Stop complaining and pay programmers more • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#111

Post by huhtenberg » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:21 AM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #93

The same thing is (and has been) happening with nursing. They complain endlessly about the "nursing shortage" unable to figure out why people might be unwilling to do a hard job for long hours requiring extra education and incurring outsized liabilities for extremely low pay. The really bad news is its starting to catch up with many doctors as well.

> for extremely low pay

Not sure where you are from, but here in Canada nurses lead very cushy lives. Salaries of 80 to 120K are not uncommon, and that's with 4 weeks of vacation, 1 day in / 3 days out schedule, etc.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#112

Post by watmough » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:26 AM UTC

mikemainguy wrote: post #34

ojbyrne wrote: post #28

I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the sal…

That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.

Isn't it even worse? None of those professions have access to copy and paste!

We all know programmers who would be sunk without it.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#113

Post by aufreak3 » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:29 AM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #5

You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs. That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.

I think there is a large factor of "specific incentives spoil the game for me" in programming. What I'm trying to say is, the moment you put a price on something you diminish its value and decrease motivation. Just pay the folks enough to get the money factor out of their minds and give them great challenging work. The last thing that a passionate and competent programmer actually wants to think about is money. Carrot/stick technology is outdated.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#114

Post by binaryfinery » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:32 AM UTC

damoncali wrote: post #7

I think you have it exactly backwards. The best programmers I know seem to be indifferent to cash. They work on the most interesting project they can find that pays them enough to live. Hiring people like that is really tough.

I am such a person. However, since I have a wife, two kids, and I track cars, "enough to live" means a LOT more than the genius buying the latest killer card deck. Work hard, play hard. Costs money.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#115

Post by hello_moto » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:37 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #104

hello_moto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to know who they are. I'm dead serious. If "great programmers" work attitude is based on mood swing, business owner will be in danger hiring "great programmers". Cause what you just said boils down to human's mood to perform. "I'd like to do this because that's what I want to do now, I don't like to do X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z are usually "testing, documentation, and mentoring".

[deleted]

Do people really throw around the words "easily get a high-paying job" that easy?

Anyone who wants to start their own startups and not making money is like having a business not turning profitable. Eventually they want the profit to be bigger than working as an employee.

If there are people who would want to work for free, or work for less money in return they get to do cool stuffs (but hear me: cool stuff including writing clean code base, writing proper documentation and writing unit-tests), let me know, I have several ideas that I'd pitch to them and let them run wild and add their own ideas... as long as I get some profits out of them...

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#116

Post by jshen » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:39 AM UTC

wake_up_sticky wrote: post #95

mkn wrote: post #18

If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems t…

"Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities." Unadulterated nonsense. On the one hand, I recall a cartoon-drawing presentation about school contests and the like. On the other hand, there are these centuries and centuries of evidence that PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES, PERIOD. If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid…

"If you think that a company couldn't assemble a team of OUTSTANDING programmers by offering each $200k a year, you're crazy or stupid or both"

This is simplistic and naive. Money isn't what motivates most programmers. I know this may be hard to understand for many people on HN, but it's true. Many of the best programmers I know are passionate about a specific area or two. Imagine going up to one of the jruby developers and saying "Hey, I think you should stop working on jruby and make an asp.net site with me and I'll pay you $200k". They're polite so they probably wouldn't laugh on the outside.

The second major problem is the assumption that offering a lot of money will some how magically make it easy to identify good talent. It won't.

The third problem is that most good programmers aren't looking for work. Offering more money won't make a difference because they'll never know anyway.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#117

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:39 AM UTC

hello_moto wrote: post #115

[deleted] wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Do people really throw around the words "easily get a high-paying job" that easy? Anyone who wants to start their own startups and not making money is like having a business not turning profitable. Eventually they want the profit to be bigger than working as an employee. If there are people who would want to work for free, or work for less money in return they get to do cool stuffs (but hear me: cool stuff including…

[deleted]

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#118

Post by jshen » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:41 AM UTC

kjksf wrote: post #51

ChRoss wrote: post #22

"Rare commodities are expensive." I do agree on this one. However, money is not always the primary motivation/reason for people to join you. My friend once told me about how he asked his team, what is the reason for them to join a company. From tens of reasons, they finally come out with two only: FUN and TEAM.

The problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those. At best during interview you meet a few team members for an hour each and maybe another hour during team lunch and everyone (including you) puts their best foot forward. There's no way to tell if they'll be a great team to work with or a daily nightmare. The same goes for fun: rarely you know exactly what you'll be doing or how interesting it'll be.…

"the problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those"

this is a real challenge. I'm trying to get better at judging if a company is good to work for, but so far it still feels like a crapshoot.

Of course, we often cheat and go to places where we already know someone :)

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#119

Post by jquery » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:44 AM UTC

amock wrote: post #4

staunch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should improve the ratio though.

Maybe, maybe not. I think a better way to filter people would be something like Justin.tv or Facebook does where they have applicants write code as part of the application. I don't have any experience with hiring so i don't have any real data, but I'd love to know how effective those are.

This only works if there's a time-limit. Facebook's doesn't have one, so they make the problems inordinately time-consuming, which has the side-effect of filtering for not just skill, but desire to work at Facebook as opposed to the many alternatives that won't make you spend the equivalent of nearly an entire workday applying. Six months ago when I applied, I spent a day completing a puzzle--and getting their puzzle-bot to accept it... it only runs every few hours, on input which is unbounded so you're not sure how optimized your solution has to be. If your solution doesn't pass, the puzzle-bot does not tell you why. Afterwards they asked me to do another puzzle at which point I voluntarily dropped out of their interview process. Overall I would say the experience was very poor and reflected badly on Facebook in my mind.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#120

Post by eldavido » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:58 AM UTC

vishaldpatel wrote: post #38

mikemainguy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.

Docs, mechanics, skilled tradesmen, lawyers,...hell even accountants have location knowledge and expertise that is location specific. - You won't drive your car cross country to a cheaper mechanic. - You won't get a lawyer from India to represent you in America. - You don't go to a doctor... well thats changing isn't it? Too bad doc education still costs so damn much in America. Its about group supply and demand. Don…

Programming, especially high-paid programming, tends to be highly domain-specific. Whether oil pipelines, financial models, or various control algorithms for aeronautics, you can't just hop jobs.

I think most programmers, and even non-programmers, don't really understand how much domain specialization affects their value. To me, this is "localized knowledge" just as much as any mechanic, accountant, or lawyer has.