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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#291

Post by ryuker16 »

warfangle wrote: post #20
ghaff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect even more so. Top school, law review, good federal clerkship, white shoe New York firm and everyone else. (Of course, that's a gross oversimplification. There are lots of lawyers with, e.g. solid in-house corporate counsel jobs. But the overall "commodity" market for lawyers isn't great these days.)

And there are many lawyers who work on social issues like tenant advocacy that make a whooole lot less than, say, an M&A lawyer.

Those are trustfund lawyers who plan to join the big boys in a few years or switch careers(like running dad's business).

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#292

Post by sev »

Just bimodal?

I work for a large, well-known tech company and they just re-titled all of their front-end engineers to "Software Engineer" (probably to stop creating a pay divide between front-end and back-end engineers). If you have a "Software Engineer" doing basic wordpress stuff, another "Software Engineer" doing PHP/Zend framework stuff, another doing pure JS/React/Angular stuff, and another doing backend services (concurrency/spring boot/API, etc) - the pay scales of all these "Software Engineers" should be different.

I'm surprised it's not trimodal.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#293

Post by ryuker16 »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #26

Funny thing that I was having a discussion with one of my friend who is in the middle of salary negotiation. The company is pushing him hard to accept the offer well below than his expectations and he was expecting more hike as he was relocating to bay area. He was quite disappointed that he didn't get the salary figure he was expecting but still wanted to accept the offer as he didn't want to loose the opportunity.…

There is a big difference between back-office and front office or finance pay. I'm sure back-office monkeys get jockeyed around for at little as possible in salary negotiations with promises of a huge bonus to help them ignore it.

Law pay is great on the upper on end and a shit show on the lower end. Many lawyers are self employed for a reason.

Doctor pay IDK much about but given the small pool of applicants, it makes sense to be transparent.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#294

Post by ryuker16 »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #37
crispyambulance wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale is not the most important factor. It really is about supply and demand. If employers could get away with paying their developers 30K a year, they would (... and they do whenever possible). The actual scale of the work certainly informs the compensation, like it might for other jobs like journalists for example, but that is only part of the story. If you need developers, you simply gotta pay them salaries the ar…

Scale is part of the demand side of the supply and demand equation. Using dkopi's example, at a company with 2M users, it's worth hiring a developer for each "penny per user per month" problem. A company with 1B users, it's worth hiring a developer for each "0.002 pennies per user per month" problem. Or similarly, if you look at developers who work on internal tools that save other developers time. At a startup with…

Tell that to investors.

Long term Efficiency versus short term gains is the issue.

A company like google can get away with this but not most.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#295

Post by ryuker16 »

markbnj wrote: post #200

Being a physician or attorney confers additional compensation in the form of social status and prestige which I think it's fair to say we don't get by virtue of working on code. I also think that as a general rule there is a fairly small percentage of people who like programming, and can sit in front of a computer and focus on code for hours at a time and consider that a fulfilling way to make a living. I doubt that…

I beg to differ....nobody thinks programmers are slouches in the pay and intelligence area.

Plenty of broke ass lawyers running around like Better Call Saul.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#296

Post by yc2cult »

vonmoltke wrote: post #269
dismantlethesun wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well the first rule in developing is 'lifestyle', I agree with you 100% that if you willing to work in a shit-hole be that east-coast or houston, or any shit-hole in USA, sure there will be a job Did you just call an entire continental coastline a 'shit hole'? An entire coastline of 112.6 million people, dozens of cities and weather ranging from cold-temperate to near-tropical? Well, I must say I'm surprised. I kne…

> near-tropical? Nitpick: South Florida is a legit tropical climate zone. Otherwise, yeah, that post rustled my East Coast jimmies.

If you don't know that the eastern seaboard of the USA is a sinkhole of humanity, and a polluted hell, then its because you have not been any where else.

In SF they call LA the armpit.

West coast we call the east coast the arm-pit of america,

What's new here? nada, the issue is the truth cannot be told in SJW forum that is yc/hn.

Anybody that takes a job near DC in defense is a loser.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#297

Post by alecco »

geodel wrote: post #134
alecco wrote: post #92

I'd like to see that adjusted to cost of living where the job is. I bet is not bimodal anymore.

I do not have US data but in India a few friends and relatives living in same city have 5:1 ratio in compensation for same no of years as experience. The lower ones are in traditional IT job others in mobile app / big data. I think in US it will be same cutting edge skill vs traditional skills.

Ratio of highest/lowest doesn't have much to do with distributions. This is about having blocks of people paid more than others.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#298

Post by dredmorbius »

bpyne wrote: post #86
alistproducer2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a large corp that has recently insourced all its IT. To support this they have been vacuuming up as much mediocre IT talent as they possibly could. Every once in a while they hire a person who is curious about the field and competent. For the most part, though, the majority MIS/CIS folks who couldn't hack CS or were business until a professor told them they could make a lot more money in MIS or "experienced…

What I find in in-house IT is that CS curiosity and ability to develop good software aren't the critical traits. In those environments, a "developer" spends the majority of his/her time integrating vendor solutions and writing connector code. Often they are task switching rapidly between projects, operations, and support. The critical skills belong to executive function: time planning, task switching, communications,…

That vendor-integration (and vendor-relationship-management), rapid task-switching, ops / support description sounds exceptionally familiar. It's what I view as more a dev/ops role, though it's also somewhat the old-school Unix-class sysadmin model. Someone who's familiar with compiler and scripting tools, and writes a fair bit of glue, but who is mostly building systems out of component parts, rather than coding them up from scratch.

It's the task-switching and firefighting elements of that position which tend to dominate, and which I've found increasingly untenable (at least to my own personality) with time. I need the long, clear timeblocks in which I can actually think.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#299

Post by sctb »

yc2cult wrote: post #296
vonmoltke wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> near-tropical? Nitpick: South Florida is a legit tropical climate zone. Otherwise, yeah, that post rustled my East Coast jimmies.

If you don't know that the eastern seaboard of the USA is a sinkhole of humanity, and a polluted hell, then its because you have not been any where else. In SF they call LA the armpit. West coast we call the east coast the arm-pit of america, What's new here? nada, the issue is the truth cannot be told in SJW forum that is yc/hn. Anybody that takes a job near DC in defense is a loser.

We ask that you please comment civilly and substantively on Hacker News or not at all.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#300

Post by vonmoltke »

cestith wrote: post #279
vonmoltke wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are programmers working for a "tech" company that is not in Silicon Valley?

It depends on how you define "tech" I guess. There are lots of companies I'd call tech companies that are either headquartered elsewhere or have branch offices elsewhere that include programmers. Which of these don't have programming jobs at "tech" companies? Seattle (Microsoft and Amazon)? San Francisco isn't technically in the valley... Phoenix (GoDaddy)? Austin (Blizzard, a bunch of non-HQ offices like eBay, Googl…

I think you and your siblings misunderstand. I meant, in the bimodal distribution of the post I was responding to, where do the programmers who work for these companies fall? I am one of them, after all.
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