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.
Where do you live?
Are coders worth it?
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Re: Are coders worth it?
#132A 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.
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Re: Are coders worth it?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't feel like the author was trying to prove anything, or was trying to get people to pursue more "virtuous" pursuits. It is simply a personal reflection on the state of the startup ecosystem and what it means to be a computer programmer.
I'm trying to save him some angst. Trying to reconcile the virtues of what he does with his economic value is pointless. They're just not connected. Demand for Ruby on Rails plumbing is ultimately connected with the current wishes and desires of most of the planet's population and has nothing whatsoever to do with how he, or anyone else, feels about it. In literary terms: he's tilting at windmills.
MOST of the planets population? Really?
I think the actions or desires of most of the planets population, who don't have computers or internet-enabled phones, have virtually no impact on the market for rails developers.
Re: Are coders worth it?
#134The 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…
Yes, new advertising innovations have power. Partially positive, partially negative.
But most new startups don't invent new advertising techniques. They don't grow the amount of attention. They just fight for the piece of the current attention pie.
And In similar fashion to reality TV relative to game of thrones, they offer crappy but addictive products.
Re: Are coders worth it?
#135Not all web developers are "plumbers". If you are working on websites with heavy traffic, then you need to use complex algorithms to scale. That needs someone who is comfortable with algorithms, and that needs a quite lot of thought. The author describes simple CRUD websites and then equates all of web development to trivial tasks like that. Even scaling simple CRUD needs a lot skills, intelligence and ingenuity. And…
The analogy is still apt. I imagine plumbing the Burj Khalifa needs a different and more advanced set of skills than plumbing a prefab home.
Engineering the plumbing systems for the burj requires a different set of skills, but it's not done by plumbers. The actual plumbing part is pretty much the same as in any structure.
Re: Are coders worth it?
#136Wonderful 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,…
Your last sentence explains it all.
Basically, the majority of people cannot appreciate art. Abstract ideas and brilliant commentary are simply not valued by the majority as much as a working system, even if it's as obvious a concept as Facebook. When you hire someone to write something, it's almost impossible to predict the audience's reception to it. When you make a website, a logical machine, you at least know you have something less abstract. A website is more tangible than a piece of prose. Words indeed have no value in themselves.
You would expect the people who make the software that facilitates web publishing to be paid more on average, no? Developers get paid more because they make the stuff that people want -- stuff that does something or solves a problem. It's that simple.
Re: Are coders worth it?
#137> Web development is more like plumbing than any of us, perched in front of two slick monitors, would care to admit.
Not only web development, but programming jobs in general. To be honest, after going through a couple of 'real' jobs, I am at the point where I'd rather do some plumbing rather than write another rpm spec or see why a bash script is misbehaving.
Re: Are coders worth it?
#138Wonderful 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,…
Tulip Mania was so volatile and quick that I doubt there was much of anything beyond armchair tulip specialists
True, but it's virtually certain there were people marketing themselves as world-class tulip experts.
Re: Are coders worth it?
#139We are not the shovel, we are the ditch diggers, just slightly better paid. Either way, who wants to be a commodity. Your analogy doesn't make me feel lucky, but like I need to get out of the ditch.
Nothing wrong with labor. Dirty hands make clean money.
Re: Are coders worth it?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
There does seem to be the same sort of frenzy in Canada. You can hear it in normal conversations all the time: 'Wow I can't believe you do that, it's so confusing to me. I could never write code.' It seems this mystique is what is paying us so well.
Depends on where you are. Toronto? Definitely. I get recruiters every day asking if I want a job (always onsite though, never contracts). Anywhere else I've found salary and perks drop quickly. Case in point, my last location (PEI) the salary was barely above minimum wage (35-50k/year), even though they keep complaining about shortages in skilled IT folks
Out of curiosity, how do the numbers in Toronto compare to PEI? Do the jobs you've seen offer some mix of in-office/remote schedule?
-Canadian working overseas