Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 584 posts

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#241

Post by salmonfamine »

dhd415 wrote: post #233
salmonfamine wrote: post #212

I think the explanation for bimodal dev salaries is pretty clear, and is similar to the explanation for the bi-modality in Lawyer salaries. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and whatever other big name you want to throw in the pot, are competing for developers. However, they are not competing for the same developers as Epic Systems, for example. FAANG (or whatever) are competing for a highly skilled subset of devs that can m…

I think skill differentials in programming is a contributing factor to the bimodal distribution. I think there's also another factor which is the degree to which one is an active "curator" of one's own career. I've known some devs who were quite talented but were perfectly content to stay at low-paying jobs where the value they generated for their companies for developing CRUD or other low-multiplier apps was moderat…

Sure, and top companies are not necessarily discriminating amongst dev candidates based solely on technical merit. In fact, there are plenty of recent articles that claim that Google is looking for more and more "soft" skills in addition to high technical merit.

Point being, there are probably lots of factors that combine to make a candidate skilled enough to get hired at Facemazon. It's just that having that combination of skills is rare, so the salary gap persists.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#242

Post by unoti »

fuggedaboudit wrote: post #197
aaavl2821 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two interesting correlaries: 1) programming seems to be one of the only "hard" professions that pays well (compared to math researchers, hard science researchers, or even things like some social work -- that's really hard in entirely different ways). Of course I'm probably missing some hard stuff that pays well 2) programming seems to be the "hardest" of the high paying jobs mentioned. Once you get…

I guess the grass is always greener. I'm a lawyer who lurks here occasionally. Most legal jobs involve 60+ hours of work, being on call 24/7, and there is pretty much no legal equivalent of a 10Xer because almost all work is billed by the hour. There is no way to make a contract that's 10x as valuable as your competitor's, and certainly no legal equivalent of scaling to the degree of Google or Facebook. Law is incred…

Software keeps working after the work is done. That’s the key differentiator, not the brain power. This leads to economies of scale on two fronts.

1) scale for the low end. As an engineer, I’ve made a game where I have customers worldwide that pay me something like 25 cents a week. A lawyer can’t really do work that scales out at the low end like that. It’s not a brain power thing, it’s just the nature of the work product.

2) at the high end, a big company like Google or a financial institution can keep hiring programmers at say $100k, and have them produce tiny detailed enhancements that produce say 150k or or more of revenue per year over a multi year period. Most large systems can always sustain a little more enhancement that will produce an optimization of revenue.

I think this is the key difference between programming and other kinds of work. Programming is scalable at both the low end (distributable to very cheap consumers) and the high end (can always get more revenue through optimization). And at both ends of this spectrum the machine keeps earning money even when the programmer is sleeping or working on a new project.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#243

Post by ivm »

d0lph wrote: post #194
kimdcmason wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality." American exceptionalism and absolutely wrong.

I speak primarily from experience.

As an "offshore developer", I have worked on multiple US projects with low quality code written by US developers.

Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#244

Post by galieos_ghost »

geodel wrote: post #235
galieos_ghost wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that millions of people made sacrifices for themselves and their families which cumulatively created the greatest civilization in history. Why should we feel guilty about reaping the benefits of those sacrifices? Why should we feel obligated to hand over our prosperity to those who contributed nothing to it?

Ideally not. But then your government unilaterally decided that spreading American values, culture, and products is the best thing to do. And now a lot of people want to come here and experience first hand.

I'm fine with that, as long as they can positively contribute. I'm not fine with bringing in millions of people who immediately go on benefits while US citizens can't afford health care, college, and military vets are living on the street

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#245

Post by jnbiche »

wfo wrote: post #223
d0lph wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why people don't like the concept of privilege, it seems almost built to shame people for having more due to circumstances.

If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it. The way the word is often used and even the word itself, absolutely that ruffles some feathers and rightly so. They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their vict…

There's a good reason many of us dislike current usage of word "privilege", and to your credit, you avoided it. Lots of times the word "white privilege" is thrown around by relatively well-off people in urban areas, and that usage is extremely hurtful and frankly stunning if you're a poor white person living in a small town in say, W. Virginia. You work multiple minimum wage jobs and still barely scrap by, watch friends and family succumb to desperation and opiates, and look around your town as it crumbles in neglect. And you don't feel like you're very "privileged" in spite of being white.

The term is particularly bewildering to rural and small town poor whites when it's tossed out by a 20-something-year old professional in some big city who's making a $200,000/year salary, or by a trust-fund kid protesting in a university where tuition costs more money a semester than your whole extended family makes in a year.

I realize that many people who use the term "white privilege" may not be targeting such people with the term (although many clearly are). However, when the only qualifier someone uses is "white", it's hard to draw that conclusion.

