271–280 of 350 posts
I think this misses a possibly very important effect: agglomeration. Programmers in the Bay Area were not all born there, many (most?) chose to move there, some from elsewhere in the US, some from abroad. If those programmers who are more skilled tend to move to this area then the resulting greater productivity could explain higher pay. So why might more skilled programmers move to the Bay Area? Perhaps because other…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are good things there of course, first and foremost the salaries and the nice suburban houses. It's a good place to consume things I guess. But there are many illnesses as well, what's happening now could be just a preview if things go sour economically. Also you will work more and probably experience more stress for that money than you would in Europe. On average North Europe is way happier than the U.S but no…
> There are good things there of course, first and foremost the salaries and the nice suburban houses Australia has lots of nice suburban houses too. But they are expensive, and you'll struggle to get paid enough to afford one. One advantage the US has over Australia – while it has really expensive areas like the Bay Area or Manhattan, it also has lots of medium-sized cities with affordable housing and plenty of jobs…
Sorry, but I know developers with way more natural talent than I have but without context to what they want to accomplish it means little. Can those developers learn what I know and then be 10x what I am? sure. But there are few domains where there isnt a learning curve. That creates inefficient markets. That creates disparity between salaries.
Agglomeration is the idea that there are a cluster of benfits arising from clustering people doing an activity together. Inter-firm sharing of technologies and practices, in particular. A lot of the transferred knowledge is informal and implicit, and a lot of the transfer happens outside of the formal workplace.
Transport costs: as transport costs decline (and they certainly have done so for information, voice and video communications), then previously negligible differences in costs become significant.
So, paradoxically, cheaper communications increase the relative value of clustering together, and especially the value of being physically near your biggest customers.
This is true even for whiteware manufacturers, let alone high-information services.
It goes on and on. Hard enough to manage a remote worker when that's the single issue; compounded with the rest it becomes a hard sell. So the price has to be low, to make it worth the effort.
You don't get good software by dumping a bunch of requirements on a low-paid remote team and pressing "blend." You get good software when you have programmers who share your schedule, who share your culture and mission, who don't struggle with language barriers, who care about the needs of their teams and stakeholders because they know them personally, who feel goodwill towards you and the product they're building fo…
This is why developers must be paid well. It is extremely hard to focus on a problem you don't care about. Every little bit of lost focus is lost time/money. It's more bugs in the future. It's more churn.
There aren't many jobs that are this dependent on the workers will to do it.
I think this misses a possibly very important effect: agglomeration. Programmers in the Bay Area were not all born there, many (most?) chose to move there, some from elsewhere in the US, some from abroad. If those programmers who are more skilled tend to move to this area then the resulting greater productivity could explain higher pay. So why might more skilled programmers move to the Bay Area? Perhaps because other…
I was born in a cheap city in southern Europe, and all my life I moved to increasingly bigger and more expensive cities. Why? In my home town job opportunities are very poor. Local jobs are scarce and for full remote positions you are competing globally.
Sure, London is expensive as hell, but there are many more opportunities, so I can progress my career, and drive up my salary. A bigger talent pool attracts more companies, more job opportunities attract more people, and so the snowball goes...
I've worked with outsourced programmers before. Most of them are talented and a joy to work with. However, giving them work is often a form of programming... they will do exactly what you tell them to do, no more and no less. For example, unless you describe the tests you want them to write, they may not write tests. If they see a possible refactor or optimization, they won't volunteer to do it. One of the frequent s…
Yup. My anecdote: There was a middleware business application. Two database fields were last-changed-timestamp and last-changed-username. The spec document accidentally flipped the definitions, defining the value for last-changed-timestamp = current-username and vice versa. You can guess what got implemented.
"I ran this and got a type conversion error. Did you even test this?"
"Yes that is what should have happened based on the spec."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience Americans are pretty blunt, and will not hesitate to point out flaws and make cynical jokes about them openly in the presence of their team.
Cynical or sarcastic jokes are arguably the opposite of blunt. They're a way to acknowledge or broach a subject which the person, and most often the group, is uncomfortable or incapable of articulating more clearly. For example, because they're being forced to do the impossible, or because the character, cause, or resolution of an issue is poorly understood. People from cultures where sarcasm isn't common don't under…
What also helps, counter intuitively, is providing multiple sarcastic statements in quick succession. People listen to spoken words at set rate but the nonverbal parts of communication are instantly clear. This allows the listener the opportunity to consider the extended thought in a single context allowing for a richer sample of sarcastic communication to think over.