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Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

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Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#71

Post by Jach »

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?

Seattle area also. And I've seen increasing numbers of remote offers that are close ($170k base was the most recent I saw), you could live in a cornfield for all they care.

It's not a difference of FANG vs. non-FANG, and not even necessarily of location, it's a difference of tech company (or trying-to-act-like a tech company, "tech-like") and not. A lot of words could be spent trying to define exactly what I mean by "tech company" and certainly some non-tech-companies might have tech sub-departments that are given enough autonomy to be sufficiently "tech-like". But mostly it's just a mindset. Tech companies are full of people who understand it's the tech workers who are responsible for the lion's share of the company's success, and so they're often run by technical people too. They understand it so well that some of them had to be sued in order for salaries to rise proportional to contribution again (even if still too low) since the socially low rung of individual contributors even at tech companies often fail to see it well enough to complain, which puts the sibling comment about 2009's "reasonable salary" in another light. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...)

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#72

Post by crispyambulance »

jerf wrote: post #30
scarface74 wrote: post #10

No this is not ageism. After a certain point, if you are an individual contributor, your value is not worth more than someone with less experience. A developer with 10 years of varied experience can usually do just as well as someone with 20 years of experience. 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. I speak as someone in my mid…

"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…

    > The problem with the 10x myth is that it assumes a single dimension of productivity...
There's another problem with "10x": people evolve.

No one starts their career as a 10x-er, juniors are not juniors forever and people take time to find their knowledge, preferences, the right context, employer, coworkers, etc, before they can even discover their "super-powers".

And anyway, all the people I've ever met who could be called "10x" would immediately reject that label and/or buffer it with generous praise of the team in which they work. They would also tell a LONG story of how they got to where they are-- hint: it never starts with being at the top of their game. Instead, it always starts with or involves a lucky-break or a hard situation made better by someone who believed in them.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#73

Post by mdorazio »

Grustaf wrote: post #23
axlee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would believe it if that would apply to other positions. Why is it the case for us but not regular businessmen, lawyers, etc?

In almost all industries you start out doing low level technical stuff and then over time transition to working with people. An analyst at a management consultancy, a bank or a hedge fund spends his time looking at balance sheets or excel, whereas partners go to meetings and dinners with clients. In a word, you make more money by transitioning from hard skills to soft, and since most developers are unwilling or unabl…

Think you nailed it here. For example, in the consulting world you can pretty easily calculate the dollar value of employees at different levels based on the rates you can charge for them, the hours they bill, the new revenue they bring, and their compensation. That calculation tends to put a pretty hard limit on salaries for people not willing/able to make the transition to highly billable SME or partner-type business development/practice management.

In more traditional corporate roles, the compensation path is tied pretty heavily to growth in managerial skills and subject matter expertise in ways that don't always have parallels with software development. Even there, though, I've started seeing similar "ageism" as the article points out come into effect. Clients I've worked at have started coming to the realization that younger and more tech-savvy workers can often get to, say, 75% of the value of a 20-year employee for half the price in compensation.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#74

Post by switch007 »

plutonorm wrote: post #47
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…

And even if they are, transition into management is much harder. In my experience in the UK, in London at small to medium companies, I've never seen a promotion to management and only once seen promotion to senior developer. Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult.

> Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult.

The pointy haired bosses all think we have severe autism and can't deal with people.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#75

Post by mistermann »

xfitm3 wrote: post #35
notacoward wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your value is not worth more than someone with less experience. I don't think such a general statement (even its direct inverse) can be true or even particularly useful. At a certain point you're playing the odds. We're dealing with X, what's the chance that someone has seen X before or can see a connection to something else? In those situations, 20 years of varied experience can be a lot more valuable than 10 year…

Let's not forget the essence of why we get paid: you are paid because someone likes you. They like your work output, your social skills, or your status. I'm not as hungry as a intern but I present well, and at the end of the day, thats why I get paid.

"In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times."

– Buddy Kane, American Beauty

I doubt many people know this explicitly, but I think the necessary behavior is intuitive to lots of people. I suspect people "on (or near) the spectrum", which is far more common in tech circles, get their ass handed to them career wise many times because of this, because they are in some sense looking at a different version of reality than other people.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#76

Post by scarface74 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #72
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…

> The problem with the 10x myth is that it assumes a single dimension of productivity... There's another problem with "10x": people evolve. No one starts their career as a 10x-er, juniors are not juniors forever and people take time to find their knowledge, preferences, the right context, employer, coworkers, etc, before they can even discover their "super-powers". And anyway, all the people I've ever met who could b…

If I consider myself even twice as good as average with something, it’s probably time for me to transition to something else and start over.

Right now, for instance, I’m getting into the $cool_kids front end stack and I am barely above the level of “don’t eat the chalk”.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#77

Post by mi100hael »

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?

Yes - St. Louis. Mostly in the local consulting market. Probably tougher in the corporate market.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#78

Post by barbarr »

40acres wrote: post #39

I work with a lot of folks over 40, the two things I've seen that make me doubt ageism studies -- especially in tech, is that older engineers on average seem less likely to consider new technologies, and older engineers are more concerned about day to day stability and are less risk averse to consider another job which may pay higher because they have kids in school, mortgage, etc.

Your statement is literally ageism.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#79

Post by notacoward »

bongobongo wrote: post #69
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…

People expect their salary to go up for a number of reasons, but the major factors are inflation and cost-of-living. If your salary is not going up by at least a certain percent a year, you are likely stagnating or losing income. Another reason people expect their salary to go up is because it is a basic expectation that has existed for decades, and one upon which the supposed fairness of the current market is predic…

> If your salary is not going up by at least a certain percent a year, you are likely stagnating or losing income.

That explains why income for the same person at differing times is correlated with age. It does not explain why income at the same time for different people is also correlated with age.

> Life is _much_ more expensive the older you get.

It's much more complicated than that. Cost of living goes down when you've paid off your student loans, down when you've paid off your mortgage. It goes up when you have children, up more when they enter college, sharply down again when they leave. About the only cost that consistently increases is health care, but insurance and other factors make that complicated too.

Also, we don't live in a world where people are paid according to their need, or where many people believe they should be. We live in a world where people are paid according to supply and demand (distorted somewhat by lingering neo-feudalism but close enough). People have to justify their salary based on what they produce, not what they require. Nobody expects their salary to go up based on the latter.

Re: Earnings Ceiling for Tech Professionals over 40

#80

Post by burfog »

neilv wrote: post #61
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

Photos are another one in the US, with our wealth of diversity, yet ongoing history of biases and marginalizing. I used to hear in the US that some companies' HR had policies of discarding all resumes with photos or certain other details, to reduce risk of the company appearing to discriminate on basis of ethnicity or family status, for example. Perhaps apocryphal, but I always heard not to include a photo. And we he…

Note that a name can only indicate culture, not physical traits. This is a very different sort of discrimination.
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