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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#541

Post by mcmacintosh »

foo232323 wrote: post #190
mcmacintosh wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you have any advice for new graduate entering the market? where to look for and how when searching for jobs?

From my experience so far (cs/ee, software developer): work experience is more important than grades, current tech stack, interested/knowledgeable in what you're doing, networking (xing/linkedin helped quite a lot), bigger company for the first role also helped with salary. started out with about 58k (~13.8 salaries + bonus + >40 vacation days), quickly went up to around 80k (2yrs)

Thanks a lot for the answer! By networking on xing/linkedin you mean that you were reaching out to people? Asking for positions?

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#542

Post by malvosenior »

joshuamorton wrote: post #511
malvosenior wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my town was a hellhole and very, very small. I'm the only person who has achieved professional success. Most are dead, in jail or hooked on drugs. My relatives included. > You were the valedictorian of your high school No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success. > worked jobs on the side to make money There were no jobs in my town. I admit I'm making some assumpti…

>No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success. See, this is the kind of thing I mean. This is essentially a post-hoc justification of your success. Why did you "know that school had little to do with success". Why didn't your classmates? Did the valedictorian also end up on drugs and in jail? Or did they just end up less successful, despite working hard? I mean I can act…

Your assumptions about me are pretty off base and that’s the problem. You’ll never be rhetorically successful by invalidating people’s personal experience. I have a lifetime of making decisions and viewing their outcomes to draw from. You have theory. I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail.

This is why I think the concept of privilege will never grow beyond the people who already believe in it. It’s just too smug at its core.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#543

Post by ryanianian »

randomdata wrote: post #528
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!)

That is a good question. I'm not sure how well I will be able to put it into words, but I'll give it a go! For what it is worth, I have a grain farm, so my perspective comes from that type of operation. A big one is simply the breadth of the subject matter. To me it feels like learning to program, forgetting everything, and repeating several more times. You have to know about plants, chemicals, machinery, computer te…

Thank you very much for the thoughtful response! The parallels are interesting. Farming sounds a lot like writing assembly! Start over every time, have to know about wildly arcane and disparate concepts, hard to get help except from somebody who has encountered something very similar perhaps a long time ago, and takes many years to feel productive.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#545

Post by joshuamorton »

malvosenior wrote: post #542
joshuamorton wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success. See, this is the kind of thing I mean. This is essentially a post-hoc justification of your success. Why did you "know that school had little to do with success". Why didn't your classmates? Did the valedictorian also end up on drugs and in jail? Or did they just end up less successful, despite working hard? I mean I can act…

Your assumptions about me are pretty off base and that’s the problem. You’ll never be rhetorically successful by invalidating people’s personal experience. I have a lifetime of making decisions and viewing their outcomes to draw from. You have theory. I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. This is why I think the concept of privilege will never gr…

>I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail.

And this is the fallacy in your thinking. I can find people who made terrible choices and became more successful than you. I can find people who made similar choices to you and are much less successful.

If that's all you do, then plain and simple, your experiences are invalid. They don't matter. They're not data. And anyway, you're already successful now, so your choices practically don't matter anymore. Success begets success.

To put it simply, you need to accept that there are people who made good choices as you did, and aren't successful despite their hard work and good choices. Because that's fact. That's the world we live in. That's not smug. It's a hard pill to swallow, sure and I don't really blame you for refusing to. But there's nothing smug about it.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#546

Post by rmah »

laythea wrote: post #539
petra wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can disagree but you would be wrong. I have personally taught people to diagnose and repair systems. Many others have as well.

There are are also formalized methods of teaching how diagnostics. And training on how to teach it. So yes, you can teach a monkey how to teach another monkey to do X.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#547

Post by malvosenior »

joshuamorton wrote: post #545
malvosenior wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumptions about me are pretty off base and that’s the problem. You’ll never be rhetorically successful by invalidating people’s personal experience. I have a lifetime of making decisions and viewing their outcomes to draw from. You have theory. I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. This is why I think the concept of privilege will never gr…

>I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. And this is the fallacy in your thinking. I can find people who made terrible choices and became more successful than you. I can find people who made similar choices to you and are much less successful. If that's all you do, then plain and simple, your experiences are invalid. They don't matter. They're not…

Do you really believe that nothing we do matters? That it’s all a roll of the dice or uncontrollably riding the waves of systematic oppression and privilege?

