Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50? • Hacker News Board

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#161

Post by suby » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:14 PM UTC

LnxPrgr3 wrote: post #110

tatsuke95 wrote: post #11

> "The fact is that your material well-being is rarely in jeopardy because of a missed deadline, so your reaction is fully up to you. " Much of what the author says is true, currently. This is a fantastic market for programmers, and anyone being born into this era is lucky. But the forces of supply and demand will sort this market out in the future, to which the author seems ignorant. Name another profession that req…

I went to school with people who went into CS because they thought they were pretty good with computers and they saw money in programming. Some of them made it; others dropped out or changed majors. "Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can’t learn to program: between 30% and 60% of…

I don't understand how anyone can be a working programmer and fail the FizzBuzz test. What are these individuals working on that allows them to contribute enough to the company to not get fired?

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#162

Post by jkimmel » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:17 PM UTC

padobson wrote: post #112

Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year. Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more t…

As a biologist, I'm going to have to object. No matter what level of talent and competence you have, there are very few opportunities in this field to make a nice living. You're pretty much relegated to becoming a tenured professor (good luck) or working your way up in an established biotech firm doing work many would consider mind-numbing. At best, you're looking at the low-end of six figures for someone with decades of experience and an amazing track record, and there are very few of those positions. You can go the entrepreneurial biotech route, this is HN after all, but considering the small number of successful firms we can safely leave that option out for the purposes of salary estimation.

I think this is a factor of latency in added value. It seems to me that higher salaries are often given to those who can provide immediate usable value in the short term (lawyers, stock traders, some programmers). Long-term value-add professions, such as biology and many other R&D fields, tend to get the short end of the stick salary wise. Perhaps this is tied into the immediate gratification complex of western culture; professions with a significant value-add prospect >~5 years in the future have a difficult time arguing their own worth.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#163

Post by suby » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:18 PM UTC

rsaarelm wrote: post #47

_yosefk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't the field extremely competitive now? The demand has been strong for a decade and a half; it seems like a lot of time. (I'm not sure I have an explanation myself, really; perhaps it's something innate in people and perhaps it's something about education, but the fact remains that the world still hasn't churned out enough programmers even though the incentives have been there for a long time. One possible exp…

There's definitely more you could do with education. A lot of professional programmers are people who started doing programming as a hobby as kids. Attempting to teach programming to 20-year-olds entering an university seems to not work terribly well, while the basics can be picked by a 10-year old. If you waited until people are 20 to start teaching them to read and write, you would probably also get poor results, w…

On the other side of the coin, people who picked up programming as a hobby while they were 10 might have picked up some rather nasty habits that need to be unlearned, where as someone who is learning in school at age 20 won't have those problems.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#164

Post by yxhuvud » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:18 PM UTC

veemjeem wrote: post #91

randomdata wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmer talent is sparse worldwide And yet, when I look around at the job postings in Canada, a job with requirements that go on endlessly tops out at about $80,000/year. Expect less if you are an average programmer. Such a low income, relative to what US-based companies are offering, doesn't really speak to a shortage in my mind. I admit, there could be some kind of survivorship bias here: I'm only seeing the low…

I'm guessing the payment scales depend on the cost of living in your area. They pay more in Silicon Valley compared to Toronto because a 1500 sqft single family home in SV is around $1M.

And then there are Stockholm where I paid about $300k for roughly 365 square feet a month ago or so...

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#165

Post by foohbarbaz » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:43 PM UTC

kfcm wrote: post #120

The author is a bit naive in his cheerleading, extrapolating his situation in his location to a nation-wide situation. That is just simply not the case. As a business-owner in my mid-40's, I travel around quite a bit. There are locations where the employment picture is similar to what the author describes. But what he describes is far from the norm in the places I travel to, or from what I hear from friends and old c…

Oh come on! I am in mid-forties and not just did not have any problems getting interviews, but also did not have any problems switching jobs a few months ago. Where I work we can't find enough decent devs for any money. H1-B is just a memory at that point. Mind you, this is not Silicon Valley, the market is quite a bit smaller (north Denver metro).

Someone is either feeding you bad information or you are extrapolating and imagining things.

Where I work, we have a very good team of developers and being mid 40-ies I am right in the middle of the pack.

BTW, having been on H1-B 10 years ago, I can tell you that "40-50%" is not true either.

So, what the heck are you talking about?

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#166

Post by gaius » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:45 PM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #136

padobson wrote: post #112

Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year. Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more t…

Hogwash. For every skilled craftsman you can find, I can find ten other idiots making ten times as much money thanks to being born in the right family. Skilled developers recognize that rockstar developers can be ten times as productive as average ones. I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average. Stock brokers are regularly getting beaten by monkeys when it c…

You've never heard of a developer who made a mil in a liquidity event? This is Hacker News dude.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#167

Post by blackhole » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:47 PM UTC

If money is your primary motivation for any long term choices, you are doing something wrong.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#168

Post by tkl » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:49 PM UTC

encoderer wrote: post #137

colinb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the problems with software engineering is that [almost] no one knows anything about it. I've been a working programmer [or software engineer if I've just met you at a party and I think you're cute] for long enough to work on >5 multi-billion dollar projects. Of these, one was delivered on time and according to spec. That company went down the toilet within four years. I've read fairly widely in the sof…

When companies that are large enough to spend "multi billion" dollars on a software project blow up "within 4 years" it makes the news. Like Enron. And Worldcom. And Lehman. Etc. And in those cases it's usually a very deep systemic rot. So I don't know how much all of that matters. I also echo the concerns below about the "multi-billion" comment. Did somebody just mention sometime that it's that expensive? Because th…

I'm curious, which company is that that did the largest electronic medical record rollout in the country? Sounds interesting.

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#169

Post by cpeterso » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:49 PM UTC

fraserharris wrote: post #140

johansch wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall iPhone 1.0 being called a $100 million dollar project in some Wired article. They were several hundred people (not thousands), working together for about 2-3 years. That seems sensible, and the numbers seem to add up.

Apple's strategy is to assign fewer people than you would expect when building a new product to ensure focus / reduce feature creep. Staffing on stable products are in line with what you would expect.

For example, I heard (from an ex-Apple co-worker) that the entire iTunes.app team was about 25 engineers. In contrast, Adobe's Flash plugin team had about 50 engineers (not including QA).

Re: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

#170

Post by gaius » Sat, Oct 06, 2012, 7:50 PM UTC

jkimmel wrote: post #162

padobson wrote: post #112

Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year. Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more t…

As a biologist, I'm going to have to object. No matter what level of talent and competence you have, there are very few opportunities in this field to make a nice living. You're pretty much relegated to becoming a tenured professor (good luck) or working your way up in an established biotech firm doing work many would consider mind-numbing. At best, you're looking at the low-end of six figures for someone with decade…

The point of tenure is that it's well tenure. There is actual value attached to a sinecure. What would it cost right now to buy an investment that would pay you a six figure salary for the rest of your life, no strings attached? That's what tenure is worth. Now tell me profs aren't well rewarded.