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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#431

Post by logfromblammo »

salmonfamine wrote: post #280
epmatsw wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just chose Epic because the author did. I honestly don't know anything about it. However, I do have to point out that it seems that Epic is trying to become more competitive with regard to that same subset of engineers that Google hires. Presumably, if they're trying to become more competitive, then they're not yet competitive. Either Epic will have to pay some engineers the same as what Google pays (including equi…

When I left Epic, they had just reneged on an equity compensation promise by issuing me some form of "shadow" stock tokens, because they didn't want to bring their number of real owners up past a point that would trigger automatic financial disclosures. I read the accompanying paperwork, and decided that I needed to kick my job search into an even higher gear, immediately. Just one of the many reasons I had for moving on. (2007)

At that time, they were not offering salaries that were even competitive with other companies in Madison. Never mind about Seattle or SV. I had four managers in 2.25 years, because three of them left for higher pay elsewhere almost as soon as they got promoted. I left the fourth for ~20% higher pay.

I would guess that any major tech employer could stroll into town and hire the best 50% from under Epic's feet in less than two weeks, while still saving money on salaries compared to SV. Queen Judy is not taking that company public, and would rather divert her profits to charity than to employees. There won't be options or RSUs. The only reason people might stick around is the cult-like atmosphere.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#432

Post by atomicUpdate »

ryanianian wrote: post #217
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?

Don't feel guilty, but realize that you're not entitled to what you have - you got lucky being born to parents who worked so hard etc. Continue to work as hard as they did and appreciate their work.

> realize that you're not entitled to what you have

That's ridiculous. The fact that his parents worked hard is what entitled him to the life he has, all the way up the chain to the ones that emigrated to America and earlier. This 'original sin' stuff that people are trying to push just because we are born in the US is crap.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#433

Post by marvin »

meuk wrote: post #37
clintonb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't care much for my internships and early work. I felt like a cog in a machine. I always wanted to be the guy designing the machine. After a few years I was that guy. Not all entry work has to be mundane, but you learn a lot doing some of that work. The fact that you are spending multiple days, rather than hours, building a controller hints to me that you haven't really mastered that work. Perhaps the task migh…

I don't have time to implement a tool for implementing CRUD. Wouldn't it be better to not have so many layers of abstraction that you need a tool in the first place? Let me elaborate on what it took me to implement a CRUD controller. I had to implement a repository interface, a respository a context, a service interface, and a controller. Then I had to understand how to write the swagger documentation. Then there is…

Hope you won't get me wrong here; this sounds to me like the million details required to implement something properly, and certainly a task like the one you describe here would take a workday or two to implement properly.

But it does also sound like there are some problematic inefficiencies in the way your company's software stack is set up. Common tasks like logging, caching and error handling should be abstracted away to a separate layer so that you get it for free whenever you implement a new service or endpoint. Don't know if this is old news to you, but check out e.g. [1].

This part about abstracting away rote work and optimizing a stack to be less maintenance-heavy is a learnable skill. The problematic part is that your working environment needs to have it in its culture. It needs to be okay for staff to spend a week here and there tuning a process that's used again and again. This is a big force multiplier which needs to be appreciated by management.

I'm in an online banking company with an 18-year history and all the cruft that entails, and we're in aggregate spending multiple full-time positions continually upgrading our infrastructure and practices. Releases used to be one-week affairs that were performed twice a year. Now they're done in half an hour, most of which is verification and monitoring. Etc, etc.

[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn223671(v=pandp.30...

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#434

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

screye wrote: post #354
tomwphillips wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To become a chemical engineer, you first have to complete the course work for a degree in chemistry. That is incorrect. Look at the programme of study for a chemical engineering undergraduate degree [1]. It doesn't cover anywhere near the same content as an undergraduate chemistry degree [2]. [1]: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/chemical-engineer... [2]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/chemist…

Yep. My classmates from Chem.E had more classes in common with us mechanical engineers than any other branch. Thermo, fluid dynamics, CFD and heat transfer is where it is at.

There are huge overlaps between the different kinds of engineering - not quite enough to support a single unified core curriculum, but enough to make it obvious that there's a lot of similar math across all the disciplines, and only the emphasis varies.

The big problem with engineering isn't the specialisms, it's the name. Outsiders still think engineers are people who wear oil-covered overalls and are essentially mechanics.

