Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

programmers.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 71 posts

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#31

Post by anonymous246 »

Hopefully this comment won't get lost and I can get some contrary views. Everything IMHO; I'm trying to formulate my own views on this top. Be kind. :)

Among other things, I think open source and free software has devalued software and programming in the eyes of business owners. The root cause for this is that a culture of self-employment doesn't exist in the programmer community.

All of us are looking to polish our resumes and make them look good. The easiest way to do that is to clone some existing idea and make it open source so that it can be reviewed by a prospective employer.

IMHO, no other profession gives away their crown jewels for free like we programmers do.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#32

Post by snorkel »

Pay structures are stupidly hierarchical but who enforces that? The managers enforce it by threatening to quit if they discover someone below them on the org chart is being paid more. Sure, some managers are replaceable so let them quit, but the organization has to weigh the cost of disrupting an entire branch of the org chart, and perhaps losing a talented manager, vs. just giving them the raise (plus pile more work on their plate to justify it)

Programmers can be managers too by volunteering to lead new initiatives that will require new staffing. The key to being seen as a an effective manager is to manage down (relate and motivate your direct reports) and manage up (relate your team status and exciting initiatives to your boss) To continue up the org chart you must volunteer to take on more responsibility at every opportunity until you don't go home at night at which point you have to ask is this really worth it?

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#33

Post by clistctrl »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #22
sarkozy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a good idea to encourage everyone to try to get paid more, since (a) corporations make massively disproproportionate wealth relative to employees and (b) programmers are bad at the type of social and interpersonal skills that are required for negotiation. That said, as someone who has been through this, I think your advice is a naively optimistic oversimplification of the forces that hold programmers bac…

(a) corporations make massively disproproportionate wealth relative to employees... Depends on the corporation. Walmart only makes about $10,700/employee in profit, for example (about $6/hour if all employees work 35 hours). Since walmart typically pays $10-12/hour at minimum, employees are capturing about 2/3 of the value they create. http://www.advfn.com/p.php?pid=financials&symbol=NYSE:WM... Of course, the numbers…

you literally just changed my world view, thank for showing me this.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#34

Post by _delirium »

sarkozy wrote: post #30
yummyfajitas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(a) corporations make massively disproproportionate wealth relative to employees... Depends on the corporation. Walmart only makes about $10,700/employee in profit, for example (about $6/hour if all employees work 35 hours). Since walmart typically pays $10-12/hour at minimum, employees are capturing about 2/3 of the value they create. http://www.advfn.com/p.php?pid=financials&symbol=NYSE:WM... Of course, the numbers…

That undermines my assumptions. Thanks for the link. I'm very surprised a company of Walmart's size has such low profit per-employee. I would have assumed some accounting tricks were responsible but maybe it's the nature of their business.

Walmart is the canonical example of a low-margin / high-volume business. Especially during their growth phase, every time they would find a way to reduce costs, they would funnel that savings into lower prices, rather than taking the savings in the form of a higher profit margin.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#35

Post by wazoox »

This is a beautiful answer, which thoughtfully explains what makes the difference between "big entreprise java coding monkeys" and "startup rockstars". I love it.

The difference between "widget factory" and "film crew" explains also most of the differences between Java (archetypal "widget factory" tool) and dynamic ( or lesser known) languages, too.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#36

Post by far33d »

I'm going to ignore all the "social" aspects of the supposed pay difference in my analysis. I think they are valid and accurate, but don't paint the full picture. This is coming from the perspective of a programmer turned PM. Note, however, that I haven't actually observed any pay difference - in the current startup/tech climate, good engineers are in high demand and are commanding super-high salaries. The best engineers are often the highest paid (cash-wise) in the company.

The reason good PMs are paid highly is because they use leverage to create more value across the organization than they can provide as a single contributor. A great BA or PM guides the whole project and the whole team, making a group of people more efficient by properly prioritizing their work and getting more value for each hour worked. A great PM measures these results, and shows the difference they make. A great PM tunes the product to the customer.

