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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#461

Post by mcguire »

empthought wrote: post #418
fnord123 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare to mechanical engineering, where if you use the wrong steel your bridge will fall down; or to medicine, where if you prescribe the wrong drug someone might just die. Dereference the wrong pointer and the rocket blows up. Forget a memory barrier and the robot brain gets corrupted memory and sees human life as an impediment to paper clip maximization. Forget to zero out some memory in a goto: cleanup section…

For software developers (and in fact, for the general public), the smart play is to rely on real engineers to provide mechanical, electric, or electronic failsafes in their designs.

That seems to have worked well for Intel.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#462

Post by ahultgren »

bigmanwalter wrote: post #314
d0lph wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How bad should I feel exactly? Is this equivalent to murder? Had we foregone some luxury many could be saved from starvation. I don't even really disagree, but the weight of the burden you assume responsibility over is very great. Why not devote your entire life to helping others if you are responsible for them, consume no luxuries, or anything but the most basic of needs. I'm sure you could save thousands.

That is my end goal. My best chance at having a lasting impact on society and this world requires me to first accumulate more capital before I can help. If I spend everything helping others now, then I won't have done all that much, and chances are it won't be a lasting change. It is important to be aware of your place in society. I am a 28 year old white male with only a handful of years of professional experience.…

Are you saying that you think you will be able to climb faster than everyone else and when finished (when are you rich enough btw?) be better at making an impact than all the other efforts trying to change the world?

At least be honest. It's not that it's the most efficient way to spend your money; you simply want to be the hero. While letting your spare coins trickle down to those below. And it's ok cause you'll pay back later. Maybe through the next generation even.

But perhaps it was I who missed the irony?

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#463

Post by s73v3r_ »

jcadam wrote: post #326
ryanianian wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

My grandfather was a farmer. By necessity he was also forced to become a competent mechanic, carpenter, electrician, and plumber (did I miss any?). Farmers are the most self-sufficient people you'll ever meet.

Business person, maybe economist when you take into account prices for crops and deciding what to grow.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#464

Post by sloppycee »

whytaka wrote: post #282
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,…

> 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? If you actively promote or passively allow politicians and legislation that bars other people from having a shot at earning those things themselves, then yes.

> bars other people from having a shot at earning those things themselves

Restricting immigration doesn't 'bar' people from making their own country better...

Have you never visited a place that has had it's beauty or charm ruined by the sheer number of visitors it receives?

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#465

Post by petra »

petercooper wrote: post #343
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. It's even more elementary than that, I think. I've encountered lots of intelligent people who lack any sort of diagnostics skills - absolutely essential for being a programmer. Things like.. the landline is broken. Well, then, get another phone, plug it in and see if it works. If it does, then it's the phone we need to look at, if it doesn't, we need to…

That's learnable. For example, military forces teach enlisted people with varying levels of skills how diagnose systems, and it works.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#466

Post by saas_co_de »

namelost wrote: post #158
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…

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

And that is only half the job. You also have to practice, a lot.

I think "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" is about right http://norvig.com/21-days.html

You can learn academic computer science, or know a lot of trivia about programming and computers, but without years of dedicated practice it doesn't translate into actual productivity.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#467

Post by mcguire »

rossdavidh wrote: post #149
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…

In Electrical Engineering, which the article often mentions as a counterexample, the 10-year veteran is not nearly as likely to drop out of the profession. Programming has a constant bleed-out of people who learning how to program, became veterans, and then were dismayed to discover that they were going to have to do it all over again, because the libraries, frameworks, languages, etc. were different. Some just do it…

I don't know. Is it having to learn new things, or is it having to do the same things over and over, with the names changed?

Once you get the principles, there isn't much difference in languages, etc. But if you are a senior developer after 5 years, or 3 years, there isn't much room to go up.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#468

Post by hoosieree »

logfromblammo wrote: post #385
jopsen wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you've become a highly paid software engineer it's very human to try and justify your status by claiming that programming is exceptionally hard and therefore your status/salary is justified. That's not to say that the job isn't hard... but lots of jobs are hard. 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.

Writing software is not difficult. Anyone can do it. The hard part is learning to structure your thinking such that the software you will be writing will actually solve a problem as it currently exists in a cost-effective way. With that skill, you don't even always need to know how to write software programs. Sometimes, you're better off delegating specific tasks to humans. When someone hands you a problem like "make…

No real programmer would propose an O(N) solution like that.

Here's O(1):

    elephant.invisible = true;

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#469

Post by s73v3r_ »

kimdcmason wrote: post #179
d0lph wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality. Not that we all deserve huge salaries, but code quality important.

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

I think, for many of us, our only experience with offshore code is with the bottom dollar coding sweatshops, which are universally shitty.

I have no idea what % of offshore code work that represents compared to just a regular consulting firm that happens to be located overseas, or a branch office of a company located in another country.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#470

Post by salmonfamine »

logfromblammo wrote: post #431
salmonfamine wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 movin…

That's crazy. I knew that one of my college friends had interviewed at Epic as a new grad, but he didn't go any further with it. Sounds like a really strange company.

It might be the case that salaries won't become truly bimodal. It seems like there might be "tiers" of compensation which are based on levels of competition between similar companies. SV startups tend to pay less than Google or FB, but their compensation packages are typically within the same ballpark of each other. Perhaps the bimodality is most notable for new grads, since they typically don't get hired at mid/small companies.

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