Not one person in fifty understands that the job is mostly mathematical modelling of complex systems.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#435

Post by throwaway287391 »

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…

> These barriers may not be artificial, but they are real.

Real and non-artificial? Could it be?! :P

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#436

Post by ryanianian »

atomicUpdate wrote: post #432
ryanianian wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't feel guilty, but realize that you're not entitled to what you have - you got lucky being born to parents who worked so hard etc. Continue to work as hard as they did and appreciate their work.

> realize that you're not entitled to what you have That's ridiculous. The fact that his parents worked hard is what entitled him to the life he has, all the way up the chain to the ones that emigrated to America and earlier. This 'original sin' stuff that people are trying to push just because we are born in the US is crap.

I'm not super interested in debating this philosophy and your response reads to me as pretty flippant and entitled, so I'll bow out. I hope you receive everything you're entitled to.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#438

Post by tostitos1979 »

giobox wrote: post #381
zozin wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Afraid I don't really have much to say about this - I did a postgrad Computer Science Masters, applied for Software Engineer jobs and started new career immediately following completion of Masters. I've known several law graduates follow this path. If like me you've always had an interest in the field and were a reasonably competent programmer before starting the CS degree this wasn't all that difficult by comparison…

CS PhD here and worked over a decade. Yesterday, I made a list of over a dozen technical areas in CS I feel inadequate on. I think the issue is not that a CS Masters is easy. It is that CS knowledge is a never ending firehose. When I graduated (2008), most NoSQL systems were not even created. For anyone transitioning from law/medicine to CS, while I welcome you to the field (good for you!! tech is awesome), just be aware that tech gets obsolete very fast. While an older lawyer or doctor may be considered experienced, the newbies right out of school may run laps around you (lots of examples but the creator of Ethereum comes to mind. I know oh so many PhDs who work on distributed systems but it took a Waterloo undergrad student to think out of the box).

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#439

Post by guntars »

timr wrote: post #351
jimbokun wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dealing with the constant loss of people around you if you work in a retirement home or hospice is also hard; but those jobs aren't rewarded equally." That is a completely different sense of the word "hard" from "programming is hard". Working in the retirement home requires enduring emotional pain and sacrifice. Programming (at least some kinds of programming) requires a high degree of skill, knowledge, and intellig…

I don't know why the parent went to hospices and nursing homes as a counterexample, but your response is missing the point: lots of jobs are hard in the way that programming is hard, and don't have the same compensation levels. Of all the programmers I have met in my life, I would trust only a select few to do the things that most professional engineers do on a daily basis. For example, control system engineering, wh…

The compensation is not based on how hard the job is so it doesn't matter. There's a limited amount of people that can do programming, but also limited amount of people that can do safety-critical engineering. Perhaps there is some overlap. But can you engineer a bridge that's used by a billion people every day? Probably not, hence the salary differences.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#440

Post by cableshaft »

gambiting wrote: post #72
meuk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started working as a programmer and don't like it. I started coding when I was about twelve, and did a CS bachelor and CE master. I like coding. 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…

I have similarly started coding at around 12, and now I work as a C++ programmer in games....and love my job. On the other hand, I get paid peanuts compared to literally any other industry. But then all of my programmer friends who work in other industries(and frequently make 150-200% of what I make with the same level of experience) hate their jobs with passion, every time we meet it's just an endless rant on how th…

Game dev has it's own industry problems, not simply lower pay. You might be working on something you enjoy right now, but that's not necessarily always the case, and there are plenty of crap you have to deal with from clients, publishers, and the like.

And the market is severely hit driven, so you could be working 6 months to 2+ years on a project only to see it land like a thud in the marketplace, possibly due to nothing more than a couple reviewers that clearly barely played your game before writing a scathing review, or you just picked a bad week and get completely overshadowed by other games.

I worked on 7 games for three different companies, and all of those games failed to find and retain an audience, for various reasons. You spend 4 years of your life working on projects that may as well not have existed, except for your own personal development, and the industry starts to look less appealing.

I'm working on software I have much less passion for right now, outside of the game industry, but at least it gets used on a daily basis by thousands of people (not always, I've worked on projects that have gotten binned because clients have backed out or contracts never got signed, or the lead developer quit and the manager decided to outsource the project, in this industry as well). And at least I'm getting paid quite a bit more than I would in the game industry.

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