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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#161

Post by randomdata »

morgante wrote: post #91
pmorici wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally disagree. Housing is such an over riding cost that no amount of things you can buy on Amazon will save you. The housing prices are rising so fast in SF that it makes estimates like this one LOW. you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k but Kansas has such a wide variety of hosing options that range form super cheap to substantially affordable that you could easily save as much or…

> you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k This statement is farcical. You do realize that the median wage in SF is less than $100k. How do you think those people are living? Have you actually lived in SF or NYC? You're totally out of touch with the actual costs. Yes, housing is expensive. But you can still easily get a solid apartment for $3k/m. Add in another $2k/m for food (high!) and th…

> But you can still easily get a solid apartment for $3k/m.

What does the same apartment cost elsewhere though? Cost of living calculations are not for calculating how little you can possibly spend in a given location, they are for comparing the same standard of living in various places.

It sounds like you are willing to sacrifice your standard of living to make more money, which is fine, but not comparable to the parent's calculations.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#162

Post by coredog64 »

city41 wrote: post #141
tboyd47 wrote: post #135

The discussion about bimodal pay distribution is interesting, but I think there's a much more parsimonious explanation to it. Most of the companies that are going to be paying software developers $150k+ are based in or around SV, where rent is abnormally high. But what's even more interesting to me is another question the author discusses halfway through the article: > How is it possible that programmers are paid so…

But isn't OmniCorp married to their devs too? Those devs probably took a while to get up to speed on the proprietary stack, and outside devs would have a ramp up time. Not to mention outside devs would be hesitant to take the job seeing as they'd get stuck learning proprietary technology making them less mobile.

There's actually a practical case study in this. Epic Systems, which uses MUMPS, is reasonably well known for hiring naive college grads, teaching them MUMPS, and then exploiting the crap out of them.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#163

Post by krakensden »

morgante wrote: post #91
pmorici wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally disagree. Housing is such an over riding cost that no amount of things you can buy on Amazon will save you. The housing prices are rising so fast in SF that it makes estimates like this one LOW. you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k but Kansas has such a wide variety of hosing options that range form super cheap to substantially affordable that you could easily save as much or…

> you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k This statement is farcical. You do realize that the median wage in SF is less than $100k. How do you think those people are living? Have you actually lived in SF or NYC? You're totally out of touch with the actual costs. Yes, housing is expensive. But you can still easily get a solid apartment for $3k/m. Add in another $2k/m for food (high!) and th…

> How do you think those people are living?

Most of them are grandfathered in via rent control. Some immigrant groups give preferential treatment to people coming from the old country, but if you are on HN, you can't access those networks, and you might be too fussy anyway.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#164

Post by jghn »

logicchains wrote: post #112
driverdan wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think it depends where you study. In my university, SE was basically "Write essays about why OO is great and draw lots of UML".

Perhaps things have changed since I was in school about 15 years ago but I always called it "academics teaching you their warped view of what life as an industry programmer is like". I quickly learned that nothing which was covered in those classes were things I did in my jobs once I graduated.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#165

Post by tboyd47 »

city41 wrote: post #154
tboyd47 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but you can't re-negotiate your salary once you're in the job. So OmniCorp has all the leverage there.

Do they? If you're the one developer in the world keeping their tech going, and the nearest next developer is 6 months of ramp up time away (plus the time for the hiring process), you'd have some leverage.

In this hypothetical scenario, the developer has no leverage to renegotiate, because they have no job options outside of OmniCorp, hence, no BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement). If the developer was homeless or independently wealthy, and not in need of a job, they might have the ability to terminate the agreement without reaching a new one. Then the company would truly have something to lose.

But OmniCorp knows that the developer has to pay rent, and no other company is going to offer them anything but an entry level job, because the only experience they have is OmniCorp this, OmniCorp that.

It may seem far-fetched, but believe me, this discussion is hitting close to home for me. My team is currently moving to a highly customized tech stack that is open-source, but has zero or near-zero adoption outside of the company. It's scary; I've been in software for eight years and I feel like I'm fresh out of college. If you're in software I hope it never happens to you.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#166

Post by Bartweiss »

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…

I've held this basic theory for a while, and it seems to explain a lot of things about the state of software engineering.

Most visibly, there's a wild disagreement about whether we have too many programmers, or not enough. Big tech companies consistently say that they struggle to find programmers, while contrarians at places like The Atlantic love writing pieces about how we're education way more programmers than we hire each year, and the bubble is going to burst.

The ultra-cynical take is that companies are trying to drive a crash to drop salaries. It fits with the wage-fixing collusion, but doesn't really explain things like paying massive referral bonuses for new hires.

