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Want good programmers? Then pay them.

irrlicht3d.org

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Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#441

Post by ericd »

keithnoizu wrote: post #426
ericd wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. You're only able to make 200-300k/year for the company because of the infrastructure and audience they've built for you and all the other engineers to use as leverage . It is orders of magnitude harder to make that much on your own, regardless of how good a coder you are. Also - we need more consumption? Wealth comes from production, everything else is just shuffling money around. People in the US are…

200,000-300,000 gross isn't that much really. ~150.00 an hour with 40 billable hours per week ~60 actual work hours if you're freelancing. Most good programmers should be able to hit that. As to providing infrastructure/etc, they aren't providing anything odesk and some research could provide. If someone talented set off on the own they should be able to put together similar marketing/framework/teams within a few yea…

When I say infrastructure/audience, I'm talking about the many millions of users in the ecosystem which your code will be used by, and the marketing machine to push it out there. The same code that's used by 10k people if you set out by yourself has a 100x impact if it's used by a million Google users. That's why Google has such a high revenue per engineer number, and you're not going to replicate that without a lot of brand building and marketing, which is hard, expensive, and takes a long time and a good amount of luck.

I don't know many freelancers that make 150/hr and have 40 hours of solid work a week every week at that rate - you'd spend a lot of time lining up that work. Sure it's possible, but it's much harder than if you're just working at a large successful company. I believe total compensation at Google is roughly around there for a good programmer anyway, without all the hustling for work or risk.

>As to providing infrastructure/etc, they aren't providing anything odesk and some research could provide. If someone talented set off on the own they should be able to put together similar marketing/framework/teams within a few years.

Not without a huge amount of investment, you're underestimating even just the technical infrastructure at the SV giants.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#442

Post by ricardobeat »

rmc wrote: post #180
dr_ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors don't have infinite sick days, many don't have 30 vacation days (I barely take a week off a year), and most don't have 40 hr work weeks.

Yeah no-where on earth are there 30 holiday days per year and 40 hour maximum. No-one works that. Except several EU countries which have that as the legal minimum… (e.g. France: 35 hr legal working week, 25 days holidays and ~ 13 paid public holidays per year)

Brazil: 44h, 30 days PTO, ~12 public holidays, 13th salary (yeah...). If you're not working as a contractor, that is, which is way too common in the IT field.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#443

Post by ricardobeat »

mahyarm wrote: post #435
sliverstorm wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need six figures to make rent?

A 1 Bedroom starts at $1600. A 3 bedroom house is ~$3000. 6 figure tax rate is %40 not counting deductions. If you have a family, your rent already takes out over half your 6 figure income. You only live so long, so you need to make some savings too.

So a $100k salary actually gets you $5000/month? Is that true in practice (not on paper)?

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#444

Post by ricardobeat »

pmjordan wrote: post #57
zeemonkee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Austria, here it's a case of "well, this is the industry standard, why do you deserve more? - oh you're a foreigner? Just be grateful we even give you a job" (even if you speak Finnish). So, most employers don't go with it ;-) I'm quite happy with foreign clients as they pay better and the work tends to be more interesting - the only killer is the different timezones.

Yes, there is also a strong bias against employing non-natives (or at least non-Germanics) in Austria, orthogonal to the other issues, which was quite shocking after living the previous years of my adult life in the UK, which has a much more liberal culture. This bigotry is much less of an issue (I'd almost say a non-issue) in actual technology companies though. It's telling that the proportion of immigrants among th…

Being brazilian and having lived in the UK, calling the british a "much more liberal culture" is incredibly funny :)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#445

Post by enjo »

Retric wrote: post #401
3pt14159 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience Europeans have a different view of life than North Americans. Especially East coasters. In work I find they are more interested in perfection and creativity, and less so on productivity, output, and efficiency. Thirty days of holiday a year is affordable if North Americans would be fine with houses that were 13% less spacious, but most North Americans I met heavily optimize living space, where Europe…

I am a 31 year old programmer working 40 hour weeks in the US. I get 21 days PTO + 2 floating holidays + 7 Government holidays + 5 days training days + 3 months sick leave at full pay + unlimited sick leave at 60% pay (long term disability). I also pay 2k/month in rent for a small, but nice apartment in the DC area. Ignoring sick-leave and training that works out to 30 days / year off, they don't let you cash it out…

Where is this?:)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#446

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #408
kstenerud wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised... But actually, fizzbuzz is just the bottom level. You also want to do basic coding exercises for whatever specific area you are hiring for, such as: - Set up an extremely basic web app that lets the user enter a name and echoes it back to them. - Make a sprite move across the screen. - Display a 3d cube with different colors on each side and make it rotate. - Make it play some music. - Aggregate…

I wonder if there's a harder equivalent to FizzBuzz — one that doesn't take any longer to explain or do, but requires a much higher level of skill to pass. One we used at http://airwave.com/ was "Write a Perl subroutine to determine whether a string is a valid dotted-quad IP address," which is something you can do in various reasonable ways in one to five lines of code.

[deleted]

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#447

Post by intractable »

matwood wrote: post #287
tatsuke95 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Six figures, 30 vacation days, full benefits, infinite sick days, convince me that you won't be out of business in any short span of time and you won't bounce a check. Also, under no circumstances do I work more than 40 hours a week." There was a time, after the crash of 2000, when programmers actually had a difficult time finding work. It doesn't matter what the career, training or job, this stuff goes in cycles,…

All the more reason to get the most of what you can out of the inequality before the cycle swings back the other way.

Absolutely. After all, that is what most employers will do when the pendulum swings their way.

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#448

Post by soup10 »

skerrit_bwoy wrote: post #344
kamaal wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, One more thing that I didn't like about it was the feeling that its OK for the employer to overwork you and then not compensate it, under the pretext of 'interesting work'. This is an old plan used by most companies. I like doing what I do, but I would love to something else if I had the money to free me up. For most people, their area of least incompetence becomes their passion.

I'll add that if you LOVE doing what you do for 40 years, straight through retirement, you are one odd duck indeed. The idea of "passion for work" is a power play to get folks to put in more for less. Don't get it twisted. Furthermore, workaholism is for people who don't understand what it means to be human. Steve Jobs was a sucker - almost as much as his followers who didn't realize that he was.

Steve Jobs was a sucker because his values were different than yours? Really?

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#449

Post by potatolicious »

Apreche wrote: post #330
solsenNet wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe you should start your own company? seems to me you chaff quite a bit about being a "wage slave"

I am incredibly risk averse. I will not take the chance of becoming homeless.

In the current climate, the risk of that is incredibly low. For one thing, if you're risk averse and amenable to trading risk for equity, you can keep a sizable war-chest at home and simply run off VC money. That way even if you crash and burn you have a safety net to fall into.

The current state of the software industry is funny that way. The worst case outcome of being a failed startup founder is a six figure job ;)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#450

Post by potatolicious »

ricardobeat wrote: post #443
mahyarm wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1 Bedroom starts at $1600. A 3 bedroom house is ~$3000. 6 figure tax rate is %40 not counting deductions. If you have a family, your rent already takes out over half your 6 figure income. You only live so long, so you need to make some savings too.

So a $100k salary actually gets you $5000/month? Is that true in practice (not on paper)?

I'm in SF right now and that number seems correct (mine don't line up exactly, but close enough). So yes, $100K salary nets roughly $5K a month (assuming no extraordinary deductions).

And a studio is hovering around $2K a month around here, and rising.

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