Is developer compensation becoming bimodal? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#151

Post by myth_drannon » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

xya3453 wrote: post #136

meuk wrote: post #9

IMHO, the title should be fixed to mention that it is only about developer compensation in the USA . I am always surprised at the salaries in the USA. I have two bachelor degrees and two master degrees from two well established universities, and earn about 2k euro a month (before 20% tax deduction), which is considered fairly decent for a starter. Even then, many corporations outsource software development to Eastern…

Europe does not value software or developers anywhere near the levels the US does. Other developed economies e.g, Australia, Canada and Singapore are closer to the US but still trail behind.

In Canada developers are valued for the same reason doctors are valued. If the pay is not good we can just move south of the border. In Europe you don't have that option and actually you always have the threat the company will just hire people in Eastern Europe which are in close proximity.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#152

Post by CalRobert » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

Supernaut wrote: post #113

CalRobert wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago I worked in ad ops for one of the biggest publishers on the internet, making a bunch of ad placements by hand using Dart for Publishers, which was a dreadful product. I also was taking a night course in Java mostly for fun. At that point I didn't even know what functional programming, Big-O notation, or any of your other highfalutin' CS stuff was. All of the company's ads (thousands of different lin…

Doesn't your anecdote actually support my primary point, which is that a programmer with limited knowledge and experience will typically produce poor-quality software? (Or, to use your own terms, apps that are craptacular and awful?) An application, in my mind, is truly useful when it not only fulfils a user requirement, but is also dependable, scaleable and maintainable. It's not best practice for a business to base…

Eh, it was dependable enough to make money. It scaled to the task at hand. It was maintained longer than the Dart API was since Google retired it months later.

"It's not best practice for a business to base a process around some jury rigged POS "

I suspect you'll find plenty of businesses jury-rig a POS first, and then only fix what needs fixing. Turns out most stuff doesn't need it.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#153

Post by 52-6F-62 » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #134

>Another possibility is that U.S. immigration laws act as a protectionist barrier to prop up programmer compensation. It seems impossible for this to last (why shouldn’t there by really valuable non-U.S. companies), but it does appear to be somewhat true for now. I feel like this is the real issue here. The reason that the US has great companies is simply from the availability of large amounts of capital. And if the…

I think that’s a touch more complex a problem than you’re making it out to be.

Maybe you were born in the right place for the economical opportunity for someone born “lower” (please be generous with my terms here), but maybe it’s that these others were born “higher” to a place where higher education is easier to accumulate granting them a severe advantage competitively should you have to compete in an economic arena on the same level.

Or do we accept that being born to an economic disadvantage due to whatever factors mean you should be solely relegated to your caste of manual labour, service occupations, or direct servitude?

Second to that problem is what value does higher education really have in application in what are varied circumstances.

My understanding was the founding of the US was quite counter to that idea— and it’s one ideal that many countries have thankfully sought to incorporate.

Though I think you’re on to a problem—one that includes the consideration that current rules don’t exactly line up with the values we might wish to pursue as a (human, global) society. Partly because it might be necessary in what appears to be a period of transition.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#154

Post by sjg007 » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

It's probably a function of going to a brand name school + killing the Google style interviews. If you do that and have multiple offers you probably get the average up. SV in general is nuts wrt to housing and rent so that's going to steadily push things up as well. Then certain markets are winner take all so it makes some sense to "over" pay for talent. This would create a bimodal distribution as well. If you work as a software eng in a biotech your pay will probably be less than at Google on average b/c the biotech has less need for a highly qualified say distributed systems engineer. So they will accept a different candidate out of the talent pool. Also the talent may want to work at the biotech for reasons other intangible reasons. H1B is just a guarantee for some employees over some term. So H1B sets the bottom of the market really. There is no reason to work a job or somewhere that pays less than an H1B level wage unless you've got some crazy stock options or something.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#155

Post by anonytrary » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #25

meuk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started working as a programmer and don't like it. I started coding when I was about twelve, and did a CS bachelor and CE master. I like coding. I don't like, however, my work as a programmer. The tasks are just too mundane. I spend multiple days on a RESTful CRUD controller, just because there are so many (IMO useless and even obfuscating) layers of abstraction. The only challenging aspect is the lack of…

I don't think this is the general frustration with programming that the grandfather post mentioned, it sounds more like you are working on a bad project. There's always been some push-back against over-abstraction, from Rails' "FU Java" spirit to the whole Go ecosystem. It's just that these jobs are much harder to find than the typical Java EE hellscape.

