A simplified view is supply and demand. There's only like 600 major league baseball players and their average salary is 4mm. Rare group to get into. There's fewer doctors than engineers or coders. And it's not like you can jump on elance and have someone remove your tonsils. And with greater supply comes greater variability in skill and salary.
If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
141–150 of 276 posts
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Even in this thread, it is appalling how quickly people reach for the "but look at Google!" argument. Guys, Google is a top paid company in a top paid part of one of the richest countries in the world! Stop throwing around 6-figure salaries (in US dollars, no less). I can attest to the fact that in Europe, programmers have respect on the level of assembly line workers. By Europe I mean countries from UK to B…
"...programmers have respect on the level of assembly line workers... [in the] UK... your parents would much prefer you picked a respectable profession, like a doctor or a lawyer." In the UK, sure, being a lawyer or doctor is much more prestigious than being a programmer. However, to equate programmers to (presumably unskilled) assembly-line workers is total nonsense.
> However, to equate programmers to (presumably unskilled) assembly-line workers is total nonsense.
Really? Is it so absurd?
Some programming tasks certainly require a lot of skill and insight. Not everyone could be a senior developer on a major software project, or start a successful business making their software from scratch.
On the other hand, many programming tasks today are very much like an assembly line: here are some parts, glue them together like this, make a product. A scary number of "programmers" today lack even basic background knowledge of the theory underlying their work, or a proper understanding of their tools, or any particular training and experience (academic, personal projects/self-study, or otherwise) that qualifies them to work on industrial, commercial projects.
Unsurprisingly, those people produce crap. Their software doesn't do what users need, or loses users' data, or crashes users' computers, or in the Internet age has security problems that let malware onto users' systems. Funnily enough, the people paying for that crap don't much appreciate it, and the software industry generally has a poor reputation for being able to produce good quality work as a result of these fools.
Of course, smart programmers have also built things like the Internet and air traffic control that can co-ordinate landing dozens of planes an hour safely, but people take it for granted that these things work without any understanding of how difficult it is to get such critical software right, and most professional programmers will never work on such important projects anyway.
I don't see how we're going to start distinguishing between software developers who know what they're doing and those who don't until we have some sort of competent and authoritative professional standards body. I don't see how we're going to have one of those until our industry is grown up enough to set useful professional standards. We clearly aren't ready for that today, with widespread ignorance in the industrial community, academics whose theories often don't stand up to practical applications, management who can't even estimate a project within a factor of 5 for time and budget, and consultants who peddle the Next Big Thing as if snake oil was going out of fashion. And thus the vicious cycle goes on, and probably will until our industry is a lot more mature.
Until then, many so-called professional programmers are pretty close to unskilled assembly line workers, and it is a strange idea that they should earn 10x the wage of someone working an eight-hour shift under far less pleasant conditions in a factory to produce goods that you and I rely on every day.
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#143There is a big confusion here between personal credit and objective physical properties.
Software is 'eating the world' because it is the most super-efficient building material ever invented.
You could say the wheel 'ate the world', but not because each person making each wheel is a genius, but because of the general physical properties and value of roundness. The overall benefit is not a matter of individual credit or respect, it is a matter of physics.
We should be paying the total programming workforce for the total (personal) effort required, not the absolute (objective) 'value' returned. The excess of value is gain: you do not need to pay anyone, it is a free gift from physical reality.
Now, whether programmers' pay compares 'fairly' with anyone else is still an open question, but the physical facts of software being great stuff does not (or should not) seem to justify one side or the other.
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#144This 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 doct…
Funnily enough, many political representatives in China are engineers.
Could that be because they don't have to win a media driven popularity contest to 'win' office?
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#145This 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 doct…
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). Wait, think about that for a second.
There is a concentration of tech startups in SV because the internet lets them sell to the rest of the country without issue. Brick layers / construction are far less mobile because you need to be at the construction site to build a brick wall. Now nationwide startups represent a fairly small percentage of successful small businesses their advantage is how quickly they can go from multimillion dollar companies to multibillion dollar companies.
