I was hoping this would go into how the demand from programmers is temporarily high because X. Maybe AI learns how to program? Maybe we're just seeing investment because of the smartphone revolution? Instead, it basically argued that other jobs are harder. While true, that doesn't hold economic water. The wages he's talking about are part supply and demand, part market conditions and RSUs. All he really convinced me of is that wages will go down in a recession because RSUs won't appreciate.
Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
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Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#62I think Simon Peyton Jones has the right idea (paraphrasing): programming is one of the most difficult, complex engineering efforts undertaken by humans. At the scale we do it one can't help but be amazed that it works at all, let alone that it works so well.
I think the reason these compensations get that high is because it does take 5-10 years to become good enough to lead a team that manages something so complex and to do it well so that the results are reliable and consistent. I think the difference with doctors and lawyers is that we're not licensed to practice. We're not a capital-P profession. However we still have to attend conferences and stay relevant but the expense and requirements to do so are on us or the companies we work for: there's no professional obligation to do so.
I don't think we're in a programming bubble if the author means we're in a compensation bubble and that programming is over-valued.
I think the real bubble is complexity. We're seeing a deluge of security breaches, the cost of software running robots in the public sphere on unregulated and very lean practices, and a lot of what we do is harming the public... though by harm I don't necessarily mean only harm to human life -- but harm to property, insurance, people's identities, politics, etc... and we're not accountable yet.
If anything I think we need to up our game as an industry and reach out for new tools and training that will tame some of the complexity I'm talking about... and in order to do that I expect compensation to remain the same or continue to spread further out and become the norm. Being able to synthesize a security authorization protocol from a proof is no simple feat... but it will become quite useful I suspect.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#63If they paid you 'what you are worth' they could not make a profit. Since they make obscene profits, by definition, they are not paying you what you are worth.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#64How many software engineers are truly making over $300k as a rank-and-file? Let's be generous and say there's about a dozen or so companies that routinely pay engineers that well. Each FAANG will have on average, 10k engineers? So that's around 120,000 out of an estimated ~20 million developers (from a quick google search). That's around 0.6% earning pay in a "bubble" situation, the rest being senior folks or executi…
There is a bubble on salaries in the Bay area. Only because of the real estate bubble that has been artificially created there. It will eventually burst as more companies will seek to hire in cheaper areas.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#65I wonder about this.
It might be a huge bias but I would imagine a significant amount of productivity gained in the economy, and thus new wealth created, over the last couple of decades has been software driven. So it _should_ pay well, right? It doesn't really matter that it's considered easy or hard, just scarce.
I've heard it, perhaps jokingly, stated that more than half of software that gets built fails; it never finds a market or never meets completion. In that case high-salaries are also a good thing as it increases the funding, and thus social proof, required to start a new software project.
So, perhaps we have a way to go yet!
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#66I 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…
There is still a drastic shortage in good engineers.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#67As long as the demand for skilled programmers stays as high as it does, I don't see this alleged "bubble" popping. And it does not seem like software will stop eating the world.
In fact, as someone (I think it was Marc Andreesen) said, we're just at the "end of the beginning". Software is in the final stages of eating the media industry and will now progress toward heartier fare. This will be accompanied by further growth in programmer demand - specifically, programmers with skillsets which are niche right now.
Even as CS enrollment reaches an all-time high, I do not believe the supply of developers with appropriate skills will come anywhere near the demand in the next few decades.
So, no I do not think this can be called a bubble - except in the specific case of FAANG workers. They might see their salaries go down in the next years - but programmers as a whole are unlikely to have a hard time finding jobs with decent pay in the foreseeable future.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#68Sure 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.
Housing bubble, car bubble, etc. 10 years of economic growth and 0% interest rates and a few trillion dollars of QE will do that. Once interest rates rise sufficiently and the bubble pops, it'll hurt, but we get to get back on the ride again. Rinse, repeat.
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#69[deleted]
Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?
#70The only bubble I see are of programmers who work at Google and Facebook thinking most programmers have lives like theirs and make as much as they do. Most surveys of programmer salaries do not conclude that they routinely make $300k-$400k.
And when talking about just the top-tier tech companies, of course the economy around them is bubble-like. That is the danger of allowing them to maintain nearly monopolistic reign of their markets.