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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#101

Post by jhorna003 »

hueving wrote: post #99
morgante wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have an insanely huge apartment for rent to increase by $4k/m by moving to SF. But even assuming that -36k adjustment, you're much better off making $150k in SF than $80k in Kansas City. Of course, you also have the option of downsizing into a smaller apartment. The amenities in a large city make it much easier to have a small apartment (for example, in NYC I drop off my laundry instead of washing it at home…

In many places in the US you could easily rent a 3 bedroom house with a 2 car garage for $1000. Guess how much a 3 bedroom house is in San Francisco. >you're much better off making $150k in SF than $80k in Kansas City. Don't forget state income tax and tax bracket. Also don't forget that some things like student loan interest aren't deductible above $80k. And don't forget that to get the mortgage interest deduction y…

Galapagos Natural Life did a great job for us.https://www.galapagosdanatours.com/galapagos-cruises/ They quickly found an excellent boat in the Galapagos, their lodge in the Amazon was excellent as well

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#102

Post by driverdan »

mafribe wrote: post #15

I teach computer science at a well-known, large and mediocre university. I see bimodal grade distributions all the time. The more technical a subject, the more bimodal the grades. In fluff subjects like software engineering where grading relates to essay writing and group projects, grade distribution tends to be gaussian. OTOH in technical subjects where I grade by automated test suits, basically students fail almost…

> In fluff subjects like software engineering where grading relates to essay writing and group projects

How is SE a "fluff subject?" Why are they writing essays? When I took SE we had individual programming projects and a group project to write a compiler. Not fluff at all.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#103

Post by douche »

morgante wrote: post #66
pmorici wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$80k in Kansas City and $150k in San Francisco is exactly the same amount of money after accounting for differences in the cost of living. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=$80000+salary+Kansas+C...

I hate these reductive COL adjustments. They're preposterous. Even if you assume that all your expenses are linearly multiplied (hint: Amazon costs the same no matter where you live), your savings are a lot more afterwards. If you were living on $40k/yr in Kansas City, you could move to SF and suddenly be saving $80k/yr. Would you really rather have $600k in Kansas City than $1 million in SF?

Yes, because I'd be living in Kansas City, and not SF.

For one, I'd be paying about half as much in income taxes, even if I was earning the same salary in both places.

For two, I'd be living in a midwestern state with more reasonable laws and regulations, as opposed to California.

Of course, I'd rather make $100,000 and live in Montana, or Alaska, or the northern band of New England, than in either of these places...

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#104

Post by ghaff »

morgante wrote: post #66
pmorici wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$80k in Kansas City and $150k in San Francisco is exactly the same amount of money after accounting for differences in the cost of living. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=$80000+salary+Kansas+C...

I hate these reductive COL adjustments. They're preposterous. Even if you assume that all your expenses are linearly multiplied (hint: Amazon costs the same no matter where you live), your savings are a lot more afterwards. If you were living on $40k/yr in Kansas City, you could move to SF and suddenly be saving $80k/yr. Would you really rather have $600k in Kansas City than $1 million in SF?

When housing is the overriding factor in COL differential (as it tends to be in the Bay area relative to other locations), you probably need to look at something after-tax pay less mortgage/rent for a house/apartment where you're realistically going to live in the respective areas.

Clearly there are other cost and quality of life tradeoffs to consider, but the above gives you a pretty good baseline to work off.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#105

Post by gaius »

phd514 wrote: post #64
joeblau wrote: post #28

> Programming also doesn’t have a licensing body limiting the number of programers, > nor is there the same prestige filter where you have to go to a top school to > get a well paying job. This is my favorite quote from this article. I went to a great school and even though it wasn't Berkley, Stanford, MIT, or CMU, that qualification has never limited my ability to get great opportunities.

While it's true that a prestigious degree is not strictly necessary for obtaining a good job, in my experience, it helps a lot in getting your resume nearer the top of the stack for those job openings.

It matters alot in the first 5 years of your career.

Consider tho' that a developer with say Google on their CV has the "prestige" that once would only have been conveyed by a university.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#106

Post by gaius »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #46
rmk2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A roadworker should be paid amazing rates, then, because millions of people will end up using that road.

