Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upvote for satire!
I'm curious about why this was downvoted. Is "upvote for x" too reddit-y?
You honestly didn't consider that it might be because the comment was entirely pointless?
Stop complaining and pay programmers more
151–160 of 290 posts
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#152You have to understand: there's more to hiring programmers than paying lots of money. If that were the case, we wouldn't have had a dot-com bust and software companies would be dominated by MBAs. That's the hard part of hiring programmers. How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you? If you have a solution to that problem, I suspect you'll be a very much in-demand person.
Incentive == Money. Incentive !== Money.
Huh?
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about? When you roll a new version of a high volume web app if it has bugs that don't get caught in certain scripts then you can literally cost people hundreds of thousands of dollars before it is fixed. eg. A trading platform, an advertising platform, etc. This is not that rare.
Disagree, I think that's rare across the whole spectrum of programming work that's done. The vast majority of websites have perhaps 100's of users at most. The majority of software written has anywhere from 1 user to 10's, sometimes 100's, and more rarely thousands to millions. For every hedge fund trading platform I bet there are 1000's of Bubba's blogs and Joe's file-munging Perl scripts. The latter is the general…
I disagree. Medicine is not that powerful. Doctors don't have that big power over people's lives. And the ones that do have are mostly edge cases, like it is in programming. Most of the doctors just move you around the "system". I can tell you this because I am a doctor myself. And gave up medicine in favor of programming.
Medicine is a beauroucratic closed society, that is not willing to accept new members. They have the power and connections to make their profession seem "elite" and "important" and "dangerous". And they impose expensive university education (which is mostly unneeded in order to "do the job"), government regulations and all kinds of other hindrances in order to hide that their profession is just like the rest.
From my experience so far, programming is much more difficult (unlike medicine, you need to think all the time), changes much faster, and changes are far more radical. In medicine you don't pick a new speciality every few months/years (like we do with languages). In medicine patients don't get released with new versions (incompatible with former ones), every other month. Doctors' tools (pharmaceuticals) don't change with the speed our tools (libraries, frameworks) change. You don't have to pick different "styles" and "philosophies".
I guess you will now ask me "why the hell did you choose programming then"? Yeah, I could earn more money with less work, with less thinking. But it would be much less enjoyable. And I guess this is the reason why programmers get paid less. We love our job. And we are willing to do it just for the sake of doing (and a little money for living).
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctors, dentists, and lawyers have legislated their jobs so that they can maintain monopoly through their guilds and licenses. That's why they can charge such a high rate. If programmers can get non-licensed programmers writing code go to jail, their rate would go up, too.
I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development. Elitist, protectionist mechanisms like this would dramatically limit the talent pool, slow down innovation, and restrict thinking to a set of norms agreed upon by a conservative organization intending to maintain the status quo. Programming is more of a meritocracy than in many other fields, and I think we should be proud of this. If people wa…
> I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development.
Oh I don't know, the idea of programmers being better paid has a certain attraction to me :-)
On a more serious note, the way that lawyers and doctors (and some other tradesmen in some jurisdictions) have managed to illegalise competition is wrong and needs to be stopped. Vets can perform operations for a tenth the cost doctors can -- is this because vets are less competent? On the whole, no.
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#155I have a simple theory. Most managers are still educated according to Taylor's Scientific Theory of Management, where the managers are more intelligent than the "factors of production," and their role is to "scientifically" direct their work so that they create additional value (which is multiplied by how many workers they have reporting to them). Their salaries reflect that model, and thus is proportional to the sal…
That's silly, physicians, mechanics, lawyers, and many other skilled tradesmen are just like programmers. The problem is that many folks see programmers as somehow different than these folks.
We should not seek to emulate doctors or lawyers, but cabinetmakers, watchmakers and joiners.
Programming isn't a profession, it's a craft. The trouble is that traditional crafts are not really valued any more, as their purpose has largely been supplanted by mass production. So, we have no current role models for how to organise ourselves.
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#156The same thing is (and has been) happening with nursing. They complain endlessly about the "nursing shortage" unable to figure out why people might be unwilling to do a hard job for long hours requiring extra education and incurring outsized liabilities for extremely low pay. The really bad news is its starting to catch up with many doctors as well.
I wouldn't describe nurses in the UK NHS as being underpaid either:
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious about why this was downvoted. Is "upvote for x" too reddit-y?
You honestly didn't consider that it might be because the comment was entirely pointless?
I actually thought it was better to be specific about why I liked the parent link, because that way the parent would get more upvotes, which I believe it deserved.
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#158I suppose this refers to us (and our Will the real programmers please stand up post). If it doesn't, excuse our self-centeredness and kindly disregard this message. Our salary structure is designed to select for exactly the type of people we want to attract - the kinds of people that will go through walls to bend the world to their will, for some deeply ingrained reason unknown to anyone but them. For people like tha…
(2.25% of everyone's contribution on the high end)
I'm probably dense, but what does that mean?
Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incentive == Money. Incentive !== Money.
Huh?
It makes sense in PHP. (Thinking in PHP is a terrible thing to do to your mind.)
I believe OP is trying to say: Money is an incentive. But it isn't the only incentive.
(== in php isn't the equality operator insomuch as the 'kinda like' operator.)