If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?

Actually it's not. Name calling would be if I called you an entitled whiner. There's a difference between attacking your argument and attacking you. The difference is very minor.

Median programmers write intellectually trivial code that solves uninteresting problems. Training is optional and there are virtually no systematic hurdles to cross to enter the trade. A median programmer has BS in computer science, understands basics of computer hardware architecture, OS administration, networking and database management. Keeps current with the latest industry trends, has familiarity with a number of complex development tools and, in addition to all that, specializes in some area of programming.

What I listed above are the implied prerequisites for almost any mid-level developer position out there.

FYI, that "marketing savvy" involved going to door to door and giving homeowners a free appraisal of the state of their chimneys, which would invariably collapse. Because apparently it's a lot easier to push over a chimney than it looks, especially if you are a bodybuilder. Schwarzenegger admitted this on the Johnny Carson show back in the 1980s.

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2007/04/your_multitask...

I'm surprised that so many of the comments/replies to this post accept the premise that programmers are underpaid and don't get respect.

Everyone I know who writes code is making a hell of a lot more than people who aren't. The people I know at Google aren't making $150k. They are making a lot more and would be making a lot less as a management consultant or a politician or whatever else.

In fact, to say that top management consultants clear $500k is true, but top engineers clear a lot more, both of those industries strike me as massively paid industries.

Then there's banking. Engineers at banks make ridiculous amounts of money just like non-engineers working at investment banks.

Sure, there are engineers working for $60k just like there are management consultants working for $60k.

But I know a lot of unemployed management consultants, and I don't know a single unemployed engineer.

So I think people have raised very interesting thoughts about why doctors make more or less, but I couldn't get past the premise of the article. I think engineers are making a ton of money, and they deserve a ton of money. I think they get a ton of respect, and they deserve it.

Maybe that's just what I'm seeing. But particularly when you then say that teachers are paid more than the average American, I start to wonder who this mythical "average American" is, particularly knowing that my sister is a high school teacher and has to buy her own chalk. She would probably disagree with the article based on all the corvettes and teslas sitting in the Google parking lot.

:-)

The content of the orignal post may be questionable, but I feel it was written in a way that would trigger a heated debate. For that, mission accomplished. There has been many wise comments, but they all choose to take a branch of the post to dig into. Not to blame them, as the question raised here is basically:

    The software industry has huge impact on human lives 
    but such impact has not been materialized in terms of
    both cash and social status for its practicioners. 
    True or false? 

And it boils down to too many things to talk about all at once. Maybe it would help to break them into sub-topics to make it easier to link the seemingly disconnected but insightful points posted here:

1. Are lawyers and investment bankers overpaid? If they are overpaid, one can't say software engineers are underpaid by comparing to them.

2. So the software industry impacts lives, but is it all positive? Maybe society isn't that much better off with all this digitalization. There is a chance that the total value of the industry is being inflated.

3. Are we concerned that the median and average salaries of software engineers are too low (a), or are we concerned that the elite programmers are not being paid as high as top attorneys (b)? We can solve (a) by raising barriers to entry, much like in other elite fields, but is that a good thing to do? As for (b), elite programmers are now called startup founders. If entrepreneurship is made easier in the software industry, then things seem fair.

4. Now speaking of social status, I think programmers aren't cool because nerds aren't cool, not because they are paid less. Pick a programmer and an accountant with the same salary, and the accountant is more likely to shine in social outings. But if the whole industry raises its average salary, then yes, the social status of being a coder will increase. We are back to the question raised in (3a).

5. About political power, I think this is more of a problem with motivation. To be motivated enough to run for office, you have to be hungry for fame and power. However, it's a good point that the government could benefit from having more top engineers. See a related post: http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/08/22/linux-and-the-fina...

6. Is China really on the right track?

I'd buy this argument if a CS degree qualified you for a programming job. It doesn't. It doesn't even mean you can program. You're expected to learn all of the skills that a programmer uses on the job on your own time. What if instead, you went to university for a pre-programming degree (CS) that was math and theory heavy, then went to a 2-3 year programming school, then went into some established shop for your 3-8 year residency?

My guess is that the profession would become a lot more attractive to the average kid that is very smart, but doesn't have an interest in law or medicine. Other guesses are that security would become absurdly good in general, and a lot of tools would be perfected.

Instead, the importance is placed on loving programming, because you're going to have to love figuring out what you need to be educated in and love providing for that education out of pocket, and with no credentials to show for it. So you're on an equal playing field with anybody off the street when dealing with an HR department, and at a disadvantage against a CS graduate who may not be able to program to save his/her life if you didn't go to school to learn the math, but simply learned your profession.

To have a capital-p Programming educational track like Law or Medicine could really be a boon for the profession in most ways in my opinion. Could somebody tell me where the Perl class is? Because I can't seem to find it or get student loans to cover it.

The one thing that I think would be problematic would be an injury to Free/Open Source software, because practitioners wouldn't feel the necessity to put that evidence out there that they actually can program, like surgeons don't feel like they have to stream over the web live operations they are doing for free.