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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#371

Post by zozin »

giobox wrote: post #322
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…

> There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. Programmer now, gained a law degree in a previous life. Know lots of folks who studied medicine. The idea that med school or law school teach you "all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor" is laughable and a truly absurd statement. The sheer size of the problem domains these subjects co…

Do you have a throwaway email? I'd like to ask you a few questions about transitioning from law to programming. Thanks.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#372

Post by siegecraft »

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…

Lack of knowledge doesn't neccesarily stop one from programming. There's nothing stopping you from calling yourself a programmer, or applying for programming jobs, and so on. Whereas to be a lawyer or a doctor you usually have to be licensed by some sort of government authority.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#373

Post by jtolmar »

> The most common response I’ve gotten to this post is that we should expect programmers to be well-paid because software is everywhere and there will be at least as much software in the future. [...] Yet electrical engineering comp isn’t in the same league as programmer comp, [...] and there are more processors sold than ever before.

What drives the demand for engineers isn't the number of things sold, but rather the number of kinds of that thing. The variety of chips is still growing, but not proportionate to chips sold, because the numbers are mostly coming from the handful of chips used in servers and mobile devices.

> What is it about some software companies that make a similar amount of money that prevents them from funneling virtually all of the wealth they generate up to the top?

We don't have a union, so the only way a company can be punished for low compensation is if developers leave for higher-compensation companies. Salaries in the games industry are much lower for longer hours, because developers are unwilling to leave the industry to go work on something boring. I don't know the specific case with Epic Systems, but if their employees are older (have families) they might be less willing to relocate. I also know (being from there) that people from Wisconsin have a specific aversion to leaving the state, and it could be that Epic is exploiting that fact.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#374

Post by cimmanom »

Hypothesis: there aren't two clearly differently skilled populations of programmers. There are two different populations of companies that are willing to pay different amounts. Lower pay being at startups and large non-technology companies in lower-cost-of-living markets; high being at the big prestigious tech firms, banks, and the like.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#375

Post by u801e »

giobox wrote: post #322
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…

> There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. Programmer now, gained a law degree in a previous life. Know lots of folks who studied medicine. The idea that med school or law school teach you "all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor" is laughable and a truly absurd statement. The sheer size of the problem domains these subjects co…

> While I can't speak fully for medics

Medical school will teach you the basic science and theory and give you basic clinical experience, one still needs to complete a 3 to 7 year residency in the field one wants to practice in. Then there are fellowships that one may want to do if they want to specialize even further.

It's definitely not the case that you learn everything you need to know in school.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#376

Post by klibertp »

d0lph wrote: post #291
ivm wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not at all denying the existence of low quality programmers in the US, but generally it seems like there is a focus on quality that does not exist for the majority of offshore developers, just about churning out code as fast as possible.

I feel like I miss a part the meaning of "offshore" here, and I suspect it's more cultural than a linguistic problem. I mean, technically, German or Japanese developers working for US companies are "offshore" too, but I don't believe you're accusing them of "churning code without regard to code quality"?

Oh, and also, both the previous paragraph and your comments in the thread are (edited:)nationalist[1]. Not that it's not fun to use stereotypes and a few anecdotes to form an opinion, so don't mind me, just noting.

[1] Not sure if it's the correct word, I mean discrimination by ethnicity and nationality.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#377

Post by null000 »

bigmanwalter wrote: post #246
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,…

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 hel…

I think it's kinda pointless to "feel bad" about something we have no control over (while we could not take the job, we definitely can't give someone else our seat). It's mostly just unhealthy.

Much better to support political movements trying to help spread the wealth and donating money to things that advance the public good in the mean time.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#378

Post by badpun »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #268
fuggedaboudit wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I'm not convinced. From what I hear, being a developer at Google can actually be stressful, if only for the fact that your peers are likely to be talented and ambitious - so it will take effort to keep on par with them.

Compare that to countless corporations which also hire developers, but where the motivation and talent levels are lower. In many of those jobs, you will be fine with doing maybe 15 hours of real work peer week. I'm not sure it would fly at Google. Based on this, I recently declined an interview invitation from Google recruiter - precisely because I was worried that my work-life balance would plummet.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#379

Post by User23 »

Why do companies pay so much for computer programmers? Because on average they make a massive net profit per programmer, that's why. There aren't many other fields where one person can increase productivity by orders of magnitude. When was the last time a clever doctor reduced the number of nurses required to handle a fixed number of patients by a factor of a hundred? Good developers do this routinely!

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#380

Post by jachee »

jnbiche wrote: post #245
wfo wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frie…

> we should work to ensure that all people have that same privilege

That is working to destroy privilege.

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