If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?

Quite a few good replies in this thread already. Let me just add a couple points:

Engineering, done right, is an invisible art. Doctoring and lawyering done right are intensely personal activities, service businesses with one-on-one human attention. Good engineers fade into the background. Engineers make objects and the objects speak for themselves. You probably can't name the engineer who recorded and mixed the sound on your favorite new record. You almost certainly can't name the engineers who designed all your local bridges and rail systems. We don't even know how many people designed, say, the smart cover for the iPad 2. All of this is by design.

Engineers also rip and mix and burn and create things that are the sum total of a lot of individual efforts. I don't even know if I'm the engineer responsible for the test software that tested the wafer that spawned the chip that went into your cell phone that filters the RF frequencies in your cellular radio. There are very good odds that I am: I wrote such software, and last I heard it was still running and my old company is still selling chips. Again, this is how proper engineering works. Many of the best people you'll ever meet work outside the spotlight, quietly making their corner of the system better.

Engineering is a worldbuilding activity. The objects become famous, not us, but even the objects' fame is fleeting. The marvel of one age is the boring infrastructure of the next. But, hey, at least you get to change the world. Fame isn't everything.

This is a fantastic post. It is well written, and I agree with many of the authors points. Far from being angry, I think that the majority of people reading here on HN actually appreciate this type of critical analysis, and I think that it is a shame that it had to be posted on a throwaway account. However, I would like to present some alternative viewpoints for a few of the issues brought up in this post.

"As a doctor, however, someone like this - a top professional at the peak of their career - would probably make about $400,000. Partners at big law firms commonly net a million a year. Investment bankers are making several million (post-crash!). Top management consultants easily clear $500,000. Even a top accountant - probably a partner at a big 4 firm - would make two, three, or four times as much."

Hold on a second. What is the point that you are trying to make in this post. You say that you are talking about comparing computer programmers as compared to other highly skilled professionals, but then you narrow your focus to the highest percentile in each category. How many lawyers are partners in a big law firm out of the total number of lawyers? How many of these top management consultants clear $500,000?

The top performers in every industry will always make a salary that is amazingly higher than the median. However, unless you know the exact distributions of the salaries in each industry you can not meaningfully compare top performers. What good is it to know that a certain lawyer makes a million dollars a year without knowing how probable that outcome is relative to some more dreary alternatives.

When I started reading your post, I started reading it with the expectation that you were talking about the general market for programmers. Then about halfway through, it seemed to me that you had switched to talking about the very highest performers in the highly skilled labor market. Well, if that is what we are going to be talking about, then we should focus on it.

Look, the highest performers in the computer programming field are no longer called computer programmers. They are called CEOs and there is a high likelihood that they are very, very well compensated relative to the best performers in many other industries. However, as I said earlier, it is pointless to throw around anecdotes about how this 99.999th percentile individual made millions or this one made billions.

So, let's get back down to earth, and try to find some passably good numbers (not perfect, but better than nothing) to use as comparison points. Let's look at some numbers that may be more relevant with what someone around the 50th percentile would experience. All of the following links display ranges for salaries in each field. No, they are not the best samples available, but they are better than going without any data whatsoever.

Note: As stated on the site - all compensation data shown are gross, national from the 10th to 90th percentile ranges.

Physicians: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/People_with_Jobs_as_Phys...

Note: Physicians must have several years of residency as well as an M.D, so a programmer would already have 5 to 9 years of experience compared to a physician that is just beginning.

Lawyers: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Attorney_%2f_Lawyer/...

Lawyers in the states typically need a J.D. before they can actually begin being a lawyer, and law school is very expensive. I should also note, that the gravy train is slowing down dramatically for lawyers - http://www.economist.com/node/18651114

Software Engineers: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer_%2...

Sr. Software Engineers: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Sr._Software_Enginee...

Sr. Business Analyst: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Sr._Business_Analyst...

System Admins: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=System_Administrator...

Computer Programmers: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Computer_Programmer/...

Management Consultants: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Management_Consultan...

Investment Banking: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Associate_-_Investme...

Accountants: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Accountant/Salary/by...

Sr. Accountant (numbers look a little screwy here): http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_Accountant/Sa...

Looking at those numbers, it does not seem to me that there is anything particularly wrong with computer programming as compared to other highly skilled professions. As a matter of fact, given that one can become a programmer without needing additional certification, it seems to me, at least, that computer programming is a great field to be in.

"What \"programmers can get rich in startups\" really means is \"entrepreneurs can get rich in startups\", whether they're programmers or bricklayers."

