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We will never have enough software developers (2020)

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Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#31

Post by drekipus »

trashtester wrote: post #23
cs137 wrote: post #10

There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…

SWE's are not the only ones that think that their pay is low compared to their intelligence level, their education level, how tough, inconvenient or important their work is or what they feel they deserve for some other reason. For instance, I'm sure there are plenty of HR managers in various companies that are secretly furious about all the young young mostly males, mostly white or asian, still in their 20s, join the…

I'm sure HR managers know that the majority of jobs they are hiring for are different from the job they're in, with different pay scales and demographics.

Infact I'd say it's their profession.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#32

Post by itsmemattchung »

With OpenAi (and other comparable technologies) able to semantically understand "write fast and efficient C code for a prime sieve" and generate fairly impressive C code, I'm no longer sure I agree that we will never have enough software developers (after watching this, made me get just a little nervous as well as excited about the future of our industry):

https://youtu.be/k_EF42H2ZC0?t=187

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#33

Post by quickthrower2 »

nicoburns wrote: post #27
quickthrower2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I made more from owning and living in a house than I can possibly save from SWE job.

It’s housing that’s the anomaly there though, not SWE salaries.

It is both IMO.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#34

Post by thrwawy283 »

cs137 wrote: post #10

There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…

I'm optimistic growing remote work means extending the working life of an SWE (counter to ageism).

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#35

Post by mcculley »

www_harka_com wrote: post #26
quickthrower2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I made more from owning and living in a house than I can possibly save from SWE job.

How do you make money from owning and living in a house?

* by ensuring that others pay more in property taxes

* by ensuring that others cannot build, increasing value of your investment

* by leveraging the deduction for mortgage interest

The system is working as designed.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#36

Post by leoedin »

willjp wrote: post #15

Re: skill churn I got the impression that there is much less of this in lower level languages. It seems like there is a fairly stable foundation of C, Cpp that everything else is built on top of. I wonder if embedded programmers have this problem.

In my experience it's the opposite problem. Advocating for modern development practices or languages (even unit testing, let alone Rust) for embedded projects is hard work. Most new embedded projects, even today, are written in C or C++.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#37

Post by itsmemattchung »

JackMorgan wrote: post #5

A fascinating premise, and matches what I saw as an engineering director. The best just get bored and move on. I think many teams are unaware how much extra value is possible by retaining existing employees vs hiring new ones. Each year I'd try to make sure I was "making them an offer they couldn't refuse" with new interesting challenges, new tech, plenty of personal research time, as much pay increase as I could pos…

> The best just get bored and move on.

Or a reorg happens and you land a shitty manager.

To be fair, almost all my managers were amazing, people who truly cared about their staff: at professional level as well as a personal level.

I've only had one absolute psychopath as a manager ... but I should thank him because he was the last straw and gave me enough courage (and anger) to leave AWS and start my journey as a solo entrepreneur.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#38

Post by BlargMcLarg »

trashtester wrote: post #23
cs137 wrote: post #10

There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…

SWE's are not the only ones that think that their pay is low compared to their intelligence level, their education level, how tough, inconvenient or important their work is or what they feel they deserve for some other reason. For instance, I'm sure there are plenty of HR managers in various companies that are secretly furious about all the young young mostly males, mostly white or asian, still in their 20s, join the…

Why would the ethnicity or sex matter when these HR managers would still see the same differences regardless of ethnicity or sex?

Either way, I'd think twice about putting HR managers as victims here when they are the main perpetrators of low raise budgets and high hiring budgets.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#39

Post by tialaramex »

cs137 wrote: post #10

There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…

Many lawyers have to religiously time track everything. Because hours attributable to a specific client are billed and billable hours are where the revenue comes from.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#40

Post by bruce343434 »

cs137 wrote: post #10

There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…

Lawyers work on "discovery". Requesting and sifting through piles of documents. The jira ticket doesn't seem so bad.
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