PS: Read the millionaire next door and you find a lot of people in the use that made a few million from those bricklaying startups. The main difference is it often took them 20 years to get where software companies got in 5.
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me start by stating that you reply is somewhat of an example of HN-bias... The world of programming is vast. Larger than "America", larger than Sillicon Valley, larger than the world of startups, and certainly much larger than the "elite" that regularly reads (and comments on) HN and pats each other in the back. Even if we accept that programmers are well-paid and respected (two different propositions) in the tec…
I'd taken to calling myself a 'digital garbageman' for a time, because that's essentially what I was. I had some corp jobs, and it was mostly cleaning up other peoples' code. I said it tongue-in-cheek, but I did feel that way, and eventually left corporate work to hang out my own shingle. This time around, I'm primarily solo, and sub out work to people to augment my time/skills. I've gotten much better about charging…
"With medical and legal professions, the licensing/regulation creates a large barrier to entry"
This is the heart of the differences in pay. Expensive certifications keep the supply of doctors and lawyers artificially low and thus their average salaries higher. Meanwhile, anyone with a computer can start programming software.
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough, many political representatives in China are engineers.
India too. "If you are not an engineer, you are nothing" I was told that by a friend from India once.
I don't want to come off as arrogant but I should say this. People generally do not select engineering as a profession in India- it's one of the default professions for most of the middle class.
I have been involved with computers since I was 6, so for me it was a pure choice. But most of my friends, some of them working for big name SV places don't really love or care about software or technology. In fact, some of them actively hate their jobs. Unlike in America, where people actually go to computer science because they love it. In India it's just the default way for a better life.
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#148This 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 doct…
> 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?
Even with doctors, to be solidly in the above $200,000 layer, you pretty much need your own practice established and smoothly running (with nurses, staff, and everything) -- not every M.D. out there has that, and the effort required to get there is equivalent to the effort required to start your own business (with 80-hour work weeks etc.)
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#149I don't see this mentioned anywhere, but one very important difference between programmers and the other professions is that doctors and lawyers have not only a high bar to entry, but a legal monopoly. There is outsourcing of legal review and radiology, but still not on the scale of programming. There's also the matter that doctors save lives, and lawyers either bring justice to the aggrieved, or keep you out of jail. OK, most of them actually don't do those things, but those are the images we have in our minds, and that's part of what makes them respectable.
If we professionalized and forced anyone calling themselves a programmer to meet a very high bar of competence, things would look pretty different. The median salary would be higher. My guess is that we wouldn't see anything like the dynamism of the startup community. Think of how slow-moving and conservative both medicine and the law are compared to programming. You could argue that that's not a bad thing, but it would certainly be very different.
I would love to see the top programmers get respect for doing what they do, instead of having to become marketers, but I'm just not sure it's how the world works. To make money, you have to convince someone else to give it to you. Most people working in a job only make it linearly because they only have a relationship with one customer. Many more fortunes are made by figuring out how to serve MANY customers than are made by finding a single customer with very deep pockets who needs you badly.
Re: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?
#150Great thought provoking post. I think two sentences in your post truly answer the question "Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?"
"But for some reason, unlike just about every other profession, programmers seem to have an aversion to asking for more pay and more respectability." and "And I think we'd all be better of if computer science wasn't just seen as a major for socially awkward nerds."
As a non-programmer, I think the perceived lack of communication/influence/negotiation "soft skills" has become the group's reality. Obviously there are exceptions, but the natural tendency is to think programmers are introverts, who don't innately have or haven't been taught the skills involved in negotiating higher salaries and gaining power through office politics/informal communication methods.
Maybe the act of programming in the US creates a natural selection bias towards a certain type of person and maybe that person isn't a natural fit in positions where communication, both formal and informal, is a key requisite. Or maybe the programmer just doesn't care. Either way, I think these skills can be learned to some extent and wouldn't mind seeing more programmers in power positions in companies and in the government.