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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

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Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#121

Post by daxfohl »

rayiner wrote: post #117

I suspect the bimodal distribution for programming and law have the same explanation: a group of highly profitable firms targeting a subset of the overall industry have imposed a de facto hiring floor that limits supply, raising wages.[1] Why is Cravath raising salaries while 85% of legal grads are taking jobs making half or less of its old salary scale? Because it has a hiring floor. It won't hire lawyers that aren'…

Most of the comments seem to be focusing on the supply side. I agree the demand side is probably the greater factor.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#123

Post by matwood »

henrik_w wrote: post #58
charlesdm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you enjoy something, it's much easier to put a lot of time in to figure it out. For example, I became a software entrepreneur about five years ago making money from my own projects. Dealing with a lot of business related "work", I actually discovered I also really like law, in particular tax law. A friend of mine was a pretty good lawyer (hung up his hat to do more entrepreneurial stuff) and I occasionally a…

I think the question of whether anybody can get good at programming is very interesting. I often hear "anybody can do it, but you can only become really good if you enjoy it". So then the question is: why do you enjoy something? Are we born that way, or is it something we do? (I don't know what the answer is) Edit: also, it is interesting to replace "programmer" with "math professor". Can anybody become a good math p…

I think it's a bit of both nurture/nature. In hindsight it was obvious that I would be a programmer even though I didn't have much access to a computer until college. Growing up I gravitated towards math/science, loved any sort of problem solving, and enjoyed things that many would consider tedious (building model WW2 naval ships with my grandfather for example). I did have a Nintendo that was in a constant state of being taken apart, but it did work most of the time :) When I finally had school computer time starting around middle school, they literally had to drag me off of them. Trying commands, tinkering, etc... was just...fun.

None of my friends (or parents for that matter) understood because they were mostly jocks with a few artists types mixed in. But, my friends never cared as long as they could get me out of the house to play whatever sport was in season.

To circle back around, I had a natural inclination with people like my grandfather encouraging it without really knowing.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#124

Post by noxToken »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #75
morgante wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate these reductive COL adjustments. They're preposterous. Even if you assume that all your expenses are linearly multiplied (hint: Amazon costs the same no matter where you live), your savings are a lot more afterwards. If you were living on $40k/yr in Kansas City, you could move to SF and suddenly be saving $80k/yr. Would you really rather have $600k in Kansas City than $1 million in SF?

This adjustment is on the extreme end to be sure. If you make 80K where I am and live in the square footage I do, a comparable place in SF is around 3K* more expensive per month. So there's a very real, ~36K negative adjustment to that 120K SF salary for me. *editted

I really think GP is oversimplifying, and I have lived in economically disparate areas with the same salary in each. I moved from southern California where I made roughly $60k. Then I move to the Southern US. I changed industries and settled in at $50k.

In terms of raw salary, I made $10k less, but my money went infinitely further in the South. I wasn't hurting for money in CA, but I had to be much smarter about my financial choices towards the end of the month. In the South, I always has leftover money at the salary. I mean, that 740 sqft apartment in CA for $1200 really sucked compared to that 2 BR house I was renting for $850 in the South.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#125

Post by walshemj »

meric wrote: post #34
mafribe wrote: post #15

I teach computer science at a well-known, large and mediocre university. I see bimodal grade distributions all the time. The more technical a subject, the more bimodal the grades. In fluff subjects like software engineering where grading relates to essay writing and group projects, grade distribution tends to be gaussian. OTOH in technical subjects where I grade by automated test suits, basically students fail almost…

I have a theory where the bimodal distributions comes from two sets of people: one set focused only passing the course/assignment/test, the other set focused on actually knowing the content. Appearance and substance.

I suspect that some do cs because they are interested and some because its a hot field or because of family/social pressures

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#126

Post by flareback »

ffjffsfr wrote: post #2

Majority of new IT grads earning 150k? This can't be representative sample for US. > this is from about 100 data points, members of the “Hackathon Hackers” Facebook group, in 2015. What's the point of analyzing data from such narrow and unusual sample? RE: how to get data about programmers salaries, I'd say try to check job postings, they usually say how much company offers.

