Live data from Hacker News

Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

thinkfaster.co

151–160 of 407 posts

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#151
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the side of the employees, unions have proven themselves to be good means to improve the situation for employees. Here in Germany they definitely have helped in many industries. My comment was more about the companies though which may form cartels to drive down employee wages. Companies forming cartels is illegal, while unions are legal in many places.

If unions are the best way to improve compensation why do un-unionized FAANG employees get paid so much more than unionized developers in Europe?

I've said that they are good means, not the best means. And I guess the reason why they are paid so little is the higher profit margins of FAANG companies as well as probably the alternative in SV that you can found a startup and make much much more if you're good (and lucky).

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#152
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the side of the employees, unions have proven themselves to be good means to improve the situation for employees. Here in Germany they definitely have helped in many industries. My comment was more about the companies though which may form cartels to drive down employee wages. Companies forming cartels is illegal, while unions are legal in many places.

If unions are the best way to improve compensation why do un-unionized FAANG employees get paid so much more than unionized developers in Europe?

Because they're in Europe.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Good programmers I know also overestimate the skill needed to earn high salary in this job. You don't have to go up the learning curve much; these days, you just learn yourself JS a little bit and go for a webdev job, making shit cod…

> Nah, that's like wondering why is this ice block sitting on a hot plate and still solid. The answer is: because it just got put there, and it'll melt in a moment. So too, will end high salaries, as most low-hanging fruits get eaten by software, made by mass-produced cohort of programmers. Our industry has its share of cycles, but this, in my view, is largely wishful thinking on the part of people. Nothing wrong wit…

your standards for acceptable software were frozen in time in 1985

Haha in 1985 Amiga had a multitasking GUI desktop in 512k and 7Mhz. Now we have millions of times more computational power and struggle to deliver an experience as crisp and satisfying.

I wish people still made software like it was 1985, that actually used the full power of the hardware for something useful...

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#154
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the side of the employees, unions have proven themselves to be good means to improve the situation for employees. Here in Germany they definitely have helped in many industries. My comment was more about the companies though which may form cartels to drive down employee wages. Companies forming cartels is illegal, while unions are legal in many places.

If unions are the best way to improve compensation why do un-unionized FAANG employees get paid so much more than unionized developers in Europe?

[deleted]

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#155
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for programmers getting paid more. However, by your logic, if the company is losing money, should programmers contribute from their own pockets to keep the company afloat? Starting your own company (not self employed contractor) gives a really good perspective on what it means to be owner and employee.

No they should quit and find another company.

You can't keep a significant portion of the upside without taking on more risk.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#156

How many software engineers are truly making over $300k as a rank-and-file? Let's be generous and say there's about a dozen or so companies that routinely pay engineers that well. Each FAANG will have on average, 10k engineers? So that's around 120,000 out of an estimated ~20 million developers (from a quick google search). That's around 0.6% earning pay in a "bubble" situation, the rest being senior folks or executi…

Let's put it another way: we are looking at the top 1% of software engineers. Is it surprising that they have incomes in the 1% range? For comparison, in Amazon, Senior and above engineers count for ~20% of the total, and those are the ones pulling +300k regularly. So only the top 20% of one of the top companies are getting such compensation. And to follow the article, this won't last forever. Whenever the next stock…

> we are looking at the top 1% of software engineers

Working for a big company that pays well does not mean you're at the top 1% of software engineers. It means you're willing to do what it takes to secure that job and maintain it, including moving somewhere many don't want to live.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#157
SV Bubble? Maybe. But looking at it more long-term, aren't all the incentives there for programming to become a blue-collar (as in more modest pay) job?

* Good to great pay both attracts more people and makes employers supportive of policies to increase the labour supply.

* Cultural acceptance.

* Widespread access to computers and the internet. This was not the case just ~15 years ago.

* Low risk of automatization gets it promoted by governments all over the western world.

* Low barrier of entry. I mean come on, let's not pretend that work on most apps/websites today necessarily requires a CS degree.

* Remote work, in all its glory, may however increase competition for jobs.

I'm just worried about how far this will go given the currently rather widespread anti-union sentiment - even after years and years of game industry bullshit.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#158
post #31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if another programmer is willing to make me a million for only 25%? That's how markets work. You get paid what what the market will bear, not what you "should" make.

As I said good programmers are underpaid. They should figure out how much they are making their companies and ask for more. The market can often afford to pay more, if you just negotiate better. You can also unionize to get your employers closer to what you are worth to them rather than what they are worth to you.

> just negotiate better

In every other aspect of computers, the industry has finally embraced usability as a desirable goal, and not just for end-users.

On my first computer, you had to read a 100-page user manual and learn exactly what commands to type. In my first programming language, you had to manually allocate (and worse, deallocate) memory. With my first database, we used to have to go type VACUUM regularly. None of these is true today.

Yet even though some of the highest paid people in the world are members of unions and have agents to do their negotiating, programmers seem to have latched onto this idea that if you're not making top dollar or have your ideal working conditions, you should "just negotiate better".

Why stop there? Tell programmers they should "just program better", too.

> You can also unionize

Have you ever organized? I don't think you realize how difficult this is, especially without strong support from an existing union. There's a reason unions heap rewards on people who do it.

Existing unions also have great labor lawyers. A common response to even thinking about unionization is getting fired. (That was in the news recently because it happened 4 weeks ago here in Seattle.) Labor laws aren't what they once were, and there's usually no consequence to the company for firing organizers.

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a social safety net and actual workers’ rights that make up for at least some of the difference.

I would rather make $500k a year and have "no rights" than have strong labor rights protecting me from being fired from my $50k/year job.

Well, do you make 500k? If not, then why not? It’s possible in the US, but the median US household income is 1/8 that. The vast majority of workers, probably including most software engineers, ate better off at $50k but not having to worry about insurance if they get laid off, and getting 3-6 weeks notice when being let go (among other things).

Re: Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

#160

I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Some of the smartest people I know work in other domains: biology, chemistry, and even physics. They are sometimes baffled by tasks that seem trivial to me, and I'm under no impression that I'm more intelligent than them. I simply spec…

> I think programmers tend to underestimate the difficulties involved with becoming a good programmer because once you're good, you only see the even steeper learning curve ahead of you. Good programmers I know also overestimate the skill needed to earn high salary in this job. You don't have to go up the learning curve much; these days, you just learn yourself JS a little bit and go for a webdev job, making shit cod…

End user tasks might be able to be automated into dumb programming jobs, but companies have tried for decades to down-source their programming and it always falls flat on its face.

Even if you have library support to hand hold your budget coders, even if you use a lot of them, even if you give them all the time in the world, they will produce more complicated, less coherent, less stable, buggier, and harder to modify, improve, or iterate results than better coders who understand the problem better.

That means that no matter how little you pay up front you end up paying more in the long run throwing more man hours and money at fixing the mess made. A good mess is easier to maintain and improve and costs less over time. A mediocre / bad mess takes substantial efforts to maintain and iterate on.

Its also probably a domain impossible problem to remove the ability for any coder to make bad code. If for no other reason that in any programming environment you can never stop someone from iterating by index over a binary searchable tree for a specific element in it, or you can't stop someone from turning a float into a string to truncate the decimal part to then reinterpret the result as an int. But if you don't give them the tools - the integer types, the data structures, access to the bytes in some form or another - you aren't really programming. Someone else did the programming and you are just trying to compose the result. A lot of businesses, like I said, can be sated on that, but its still not programming unless you are in a Turing complete environment, and anyone in such an environment can footgun themselves.

Post reply on HN