IMHO, the title should be fixed to mention that it is only about developer compensation in the USA . I am always surprised at the salaries in the USA. I have two bachelor degrees and two master degrees from two well established universities, and earn about 2k euro a month (before 20% tax deduction), which is considered fairly decent for a starter. Even then, many corporations outsource software development to Eastern…
Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#12As a manager I’d probably advice against picking programming unless you love it. In our educational system the increase in short-length programming classes at academy level has exploded and I doubt the market will keep up. Really great comp science or engineering students won’t ever have a problem, but I fully expect the short-length, autodidact or mediocre students to be entering a saturated market within the next f…
do you have any quantified evidence of this or is it just a gut feeling
The last position I put up for a regular .net, jboss and sharepoint position had over 300 applicants, several vastly overqualified.
I work in the public sector, so it’s not exactly because we offer what most developers consider “dream positions” and we certainly don’t offer a good salary.
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#13I have two ideas:
1. Lots of technically able people still don’t enjoy plugging their mind into a machine. Its probably hard to believe in the HN community but many people don’t enjoy the work, I’ve met a few. Maybe its too abstract or boring, its a mystery to me.
2. What multiple is the market putting on the ‘tech industry’ vs semiconductors or mineral extraction? We can actually look that up. AMZN 220; MSFT 69; FB 33; SOXX 4.7; XOM 25. Investors are paying more to fund the work of programmers than most other industries.
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#14In Seattle, salaries are definitely bimodal (at least from my experience over dozens of offers from me and fellow classmates). Many mid/small corps are paying ~75-120k base with x stock which is of course not worth anything yet. Most large competitive firms are paying more around 115-150 with 15-75 in stock. So an explicit divide between the mid/small companies and the large tech giants exists here.
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#15To the puzzle about developer comp outstripping EE or other engineering disciplines pay (ie Civil Engineering god help me), I agree that the student in those fields could apply themselves to become able programmers. So why the huge disparity in pay? I have two ideas: 1. Lots of technically able people still don’t enjoy plugging their mind into a machine. Its probably hard to believe in the HN community but many peopl…
Large compensations enjoyed by engineers in the AMZN, FB, or MSFT is not derived from "investors paying more to fund their work", as these companies haven't been dependent on investors' capital in a long time.
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#16I'm partial to the O-ring explanation. Software engineering is uniquely multiplicative because it's possible for a software engineer to create software that does software engineering. Chemical/electrical/mechanical engineers can't use their field to automate their field. Doctors and lawyers are almost exclusively service jobs, unlike the manufacturing nature of engineering. Automation is a force multiplier, and softw…
I think you misunderstood the O-ring explanation by citing that idea as an example. It doesn't mean building AI. It applies to any of those fields you mentioned. Good people in field X work together with other good people in field X in top firms -> multiplicative productivity.
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#17To become a chemical engineer, you first have to complete the course work for a degree in chemistry. Chemistry as chemistry is an extremely modular subject matter; you can solve most problems in discrete steps in isolation. In a computer science sense, chemistry is about pure functions. Very easy to analyze, as material side effects (like spontaneous detonation) are rare.
Chemical engineering, on the other hand, is about analyzing systems that leak their state everywhere and have effects that feedback into other parts of the system. But it needs to be extremely efficient nonetheless. There is no isolation because it doesn't exist in real-world complex systems. I have seen excellent chemists absolutely fail to grok chemical engineering even though it is literally the same subject matter. The only difference is that chemical engineers are required to reason about complex distributed systems; as with computer science, only a minority of practitioners ever seem to grok it despite their best efforts. Same problem, different domain. And chemical engineers are paid on a different scale than chemists as a result.
In engineering, bimodal distributions are the sorting of people that naturally have the ability to easily reason about complex distributed systems with many concurrent moving parts and people that cannot. Increasingly, the market is discriminating on this characteristic and it is reflected in wages.
Anecdotally, it is somewhat well-known that people competent at chemical engineering find advanced software engineering to be intuitive; it is a very easy second "language" to pick up. An inordinate number of chemical engineers end up in high paying software engineering careers -- it comes very naturally and lends itself to the abstract analytical toolset you develop as a chemical engineer.
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#18To the puzzle about developer comp outstripping EE or other engineering disciplines pay (ie Civil Engineering god help me), I agree that the student in those fields could apply themselves to become able programmers. So why the huge disparity in pay? I have two ideas: 1. Lots of technically able people still don’t enjoy plugging their mind into a machine. Its probably hard to believe in the HN community but many peopl…
I don't like, however, my work as a programmer. The tasks are just too mundane. I spend multiple days on a RESTful CRUD controller, just because there are so many (IMO useless and even obfuscating) layers of abstraction. The only challenging aspect is the lack of conventions and documentation.
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#19To the puzzle about developer comp outstripping EE or other engineering disciplines pay (ie Civil Engineering god help me), I agree that the student in those fields could apply themselves to become able programmers. So why the huge disparity in pay? I have two ideas: 1. Lots of technically able people still don’t enjoy plugging their mind into a machine. Its probably hard to believe in the HN community but many peopl…
Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
#20I'm partial to the O-ring explanation. Software engineering is uniquely multiplicative because it's possible for a software engineer to create software that does software engineering. Chemical/electrical/mechanical engineers can't use their field to automate their field. Doctors and lawyers are almost exclusively service jobs, unlike the manufacturing nature of engineering. Automation is a force multiplier, and softw…
> Software engineering is uniquely multiplicative because it's possible for a software engineer to create software that does software engineering. I think you misunderstood the O-ring explanation by citing that idea as an example. It doesn't mean building AI. It applies to any of those fields you mentioned. Good people in field X work together with other good people in field X in top firms -> multiplicative productiv…