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Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

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Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#81

Post by someone454 »

stickfigure wrote: post #71
shantanubala wrote: post #9

I 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…

I think the comparison to biology/chemistry/physics is interesting. Perhaps even more than software, there's a huge spread between the value of low and high performers - the best scientists make new discoveries that can be worth billions. On the other hand, if you think the software industry has a hard time figuring out (at hiring time) who the high performers are... science is driven by serendipity. Nobody can predi…

Science doesn’t reinvent itself every couple of years either: new discoveries build upon a foundation of old discoveries. Software is more like the fashion industry.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#82

Post by sbov »

leoc wrote: post #74
specialp wrote: post #44

This 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…

CS has been through a couple of salary busts in the US previously though, no? One in the '80s when all the then-new CS programs started to release graduates into the market, then another after the dot-com bubble; or have I been misinformed?

I graduated from a no-name college shortly after the dotcom bubble burst and it was still easy for me to find a job paying $60k/year, which was plenty to live off as a single person in the SF bay area at the time.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#83

Post by est31 »

matz1 wrote: post #48
est31 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the side of the employees, unions have proven themselves to be good means to improve the situation for employees. Here in Germany they definitely have helped in many industries.

My comment was more about the companies though which may form cartels to drive down employee wages. Companies forming cartels is illegal, while unions are legal in many places.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#84

Post by Pamar »

tanilama wrote: post #54
shantanubala wrote: post #9

I 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…

> I 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. But that is no definition of bubble. Bubble, at a very basic level, means there is a lot of capital flowing within, it has little to do with whether how difficult your job is.

This is... debatable. I was around in 1985 and if I had proposed using "an eventually consistent schemaless DB" to tackle a bank or a manufacturing project I would have been laughed out of the room. And not because it sounded too good to be true, mind you...

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#85

Post by peteradio »

rch wrote: post #47
sharkweek wrote: post #15

I 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.

I think barrier to entry for lawyers is way higher than for programming.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#86

Post by gammateam »

sciencewolf wrote: post #20

How 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…

FAANG companies have engineers staying just 2 years because they made enough money. Your statistics don't account for time.

Sure its not "easy" to get into those companies, but it isn't an outlier to get into them either.

The simple reality is this:

If you are an engineer at a publicly traded tech company, it is customary to get RSUs and Refresher RSUs. These have compounding effects as their vesting schedules start occurring in parallel. By the end of your second year you will have two series of shares unlocking, and this is in conjunction with your salary increases and bonuses.

You should expect and negotiate your RSU grants to be proportional to your salary. Competing offers from other publicly traded tech companies ensures this.

If the share price has also increases, which is the only thing that happened over the last decade, this is enough for a lot of people to quit.

The article did not talk about share price increasing.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#87

Post by someone454 »

wffurr wrote: post #33
jjeaff wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

It's how markets work when wealth is distributed incredibly unevenly, and a weak social safety net makes it intimidating to work for yourself instead. In other words, markets work that way because that's how the bosses and capitalists want it to work, and have so far been successful at thwarting attempts to use the government to change things.

The simplest and most accurate statement is that it’s an emergent result of the principles of capitalism combined with human nature and not a plot to keep us down.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#88

Post by titanomachy »

stickfigure wrote: post #71
shantanubala wrote: post #9

I 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…

I think the comparison to biology/chemistry/physics is interesting. Perhaps even more than software, there's a huge spread between the value of low and high performers - the best scientists make new discoveries that can be worth billions. On the other hand, if you think the software industry has a hard time figuring out (at hiring time) who the high performers are... science is driven by serendipity. Nobody can predi…

I've worked with good people at every company I've been at... but the nice thing about being at a top company is I never have to deal with totally incompetent or helpless people. Nothing frustrates me more than having my job responsibilities include training someone with no initiative.

The selection process seems to do a good job of keeping out the lowest tier at least, although we openly acknowledge that we miss a lot of good people as well.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#89

Post by duderific »

leoc wrote: post #74
specialp wrote: post #44

This 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…

CS has been through a couple of salary busts in the US previously though, no? One in the '80s when all the then-new CS programs started to release graduates into the market, then another after the dot-com bubble; or have I been misinformed?

The dot com bubble caused a salary bust because so many companies that were employing lots of people went out of business. This put a glut of programmers on the market with nowhere to work, which predictably pushed salary levels down.

This is nothing like the current environment, where there is a consistent demand for programming talent which outstrips the supply, and the industry as a whole is far more stable.

Of course, a global economic slowdown could put a damper on salary growth, but it will not be a salary "bust" like what happened after the dot com bubble.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#90

Post by kerng »

spamizbad wrote: post #53
TeMPOraL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I 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. Good programmers I know also overestimate the skill needed to earn high salary in this job. You don't have to go up the learning curve much; these days, you just learn yourself JS a little bit and go for a webdev job, making shit cod…

> Nah, that's like wondering why is this ice block sitting on a hot plate and still solid. The answer is: because it just got put there, and it'll melt in a moment. So too, will end high salaries, as most low-hanging fruits get eaten by software, made by mass-produced cohort of programmers. Our industry has its share of cycles, but this, in my view, is largely wishful thinking on the part of people. Nothing wrong wit…

I have not noticed these technical shifts per se. What I have noticed is that mature engineers move on and do other things and new ones reinvent the wheel with some new fancy language or term which then becomes the new way of doing things, and the cycle repeats. Sometimes there is a great deal of value when a new level of abstraction happens but I wouldnt call this a shift, it's just progression.

Many of the underlying problems and solutions exist for decades. Database systems you mention are a good example of this.

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