Stop complaining and pay programmers more • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#221

Post by mmt » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:09 PM UTC

danudey wrote: post #46

scott_s wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.

One option is to find a qualified technical individual - either someone on staff (such as a systems administrator), or someone from outside the company whose opinion you trust (perhaps a service provider, or perhaps the lead developer at your friend's startup, etc.). Find someone who doesn't actually want the job, but who has the skills to help you narrow things down. Trim out the people who obviously aren't qualifie…

An outside person has no "skin in the game," thereby creating a skewed incentive structure. Paid by the hour, the incentive is to process as few resumes as possible. Paid by the resume, the incentive is to reduce th effor per resume.

Personally, I this kind of work terribly tedious, at best. One would have to pay me at least double my normal rate.

The traditional model might call this role an "in house" conteract recruiter, and I doubt the good ones get paid what a good programmer or sysadmin do, thoug perhaps they should.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#222

Post by Alex63 » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:14 PM UTC

chrisa wrote: post #217

huhtenberg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Here's a link to information about base pay for nurses in the US (2006). It actually mentions the nursing "shortage" at the top: http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary-surveys/nursing/

Thanks for the link! Good to see supporting evidence.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#223

Post by raffi » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:16 PM UTC

adamc wrote: post #191

jdale27 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it piqued your interest.

Is there a name for that phenomenon, where people hear terms in use but map them to the wrong words? Or the opposite, where people learn words through reading but mispronounce them?

Linguists call them real-word errors. They're very common in writing and spell checkers do nothing to protect against them.

I work on a free browser extension called After the Deadline. It picks a lot of this stuff up. It didn't pick up this particular example, next time I deploy an update to our service it will.

You may want to check it out, it works here on HN too: http://www.afterthedeadline.com

(as a note, I tend to make the same types of errors)

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#224

Post by Alex63 » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:23 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #111

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.

As the spouse of a former Canadian nurse, and friend of others, I think you might be stretching the definition of cushy. Average salary for an RN in Canada a couple of years ago was about $32/hour. You probably would clear $80K if you were a full time nurse, because of all the mandatory overtime.

If being an RN was cushy, I think there'd be less of a shortage of working nurses in Canada.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#225

Post by mmt » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:29 PM UTC

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #176

lowdown wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really, keep your "perks" - it is like giving a gift card. Just give me the cash and I will buy what I want.

It may be hard to buy extra vacation, though.

I can't imagine how, since "vacation" just means being paid for not working.

Buying vacation would just mean not being paid for that time.

Here in California, vacation/PTO is treated just like wages for regulatory purposes, including final paycheck.

What I can imagine being hard to buy is company holidays, but I'd rather have the "vacation" (read: cash) instead.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#226

Post by umjames » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:38 PM UTC

Loic wrote: post #168

jquery wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I love your work" Nothing says "I love your work" more truthfully than a bonus or a raise.

Where have you been working for the past few years? A bonus you get it twice a year, a boss respecting your work and saying thank you, you have it every single day. If you are paid correctly, you should not even need a bonus but you cannot go long without respect from your boss and peers. By the way, it is proved by countless experience that once salary is good enough, it is disconnected from happiness at work. Good…

Personally, having my boss say thank you doesn't mean much to me. That's not because I don't want appreciation for my work, but because praise carries a more significant meaning when it comes from someone who you hold in high-enough regard.

For me, high-enough regard can mean someone whose work I know of and can appreciate on its merit, or it can mean someone who used my software by choice.

For example, if my boss' actions don't show that he's interested in my happiness at work and he thanks me for making his pet project happen, it means nothing to me. But, if a customer, or someone whose work I admire, tells me they like the software I created, they've just made my day.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#227

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:47 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #208

rosejn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development. Elitist, protectionist mechanisms like this would dramatically limit the talent pool, slow down innovation, and restrict thinking to a set of norms agreed upon by a conservative organization intending to maintain the status quo. Programming is more of a meritocracy than in many other fields, and I think we should be proud of this. If people wa…

Would it really tho'? I mean, PE (or CEng in the UK) is an "elitist, protectionist mechanism" but it hasn't hurt innovation in aviation or civil engineering, has it?

Very possibly it has - there is no way to know the answer to this kind of what-if, because you either have one or you have the other, you can't let the two alternatives compete with each other over the same time scale and then measure the outcomes. Very similar to the question of whether software patents help or hurt software innovation. There has been innovation in engineering with the PE system in place, and there has been innovation in software with the patent system in place, but there is no way to know if there would have been more or less over the same time period without those controls.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#228

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 4:51 PM UTC

alextingle wrote: post #155

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.

We should not seek to emulate doctors or lawyers, but cabinetmakers, watchmakers and joiners. Programming isn't a profession, it's a craft. The trouble is that traditional crafts are not really valued any more, as their purpose has largely been supplanted by mass production. So, we have no current role models for how to organise ourselves.

Hmmm, seems like the appropriate role model to take from this may be "mass production". Perhaps that is the right and proper end game for any craft. But I tend to think that computers can't take all our jobs in this society, because once computers are fully capable of programming themselves our society will cease to exist in its present form.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#229

Post by lg » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:20 PM UTC

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…

Programmers are the managers and computers are the factors of production.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#230

Post by cabalamat » Thu, Jul 01, 2010, 5:30 PM UTC

mister_chips wrote: post #185

cabalamat wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development. Oh I don't know, the idea of programmers being better paid has a certain attraction to me :-) On a more serious note, the way that lawyers and doctors (and some other tradesmen in some jurisdictions) have managed to illegalise competition is wrong and needs to be stopped. Vets can perform operations for a tenth the cost doctors can -- is thi…

I don't think that the competition is illegal. I thought that if you are a private practitioner of either you could just set your prices lower. The fact no-one does maybe implies that either there is a shortage of these people or that they really just do it for the money neither of which are true. I'm pretty sure the entrance criteria do not also include "you must charge X for this service". But I think we see simila…

> I don't think that the competition is illegal.

Yes it is. The whole point is that certain professions have got politicians to pass laws making it illegal for people without the right piece of paper to compete with them.

As Adam Smith said: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public..."