Pricing Programmers

Sure, if you're just a worker bee, you can be selfish and milk these poorly organised start-ups for all they're worth, but if you wanna step up into those senior roles and actually have a chance of making something of those options, you need to weed out folks who don't care about delivery.

I'm not saying the guy definitely doesn't deliver but there are a number of indicators that suggest that he's not actually suffering from imposter syndrome but is actually just self aware to the point that he knows the companies hiring him are not getting value for money.

Even if that is true, he himself can hardly be blamed for taking the money. Whilst I try to deliver value to my clients, I also bill them as much as I can get away with.

He basically hinted at that by saying: "because I get to do what I love (programming,...)"

I believe you and gp (lemevi) are talking from 2 different perspectives. Your perspective is more about "don't sell yourself short" or "don't devalue your skills".

The gp's perspective is more about the "mystery of the universe" as to why an enjoyable job could pay more than a boring one. It's a similar sentiment to the successful novelists, comedians, musicians saying, "I feel lucky that people pay me lots of money for doing what I love to do." (Yes, there are tons of programmers who suffer through boring CRUD coding and treat it as "just a job" but there are also many programmers who truly enjoy the activity.)

I experienced the gp's perspective in my first job out of highschool. I happened to be a decent typist so I got a job to transcribe audio to word processing documents. One day, the business owner was looking at his screen in frustration trying to make something work. I looked over his shoulder and saw things like "DO WHILE" and "DEFINE PROCEDURE" on the screen. I just looked at it and then had one of those Jurassic Park moments[1]. I said, "you need to set a variable here, and move that line there, etc etc." He was totally surprised and said he'd pay me double the hourly rate if I could fix the computer program. I couldn't believe it. I had programmed computers during middle school (age 11 to 13) and treated the whole coding activity as "playing with a toy". I stopped programming during high school and worked at a fast food joint for minimum wage. I had no idea that people paid money for programming. People will pay me more for typing "DO WHILE" than mopping floors and hauling out grease buckets?!? That's absurd!

Yes, on one level, one can do all sorts of economic analysis (supply-vs-demand, marginal utility, productivity multiplier of software) and conclude that it makes perfect sense that programmers are paid $X more than brick layers. However, even with that logical rationalization, there can still be this "mystery" of why a person typing on a keyboard in a pleasant air conditioned office makes more than a brick layer sweating in 100 degree heat. It seems unfair that a "game" from my childhood earns more than back-breaking labor.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng

As for being ahead of my time, if you look at the job market today it's true that you do have a lot of people paid purely for their ability to code. These are mostly W2 employees, who work at the kind of places where you start out as a junior developer making 60 - 80k, and then make double that after 8-10 years. And given the current state of society, this is actually a pretty good career path.

However, we also have consultants who bill on a project basis based on value rather than skill, who might easily make 400k a year even as junior developers. (E.g. c.f. patio11's essays.) And we have entrepreneurs and founding team members who get paid largely in stock, the worth of which is largely determined by how much the market values the product.

It's kind of weird because as an industry we definitely need people who have ridiculously good technical skills, to the exclusion of all else. But for the most part programming is a pink-collar job that just happens to be done mostly by men. (In that it requires education, but there is a lot of downward pressure on salaries because the people involved are perceived as being largely interchangeable.) This is why I'll sometimes describe myself as a software developer, but never as a programmer or a software engineer. Because although I know how to code and I might even spend most of the day coding, I don't ever want to work at a job where I'm paid based on my coding ability.

You hit the nail on the head that we're giving up a lot of the value "pie" in exchange for much lower risk. My mindset takes that one step farther: ensure that everyone's economic goals are aligned and stably pointed to continued employment of me and my team. That requires an exchange of my time for the company's money at a rate low enough that it's obvious to the company they're getting an economic gain from buying it and high enough that it's obvious to me that I'm getting an economic gain from selling it.

If those ranges don't overlap, you have a very unstable situation. When those ranges have large overlap, many different valuations of time are stable and mutually beneficial.

>What if the company needed you to debug some worthless software in the chain as an emergency?

If the software I'm debugging is worthless, it's hard to imagine there's a genuine emergency involving it. The mere fact that there's an emergency involving it means it has some value to someone.