Is developer compensation becoming bimodal? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#531

Post by looiid » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 5:52 AM UTC

dsacco wrote: post #405

pathseeker wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ar…

Fuck you you dumb ass retard

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#532

Post by banku_brougham » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 6:01 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #15

banku_brougham wrote: post #13

To the puzzle about developer comp outstripping EE or other engineering disciplines pay (ie Civil Engineering god help me), I agree that the student in those fields could apply themselves to become able programmers. So why the huge disparity in pay? I have two ideas: 1. Lots of technically able people still don’t enjoy plugging their mind into a machine. Its probably hard to believe in the HN community but many peopl…

AMZN 220; MSFT 69; FB 33; SOXX 4.7; XOM 25. Investors are paying more to fund the work of programmers than most other industries. Large compensations enjoyed by engineers in the AMZN, FB, or MSFT is not derived from "investors paying more to fund their work", as these companies haven't been dependent on investors' capital in a long time.

Investors float the stock to levels that alllow the company to pay generous compensation. At amazon for example, salary tops out at $160K. 1/2 or more of comp is in RSUs. Senior Devs are making $300+ in total comp.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#533

Post by yazaddaruvala » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 9:15 AM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #451

barrkel wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have other priorities than getting the best colleagues, such as living close to family and in places that feel like home. Yes: people who don't prioritize excellence in development. And it does require compromises in your life choices. You generally need to move to where the most interesting jobs are, where the cutting edge tech is being developed. It's a virtuous cycle: SV attracts the next generation of hi…

For your dream scenario to become true, you not only have to live and work in the Silicon Valley. You also have to work on interesting problems at interesting companies. Google may employ 10k engineers, but only 100 or so work on the really interesting stuff. My passion is research and free software, so yes I do "prioritize excellence in development." I don't have to move to the Silicon Valley nor the United States t…

It is not practical to compare research or open source development to working at Google.

You can definitely prioritize excellence in development, but only within the scale of a few humans. You cannot research what it is like to work at scale.

Scale of hosts, requests, code, people, money. It's an experience to itself.

It's always funny to "break" open source tools people rave about. Most recently elasticsearch is barely coping with some of my teams volumes and we have to do some really tricky distributed computing stuff to workaround and keep it happy. Mind you, like a Honda Civic, it is an amazing tool, and works brilliantly for most almost all uses, but at certain scale you need a Ferrari and that isn't something you can get anywhere but big companies. And when you learn by designing and debugging a Ferrari, everything else becomes trivial very quickly.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#534

Post by cdaringe » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

wetpaws wrote: post #488

maxander wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't think the problem with programming is that it is complex or has wast domain knowledge, it is true, but this is not a unique problem. I think the biggest barrier in programming is just how abstract and alien it is, cognitive load can be enormous. Try to teach engineer about materials or steel liquation or semiconductors - it might be abstract or complex but at least it is dealing with real life physical proces…

It's a good thought, but I agree with madengr. Other disciplines are faced with abstract challenges, and even those in plain sight are very difficult to reason about. Magnetic fields. Rotational moment of inertia. RMoI--still so confusing. Even simple to explain, easy to observe concepts can still be abstract and difficult to understand.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#535

Post by doktrin » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

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…

> Most of the well-paid programmers I know (including quite a few at AmaGooFaceSoft) can't wrap their heads around databases well enough to deploy a low-traffic web application.

I honestly don't believe this. You did caveat that this is anecdotal, but it's such a bold claim of ignorance I think it should be qualified.

> And this industry is now rather routinely hiring totally inexperienced people, right out of bootcamps, at salaries that are mind-blowing to most professionals

This is also dubious. It clearly does occasionally happen, but those candidates are also not as inexperienced as you imply ( e.g they typically hold STEM degrees like mechEng, chem, physics, Maths - often from prestigious Universities - or have years of experience with non-dev technical work like security, IT, ETL, etc. )

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#536

Post by ddorian43 » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

expertentipp wrote: post #226

ryandrake wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you’ve never experienced a tech downturn yet. Having been through two (and there are folks on this forum who have been through more) I can tell you with great certainty that you are wrong. I have been close to broke twice and am eternally grateful for what little safety net actually exists in the US.

I always smile hearing this arrogant "programmers don't need unemployment benefits" or "programmers will always find a job". Not even tech downturn is necessary, just relocate (e.g. family reasons) to a different location where this profession is not appreciated, neither well rewarded.

.. so.. unemployment benefits will keep you forever when "profession is not appreciated" or you'll convert to a beekeeper or some other job ?

Unemployment benefits, as I know, are temporary. You'll face the real-world in 2-3 years when it ends.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#537

Post by badpun » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 9:53 AM UTC

s73v3r_ wrote: post #457

badpun wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. However, one thing that I fail to see addressed here is reason for the incarceration gap. The way I see it, it can be partially because black kids are prosecuted more (the "white privilege" argument) and partially perhaps because, for whatever reason, rich black kids just commit crimes more often.

I don't buy the argument that rich black kids commit crimes at higher rates. White and black people smoke weed at roughly the same rates, yet black people are far, far, far more likely to be prosecuted for it.

It's not an argument, merely an unknown. Considering that black people have elements of their own culture that are anti-hard work ("acting white") and pro-crime ("gangsta rap"), I wouldn't be suprised if this culture managed to spoil even the kids from the good homes to some degree.

BTW how do you know that white and black people smoke weed at roughly the same rates?

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#538

Post by doktrin » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 11:01 AM UTC

I wonder if it's possible to put a $ value on how much impostor syndrome has benefitted employers. I suspect it's in the billions, but that's little more than a hunch.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#539

Post by laythea » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 11:18 AM UTC

petra wrote: post #465

petercooper wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. It may be possible to teach a monkey to perform X. But can you teach a monkey to teach another monkey to perform X? EDIT: no implied insult there.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#540

Post by laythea » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 11:23 AM UTC

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #474

laythea wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misinterpreted me a little. I think the reason that lawyers and doctors cannot "jump around" is not because, for example, a lawyer cannot absorb the information required to be both a good corporate lawyer and a good litigator, due to it being too much. They can. It is that the system that they choose to be in (law/medicine) demands the individual to be certified and formally trained to such an extent that…

I have limited idea whether its fundamentally barriers in terms of the subject-matter (because I do not know or practice in multiple fields of medicine) or in terms of the social structure (where it is pretty obvious the highly structured/time-based hierarchical regulated fields). But I will say one of the MAJOR things that I LOVE about programming is its relative lack of artificial and social barriers. In psyche, me…

Yep. Except I would consider what I do as mostly engineering, and what I said above still applies. Subsea oil/gas control systems, gas turbine control systems, etc, but then sometime just desktop applications, eg OpenGL/Java etc. All need software. But all engineering, although I would say the desktop application contracts are less engineering, more programming. But then we would have to start talking about the whether programming is actually engineering so don't want to go there :)