Great PMs are held accountable for the product and its success in the marketplace. Great PMs can't do their jobs without great engineers and respect that fact.

You only need one great PM for every 5 great engineers, so you can be more discerning about who you hire and how much you pay them. Since great PMs are accountable, they command high equity value, and should accept that instead of higher salaries (like salesmen take commission).

If this isn't true where you work, you should work somewhere else where it is.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#37

Post by petenixey »

Consider the possibility that PM/BAs are not paid more because they are perceived to add more value but instead as a safeguard against them destroying more value.

If you purchased a chainsaw and you had £10 left to spend on accessories, which would you rather purchase, a guard that protected against lethal chain breaks that happen 20% of the time or a more comfortable handle?

A bad developer will slow a project but in almost all cases will not destroy it. A bad PM can totally destroy a project and many, many BAs have specced projects that are at best irrelevant and at worst destructive.

In most businesses, the risk is not that a project will only deliver 100% of expected value it is that the project will fail. Given that avoiding failure is the primary goal, investment should follow accordingly and so we are willing to spend more to avoid a bad PM/BA than we are a bad developer.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#38

Post by sdm »

sudonim wrote: post #28
edw519 wrote: post #13

Not anywhere I've ever worked. Hmmm, makes me wonder about this meme... 1. Ask why a myth is true. 2. Discussion ensues. 3. The mythiness gets lost and is accepted as a given.

I second this. I'm the product person at a startup w/ 5 devs. I know for a fact that rails developers in NY generally command a higher salary than I am making. I can't speak about their equity situation. My responsibilities are to decide what we build and why. I'm also the shit umbrella for the developers, and end up having to speak with clients. Ultimately it's me who is held responsible for the success / failure of…

I third it. Actually in every company I've worked at -- startup, midsized, fortune 500 -- a pm or analyst makes less than an engineer at the same experience level. It's always much harder to find good engineers, especially now a days.

The confusion might come from large companies where PMs tend to be more senior to a lot of the development team. But once a engineer matures and gains experince they will pass them. I my experience, it's very common to make more than the person who manages you.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#39

Post by lemming »

lionhearted wrote: post #2

Because programmers don't ask for more money often enough. Seriously. Here's the three minute version of doing it: 1. Work hard on tangible stuff, document and claim credit for doing it, and notify people with what benefit the work provides . This sounds maybe stupidly obvious, but a lot of non-technical people don't understand the value in something. So, "Upgraded XYZ so our website loads faster, which is proven to…

While I agree that programmers don't ask for more money often enough, this is overly simplified and doesn't account for a lot of cases that are important to a lot of programmers.

Firstly, a lot of work that programmers like to work on really is invisible to pointy-haired types. I run an infrastructure group, and when I do my job well the CEO hears less about my work because there are no problems. It's much more difficult to sell the benefits of never hearing about my code than pointing to changes I made to a website that directly affects conversion rates, or something similar.

On a related note, your point 3 assumes that a) the developer wants to change roles and b) that change is going to be to something that can be justified through revenue. Again, there is a lot of work that is interesting to programmers and very valuable to a tech company that doesn't directly drive revenue. These changes are very difficult to sell unless the CEO understands the benefits of these sorts of changes, in which case you probably don't have to sell them anyway.

In my personal case, I've gone as far as pointing out that every single thing that our company builds, when deployed, is critically dependent on my code and the code that I am responsible for working - and it does work, every time. It's still amazingly hard to get sales people to value that.

Re: Why business analysts and project managers get higher salaries than programmers?

#40

Post by gadders »

As a Project Manager who has worked in Investment Banking for most of their career, I would say the risk is greater for a project manager.

I have quite often seen Project Managers "let go" when a project fails, but rarely do the developers on the team suffer the same fate.

Ultimately, in a corporate environment, the buck stops with the Project Manager.

Having said that, for esoteric technical skills (quant level programming, advanced risk stuff) the pay is probably higher for a developer.

Post reply on HN