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Are coders worth it?

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Re: Are coders worth it?

#71

Post by antihero »

jacques_chester wrote: post #16

Virtue is not value. Value is not virtue. What you consider virtuous may produce no economic value. Or maybe it does. There's no rigid formula that connects them and the Just World Hypothesis is an illusion that traps fools and wisemen alike. Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures and I retain every confidence that it will be ever thus. James Somers might find Hayek's…

What about benefits/a support system for vulnerable people? By helping people develop their own lives (which is pretty damn virtuous), you are in the long term preventing crime and helping the economy because those people go on to spend money in shops and what not.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#72

Post by d4nt »

The value of a lot of these apparently lightweight B2C apps is derived primarily from the attention that they get from their users. If you can build something that gets attention, then that's worth a lot of money.

In a world where people are spending less and less time watching TV there is now a huge imbalance between corporations who have lots of money and want attention, and huge numbers of people with smartphones and limited attention spans. It's like a thunderstorm, all these electrons trying to get to Earth, then suddenly, Bang! Instagram. These valuations, and the developer salaries they fuel are just a by-product of all that money trying to get from point A to point B.

Google got huge by inventing one new channel for that money to flow through. And a pretty brute force one at that: You searched for "laptop" here are some ads for laptops... It's still ahead of everything else though, which is basically a re-implementation of the old TV campaigns but on the web. If someone could only figure out how to show you laptops just before you thought of searching for laptops, then they would be even bigger than Google.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#73

Post by mseebach »

gambomb wrote: post #55
mseebach wrote: post #12

I think the point about code being cool is rather shortsighted: Code has only been cool to anything like mainstream youth for maybe five or ten years. In US high school as an exchange student in 1999, the computer science class/team/whatever most certainly wasn't "cool" - and this was on the tail of the .com boom. In high school in Denmark 99-02, I saw the first general recognition that while "being able to make webs…

I think you may be overestimating the capacity of the education system to change. I'm now a year removed from High School, but in my class of 350 there were maybe 10 who could program proficiently. Only two (myself and a friend) knew what linux was. I would say it wasn't treated as "cool", but certainly regarded with a wierd respect.

I'm not talking about education (admittedly clouded by my anchoring my post in school experiences), I'm talking about kids picking these things up on their own because it's easy, fun and useful. Nobody would learn Word in school for the sake of learning Word, they learn it because it's a useful tool - the fact that there's a class is helpful, but mostly tangential.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#74

Post by bergie »

One reason for how much software developers are valued is how big part of modern business it is. From the Steve Jobs Lost Tapes in mid 90s:

So software is infiltrating everything we do these days. In businesses, software is one of the most potent competitive weapons. One of the biggest business wars was "Friends and Family" in the last ten years. And what was that? It was a brilliant idea and a custom billing software. At&T didn't respond in 18 months, yielding billions of dollars of market share to MCI -- not because they were stupid but because they couldn't get the billing software done.

At the moment there are about three times as many programming job openings in the US as there are programmers graduating from universities. No wonder developers get paid well.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#75

Post by prollyignored »

jacques_chester wrote: post #42
jabbernotty wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are some really broad brush strokes.

In fairness to prollyignored, he's fighting broad brush strokes with broad brush strokes.

My point is specifically this:

My old guy, would goto

* The same barber

* Same Grocery store

* Have the Same locally made cigar

* Listen to the same news casters.

I was always the type of person who would experiment. Age is fucking with me now.

And now, like my dad I look for "virtuous" people/business to trust.

I structure my life around virtuous behavior because I have kids.

In short, people my age give money(value) to virtue.

The above addresses,

> Virtue is not value.

> Value is not virtue.

No one feels happy for being called a master chef and be paid, when he works for a fast food chain. That's the gist of OP's feeling.

> I'm trying to save him some angst.

No, you are arguing for business without morality, like the late night infomercials which, the entire 20-30 oriented startups are, in a way.

Things you never wanted, but you have an ab-cruncher in your house anyway.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#76

Post by codva »

rdouble wrote: post #18
jumblesale wrote: post #6

Very well written article, I always enjoy reading stuff from the intersection of writers and coders. What I found startling was how different my experience has been to that of the author's at the start of the article. I've put up with some horrific jobs paying miserable money in some of the most uninspiring industrial parks you could imagine. I've taken work in dingy Victorian offices so cold that I've had to program…

It's particular to the New York startup scene. There is a lot of money sloshing around and startups have a different hiring strategy than in Silicon Valley. It's quick to hire, quick to fire. I've had six figure offers without even going through a real interview. This leads to a lot of churn. One place I worked at ran through three almost entirely different engineering teams in 18 months. It will be interesting to re…

I did 10 interviews at Amazon, for a freaking sales job. 3 on the phone and then they flew me from DC to Seattle for a 7 more interviews in one day. After all that I didn't get an offer.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#77

Post by twistedpair »

grey-area wrote: post #50

Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you,…

>so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre

I just paid several thousand dollars to a wedding photographer for my wedding. That is pretty standard from what people tell me. I wouldn't say that no one is willing to pay for content. It depends on the content.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#78

Post by einhverfr »

jacques_chester wrote: post #68
einhverfr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm this is a very difficult topic to really do justice to. I don't think that Hayek is necessarily contrary to anything I am saying. The problem though is a definition of virtue. > You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all. But the problem here is…

From memory, Hayek also mentions the problem of coming up with the ranking function for virtue. Basically "virtue" here is standing in as an alliterative reference to systems of ethics, morality, justice and justness etc etc. Huge fields of human thought in their own right. That sometimes value and virtue align is inevitable, simply because there's so many combinations available to test. His general point is that try…

The problem though is that these are huge fields of thought and also that the very contentious. Ethics for example is usually defined to be asking the question of "what is good?" Obviously defining "what is good" is an undertaking which leads different people in different directions.

I take the approach of saying "what is good is what is conducive to human flourishing." This is largely an Aristotelian approach (and so you can't really accuse me of deriving terms to meet economics). Therefore I would say there is some virtue in entertaining people or rather that such is at least potentially virtuous.

The problem is that if you accept that human flourishing is the goal and thus the definition of virtue, and if you assume that to a large extent this is also the goal of the economy (something I think that both most economists and the Classical philosophers shared), then virtue and value can't be seen as separate at least in terms of solutions (as I say, wages are different).

Or are you saying that Hayek does not see distributive human flourishing as the ends to which our economic systems work?

Re: Are coders worth it?

#79

Post by NickPollard »

grey-area wrote: post #50

Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you,…

>> If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no

Don't take this as a disagreement with your whole comment (it isn't), but one trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for, which is what shareholders and VCs care about.

There was an article on HN a day or two ago about how asking people to bet on political propositions affects their stated beliefs - when there's no cost, people will happily spout whatever their favoured party's line is, but if you ask them to put their money where their mouth is, they will often skew away.

VCs are investing based on where they think people will actually put their money, not on where they say they will. If evidence is that people spend a lot of time social networks, AND evidence is that advertisers will pay money for web adverts to people, then it might follow that a new social network is a good investment.

The main issue as I see it is that as we use money as a proxy for value, we disproportionately weight the desires of the rich over those of the poor. A service for rich people (e.g. an online photo sharing website) doesn't need to produce much utility to be worth a lot of money, whereas a service for poor people (e.g. clean water for poor villages) can produce a lot of utility and still be worth little money.

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