121–130 of 407 posts
Bubble, no. Supply is going up for engineers, traditionally trained or not. So it all rests on demand, which I don't see calming. The real cliff for programmers is when code starts to write itself.
As someone who hires programmers, no. It is difficult to hire good people. The only way I can successfully hire low-cost programmers is by building a system/machine for creating and releasing software that does not require a high level of intelligence/creativity. The only people that can make high margins in programming-heavy industries are those who can do this or some sort of defensible moat. As a programmer myself…
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 put it another way: we are looking at the top 1% of software engineers. Is it surprising that they have incomes in the 1% range? For comparison, in Amazon, Senior and above engineers count for ~20% of the total, and those are the ones pulling +300k regularly. So only the top 20% of one of the top companies are getting such compensation. And to follow the article, this won't last forever. Whenever the next stock…
You're saying the value of (for example) Google stock will plummet to 10% or less and then not recover at all over the following few years?
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.
The programs created make the companies that hire the programmers extreme profits, in a way that scales by machines to serve an arbitrary amount of customers.
Even small maintenance changes make millions or tens of millions, but when they are done wrong they bring down systems they cost billions. That is why skilled craftsmen are worth their weight in gold.
How that is supposed to constitute a bubble is beyond me.
Then, payment for work isn't (or shouldn't be) about (perceived) equality and it isn't about compensation for suffering or even mere inconvenience either. It's about the value created by the work, which is why the work being hideous or insanely long work hours shouldn't be contributing factors that justify a high salary. Now, this of course is an idealistic notion. Often work is still valued in terms of time wasted instead of value created. Moreover, in the case of some not so well-paid but still important jobs the salary attached the them often is only tenuously related to the value created.
All that said, while probably few professions will be able to match the leverage and hence the value created through software development in the near future, perhaps the more reasonable hours and better work environments in software development should serve as a model for other work environments and industries rather than as an indicator that something's amiss.
Demand is super high because of 2 things: 1. Tech companies are very profitable 2. There is a lot of cash in the economy (thanks to QE) a lot of which got invested in big tech and startups.
And supply of high quality senior engineers is not there yet.
When the wave of young kids who chose to do MIT instead of Harvard Law School gets older, things should get more in line.
At least that's how market theory is supposed to play out
In fact, even with a flooded market of programmers, the production of new tools actually affords programmers even more tools to work with and even more leverage for the business by employing them. So there remains a strong case for programming.
Mind you, the silicon valley area as a specific thing may well be a kind of bubble given how much more you can be paid there as a programmer compared to just about anywhere else in the world.
If an ML system is able to extract the intended structure from a block of code and somehow translate that into a known-good pattern you could see things shift. I see it as being somewhat akin to human language translation.
That's one way. The other way is to do something that other people are unable to do. Software engineering is highly dependent on raw talent / intelligence, and hard work is unable to bridge the talent gap in our industry the way it is in other industries. The high paying companies in our industry are just the ones smart enough to pay 2-3x compensation to get 10x programmers.