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Are coders worth it?

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Re: Are coders worth it?

#121

Post by fxthea »

twistedpair wrote: post #77
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.

I would argue that the premium you are paying for the wedding photos is attributed to the service rather than the content. You are paying several thousand dollars to a professional photographer rather than a hundred bucks to your nephew so that they do not mess up your special day. While I'm sure the photos are exquisite, no one else would pay several thousand dollars for the exact same photos you received.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#122

Post by daned »

michaelochurch wrote: post #15
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…

The problem is that it's hard to show your real skill level (especially on back-end work) so getting access to these better jobs is 90% how you market yourself and where you are (New York and Silicon Valley rents are horrid, but worth every penny in comparison to 95% of places) and only 10% based on your skill level (much less unrealized potential). You don't have to be a celebrity, but you have to be some combinatio…

As a reasonably competent unemployed technologist I would be interested in hearing more about how you go about marketing.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#123

Post by rdouble »

nissimk wrote: post #67
jacques_chester wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more reason why moving to NYC or SV is in my future. I wouldn't feel weird at all.

Taxes and cost of living are very high. It doesn't go as far as you think. But there are a lot of beautiful people and culture.

Personally, I found it did go as far as I thought it would, in NYC. It might even seem like a bargain if you're coming from Australia. You finally get to live large, banking the same sums as an apprentice electrician from Perth.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#124

Post by itsybitsycoder »

darrellsilver wrote: post #11

The irony of James' point – that engineers are in such high demand because of how cheap it is to start a startup – is that engineering salaries are actually being prevented from going up as a result. There's too little supply of qualified engineers, but startups can't afford to compete in salary with the big guys (basically Facebook, Google, Amazon and the financial sector). So we compete on cheaper things like nice…

too large to... accept junior talent that needs to learn on the job.

Huh? Being larger should make it easier to do this, not harder. The company I currently work for has done this for its last 3 developer hires, and it's about the same size as yours.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#125

Post by xhrpost »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #111
BerislavLopac wrote: post #33

"In today's world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect." This might be true only by a VERY narrow definition of "world", specifically Silicon Valley. Or maybe I live in a very peculiar place, but the developers (Web or otherwise) here are in the low to mid income range, regardless of their skills and experience. And don't even get me started on freedom and respect...

Not sure where you are located but I'm in the middle of nowhere Ohio and my experience is fairly close to the Author's. Salary is scaled down but not a ton. I have had three emails for jobs this week and it's been at bit slow this week. Being involved in the community and active on different sites like linkedin help though.

Interesting. I'm a decently skilled web-developer in Ohio (but not middle of nowhere) and I'd say decent jobs are pretty scarce. I've recently gotten more into the local tech scene and started on LinkedIn but it hasn't revealed any SV like opportunities. I keep wondering if moving to a large city is the answer but I feel bad for the area having suffered through a massive brain drain over the past few decades.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#126

Post by simonh »

Are any of us worth it? In the developed world we all, from bus drivers and waitresses to software developers, earn 10x what anyone in, say, China would earn for the same work. First world problem.

As for writing as a career, most writers have earned very little for a very long time. It's always been an incredibly tough profession to crack. Yes it's being disrupted and is in a transitional phase, but life is change, it's not the end of the world or a crisis in social values. Plenty of people are still making a living out of it.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#127

Post by fieryeagle »

krallja wrote: post #91
fieryeagle wrote: post #88

I stopped reading about 1/2 way into the article. Brace yourself, the rant is coming... Too many red flags springing from a delusional, narrow-minded view which looked no further than the bloated world of Valley startups. Hope mr. Author could cast his eye to some other corners of the world (no, even other parts of the States) and witness the bleak reality of a career called web development. Startups are just a small…

Your rant agrees with the article. What a waste of a rant.

Well, I didn't even read through the whole article. Your comment prompted me to go back and read everything, and I failed to see where the agreement lies.

My point was that the author questions the values of his work from a rather high vantage point, which may be valid but it annoyed me. For a well-informed opinion to be made, I'd think that it takes an amalgamation of different viewpoints, not just from the high medians. Besides, one must see how everyone else in the same profession has it in other areas. $80k for the 1st job? Not many places around the world, seriously. Based on how much underpaid/overpaid you are comparatively to your responsibilities plus where you stay, each combination forms an entirely different set of values to question, different set of objectives to purse. That is why I found the article well-intentioned but not well-informed and in a way, misleading as most articles involving start-up programmers.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#128

Post by bad_user »

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,…

> The price of a word is being bid to zero.

The price of an already taken photograph, or that of a pre-packaged software or web service tends towards zero, however if you want original content, or to build software, hiring the talent to do it is going in the opposite direction (e.g. good wedding photographers charge a lot of money, as photos may be cheap and plenty, but good photographers aren't neither cheap or plenty).

> this is the kind of illusory value the writer posits for today's fêted startup web workers

The real value of a "web worker" is not in its ability to write PHP to serve HTML, but rather in their ability to find and solve problems. Good engineers that solve problems will always be in demand. Example: I would put an engineer to do marketing, because a good engineer would know how to do measurements, statistics and A/B testing.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#129

Post by jrochkind1 »

NickPollard wrote: post #79
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 ho…

While I think you are right that there is a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want --

I would suggest that there is also a difference between what people actually want, and what people demonstrate with their behavior, what they actually do.

What people do is not neccesarily what they want either! For all sorts of reasons. Poor self-control, costs/risks (financial/social/psychological) to doing what you really want, etc.

Just becuase someone spends money on something doesn't actually mean that, in an ideal world, they want to be paying for it, or want it in their lives.

Re: Are coders worth it?

#130

Post by arcosdev »

tcfunk wrote: post #98

A bit off-topic here but I am not sure where folks find these mystical $100,000+ web development positions. I am paid $40,000 a year with virtually no benefits to be a web developer.

Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Montreal, San Diego...these are the cities where you can handily make that kind of money. If you are getting paid 40k per year, it is time to move my friend.
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