Construction workers are traditionally resources, They can be quickly replaced. With software this becomes tricky. You need to spend considerable time, amount and energy to find the correct replacement who can drive it with same efficiency. The 2 reasons why companies like Google, Facebook etc pay so much is because: 1) They want to attract the top talent, top 1%, 5% may be. 2) They want to keep people happy so that…

The majority of companies consider developers to be "resources" too. Do you have an HR department where you work?

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#107

Post by gaius »

NhanH wrote: post #6
dkopi wrote: post #3

The most important thing to remember about developer compensation, especially when comparing to more "traditional" roles, is scale. A programmer working at a large internet company may be impacting millions upon millions of people. Building a feature that lets you collect (or save) a penny from a user every month is worth $240K a year when spread out over 2 million users. $120M when spread out over 1 billion users. T…

I was thinking along that line too. In traditional more "human" field, a good lawyer/ doctor can just do that much, regardless of how good you would be. It would be interesting to compare revenue or profit per employee for tech company, comparing to law firms and the like. Another thing is that we believe (ie. The Mythical Man Month) in software, there is a limit of programmers per task before you just can't throw an…

would be interesting to compare revenue or profit per employee for tech company, comparing to law firms and the like

Apple makes about $2m/employee/year. Goldman Sachs makes about $1.2m. These metrics are easy to get for any public company.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#108

Post by codingvelocity »

phd514 wrote: post #64
joeblau wrote: post #28

> Programming also doesn’t have a licensing body limiting the number of programers, > nor is there the same prestige filter where you have to go to a top school to > get a well paying job. This is my favorite quote from this article. I went to a great school and even though it wasn't Berkley, Stanford, MIT, or CMU, that qualification has never limited my ability to get great opportunities.

While it's true that a prestigious degree is not strictly necessary for obtaining a good job, in my experience, it helps a lot in getting your resume nearer the top of the stack for those job openings.

My experience so far is, i've made more opportunities for myself going to the bar/pub/coffee shop after a meet up to shoot the shit with my peers than anything i've ever put on my resume.

Your degree is largely just a way to break the ice with some companies, hiring manager x went to school y so he knows that you must be as good as him. Simplified greatly obviously (you still have to know your stuff), but networking is hugely important

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#109

Post by whorleater »

driverdan wrote: post #102
mafribe wrote: post #15

I teach computer science at a well-known, large and mediocre university. I see bimodal grade distributions all the time. The more technical a subject, the more bimodal the grades. In fluff subjects like software engineering where grading relates to essay writing and group projects, grade distribution tends to be gaussian. OTOH in technical subjects where I grade by automated test suits, basically students fail almost…

> In fluff subjects like software engineering where grading relates to essay writing and group projects How is SE a "fluff subject?" Why are they writing essays? When I took SE we had individual programming projects and a group project to write a compiler. Not fluff at all.

SE is often relegated to a "fluff" subject in schools simply because it's, well, not very challenging. Classes based around the topic of SE are often topics like "Formal Software Development Methods" where you learn about verification of concurrent programs, formal symbolic testing, contracts, explicit model checking, etc. These are all "soft skills" and hard to directly generalize into a programming assignment, so students often times write essays formalizing their logic.

Frankly, I'm surprised that your SE class did compilers at all, many schools in CS have their own "operating systems programming"/"low level programming"/"compiler design" sort of class, where the topic is fully fleshed out, rather than just a tiny project.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#110

Post by Retric »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #67
Retric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not about time, it's being able to think flexibly. I have seen several freshman who never coded before where 1/3 of them get it in a few weeks and have an easy 4 years, where the second set either drops out or spends a lot of time trying to keep up. An assembler class where the high end spent 2-3 hours and come in with 3-5 pages of code vs. the low end that spent 50x as long had 100+ pages of code that di…

I don't think he was refering to time spent on a given program; rather, for people who don't intuit CS concepts time spent staring at the page can make the difference between a person who never gets it and one who eventually does. At that point, there isn't much functional difference that person and a person who got it from the start.

I don't think it's really about the CS concepts as it is being able to link them together flexibly. Suppose you want the median value in an array. Well sorting makes it easy, but you don't need to fully sort the array. A modified quick sort seems like a good compromise, then again using a built in sort is probably fast enough and much less code.

That's the kind of thinking that really works. Because you can look up well known probelms, but you need to start thinking in terms of trade offs instead of going with the first idea.

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