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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#401

Post by bdcs »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #17

Yes, it is. And the example used in the article of chemical engineering reinforces the point. It ties into computer science quite nicely. To 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 funct…

Fascinating argument, which fits me well (PhD ChemE who learned software and is now SWE at large tech firm).

Allow me to take an alternative argument: Highly-driven students, especially those driven by money, became ChemEs to earn a lot of money and prestige. They looked up highest paying majors and chose ChemE for these reasons. I think it is now obvious SWE is very high paying and prestigious -- perhaps more so than ChemE -- so these highly-driven people switched. It had nothing to do with the topics intrinsically, but rather ChemE was largely perceived as the hardest/most-prestigious field and now SWE is.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#402

Post by eric_b »

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…

I don't understand the self-loathing that is so popular these days. Somehow we've convinced a generation of perfectly decent human beings that they are "exploiting" the weak and that their "privilege" is oppressing the rest of the world, just by going about their business.

You're a programmer. Maybe you're decent, maybe you're not. It is VERY unlikely that the "millions and millions" of "infinitely more talented" Eastern European/Indian/Chinese programmers you mention actually exist. And even if they did, there are many societal and economic reasons besides "US Immigration Laws" that would prevent them from coming here and taking your job for an order of magnitude less money.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#403

Post by TheHegemon »

maxander wrote: post #275
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…

> 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 have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is v…

> I'm pretty sure 90% of us would just look for a Stack Exchange question describing a bunch of popular database platforms and choose whichever looked best after thinking about it for a few minutes, and that outside of extreme circumstances (>terabytes of data, distributed over an actually unreliable network, other exotica) almost any option would work well enough.

And you're the reason why I have to mop up poor performance because someone decided to use MongoDB for highly-relational data.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#404

Post by badpun »

yAnonymous wrote: post #192
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…

Where's all the great Indian, Chinese and Eastern European software? Seriously wondering, because most software I saw from these regions was mediocre at best. The whole world uses operating systems, browsers and development tools made in western countries.

And where's the great German, English, French, Japanese etc. software? The truth is that the global software market is thoroughly dominated by American companies, probably in large part due to its unique investing environment (lots of VCs willing to take risks on startups).

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#405

Post by dsacco »

pathseeker wrote: post #387
giobox wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>furthermore I'd argue it's pretty insulting to insinuate that Computer Science is somehow more difficult in this regard Why in the world would that be insulting and who is it insulting to? If anything it's a reflection of how immature the industry is and how computer science degrees have minute overlap with software engineering.

> Why in the world would that be insulting and who is it insulting to?

It’s insulting to diminish the legitimate achievements of other people through unjustified comparison, in particular when doing so results in the elevation of the person doing it.

There is no objective criteria by which we can state computer science is a more difficult field than law or medicine. To imply that is therefore offensive, and people are not “immature” just because they react to offensive things by being insulted, even if you believe they shouldn’t feel insulted.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#406

Post by bdcs »

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…

>Sure, if companies were able to immigrate significantly more workers, then salaries at top companies might drop to a degree

Is this not the lump of labor fallacy?

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#407

Post by Caveman_Coder »

heedlessly2 wrote: post #389
nvarsj wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need to do your day job AND on your own time, keep your skills up to date, and/or work on open source and/or write a blog or something. Not just that! Don't forget about attending a dozen conferences a year, doing talks, and local meetups.

>Not just that! Don't forget about attending a dozen conferences a year, doing talks, and local meetups You don't really need any of that. Ultimately, you just need to pass the interview. Sure conferences and tech talks might help give your resume some more visibility and likeliness of getting hired. Similar to having a couple toy projects, but many top tier companies adhere to a set of standards in their hiring proc…

Agreed. I don't have a Github, contribute to open source projects, go to conferences or meetups or any of that stuff on my off-time. When asked about it in interviews I tell them about the kind of projects I've done, and that's pretty much it. Its a straight forward agreement, I'll give my time and expertise (C/C++) and you'll pay me a fair amount. I'm not going to act like my life is all about programming because that would be a totally sad life in my opinion.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#408

Post by dagw »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #147
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…

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…

Programming seems to be the "hardest" of the high paying jobs mentioned

Perhaps for some people. Most of what I spend my time on is little more than simple data munging, some trivial analysis and glorified crud apps.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#409

Post by [deleted] »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #17

Yes, it is. And the example used in the article of chemical engineering reinforces the point. It ties into computer science quite nicely. To 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 funct…

[deleted]

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#410

Post by dsacco »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #147
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…

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…

> 2) programming seems to be the "hardest" of the high paying jobs mentioned. Once you get them, banking, consulting and law jobs actually have a lot of mindless or not super challenging work

Are you saying this as a programmer, or are you saying this as a banker/consultant/lawyer?

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