151–160 of 186 posts
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Kings tend to buy houses not rent flats. Ljubljana seems nice though.
Eh, I'd much rather live in a nice flat than a house. And I guess it might be nice to actually own one eventually, I actually prefer renting. Much less of a hassle.
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A lot of managers are more like secretaries and I think they should be compensated as such. Which is where I fundamentally disagree with you. Optimised database indexes (for example) can be valuable to a company. But if the company lacked a developer who could optimise them, they could get by - they'd just have to get more/faster servers. You can't throw money at organisational and communication skills in the same wa…
Frequently, especially in smaller ( Every communication layer you add to this mix has an enourmous cost. It is a bit like playing Chinese Whispers. I think the first level of important management is managing teams of teams or portfolios of projects
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I don't think they are useless, but I also do not think that the majority are particularly skilled. In many cases, it seems like teams succeed despite their managers interference. A lot of managers are more like secretaries and I think they should be compensated as such. There are exceptions of course, but the unequal pay has nothing to do with skill as far as I'm concerned.
A lot of managers are more like secretaries and I think they should be compensated as such. Which is where I fundamentally disagree with you. Optimised database indexes (for example) can be valuable to a company. But if the company lacked a developer who could optimise them, they could get by - they'd just have to get more/faster servers. You can't throw money at organisational and communication skills in the same wa…
Look up complexity theory. There are plenty of cases where hardware will not make up for a poorly written sql query. If the people giving direction don't understand the technology, they will make stupid decisions like thinking that they can fix a bad query by throwing hardware at it.
>You can't throw money at organisational and communication skills in the same way. In fact, doing so usually makes it worse. If you don't have managers that know the company, can interact with other stakeholders and otherwise just manage people, you're screwed.
This statement has done nothing to convince me that managers have skill that is so hard to find as to justify their high wages.
You certainly need managers, but I think it best if you pick a suitable engineer for this role precisely to avoid the database example you just provided. An engineering manager should get a higher pay than their peers, because they are not only experts in the domain but also have some people skills.
But a non-expert manager? Their only skill is communicating and giving orders? This is role that should ideally go away.
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Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here. Programmer salaries are not "insane". A half-decent programmer is worth $500,000 to the business and costs about $100,000. A good one is worth over $3 million, and only costs about $150,000. Programmers are actually incredibly fucking cheap…
If that were true, why wouldn't some startup pay the best programmers it could find $2,000,000 a year and put everyone else out of business?
The talent is rarer than the capital, and the capital often isn't owned by the decision-makers (VC) but the people who control the capital are the ones who get more arrogant. Why? Because capital is easy to demonstrate, and talent is hard to prove. It's especially hard to prove talent without breaking social protocol, which is the real advantage of pedigree. Everyone knows that there are plenty of sharp people without pedigree, but proving you're one of them requires being extremely assertive. Professionally, it's often better to be presumed intelligent and thereby be able to optimize for social polish alone.
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>> "In the Bay Area, there are many companies where the most junior engineering tier earns more than $100k a year" It's important not to forget cost of living in that area is abnormally high.
How could we forget, every time someone mentions a salary in the bay area people leap to mention how expensive it is there.
If you willing to go over the bridge, then your paying $2k/month
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because unless you can work 40 hours a week and spend another 20 learning new techs as they come out for the entirety of your life, you will become obsolete unless you can move onto other roles. If management is not an option, then chances are very likely that person will be unemployable somewhere between ages 40-50. and that's only one problem. you may reach (or ever want to) the top, but if there is a low ceiling t…
"Unemployable beyond 40" has been dead for years in the software industry. Probably for decades. There's nothing in current industry that requires you to be under 30 (actually, there are tons of positions which require extensive experience) and technologies don't die that fast - C programming market is still alive, C++ is over 30 and not going anywhere, Java would be 20 years old next year and not disappearing any ti…
and people have to look ahead and see the trend. newer stuff is coming out faster and faster. The 'hard' stuff is paying more and more and requires less and less people to do it, while the easy stuff is consistently either being outsourced or made so easy 'anyone' can do it.
and unemployed beyond 40 dead in the industry? are you kidding me? we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s. Where do you think those people went, they just up and died? they had to pick a new industry
I think the problem with programming is that programmers are assumed to be interchangeable; or at least, management would like to think so. To me, this seems absurd, I'd rather have one good programmer than 10 mediocre ones. (And good programmers are rare, but not impossibly so). The problem is that programmers that are 10x more productive don't get paid 10x more. (And seriously, some programmers really are 10x more productive than average).
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"Unemployable beyond 40" has been dead for years in the software industry. Probably for decades. There's nothing in current industry that requires you to be under 30 (actually, there are tons of positions which require extensive experience) and technologies don't die that fast - C programming market is still alive, C++ is over 30 and not going anywhere, Java would be 20 years old next year and not disappearing any ti…
you cherry picked the most successful languages, and also ignored how much they changed. you also doubled the amount of time c++ was actually used. 30 years ago COBOL was all the rage I'm sure. And lets face it, knowing just those is not going to get you very many jobs, maybe for a few hundred people in the entire united states. and people have to look ahead and see the trend. newer stuff is coming out faster and fas…
>>> newer stuff is coming out faster and faster.
I see no indication of this. Actually, most of the things that were with us 10 years ago are still around, and introduction of paradigm-shifting concepts massively slowed down due to massive size of the market which would not allow quick change and incurs massive legacy costs. You could maybe introduce new HTML version in a year in the 90s, but now you're stuck with HTML 4 for decades because literally millions of applications depend on it and they are not going to change, and HTML 5 is rolling out in baby steps, despite all the cool stuff it proposes. Looks what happens to XP - they have a massive install base and now Microsoft can not get rid of it, however hard it tries. Market size is enormous now, and so the pace of adoption of any paradigm-shifting concepts is much slower than before.
>>> we have less IT/programming jobs today than we had in the late 1990s.
Could you back this up with some data? I haven't found the data that support this conclusion. The programming jobs are shifting around and moving, but I don't see IT being smaller now that it is in the 90s, even accounting for the dotcom bust. Where is that "less programming jobs" coming from?
[1] http://www.indeed.com/q-Cobol-jobs.html
[2] http://cis.hfcc.edu/faq/cobol
Edit: removed wrong data.
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Watch out, you might lose all your karma for interrupting the Bay Area self flagellation. Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here.
Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here. Programmer salaries are not "insane". A half-decent programmer is worth $500,000 to the business and costs about $100,000. A good one is worth over $3 million, and only costs about $150,000. Programmers are actually incredibly fucking cheap…