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Stop complaining and pay programmers more

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Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#281

Post by greeen »

earl wrote: post #245
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.

Do you actually know any nurses, because I doubt it from your description. My gf is an EMT, and two of my sisters are nurses. Here's the actuality: Nurses are paid OK. They work long stressful jobs with severe penalties, both moral and civil, for screwing anything up. There is a high chance of serious injury, particularly while trying to move or assist fat or obese patients, of which there are more and more due to th…

"particularly while trying to move or assist fat or obese patients"

There is a mechanical solution for this. A crane like apparatus for moving a patient. It was used in a revalidation center when i saw it last. Instead of a couple of nurses who move one patient, one nurse uses the device. This one nurse moves the 'cloth' which holds the patients under the patient etc.

A couple of Nurses are faster though.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#282

Post by jholman »

flsvilling wrote: post #268
alextingle wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Programming is not a craft. A craftsman produces some product, whereas a programmer designs some product that is then produced by a compiler or by copying a file. That the production of software is trivial and fully automated, doesn't mean that there is no distinction between production and design. We already have mass software production.

Overall, I strongly agree. I agree so strongly, I've been thinking about counter-examples, and I think I've found a few corner cases. ;)

Firstly, obviously, some aspects of programming are crafts-like. When we write conditionals as if(4 == x) instead of if(x==4) (for languages where variable assignment in a conditional is legal but not what you want), that's craftsmanship. Analogously, part of the process of designing a building is drafting, and that is a craft. A common error is to think that drafting is the primary task of architecture (at least, that's a common error about programming).

Less confidently, I would argue that the closer you get to the metal, the more craft aspects appear (without claiming that these aspects dominate), and that when we use a compiler, part of what we're getting is automated crafting. So we see three cases where we take back that crafting aspect into human hands...

First, for a new platform, sometimes some of the work is done by hand.

Second, many programmers _enjoy_ the craft of programming, and so practice it for fun. For example, code golf is craft.

Third, sometimes crafted is more appropriate. We usually prefer a cheap mass-manufactured physical object (high-quality, but not customized), but sometimes we want something handmade for the situation. I think that writing assembly by hand has some parallels with this (not to argue that writing assembler is more craft than design).

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#283

Post by stray »

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?

Malapropism.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#284

Post by stray »

glomek wrote: post #278
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.

> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? Easy. Instead of giving the programmers managers, put the programmers in charge of their own projects and give them administrative assistants to handle all of the non-programming and non-decision-making parts of the job.

t

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#285

Post by jholman »

jquery wrote: post #121
ryanbigg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer bonus and perks are definitely incentives, but a nice steady "I love your work" kind of vibe is a great way to keep me in my job.

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

I agree. Especially if the employee is actively asking for a bonus or a raise, and being denied.

If an employee says to the boss "Hey, I think I'm worth X more than you're paying me", and after extensive "due process" the answer comes back from management as "No, and you can't have more time off either", that's a clear sign that the decision makers have, at best, limited respect for that employee's work. Verbal claims of respect, at this point, are almost offensive.

That said, on the other hand, piles of cash but nary a kind word is also not very respectful.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#286

Post by [deleted] »

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/

[deleted]

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#287

Post by contextfree »

danudey wrote: post #48
dedward wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd imagine that, but you'd be wrong - there are a great many technical employees who don't realize they are way out of their league and will apply anyway.

"Hey, I've got 'two years of experience with .NET'! I remember, because it was my birthday last week and on my birthday two years ago I wrote a little digital clock app from a tutorial I found in a magazine. Man, who ever thought ten minutes in Notepad would net me a $100k job! I'm totally going to apply, and when I get this job I'm never working at another Burger King again!"

Haven't been on the hiring side, but in my experience as an applicant years-of-experience requirements are often inflated and represent wishful thinking. I'll usually apply to anything that lists within 50% or so of what I have, and often still get called in for interviews despite my resume clearly showing I don't meet the nominal criteria.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#288

Post by mmt »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #234
mmt wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your experience, is it actually as easy to get unpaid time off as you make it sound? Certainly, not being paid for not working is entirely possible, but it's much less desirable if you lose your job for it... ( My job allows you to "buy" extra time off, so it's not an issue for me; but I figured this was uncommon, especially in the States.)

If I make it sound as easy as taking paid vacation, then yes, but with a small sample size.

The much larger sample size I have for a related question: is it any easier to take vacation at a company which offers 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks annually? To this, I've found the answer is "no."

Both situations have a simple explanation, which is that, except for the smallest companies, the person(s) setting the PTO policy is not the same as the one approving absences. That is, my manager cares about my availability, whereas HR and/or Accounting cares about how much I get paid during such absences.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#289

Post by fforw »

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…

Every programmer is an executive in the sense that his code actually ends up doing business decisions -- all in a complexity far above the average managers head. I guess they'd be scared shitless if they'd understand it.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#290

Post by dblumenfeld »

kranner wrote: post #85
timr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well." ...which is why you have a screening process. When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on: 1) Their screening process sucks. 2) They aren't attracting good programmers. High salaries help wi…

I'm trying to bring up an automated screening service at http://codeboff.in/ (self-promo alert) because I think we need way more of these, especially being the sort of people who could make them. Edit: by 'we' I meant 'we as programmers'.

There is already codechef.com, codility.com, spoj.pl, online-judge.uva.es, ideone.com, turingscraft.com, etc. How is your service going to be different?...
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