221–230 of 407 posts
The last push failed but businesses will adjust their conceptual models and try new things. Eventually, something will stick.
Heck, maybe the last round failed because the technology culture needed to develop more in different areas. If so, how long before local geeks do to their area that has apparently already happened in the states?
1) I think part of this can be explained by the disproportionate living expenses on the west coast, especially in The Valley. I wonder how those numbers on doctors and lawyers would play out if you constrained them to San Francisco? 2) I do think there's a partial bubble, though. What I tell people is, programmers today are like literate people in the middle ages. You can do hard things with reading and writing, but…
Cached version since the original is down: http://archive.is/pm3QU
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Well, do you make 500k? If not, then why not? It’s possible in the US, but the median US household income is 1/8 that. The vast majority of workers, probably including most software engineers, ate better off at $50k but not having to worry about insurance if they get laid off, and getting 3-6 weeks notice when being let go (among other things).
The people pulling bubbly SV comp numbers (i.e. the topic of the thread) are not part of that majority though.
Full disclosure: I work at a public company (not FAANG) and my TC is under $250k.
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> 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...
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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..
I mean: what would you use Node.js for - in 1985 - even assuming you had access to a system to develop and test stuff made with it?
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When I talk about shifts, I'm referring to things like the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, which increase the net-demand for software and along with an entirely new specializations of knowledge. While there are some key concepts to things like databases, the fact remains that your 1985 database would not be considered sufficient in todays world: It would have too many limitations, lack features we now take…
"When I talk about shifts, I'm referring to things like the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, which increase the net-demand for software and along with an entirely new specializations of knowledge." iOS was basically AppKit, so anyone already developing for the Mac knew most of what they needed to know to develop for iPhone. Pretty much every programming innovation is incremental, and doesn't require throwing…
But the demand for developing in AppKit suddenly increased by orders of magnitude.
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.
Does this include the now >50% TVC "non-headcount" as recently reported?
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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.
I currently write software used by millions of people. Partly because I’m a backend engineer, I have no real idea how much more the company is making due to my direct efforts. Since they keep paying me, I’m assuming it’s a decent multiple of my carrying cost, but I have no way to measure it.
Whether or not the best programmers actually get paid a lot depends on how efficient the market is and I have no idea about that. When crap programmers are getting paid a lot, then its probably a bubble.