I don’t see how that’s useful. Yeah, life is not always fair but if you don’t believe in free will or that you can actually have some impact on your own existence, then what’s the point of even living it?

And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work.

Like you said though, it doesn’t matter. It worked for me and it worked for millions of other people so whether you think that was luck, privilege or something else it doesn’t impact my success. What you may accomplish is encouraging people who could help themselves to not do so. Probably not even that though because the kind of people who can help themselves are already used to ignoring the naysayers.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#548

Post by laythea »

rmah wrote: post #546
laythea wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can disagree but you would be wrong. I have personally taught people to diagnose and repair systems. Many others have as well. There are are also formalized methods of teaching how diagnostics. And training on how to teach it. So yes, you can teach a monkey how to teach another monkey to do X.

Not if X is problem solving, which is what I was getting at really. For example, you could teach a monkey to teach X to another monkey, but what if the other monkey did not consume the learned material. Then the teacher monkey would not be able to adapt to still achieve the goal of teaching the student monkey. What you say works, assuming what is being taught is simple, and there is no feedback from the monkey that is being taught to teacher monkey.

That feedback loop from student to teacher, is similar to a problem that you tried to fix, and it still doesn't work. You then need to adapt, just as the teacher monkey would need to when the student monkey did not understand what was being taught. How you adapt to the input from that feedback can not be taught, because the particular feedback that one will receive in the future cannot be predicated (for complex troubleshooting etc).

Sorry for bad monkey examples. :)

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#549

Post by aaavl2821 »

unoti wrote: post #242
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…

Software keeps working after the work is done. That’s the key differentiator, not the brain power. This leads to economies of scale on two fronts. 1) scale for the low end. As an engineer, I’ve made a game where I have customers worldwide that pay me something like 25 cents a week. A lawyer can’t really do work that scales out at the low end like that. It’s not a brain power thing, it’s just the nature of the work pr…

A lawyer can make a small modification to a drug patent that helps a company earn for example $2B a year for 15 years rather than 12

A lawyer can make a change in a corporate structure to lower a company's tax rate indefinitely

From the perspective of lawyers adding value to the law firm, a good lawyer can do this with dozens or hundreds of clients a year, and increase the firms revenue by bringing in tons of new clients. Creative lawyers can also figure out a way to differentiate themselves in a particular sector, like tech startups, and one lawyer who becomes a leader in an area can add millions in rev to the firm a year, for many years, by bringing in new business

Some law firms also take equity, and good decisions about when to do this can bring in huge windfalls

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#550

Post by joshuamorton »

malvosenior wrote: post #547
joshuamorton wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. And this is the fallacy in your thinking. I can find people who made terrible choices and became more successful than you. I can find people who made similar choices to you and are much less successful. If that's all you do, then plain and simple, your experiences are invalid. They don't matter. They're not…

Do you really believe that nothing we do matters? That it’s all a roll of the dice or uncontrollably riding the waves of systematic oppression and privilege? I don’t see how that’s useful. Yeah, life is not always fair but if you don’t believe in free will or that you can actually have some impact on your own existence, then what’s the point of even living it? And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll…

>Do you really believe that nothing we do matters? That it’s all a roll of the dice or uncontrollably riding the waves of systematic oppression and privilege?

No, and this is the second time now that you've made a ridiculous strawman out of my statements. I'm saying systematic oppression and privilege matter and have an impact. This is opposed to what you said which, if I understand correctly is "work hard and you'll be successful, no matter the situation". When I say "no the situation matters too", you manage to interpret this as some kind of fatalistic "everything is predetermined" argument, which it is not.

To be clear, I'm not saying that privilege is the only component of success. I'm saying that hard work is not the only component of success. So far you seem to be interpreting the second as the first.

Perhaps if you actually tried to understand what I was actually saying, instead of going out of your way to misinterpret it, you would realize that it wasn't as much nonsense as you think.

>And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work.

There are a lot of people that don't have the means to "become a good developer". I'll agree that good developers can get a good job, but for a lot of people, there aren't enough hours in the day to do what you handwave away as a given.

>the naysayers.

What, specifically, am I doing that is naysaying? Is saying "your success is a product of both your hard work and your circumstances" naysaying? Really?

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