I have seen some very over-engineered crap coming from GAFAM people, bringing such conventions to modern languages...

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#156

Post by tclancy » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #149

foamflower wrote: post #139

One (semi-pedantic) quibble with the article: there absolutely are barriers to entry for programming. Programming is hard! These barriers may not be artificial, but they are real. To use a non-software example, there are barriers to entry to chip manufacturers and power companies even under anarchy. Fabs are tremendously hard to build. Power plants are extremely hard to build. Building up knowledge and skills about c…

In Electrical Engineering, which the article often mentions as a counterexample, the 10-year veteran is not nearly as likely to drop out of the profession. Programming has a constant bleed-out of people who learning how to program, became veterans, and then were dismayed to discover that they were going to have to do it all over again, because the libraries, frameworks, languages, etc. were different. Some just do it…

I always wonder if some of the veteran drop-out in programming is that improvement (in my lone experience anyway) is couple with/ consists of realizing what else could go wrong. Every step up the ladder of experience affords a better view of how things can fail and that can be hard to deal with. I feel like I keep getting slower as I get older but not simply because of age; some of it is the motivation to sit down and write something that is probably going to come back and bite me in the ass (possibly through no fault of my own) later on down the line. A lifetime of programming means a whole horde of problems to think about at night.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#157

Post by gaius » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #121

gaius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chemical/electrical/mechanical engineers can't use their field to automate their field. A mechanical engineer designing a new manufacturing technique or robot is most certainly using their field to automate their field. Most of computing exists because electronic engineers used their field to automate their field. Software is not unique in this respect.

Not in the same way, or in the same ball park. Mechanical engineering didn't have its Lisp. We do.

Mechanical engineering didn't have its Lisp. We do

The steam engine was more of a productivity multiplier than Lisp could ever dream of.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#158

Post by namelost » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

foamflower wrote: post #139

One (semi-pedantic) quibble with the article: there absolutely are barriers to entry for programming. Programming is hard! These barriers may not be artificial, but they are real. To use a non-software example, there are barriers to entry to chip manufacturers and power companies even under anarchy. Fabs are tremendously hard to build. Power plants are extremely hard to build. Building up knowledge and skills about c…

If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone.

Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.

The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface.

While there are specialisms, such as game development or embedded development, most programmers are expected to be generalists. You may find yourself needing to write networking code, and there's a whole bunch of knowledge that goes along with that. Or, many programmers end up having a working knowledge of cryptography.

Sure, almost anybody can learn JavaScript or Python, and write code, but learning a programming language is only 1% of the job.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#159

Post by walshemj » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #17

Yes, it is. And the example used in the article of chemical engineering reinforces the point. It ties into computer science quite nicely. To become a chemical engineer, you first have to complete the course work for a degree in chemistry. Chemistry as chemistry is an extremely modular subject matter; you can solve most problems in discrete steps in isolation. In a computer science sense, chemistry is about pure funct…

And also chemical engineering also requires skills in mech /fluids engineering doing a reaction in a lab vs at scale is a completely different thing.

Re: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

#160

Post by tclancy » Fri, Feb 09, 2018, 2:49 PM UTC

jgtrosh wrote: post #55

yuzulicious wrote: post #44

Almost all professional and semi-professional salaries are becoming bimodal. I'm too tired at the moment to look this up, but the NY Times had a piece sometime in the last couple of years where they were discussing income distributions, and had an interactive, and what they looked like, almost across the board, was a bigger lower mode, and then a second, smaller, more spiked mode much higher. What struck me about tha…

I can imagine a simple explanation where one mode of gratification aims to pay as low as possible to keep the workforce willing to work at all, and another mode is to use pay amount to avoid talent from going away. Pay is thought about and used differently in both modes, and it's a simple enough management pattern that it could translate to every field. This is an over simplistic hypothesis and it would need more inf…

I think that's true from the management side. I also think it reflects personalities on the employee side: you have to be able to risk rejection and possibly worse to ask for a significant raise which means you either need to be very risk tolerant or in a situation where you can afford to fail.