as management can, but the tools are different. This is why I believe calling programmers "engineers" is a misnomer—it's not because real engineering is harder, but because programming is much more open-ended; a running program is literally logic incarnate. There is no limit to what can be done with software, but whether that can be harnessed to create a profitable enterprise is another question.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#78

Post by hasenj » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:48 AM UTC

lemevi wrote: post #10

For 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…

It doesn't reflect well on you to say that basically all the projects you worked on failed.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#79

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:48 AM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #76

jacquesm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both of you are way out of line. If you spent more than 10 seconds thinking about what the guy wrote then you'd see that there actually is a point to it. Calling him a troll and a douchebag is exactly the opposite of what HN is all about. Attack the idea, not the man or downvote and let it go.

This thread looks like it has an unusually high amount of flagged/down-voted comments.

[deleted]

Re: Pricing Programmers

#80

Post by LoSboccacc » Sun, Dec 06, 2015, 10:51 AM UTC

freyr wrote: post #41

sl8r wrote: post #25

The labor market for programers in the tech industry has two features (anecdotally observed) that are interesting to me: 1. Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation. This is in contrast to some other professional disciplines (e.g., salespeople often get paid on a percentage or commission, bankers often take a % cut, pe / vc / hf has 2% and 20%, real estate is on a…

> Labor does not receive (or insist on) percent-of-value or percent-of-transaction compensation. This is true of pretty much all engineering jobs, and more broadly, most non-sales jobs. Commission becomes feasible when you can directly attribute sales or billable hours to a specific person. > Initial salaries are good, but there is wage stagnation. This is true for all engineering jobs, and also most jobs in general.…

Well, that bit about management is true but sucks.

I saved my previous employer 60k years in running cost on my first three month on the job, and couldn't get a 10% raise out of it. Just promises and nice words. Well guess what? If you pay programmers as blue collars and get them to work as blue collar in a "software factory" paying them blue collar wages, you are in a self fulfilling profecy about their value.