Again, to your credit, you used the term "straight rich white men". But most people fail to make this distinction.

I also strongly agree with your final paragraph. What we call "privilege" is something that all people should have. Instead of working to destroy privilege, we should work to ensure that all people have that same privilege.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#246

Post by bigmanwalter »

humanrebar wrote: post #165
aphextron wrote: post #134

>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why shouldn’t there by really valuable non-U.S. companies), but it does appear to be somewhat true for now. I feel like this is the real issue here. The reason that the US has great companies is simply from the availability of large amounts of capital. And if the…

> In that sense it feels perversly exploitative and priveleged to make so much more money than practically anyone else on earth due to nothing but the physical location I was born. Is it perverse to go swimming because you were born near a beach? Is it perverse to visit the Louvre if you are Parisian? Is it perverse to go to a good university because the universities in Elbonia aren't good? You're not entirely wrong,…

The difference is that others' lack of access to the Louvre or the beach isn't preventing them from feeding their families.

To a degree, we should feel bad for having access to capital when there are far greater needs for this capital elsewhere. Most of us don't have any real power to change the situation unfortunately. But it is definitely something to be conscious of and you should reflect on what you can do to help turn the tide for those less fortunate.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#247

Post by lr4444lr »

ForHackernews wrote: post #189
galieos_ghost wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone in my family has fought for the US in every war since the civil war. They have fought, bled, and died for this country, paid taxes, and helped build it from a weak country to the most powerful civilization in human history. They did it because they wanted their children and grandchildren to have a better life. Why should I feel guilty about this?

Because you did absolutely nothing to earn having good family members? Most people feel at least sheepish about their own success when faced with others, no less deserving, who experience failure.

This is a quasi-religious reversal of cause and effect. Parents create children. Children aren't assigned parents. People - real flesh and blood people, not abstractions - devote an enormous amount of their resources and waking life to doing the best possible for their next generation.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#248

Post by ryanianian »

kamaal wrote: post #133
luckydata wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer turned product manager here: there is way too much yak shaving involved in bring a software engineer. Dealing with all the poorly written libraries, unpredictable bugs and shitty APIs made me realize it wasn't something I wanted to do 12 hours per day for the rest of my life. I enjoy the intellectual challenge but I enjoy less figuring out which version of which package crashes my app

But as a programmer wanting to getting into a management role of some sort. Lets be frank here, the true reason most people want to do is because, the pay as a manager is just way too good, the working hours are next to nothing. And there is a default master-slave relation ship between a manager and a programming, despite the skill, output and intellectual value of the programming being many orders of magnitude more…

Have you ever managed developers? It is incredibly hard and intellectually-demanding (albeit using a different part of the brain / areas of intelligence.) I tried my hand at it for a few years and went back to development which was much more intellectually satisfying and much less stressful.

It will depend on the company/team/* of course, but don't think that because your manager isn't visibly grinding through programming tasks that she/he isn't just as intellectually competent or taxed as you. You may just not be mature-enough in the industry to see it yet.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#249

Post by skybrian »

aphextron wrote: post #134

>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why shouldn’t there by really valuable non-U.S. companies), but it does appear to be somewhat true for now. I feel like this is the real issue here. The reason that the US has great companies is simply from the availability of large amounts of capital. And if the…

It seems like there should be more arbitrage? Google at least has engineering offices all over the world. If immigration barriers were the main issue, it seems like more companies should be doing the same.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#250

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

aphextron wrote: post #134

>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why shouldn’t there by really valuable non-U.S. companies), but it does appear to be somewhat true for now. I feel like this is the real issue here. The reason that the US has great companies is simply from the availability of large amounts of capital. And if the…

>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why shouldn’t there by really valuable non-U.S. companies), but it does appear to be somewhat true for now.

I find this quote confusing. Historically, the poaching of highly-skilled foreigners has been an important step in developing mere import substitutions into products which can be competitive on a global scale.

The Tudor government (Henry VII-Elizabeth I) kicked off its finished-wool-import-substitution program by poaching skilled weavers and machinists from the low countries (e.g. Flanders, Holland, France). Then, as the export of finished wool goods grew, so did restrictions on the exportation of raw materials and the importation of finished wool. Nearly 100 years later, England had the ability to drive European countries to famine by simply banning the export of raw wool.[0]

In the early 18th century, France started poaching British watchmakers, weavers and metalworkers; Britain responded by outlawing the emigration of skilled workers in 1719.[1]

With that context, I find it odd to hear that U.S. immigration policy has started to work in opposition to the what I believe is the largest benefit of immigration. What incentive is there to keep highly skilled workers, along with their advanced knowledge, out of the U.S.?

[0] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 40-42

[1] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 129

Post reply on HN