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

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

#341

Post by kerng » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:29 AM UTC

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #319

kerng wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, distributed database systems from the late 70s, early 80s actually had certain transactional guarantees that some of these "modern big distributed systems" you refer to still dont have.

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

#342

Post by username90 » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:37 AM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #262

username90 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are basically legalized price fixing. What happens is that the union negotiate a "fair" price, and then all companies decide to pay no more than said "fair" price. See for example (original is in Swedish): https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

That just seems to be reporting the wage levels in Sweden which is one thing unions do price discovery for workers - run surveys. I suspect your posting in bad faith here and in the usa SAG minimum rates doesn't effect the higher rates that successful actors get.

The problem is that the numbers that gets published by unions in Sweden are taken as law by employers. You don't really know what unions are like if you haven't heard your employer say "We can't give you a bigger raise due to our collective agreement". And since basically all other employers follow the same guidelines you can't get competing offers for significantly more. There is a reason why salaries are very flat in Sweden.

Another way to see it, collective bargaining goes both ways, ie both workers and employers will come to a joint agreement. So if we created a FAANG engineers union and created a joint pay-scale for them, then that would basically be equivalent to the non poaching agreement often derided in discussions like this.

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

#343

Post by zanny » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

xiaodai wrote: post #315

zanny wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know its a troll comment but it really illustrates my point. Rust feels great when you know all the paradigms and complexity involved in writing Rust code because for a seasoned veteran it does everything sensible and right. But for your average person trying to get into Rust is a nightmare of fighting the borrow checker on all your misintended mistakes that would at best be silent undefined behavior in other languages. Top it all off with how expressive Rust is relative to most C like languages (remember, we had an entire generation who thought function objects were alien because they were taught Java) and its fantastic if you know what you are doing and a totally lost cause when you don't.

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

#344

Post by mertd » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 4:49 AM UTC

duderific wrote: post #92

jjeaff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a bubble on salaries in the Bay area. Only because of the real estate bubble that has been artificially created there. It will eventually burst as more companies will seek to hire in cheaper areas.

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…

It is artificial in the sense that there really isn't a good reason why the supply shouldn't be going up.

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

#345

Post by soup10 » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:13 AM UTC

solveit wrote: post #312

spenczar5 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

people working on new systems and tech are generally better programmers than people hacking away at enterprise spaghetti at a big corp. big corp jobs like that pay better for less work though.

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

#346

Post by ball_of_lint » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:17 AM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #71

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…

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…

One way that they may be getting 3-4x the value is in the long term. Although I've only worked as a programmer, I'd expect that the impact of having one negatively valued programmer is far larger than having one negatively valued chemist or physicist. Legacy code can often be years old and far outlive the jobs of the people who wrote it.

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

#347

Post by shkurkin » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:17 AM UTC

Bit off on the law salaries - big law is pretty locked at ~190k to ~450k for associates base bonus (most firms entirely dependent on year). For partners, many making 1M /year.

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

#348

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:18 AM UTC

I think its because we saw this big consolidations and growth around the big players. If the big guys happen to saturate the market then we will see a drop in bonuses.

Is this run on big companies might be because of the end of Moores law: this event brought some kind of stasis that benefits big established players, as the big guys are now less afraid of disruption (as it is easier for the upstarts to plan ahead if they know that you have two times the horsepower within a year) Is that right?

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

#349

Post by around_here » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

tylerl wrote: post #320

>> 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: 12…

The 1% considers themselves to be rank and file, and everyone else needs to get bootstraps. Just like they did.

It's a pretty common conception within industries with high levels of pay disparity.

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

#350

Post by chrischen » Tue, Jan 22, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

Let's be honest: programming and another field of expertise are not mutually exclusive, just like how being proficient in English is not exclusive to whatever other job it is you're doing.

The longer people treat it that way the more money they will continue to leave on the table for these Google/Facebook engineers.

You don't have to be a master programmer, just like you don't need to do four years in college studying English, but unlike English, most non-technical professionals still have absolutely no idea how a computer works even though the world revolves around it. If any universal second language is important, it's not English, it'll be a programming language.