The more interesting take is that it's about this bimodal distribution. "A degree in computer science" is a pretty amorphous thing, and thinkpiece writers who assume that every CS program produces employable CS-job-seekers aren't going to get decent data.

So I think the explanation might be that CS isn't harder than EE or chemical engineering, but rather less prescriptive. There's a huge range of programs producing "CS degrees", and jobs titled "software engineering", and they're not really describing the same things.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#167

Post by MollyR »

gvb wrote: post #149
mafribe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I don't think there is much difference in intrinsic ability. I'm absolutely convinced that every healthy person can become a really good programmer. But becoming a really good programmer requires putting in a lot of time doing programming, and a lot of students don't put in that time.

I've been programming for nearly 40 years. Based on my interactions with others, programming is an intrinsic ability. People that don't have that intrinsic ability can cut'n'paste their way through simple programs, but really struggle to understand what they are doing and why their program works (or not). Anecdata: My high school got access to a computer (dialup modem). I essentially taught myself programming and the…

This is surprising. I used to be like your second student according to my father. He taught me most everything I know, and my brother used to be like your first student.

I found what personally helped me to overcome the insight bridge/gap was I had to read several different books to find the right analogy that helped achieve the "insight".

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#168

Post by ffjffsfr »

asdf742 wrote: post #27
narrator wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glassdoor.Com is a pretty good source for salary information.

I just peeked and even Google and Apple don't come close in similarity to the data presented in the article.

it's really difficult to get good salary information. glassdoor.com is nice but getting data from them will be pain (you probably cant crawl them). I was thinking about writing some spider parsing Stack Overflow careers or "who is hiring" HN threads. But if you get data in this way you only get salaries offered and not salaries actually paid. I guess salaries paid might differ from what is offered. There was a spreadsheet so maybe OP could check this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11331223 I wonder if this will confirm ideas about bimodality.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#169

Post by bzbarsky »

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?

> If you were living on $40k/yr in Kansas City, you could move to SF and suddenly be saving $80k/yr

No, because not only do we have a progressive federal tax system, but state/local taxes in San Francisco are higher than they are in Kansas City.

Just running the numbers for a simple case, say you are single and renting. You earn $80k in Kansas City. Based on http://dor.mo.gov/forms/MO-1040%20Fillable%20Calculating_201... it looks like $2100 is not taxed as a personal exemption and $5000 is not taxed if you pay at least that much in federal taxes (which we will; see below). $6300 is standard deduction. So deductions are $13,400, taxable income is $66,600. Per the table on page 25 of http://dor.mo.gov/forms/MO-1040%20Instructions_2015.pdf that gives us $3771 in MO tax. Note, not enough to make it worth itemizing federal taxes if you rent.

Federal taxes for 2015 would give you a $4000 personal exemption and $6300 standard deduction, for taxable income of $69,700. That's gives a federal tax of $13218.

Total taxes are $16,989, for after-tax income of $63,011.

OK, let's look at San Francisco. Salary is $150k. Looking at https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2015_California_Tax_Rates_and_E... the standard deduction for state taxes is $4,044 (less than Missouri, which is ridiculous given cost of living). Personal exemption is $109 (really?). Taxable income is $145,847. State tax is $11040. That's enough to make it worthwhile to itemize federal deductions. I didn't bother to look into the AMT rules for CA; this is meant to be a simple estimate. By definition the AMT can only make things worse here.

Federal taxes again have a $4000 personal exemption, our $11040 itemized deduction, taxable income of $134,960. Federal tax is $30860.

Total taxes are $41900, for after-tax income of $108,100.

OK, so say you were living on $40k in expenses in Kansas city, making $80k pre-tax, saving $23k per year. You move to San Francisco, start making $150k pre-tax, expenses go to $75k (if you accept the 1.87x cost of living difference). You are now saving $33k per year. More, true, but nothing even close to $80k/year.

Note, by the way, that the cost of living difference is largely driven by housing costs in this case....

> Would you really rather have $600k in Kansas City than $1 million in SF?

It really depends on my lifestyle. Still for a single filer, the Federal marginal tax rate on that extra $400k is 39.6%. The CA marginal tax rate is 12.3%. Medicare marginal rate is 2.35%. So overall marginal tax rate is 54.25%. CA taxes on that first $600k would be about $60k while MO taxes would be about $35k. So the extra $400k is actually about $160k post-tax.

This is the part where lifestyle matters: housing in SF can eat up a large chunk of that if you let it... If you're single, SF is probably a win in the 150k vs 80k case. If you have a family, chances are it's not.

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