What is the percentage of bricklayers that get rich creating a startup? I don't have the number offhand, but I do know that there is no "Silicon Valley equivalent" for bricklayers. If there was really that vibrant of a bricklayer startup industry, then, due to agglomeration, you would expect there to be at least a few geographical areas where there was a high concentration of bricklaying startup business being conducted (think something like Wall Street).

"I think it isn't. I think the country would be better off if MIT computer science students, like their neighbors at Harvard Law School, could dream of growing up to be President. And I think we'd all be better of if computer science wasn't just seen as a major for socially awkward nerds."

I agree completely, and, actually, I agree with many of your other points as well. That's the thing though, when you are talking about programmer respect it seemed as though confused several different "types" of respect - compensation, entrepreneurship, political pull. With regards to the first type of respect (compensation), I disagree with you because the data for compensation suggests that an alternative hypothesis may be true. With regards to the second type (entrepreneurship), I cannot definitively definitively say either way but neither can you because the data needed to compare the numbers of successful entrepreneurs in different industries does not seem to be readily available.

With regards to the third type (political pull), I agree with you, but I think that perhaps their are deeper things. I have some hypothesis:

1. Perhaps the skills that it takes to do well in politics in the U.S. are somewhat orthogonal to the skills that it takes to build a multi-million dollar software firm from nothing and run it? How could an engineer win an election where the campaigning generally consists of 5 second soundbites and smear campaigns?

2. Maybe the problem is the general youth of the industry. The software industry is in its infancy. Maybe, over time, as it grows deeper roots, it will acquire more political power and influence? This is a fairly likely hypothesis.

Finally, I would like to address one last point:

"When the government wants to bring in more workers from overseas - which obviously lowers salaries, and reduces job security - who do they bring in?"

The problem is actually not so obvious:

* Are the programmers entering the country working in the same exact fields and at the same levels of expertise as the programmers that are local? If this is not the case, then the impact on pre-existing salaries would be negligible.

* Are the programmers entering the country located in similar geographical areas to the programmers that are local? If this is not the case, then, again, you are not likely to see much of an impact.

* Do the programmers entering the country require additional training as compared to local programmers? If this is the case, then they would have lower compensation not because they are willing to work for less but because they are being compensated in the form of additional training.

* Is the industry rapidly growing? If this is the case, then it may be conceivable that existing programmers and programmers entering the country would both benefit as the growing industry has room for them both.

* Of course, one can always increase pay through artificial scarcity, but the problem with doing this is that it ends up costing society by resulting in a deadweight loss - consumer and producer benefits that are never obtained due to artificially high market prices.

* There are quite a few other things, but this post is now more than long enough, and I really need to get back to work.

Well I obviously can't say much about your situation, since I don't know you. Maybe you do have several degrees and you are more trained than any of them. But let's do the math - your lawyer and judge friends have done a 4-year degree and a 3-year JD at the very least. Let's say you've got a regular 4-year CS degree. That means they trained for 3x1800 (let's be conservative) more hours than you did; that means that you would have to have spend 270 hours per year (almost 34 days, or more than 6 full time weeks) each year, for 10 years, before you'd even have had caught up with them. That's not counting any potential in-company skills training, and the mandatory MCLE training required just to maintain your bar license that laywers go through.

Of course, I too have read numerous books about various topics in programming, and I've played for 1000's of hours with languages, tools, etc. I could count that as 'training' and say that I'm more highly trained or do more ongoing training. But frankly, the time I spend on that is not 'training', because it's way too inefficient compared with 'real' training. Most programmers that I know who are programmers-by-passion and not programmers-by-occupation are like that. Again, maybe you're different, and I'm sure that there are many people out there much more disciplined and talented who have had more training than the average programmer. But saying, in the aggregate, that programmers have much more training and do more ongoing education than other professionals, doesn't pass the smell test. I'm not even saying that they have less (although I suspect they do...), but certainly not more.

Anyway, I do agree with your last point that the amount that people are paid is not directly related to the amount of work they put into getting to where they are; and that organizations like the AMA and the ABA are relics from the era of guilds and drive compensation for their members up; and need to be abolished. Unfortunately the trend seems to be the other way - more gateway organizations under the guise of 'ascertaining professional quality' and 'protecting consumers from incompetent practitioners' - but that's a different discussion.

What kind of programmer and what kind of assembly line?

Because our main job skills do not revolve around self-promotion and manipulation of others.