Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble? • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by chipotle_coyote » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 12:56 AM UTC

duderific wrote: post #289

empath75 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the current tech bubble bursts, it’s going to absolutely wreck amazon, fb and google—the three companies that actually gain most of the benefit from all these tech companies blowing their funding on ads and AWS spend. Those are the companies driving up salaries — once that rollercoast ride stops I imagine that there are going to be mass layoffs and salary readjustments for years afterwards.

What is the current tech bubble, exactly? Those companies you mentioned have absolutely massive revenues and profits, and plenty of non-tech people and companies are responsible for those revenues and profits. This was not the case in the earlier bubble (lots of overvalued companies with little or no revenues). What seems more likely is that the little startups will get crushed as VC funding dries up.

I think that's true, but I also suspect that one of the main drivers for the incredible acceleration of big company salaries has been to keep talent at that company rather than seeing the best engineers leave to go take VC money and play the startup lottery. If VC funding really does dry up, the pressure to keep salaries this high may be considerably lower.

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

#312

Post by solveit » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 12:57 AM UTC

spenczar5 wrote: post #299

esoterica wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means you're in the top 1% of software engineers in the only metric that matters.

To be explicit, you're saying the only metric that matters (when we're ranking software engineers) is how well-paid a software engineer is?

When we're discussing income, that seems reasonable.

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

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Post by dzonga » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 12:58 AM UTC

Maybe programmers and a lot of workers are underpaid. If a company is making a profit of at least $2mil per worker, paying that worker 300k$ seems like theft. Though, we do have a problem not every company makes $2mil per worker, but most of these corporations are robber barons, if you look at Executive compensation vs average worker, difference is at least 21x. Most average difference is 100x in the real world.

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

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Post by hnzix » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

hopler wrote: post #239

zrobotics wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and the games industry may be the clearest example of this. In 1985 the developers had to actually ship a finished game, there wasn't the opportunity to release a half-finished product and update it later. Compare to Fallout 76, which was very clearly unfinished at launch. Edit:typo

Games in 1985 shipped with bugs baked in that people were just stuck with. Civilization had a broken Gandhi, and still shipped 4 different bugfix versions.

The anecdote is they deliberately left in nuclear Gandhi for the lulz.

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

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Post by xiaodai » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 1:04 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #160

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…

End user tasks might be able to be automated into dumb programming jobs, but companies have tried for decades to down-source their programming and it always falls flat on its face. Even if you have library support to hand hold your budget coders, even if you use a lot of them, even if you give them all the time in the world, they will produce more complicated, less coherent, less stable, buggier, and harder to modify…

just use Rust

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

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Post by xiaodai » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 1:06 AM UTC

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #73

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…

Ironically, knowing that I can get a good salary with relatively shit skills makes me want to up my game. Because it seems like a situation that is inherently unstable. Eventually it has to change (imo), either through companies becoming more scrupulous in their hiring, or through a massive flood of new devs.

You will get a massive flood of wanna-be new devs. But economic theory would tell us that high salary attracts more talent and even the companies will have more people to choose from they also become more selective so the riff-raffs still won't get a job. So only the good ones will get the plum roles; of coruse a few bad one fall through the cracks, but overall devs are smart people.

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

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Post by auganov » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 1:07 AM UTC

WilliamEdward wrote: post #91

rch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is law anything like programming? the potential is endless in software and tech... Law careers have extreme limitations.

Having a legal background opens up a lot of opportunities in government-related areas. These simply aren't as easily available to other professions. If you'd like to hold a position of power, doing law is probably the best bet.

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

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Post by chipotle_coyote » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 1:13 AM UTC

fbonetti wrote: post #149

duderific wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing artificial about the real estate "bubble" in the Bay Area. Prices are set by supply and demand, both in salaries and real estate. Real estate prices are high, because the Bay Area is a very desirable place to live, there are people who can and will pay the high price, and the supply of housing is low. Salaries are high because big companies are fighting for talent (demand), and the supply of talent i…

The thing that makes it a bubble is that the supply is artificially constrained by local zoning laws. Eventually people will be fed up with the situation and they'll vote for a government that'll allow more development, at which point housing prices will plummet.

This is one of those bits of common wisdom that falls into the "it's more complicated than that" territory. Zoning laws are a contributing factor, but they are far from the only factor -- and it's a stretch to say that they're the deciding factor. Zoning is an issue. Rent control is an issue. Basic supply and demand is a huge issue that arguably outstrips regulatory roadblocks. Regional geography is also much more of an issue than people sometimes think.

Housing prices here are likely to stabilize, but they're not going to start seriously declining unless the job market starts declining, too.

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

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Post by RhodesianHunter » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 1:35 AM UTC

kerng wrote: post #173

convolvatron wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'll just leave this here https://books.google.com/books/about/Distributed_Databases.h...

I'm not sure why you get downvoted, I'll upvote you. The "modern" database systems are now going back to the exact design principles that the books you refer to solved long time ago. There is tons of research, dissertations,.. that focuses on this from decades ago. Its just now that the new systems realize that these problems actually exist. If you dont know the history of a certain field and what came out, you repea…

I can assure you that the major theories behind modern big distributed databases were not written in decades old books.

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

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Post by tylerl » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 1:41 AM UTC

>> Rank and file programmers at the top tier tech companies now make $300 to $400 thousand per year.

That is absurdly false.

To be generous, let's pretend he's only talking about FAANG programmers, rather than startups. According to Glassdoor, average compensation for "Software Engineer" positions:

Facebook: 121K Base + 15K Addl = 136K

Apple: 122K Base + 10K Addl = 132K

Amazon: 103K Base + 20K Addl = 123K

Netflix: 121K Base + 20K Addl = 141K

Google: 124K Base + 20K Addl = 144K

These numbers are slightly inflated (by 1k to 20K/yr) because I counted base and additional pay independently, while Glassdoor calculates an average total combined comp, which is always lower; I'm taking the larger numbers to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

Since Google is the highest, let's drill down on them a bit: With 1yr of experience you're looking at 121K+16K (or 125K total claimed, not doing my independent math thing), with 15+ years experience you're looking at 140K+24K (or 161K total claimed).

Again according to Glassdoor, to break 300K at Google on the average you need to be a Senior Staff Software Engineer or higher, which is exceptionally rare -- bit o' Googling suggests they're around 1% of the workforce, give or take.

In other words, the author is literally calling "The 1%" the Rank and File of programmers. Which is an exaggeration, I think.

NB: What Glassdoor doesn't account for is past stock performance; since SV traditionally pays a large chunk of its compensation in restricted stock units, and since the stock in each of these companies has increased by 50% to 150% in the past 4 years, by the time those stocks vest your "additional" compensation may have grown quite a bit due to market performance. But that's not a compensation bubble, it's just the stock market.