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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?

#101

Post by dullgiulio »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #59
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…

> Each FAANG will have on average, 10k engineers? That's..really low. FB has around that many, Google has like 50k, and from what I've heard Amazon has about the same number or more. Considering that everyone I know got >= $100k base out of undergrad regardless of location I don't think it's as uncommon as you would think anymore.

Well, Google has offices around the world. In their Warsaw office, for example, the normal salary is definitely way below $100k.

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

#102

Post by thecrazyone »

jsjohnst wrote: post #72
pmiller2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose I’m working on pulling out some functionality from a large, monolithic application. How much am I making my company?

Depends on what the outcome is. If it makes the site 50% more performant on 25% less hardware, pretty easy to swag it. Same if the outcome makes developers on the team able to ship new functionality 20% faster with 33% fewer bugs.

This seems awfully contrived.

Issue 1: It's very difficult to tell if your contribution got 50% improvement in performance because there were 10 other devs pushing in features and bug fixes. This is the attribution problem

Issue 2: This happens over time. It's very unlikely that your 50% improvement happens every year or month. Because, think for your self, this is compounding with large rates. It grows quickly. 1.5x improvement in 6 cycles (months or years) is 10x. This essentially is the time problem

Issue 3: even if you deliver the results you did, in a large company there's a large bureaucracy and no one person has the ability to increase your salary by that much. This is the control problem.

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

#103

Post by nightsd01 »

jsjohnst wrote: post #72
pmiller2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose I’m working on pulling out some functionality from a large, monolithic application. How much am I making my company?

Depends on what the outcome is. If it makes the site 50% more performant on 25% less hardware, pretty easy to swag it. Same if the outcome makes developers on the team able to ship new functionality 20% faster with 33% fewer bugs.

The problem with this argument is that programmers don’t work alone in a vacuum. How do you account for the support staff? The recruiter that hired you? The cleaning lady? The DevOps people? And so on.

It’s avtually fairly non-trivial to be able to say with even a modicum of certainty how much value a given developer brings to their company.

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

#104

Post by lumost »

kerng wrote: post #90
spamizbad wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 underlyi…

In maturing parts of the software industry you'll often see a desire to stay with the times in order to maintain a competitive edge, re-inventing the wheel often looks like full/partial re-writes of a system for minor marginal gains.

A great example of this is the evolution of FB/Google/Amazon. Portions of their core tech have been completely re-written over the years for marginal gain, but there is a large premium to being the best in tech.

In other parts of the industry every new cycle enables some new area of tech, and those marginal gains become the minimum bar for entry. e.g. Deep Learning and Computer Vision, distributed systems and cloud computing/SaaS.

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

#105

Post by mgkimsal »

titanomachy wrote: post #88
stickfigure wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> Nothing frustrates me more than having my job responsibilities include training someone with no initiative.

Years ago, I worked someplace where a colleague was tasked with working with another developer on project X. After about 15 minutes it was clear the other developer ... wasn't? A web project, and this person had been employed as a "web developer" for at least several months. Questions like "how does this information in this browser get back to the server?" came up.

Colleague goes to manager and says "I can hit the project deadline, or I can make sure other_dev learns the basics enough to be able to contribute and understand projectX, but I can't do both by the deadline. Can we move the deadline back a few weeks?"

No, and no. Train other_dev and hit deadline.

Deadline was hit, other_dev moved to another project afterwards, and was pretty much as ineffective as before, but colleague was then saddled with this reputation of being a 'bad mentor' because the next team learned other_dev didn't know how things worked. Why the hiring manager wasn't tarnished... who knows?

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

#106

Post by mcfunk »

It would be very instructive to see a studied comparison of what factory work looked like during its peak as a well-compensated profession in the US, and what is happening in software development now. Certainly there are meaningful differences, but I am pretty driven by a concern that we are the factory workers of the future -- people whose profession used to guarantee a comfortable wage, but no longer.

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

#107

Post by howard941 »

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'd counsel caution in relying on those charts because, inter alia, they're self-reported salaries and the very nature of the report excludes unemployed bar members.

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

#108

Post by draw_down »

amrrs wrote: post #26
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…

Absolutely right and something we see in Data science too. Coding is a domain where we work cross-architecture. I can't be just a useful Python programmer - I can only be a useful Python programmer in Marketing automation or some Business associated with it. The fat package makes programmers not realize this.

Someone has to make the tools that are used to automate the marketing, analyze the business data, whatever the task at hand is

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

#109

Post by friedman23 »

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…

> Let's be generous and say there's about a dozen or so companies that routinely pay engineers that well

You aren't being generous. The amount of companies paying people that well is on the order of dozens, maybe even 100.

Every single FAANG company, every single unicorn, all hedge funds, and a few successful non-unicorn company based out of SF and the Bay Area.

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

#110

Post by ummonk »

Pamar wrote: post #84
tanilama wrote: post #54

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. 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...

Does anyone do that, at least on the software side? Obviously there are consistency issues with e.g. non-instantaneous bank teller actions, but those are human inconsistencies, not software inconsistencies..
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