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Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

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Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#51

Post by nilkn »

Grustaf wrote: post #20

1. There are diminishing returns to experience within software development, as you get more experience there are fewer and fewer companies that have any use for those extra years of experience. 2. The perceived value of that extra experience is even lower. How many recruiters or even engineering managers can honestly claim to be able to leverage the last 5 years of experience from someone with 20+ years? 3. In most i…

I would amend this to say that time spent in a career represents a commodity that one can invest in oneself, and different folks invest that commodity in different ways and to different extents.

Some folks coast and fall into the category of "1 year of experience, 10 times in a row." Someone else gets more out of 2 years of working than the coasters get out of 10. In the worst case, you have a coaster who thinks they're actually in the second category.

A simple number for years of experience is very hard to interpret as a result. Take someone in the second category and give them 10 years of experience and you get someone amazing at their craft. But you have to be able to reliably discern this in the interviewing process.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#52

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

neilv wrote: post #29

The article's way of using "ageism" in the lede, and their title, both seem odd, and seem to confuse the real issue of what I think what most people mean by "ageism". There seems to be a substantial tech industry aversion to hiring developers in 40s (sometimes 30s) or older. But if you suggest that developers in their 40s expect salary to keep growing without limit, that fuels hairtrigger resentment arguments about h…

>"resumes illegally screened for age"

I'm happy this is a thing in the US and wish Europe would copy this since in some Western European countries like Austria, having your birthday and photograph on your resume is mandatory making discrimination a piece of cake.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#53

Post by blueboo »

jbay808 wrote: post #50
scarface74 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My statement was referring specifically to an "individual contributor" and I said as much in the original post. If you are a team lead, by definition you aren't just an "individual contributor" and you're also not the "10x developer". Your increased effectiveness is because you have a team under you and you are a "force multiplier". but "careful, paranoid engineering" does too. Almost by definition, your really junio…

I've worked with a 10x developer. He wasn't a team lead because he wasn't interested in being a team lead and also probably wouldn't have been nearly as good at it as the person who was. But man, was he ever transformative. Not only in terms of handling the most technically challenging tasks and solving the black-magic challenges that nobody else wanted to touch, knowing the C standard like the back of his hand, and…

Likewise. To have someone with immaculate technical judgment means you potentially have a custodian that keeps an entire multi-team codebase on track.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#54

Post by jshowa3 »

ljm wrote: post #41
jerf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I also believe that the idea of the 10x developer while not a myth, is so rare it’s not worth trying to find for most companies" The problem with the 10x myth is that it assumes a single dimension of productivity, and that no-one is ever negative so there's some sort of sensible, positive "minimum" to talk about. Senior developer leads a team of three other medium-experience developer, and completes the project in s…

On that basis I’d consider the junior to actually be more senior, as understanding the need of the user and building that is vital to the role. A senior engineer who churns out code without taking that step to understand the domain and build the right thing is not, in my estimation, senior at all. Bashing at something until it finally works is, to me, something we do as beginners when we’re still in the mindset of so…

You'd be very surprised then at how fast some people at companies bang out code with very little understanding of the problem, get it done fast, and look like heroes because it works. They then build up an expectation of getting things done fast because "time is money" and end up with a garbled mess of spaghetti code that functions.

Most senior developers that I know are so good at the above that very little communication is required about even the problem. So in reality, they end up sacrificing the team and becoming one man armies.

This goes on until retirement, and then a junior replaces them because they're cheaper and they're stuck with trying to learn a huge ball of code on their own, because teams became obsolete and documentation was an after-thought, that could have been done with a bit more effort on the senior developer to get out of their box and actually impart knowledge.

However, there is the opposite end of the spectrum where they write great code and could do everything themselves while still knowing crap about the problem domain. At that point though, does the PD really matter? Most people , including customers, just accept code results on their face anyways.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#55

Post by spacemanmatt »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #26
jknoepfler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engi... (the data in the actual link you're responding to, with actual level information) $120k/year is what I'd expect someone with 2-3 years experience to be making at Google as a base, with anywhere from $35k-$80k additional in signing bonus and stock offerings. "Senior Software Engineer" means different things at different companies, but to me it indicates s…

Despite what everyone would like to believe, FANG isn't the industry.

I had to job-hop and watch my industry and my city inflate like crazy to see 120. Though...I did start some time ago.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#56

Post by jlukic »

I think generally current startup hiring discriminates in hiring for post vs pre internet age programmers and that could possibly account for the statistical differences in salary for developers that didn’t spend their entire careers under the current paradigm.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#58

Post by edmundsauto »

scarface74 wrote: post #24
Nursie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience As a developer with 20 years experience ... I'm a lot better at what I do than I was ten years ago. Better at seeing how it relates to the business I'm working with, more productive in ways that are not just LoC. I'd be OK if I can sustain my current income... but I'd still like to take the step to bein…

And that’s another line of reasoning I don’t believe. I have a coworker who is probably 10 years younger than I am but has been working for the company for 7 years to my one, how could I better understand the business of the company than he does? I worked for one company when I was 35 dealing with the complicated rules of the railroad industry. My manager was 28, but he was the founder of the company before it got ac…

One explanation could be that having more experience in a wide variety of fields brings perspective that someone steeped deeply in the business, but with very little external breadth, has.

Not that I necessarily think that's true. Personally, I have yet to be convinced that it's possible to systematically measure developer productivity, making all of these comparisons pretty worthless except as "dorm room at 2am" type conversations.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#59

Post by kod »

hinkley wrote: post #48
malvosenior wrote: post #4

> In Hired’s findings, tech pros were never offered more than $149,000 annually. I don't know where they are getting their data but that's a lot lower than good developers of all ages make. You can see on https://levels.fyi that large tech companies will pay senior developers 200-400k routinely. I don't necessarily doubt the analysis but the data is very incomplete if they didn't see a single offer over $150k.

Are you seeing over $150k anywhere other than SF?

Absolutely yes. (Austin, TX)

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#60

Post by harimau777 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #13
malvosenior wrote: post #4

> In Hired’s findings, tech pros were never offered more than $149,000 annually. I don't know where they are getting their data but that's a lot lower than good developers of all ages make. You can see on https://levels.fyi that large tech companies will pay senior developers 200-400k routinely. I don't necessarily doubt the analysis but the data is very incomplete if they didn't see a single offer over $150k.

Those numbers are already pretty outrageous outside the US.

Keep in mind that cost of living is very high in the places where many of these jobs are located. For example, $120K in SF would be equivalent to $56K where I used to live in the Midwest.
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