I'm a software developer (MS Comp. Sci.) in my late thirties. I've always had the impression that software development was really well paid. But lately many of my friends (doctors, lawyers, MBAs) has started to make way more than I can get as a regular employee. And for the doctors it's all part of their standard salaries. They don't need to demonstrate any particular high level of competence. And from here on their salary will increase until retirement, while I expect mine to flatten or decrease. I love programming and didn't choose it for the money, but my view on software as a high paying job has changed. Of course everything is relative.
Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
131–140 of 289 posts
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#132"Programmers who can program at all - as in, print out a binary tree correctly" Strikingly succinct and useful benchmark, just sort of thrown in there like it was jam on toast. There are some tidbits of wisdom in this article, but overall it boils down to a life that has lost all meaning and passion and has succumbed to the lowest common denominator: money. True, maybe, but sad, really.
TIL your life is wasted if your treat your job as a job.
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
One piece of the puzzle is that programming education is not very effective. Most computer science programs teach you almost nothing about software engineering, partially because many CS profs know almost nothing about it.
I think one of the problems with software engineering is that [almost] no one knows anything about it. I've been a working programmer [or software engineer if I've just met you at a party and I think you're cute] for long enough to work on >5 multi-billion dollar projects. Of these, one was delivered on time and according to spec. That company went down the toilet within four years. I've read fairly widely in the sof…
I would argue that if your team delivered good stuff, mostly on schedule, and your team was happy, then you were good at being a manager. The company failing despite your team deliver quality product hints that there was probably a flaw in strategic vision or external market factors.
Enjoying the role is another thing though.
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#134I'm one of those guys programming in my 50s. Technically my jobs involve project management and consulting as well but I still love programming the most. Saying that programming "requires little or no education" is from the perspective of either a naturally smart person or the Dunning–Kruger effect. Like any profession, there are some self-motivated people who can do the job effectively without formal education. Yet…
I'm 35 and I just recently started trying to turn what had been a hobby into something that pays. I harbor no illusions about ever making decent money at it though.
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#135If this fellow truly has no passion for his craft, I hope he can find the energy to constantly update his skills when he's 50. I started in FORTRAN in 1968. Today I'm working in Java and MongoDB and studying Scala and Go.
If you have followed his blog posts for a long time. He is very crafty in all low level programming that most of us are incapable of. And he also wrote his reflection on C++ programming language in C++ Frequently Questioned Answers.
Also I like this post from him a lot. He just likes to say things more frankly.
http://www.yosefk.com/blog/work-on-unimportant-problems.html
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#136Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year. Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more t…
Hogwash. For every skilled craftsman you can find, I can find ten other idiots making ten times as much money thanks to being born in the right family. Skilled developers recognize that rockstar developers can be ten times as productive as average ones. I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average.
Stock brokers are regularly getting beaten by monkeys when it comes to betting on the stock market, yet they are among the top earners in society. It's just insane to suggest that salaries are fair or that skill is in any way correlated to income.
Unless you believe that making lots of money proves that you are good at what you are doing, which makes the whole argument a tautology.
Edit: Also, the best work I've done is all open source. It isn't all very good stuff (far from it!), but it certainly is both more valuable and better than the corporate code I write for a living. Then there is http://www.ohloh.net/ that tries to estimate the labour costs of various open source projects. People have plowed thousands of hours of unpaid work into some of the highest regarded software projects on earth just for fun. They will never get properly compensated for their work. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work." is the famous slogan of Socialism, but it certainly isn't how the world currently operates.
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
One piece of the puzzle is that programming education is not very effective. Most computer science programs teach you almost nothing about software engineering, partially because many CS profs know almost nothing about it.
I think one of the problems with software engineering is that [almost] no one knows anything about it. I've been a working programmer [or software engineer if I've just met you at a party and I think you're cute] for long enough to work on >5 multi-billion dollar projects. Of these, one was delivered on time and according to spec. That company went down the toilet within four years. I've read fairly widely in the sof…
When companies that are large enough to spend "multi billion" dollars on a software project blow up "within 4 years" it makes the news. Like Enron. And Worldcom. And Lehman. Etc. And in those cases it's usually a very deep systemic rot. So I don't know how much all of that matters.
I also echo the concerns below about the "multi-billion" comment. Did somebody just mention sometime that it's that expensive? Because that's a remarkably large amount of money for business. Government? Not so much. But for a business, well, there are very few billion-dollar businesses and a scarce handfull that are spending a billion+ on any single project. My fiance is a PM on the largest electronic medical records rollout in the nation, which includes visits to over a thousand clinics around the country to install hardware, convert paper records and train people, as well as all the infrastructure, and it's reportedly going to bust through the original budget but still clock-in around $100 Million dollars.
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#138Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year. Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more t…
Hogwash. For every skilled craftsman you can find, I can find ten other idiots making ten times as much money thanks to being born in the right family. Skilled developers recognize that rockstar developers can be ten times as productive as average ones. I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average. Stock brokers are regularly getting beaten by monkeys when it c…
To be fair, compensation in banking is very related to performance. Investment bankers get paid on the size of their deals, traders get paid based on how much they make, money managers get paid based on how much they bring in. The majority of people get pushed out within a few years if they aren't top performers.
The key thing to realize is that value to the customer isn't part of the performance equation. It doesn't matter if a hedge fund manager is beating the market. His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on.
Which brings me to your point--it's not that pay isn't correlated with skill. It's that the skill it's universally correlated with is salesmanship.
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#139Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year. Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more t…
Money is about the market rate. If your good at something, but there lots of people similar to you then you're gonna have a bad time.
Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right about Google and Amazon, early posting on my part. But I'd say the iPhone was easily a multi-billion dollar project.
I seem to recall iPhone 1.0 being called a $100 million dollar project in some Wired article. They were several hundred people (not thousands), working together for about 2-3 years. That seems sensible, and the numbers seem to add up.
Apple's strategy is to assign fewer people than you would expect when building a new product to ensure focus / reduce feature creep. Staffing on stable products are in line with what you would expect.