131–140 of 407 posts
Well. I live in Sweden and I don't make anywhere close to these values. Not even remotely close. I have been programming for 12 years and I like to think I'm not half bad at it. So is peak programming just in the valley or should I be worried as well?
You have a social safety net and actual workers’ rights that make up for at least some of the difference.
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> 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.
>= $100K outside of a major city for a green undergrad doesn't seem typical. Do you hang with grads from big name schools?
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…
So are you making the point that this is just imposter syndrome writ large?
About a decade ago, I created a piece of software that made a department of 10 people redundant. The company actually tried to make use of them, but they were so happy with the improved productivity, that they basically kept the dead weight on, for the most part.
Last year, I did this at a financial company and eliminated an entire team. They did not keep the dead weight.
I may not be so lucky to avoid a future mercenary like me. Hopefully that explains it! I rely 100% on my creativity and out-of-the-box problem solving ability to solve real problems (note: not imaginary interview riddles). So far, the living I've made doing this is good.
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. 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…
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.
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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.
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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.
As a data scientists who considers himself moderately good with the pydata library set, I realized the other day if you took those 5 libraries away from me, I'm not sure I have that much to offer in terms of my programming abilities. I don't necessarily feel bad about that, although it did give me pause.
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.
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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…
> Whenever the next stock market crash comes, almost half of that compensation (the equity based one) will almost vanish. 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?