I remember the same phenomenon in 1999. It's absurd to imagine that supply can continue increasing indefinitely without price being affected. Look at what happened to the legal profession.
Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
41–50 of 407 posts
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#42I didn't understand the bit of the refresher grant. If his grant is $50K a year on joining, wouldn't it be 50K a year on refresh? Or is he making the point that as you remain you get more refresher stock?
Your initial grant is not "$50K a year". It's for example, "200k over 4 years". And it's not actually in USD, it's in number of stocks. So if the GOOG stock is $1000, your grant would be "200 stocks vesting over 4 years". Now when you get a promotion, you'll get a new set of stocks vesting over 4 years. If you get the promotion before the 4 years expire (usually the case) it will overlap with your initial grant.
Refreshes are not only on promotion.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#43I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply spec…
If anything good programmers are underpaid. If you are making your company a mil, you should be getting 1/2.
And in tough times are you taking a drastic pay cut, or jumping ship? Sounds like you want a huge share of the good and none of the bad. Also not sure why you value programming so far above all of the other activities it takes to make a successful product.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#44This has been contemplated for many years and the price has gone almost nowhere but up. In the early to mid 2000's it was thought that most work would go to much cheaper India, and put highly compensated on shore workers out of jobs. It was tried to some extent, and failed. Then it was thought that lots of people would then fill the demand by going to university for CS and other related fields and saturate the market. That didn't happen either. It has been known for a long time that CS is one of the most valuable majors as far as salary and still the percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded has stayed between 2-4% Not saying that this is the only way to get into the field but it is the most traditional way and indicative of the supply coming in.
Consider that some of the most valuable companies in the world did not exist 25 years ago, and now they do making real non bubble money where their biggest assets are software developers. This isn't the dot-com boom. The attrition rates in CS programs are very high and even then not everyone that receives formal educations ends up being a decent developer. Factory workers made good wages in the mid 20th century due to companies making lots of money on an industrial boom. We now have a technological boom, and unlike factory work the barrier to entry is much higher. So I don't see why it can't continue. Sure the 3-400k salaries are high but they are at top firms that are selective and competing for a finite pool of talented workers in very expensive areas.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#45Cached version since the original is down: http://archive.is/pm3QU
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#46I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply spec…
If anything good programmers are underpaid. If you are making your company a mil, you should be getting 1/2.
Define "making". Does the program/service sells itself? If so, then your argument may stand. Nine out of 10 times though it doesn't. There are other people involved in making the sales and they also require a piece of the pie.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#47I dunno about a bubble, implying it will pop in some catastrophic way. But will market forces correct the above average salary? I think so. More young students than ever are learning to code, which is naturally going to increase the labor pool. The supply of software engineers is going to go up in the next 10-20 years (as will the demand, though! But I still think supply will outpace). This seems like it would mostly…
Lawyers have been around for a while, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of them, and the average salary is still relatively high. However the distribution of starting salaries has trended towards being bimodal (https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib).
I could imagine the same thing happening for programmers over time, if it hasn't already.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what if another programmer is willing to make me a million for only 25%? That's how markets work. You get paid what what the market will bear, not what you "should" make.
Except if the other side of the market teams up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
That is hard because you have to convince many other people to agree. It's easier for me to just undercut other people by taking less pay. I can for example going remote and live in low living cost area.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#49I didn't understand the bit of the refresher grant. If his grant is $50K a year on joining, wouldn't it be 50K a year on refresh? Or is he making the point that as you remain you get more refresher stock?
You get a 4 year grant when you sign your offer. Then, usually after your first full calendar year, you get another 4 year grant which usually is worth about 1/4 of your initial grant. This way, your total compensation stays somewhat constant* year to year even after your initial large 4 year grant finishes because you will have accumulated 4 1/4 sized grants.
*There are some caveats to that like usually people experience a slight drop in total compensation on their 5th year, FB/G refreshers are much much better than Microsoft's and Amazons (Amazon won't even give you refreshers if the stock is doing well like it has because your are "overpaid"). Netflix doesn't do any stock stuff at all and instead pays everyone in straight up cash and yes, they do offer senior engineers 300,000+ a year in base salary.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#50Sure why not? We’re also in an AI bubble, a cloud bubble, a blockchain bubble, a machine learning bubble and a tech bubble. It’s getting super foamy.