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Pricing Programmers

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Re: Pricing Programmers

#121

Post by RussianCow »

Alex3917 wrote: post #106
jacquesm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're 10 steps ahead of us all and probably living more than 10 years into the future. Yes, programming is a form of literacy. But in todays world, programming is also a job. Just like being a scribe was a job in ancient times, HTML'er was a job 10 years ago (and still is in some places) and programmer is one today (but assembly programmer is a job that is now in large part taken over by compilers). And that skill h…

Perhaps I'm assuming a casual familiarity with some of pg's earlier essays than no longer exists. Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities. 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 th…

> Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities.

Just to add my two cents, I downvoted your original comment because I thought it made no sense and was bordering on trolling. This reply is much more eloquent and puts it into perspective, so I've upvoted it. I think this is a completely valid and interesting opinion on the "worth" of a programmer, and it's not one that is ever really explored. Our industry tends to focus too much on the general "market value" of developers without considering that they are more than the sum of their skills.

That said, I think you're drawing a line where one does not exist in practice. Very few developers these days are paid to just crank out lines of code. At work, I'm not asked to write a function that takes certain inputs and returns a certain output; I'm tasked with building a feature for a product. This requires much more than the skill of knowing how to code: I have to have a good understanding of the product as a whole, how everything fits together from a technical perspective, and the end users' needs. The titles of "programmer" and "software developer" (and all the other variations) are used interchangeably because the distinction essentially doesn't exist anymore—if you hire a programmer, you're expecting them to know more than just how to write code.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#122

Post by mruniverse »

dang wrote: post #120
mruniverse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't pay for people to make products, they pay for people to make them money. People don't pay for people to them to make money, they pay for people to build wealth. People don't... wait I have to throw up. Will be back.

You have a decent point here, but please don't optimize for snark on HN.

But pompous comments are ok?

Re: Pricing Programmers

#123

Post by jacquesm »

RussianCow wrote: post #121
Alex3917 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm assuming a casual familiarity with some of pg's earlier essays than no longer exists. Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities. 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 th…

> Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities. Just to add my two cents, I downvoted your original comment because I thought it made no sense and was bordering on trolling. This reply is much more eloquent and puts it into perspective, so I've upvoted it. I think this is a completely valid and interesting opinion on the "worth" of a pr…

The term you're looking for is 'analist', it was the job of the analyst to tell the programmer exactly what to do. Now we're all analyst-programmers. That makes the programming job that much more interesting but analyst was a separate job for a reason: people with that particular skill were a whole lot more rare than people that could program.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#124

Post by meritt »

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.

View his comment history and you'll see he's a constant troll and negative asset to this community.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#125

Post by dkersten »

sokoloff wrote: post #100
ownagefool wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a whole pile of depends. Particularly in your case it depends on what you love about programming. The guy who rocks into a company, tells them they need to write everything in new-buzzword-framework and use bucket-with-holes-in-it-db is arguably creating negative value and if the world was fair, they'd be paying for the privilege to be there. On the other hand, the guy who comes in and tries to deliver the produ…

I'm totally stealing bucket-with-holes-in-it-db...

Why would you want to steal a bucket-with-holes-in-it-db? It's not going to be very good.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#126

Post by spoiler »

burnallofit wrote: post #116
spoiler wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could leave, but I am not sure I want to. I like the people and some of them have become my good friends and the job was genuinely fun until I became a donkey. I have enjoyed most of it, apart from the parts highlighted earlier which frustrate and upset me. My alternative is to quit and sit at home. One of the reasons (I'm not sure how relevant it actually was) why I took the job was because my doctor said it'd hel…

You do "tech support" and are generally tech savvy? Try getting a job doing remote QA. There are online services for testing apps/software. I work for a company that employs such a service to test our stuff. Now, your real goal, it sounds like, is not to leave your current job, it is to get paid better. You can't do that without mobility.

I took the tech support job because it was the only tech-related job.

If I do get to doing work remotely, I'd enjoy development more than TS.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#127

Post by dang »

mruniverse wrote: post #122
dang wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a decent point here, but please don't optimize for snark on HN.

But pompous comments are ok?

They're definitely not great, but the class of all comments that strike someone as pompous is so large that standardizing on snark in replies would sink us.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#128

Post by Alex3917 »

jacquesm wrote: post #123
RussianCow wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities. Just to add my two cents, I downvoted your original comment because I thought it made no sense and was bordering on trolling. This reply is much more eloquent and puts it into perspective, so I've upvoted it. I think this is a completely valid and interesting opinion on the "worth" of a pr…

The term you're looking for is 'analist', it was the job of the analyst to tell the programmer exactly what to do. Now we're all analyst-programmers. That makes the programming job that much more interesting but analyst was a separate job for a reason: people with that particular skill were a whole lot more rare than people that could program.

That actually gets back to my original point.

I have a friend who also uses Python as part of his job, but he's a hedge fund manager. Although we're both ostensibly programmers, there is no way we'd be able to successfully do each others jobs, at least not without several years of training. Nor do I think that just knowing Python makes me qualified to be a professional biologist, astronomer, filmmaker, or whatever else people are using it for these days.

That's why I think it's weird to ask how much a programmer should make, since in most cases it's actually the analyst part of the job that determines how much value you're able to create.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#130

Post by scott_karana »

username223 wrote: post #21
gizi wrote: post #20

Google and Facebook are factor-11 dollar values (11-zero decimals, aka, hundreds of billions of dollars). The typical programmer will make a 6-zero revenue in his life time. You can create 11-digit value, only if you pick the subject by yourself. A non-programmer has never in history been able to pick an 11-digit subject. Only programmers can create half a trillion dollars in value.

> A non-programmer has never in history been able to pick an 11-digit subject. Yeah, no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil

To add on to that:

> By the time Rockefeller died in 1937, his assets equaled 1.5% of America's total economic output. To control an equivalent share today would require a net worth of about $340 billion dollars, more than four times that of Bill Gates, currently the world's richest man.

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