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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#261

Post by bigmanwalter »

galieos_ghost wrote: post #244
geodel wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The reason the US can't afford any of that is because it's not a priority. Every other modern country manages to pay for all that and now they are also putting up with large scale immigration such as with Syrian refugees.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#262

Post by badpun »

biztos wrote: post #227
badpun wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that the code created for example at Google Warsaw is worse than code created at Google Mountain View (you can even check yourself, people in Warsaw work on Kubernetes, which is open source). And yet, the Warsaw salary is maybe 30-50% of the salary in MV.

But wouldn't you live a whole lot better in Warsaw on 50% than in Mountain View on 100% of that relatively high Google salary?

Depends on your living situation. If you want a house in the suburbs with not terrible commute, it's going to cost you $200-400k in Warsaw vs probably three times as much in SV? This (and higher taxes in the US) can probably consume a lot of the salary difference. But, on the other hand, if you're ok with living in a small studio, you're going to make bank in SV.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#263

Post by epmatsw »

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…

Interesting to choose Epic as an example. In my exit interview there (leaving for SV), the whole interview was about how they could be more competitive when hiring against Google etc (obvious answers were vacation policies and equity, where Epic was woefully behind). So Epic is (or was, ~3 years ago) definitely competing for the same developers as those big companies.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#264

Post by skybrian »

wfo wrote: post #239
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…

Instead of worrying about potential foreigners competing for your job, you should wonder why there are so few jobs out there: it's because the rich are hoarding them. The money for them, that is. There is so much work to be done, plenty of work for you and your Indian and Chinese friends to all have well-paying jobs. The reason we all don't have them is that we are just extremely bad at allocating resources: we choos…

I completely agree that the main problem is lack of spending money in the hands of people who actually need it. There's plenty of work to be done, if only the people who need it had money to pay for it.

However, capitalism (in the form of Walmart and its suppliers, for example) does seem quite efficient at supplying material things to poor people. More spending power in the right places would go pretty far to fix the problem, along with boosting the economy.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#265

Post by geodel »

athenot wrote: post #99

I think the reason for high compensations is that software is the enabling factor for capital. If software can automate, reduce inefficiencies and generally be the means to accomplish the business goal, then it makes sense for the business side to invest heavily into what is essentially a competitive differentiator. The bimodal compensation reflects a growing split between software activities that are seen as an nece…

I agree. I wonder why people do not make this correlation more often that cloud/fintech companies etc have likely put huge number of people out of work across the world. And disproportional chunk of that compensation has been collected by cloud companies and their employees.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#266

Post by foamflower »

mncolinlee wrote: post #237
foamflower wrote: post #139

One (semi-pedantic) quibble with the article: there absolutely are barriers to entry for programming. Programming is hard! These barriers may not be artificial, but they are real. To use a non-software example, there are barriers to entry to chip manufacturers and power companies even under anarchy. Fabs are tremendously hard to build. Power plants are extremely hard to build. Building up knowledge and skills about c…

This is absolutely true. I've claimed for years that programming is easy and it's not hard to teach to children, but I started when I was six. For older people, the field is hard to break into due to a cognitive barrier I've seen. "I don't know how to program and computers are mysterious-- therefore I don't know how to learn how to program." The biggest impediment to much larger participation in the top tiers of soft…

I think we're kindred spirits in a way. I don't find programming terribly vexing, either (I started when I was 12), but trying to teach others has given me more appreciation for how difficult it is to grok something so rigidly logical.

That said, I have no patience for the "smartest boy" syndrome or the, as you say, "LeetCode-like problems" given in interviews.

I suspect that these interviews do "work" in the sense that they successfully filter those who know what they're doing (albeit rejecting numerous ones who do as well), but they run the risk of encouraging elitism, rockstars and "smartest boy" cultures. (I also think programmers are uniquely bad a hiring because when we can't reduce a problem to something solvable by an algorithm, we tend to try to find the cheapest heuristic.)

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#267

Post by mieseratte »

d0lph wrote: post #181
humanrebar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

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

> it seems almost built to shame people for having more due to circumstances

That's quite literally what it is. I'm not particularly Christian, but at least it doesn't make me pay for the sins of the father unlike whatever this new orthodoxy is.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#268

Post by aaavl2821 »

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…

I hear you; I'm only a hobbyist programmer myself. I worked in investment banking at the beginning of my career and did an MBA so know lots of consultants and work a lot with lawyers in my work at startups, and I know those can be grueling jobs and that most people don't make nearly as much as the lucky few at the top firms

I was referring more to the intellectual challenge of the work. In investment banking there is basically no intellectual challenge at a jr level and at senior level it's all relationship management. The trading side can be hard but increasingly that's a programming job

I'm sure there are some super challenging law assignments but from what I understand from friends at top firms there's a lot of template changing and standard cases for a lot of stuff. At startups I try to do as much of that basic work myself so we can save on legal fees. Of course I get lawywers to review / sign off, but it's usually easy for them to do so

But programming is hard at an intellectual level in a way that is different from banking and consulting work and from what I understand, legal work. The first time I did a problem set in C involving memory allocation it took me like 20 hours to get it right. And the engineers working on massive systems that have to run perfectly, fast and be maintainable by hundreds of random people have work that is orders of magnitude harder. In programming, the difficulty of the work seeks to scale as your skill does. Don't know many other professions like that

I interned at google not as a programmer, and you are right that the work life balance there can be amazing, but it probably is the best company in the world for work life balance. Lots of programmers at other companies like work crazy hours as well, and often for non technical bosses or poor managers who make those long hours unpleasant

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#269

Post by jdmichal »

foamflower wrote: post #229
namelost wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone. Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you…

> If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone. > The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface. +1024 I have said quite a few times that the…

Yep. I've talked before that we are doing a huge disservice by not focusing on the sequential logic of programming, which is the first barrier to overcome. Also, we reinforce memorization over problem solving in maths throughout school. Hearing students say, "When are we ever going to use this?", was not uncommon when I was in school 15+ years ago. And as far as I can tell, the push for standardized curriculum and testing has only made this worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164948#15168430

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12589473#12592521

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#270

Post by ryanianian »

randomdata wrote: post #260
ryanianian wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. Even simple software requires a radically different way of thinking than the way most are trained. I've taught 6th graders how to code and it is clear that the way of approaching problems and creating solutions (i.e. creative thinking, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to collaborate and ask questions) really separates the students from who "get it" and thse who don't. Don't sell it short because…

Perhaps he means in relation to other careers? As someone who is both a software developer and a farmer, software isn't exactly easy, but in comparison to the knowledge and skill required to farm successfully, it is a breeze.

This is quite interesting - I'm actually quite curious about what makes farming more intellectually challenging and difficult than programming, especially from somebody who does both. (Honest curiosity!)
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