> What's the point of analyzing data from such narrow and unusual sample? I have to agree. It seems like a really small sample.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#127

Post by alistproducer2 »

Retric wrote: post #110
alistproducer2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he was refering to time spent on a given program; rather, for people who don't intuit CS concepts time spent staring at the page can make the difference between a person who never gets it and one who eventually does. At that point, there isn't much functional difference that person and a person who got it from the start.

I don't think it's really about the CS concepts as it is being able to link them together flexibly. Suppose you want the median value in an array. Well sorting makes it easy, but you don't need to fully sort the array. A modified quick sort seems like a good compromise, then again using a built in sort is probably fast enough and much less code. That's the kind of thinking that really works. Because you can look up w…

I would argue that in order to link them together one must first understand the CS concepts and their uses. Once a person has that understanding, it becomes trivial to know when a naive solution is no longer the right approach. Once a normal person has the ability to see problem solving like that, they've pretty much got it.

That's not to say there's not a difference between all possible solutions and the people trying to find them. Some will be able to zip together the objectively most efficient solution right from the start. These are the true "superstars." People for whom doing something once is as good as doing it a million times (ie, they don't forget things). These folks are exceedingly rare and the rest of us will have to settle with kowing enough to know when we need a better way.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#128

Post by kasey_junk »

morgante wrote: post #95
alistproducer2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You must have an insanely huge apartment for rent to increase by $4k/m I meant to type 3K/mo (which is where my 36K adjustment came from). And yes, I've actually looked up housing in the Yay when I was considering a prospect there. Honestly, at the tiime I was looking for 2 bedrooms so my 3K adjustment may actually be under because now I need 3 bedrooms. >Of course, you also have the option of downsizing into a smal…

> No I don't. I have a wife and 2 children who if I can afford to give them their own room, I will. Fair enough, I didn't mean you specifically. Once you have a family the advantages of a low-cost locale definitely become greater. Of course, the advantage of working in SF/NYC is that by the time I'm ready to have kids I'll have enough money saved up to buy a house in a low-cost area in cash.

> Of course, the advantage of working in SF/NYC is that by the time I'm ready to have kids I'll have enough money saved up to buy a house in a low-cost area in cash.

That doesn't follow from the argument. If the COL adjustment means that the salary differential is not enough to cover the difference, you will be able to save more in the low cost location as well.

Of course all of those arguments are reductive as COL is not that easy to calculate and there may be other financial advantages to being local to the higher cost area (more diversity of work, less risk at job loss, or higher chance for a lottery style payout for instance).

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#129

Post by qznc »

morgante wrote: post #91
pmorici wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally disagree. Housing is such an over riding cost that no amount of things you can buy on Amazon will save you. The housing prices are rising so fast in SF that it makes estimates like this one LOW. you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k but Kansas has such a wide variety of hosing options that range form super cheap to substantially affordable that you could easily save as much or…

> you would be unlikely to save any money at all living in SF on 150k This statement is farcical. You do realize that the median wage in SF is less than $100k. How do you think those people are living? Have you actually lived in SF or NYC? You're totally out of touch with the actual costs. Yes, housing is expensive. But you can still easily get a solid apartment for $3k/m. Add in another $2k/m for food (high!) and th…

$250K Per Year Salary Could Qualify For Subsidized Housing Under New Palo Alto Proposal http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/22/250k-per-year-sa...

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#130

Post by spdionis »

NhanH wrote: post #6
dkopi wrote: post #3

The most important thing to remember about developer compensation, especially when comparing to more "traditional" roles, is scale. A programmer working at a large internet company may be impacting millions upon millions of people. Building a feature that lets you collect (or save) a penny from a user every month is worth $240K a year when spread out over 2 million users. $120M when spread out over 1 billion users. T…

I was thinking along that line too. In traditional more "human" field, a good lawyer/ doctor can just do that much, regardless of how good you would be. It would be interesting to compare revenue or profit per employee for tech company, comparing to law firms and the like. Another thing is that we believe (ie. The Mythical Man Month) in software, there is a limit of programmers per task before you just can't throw an…

> there is a limit of programmers per task before you just can't throw any more body into it anymore

This is important. The effect is that to complete the task you have to effectively scale the team up, you can't scale horizontally, which increases demand on top talent.

It means that if a programmer is (theoretically) 10x more effective than an average programmer he may get much much more than 10x the pay.

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