281–290 of 584 posts
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I speak primarily from experience.
As an "offshore developer", I have worked on multiple US projects with low quality code written by US developers. Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?
Yes. It usually is.
>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…
> In that sense it feels perversly exploitative and priveleged to make so much more money than practically anyone else on earth due to nothing but the physical location I was born. Is it perverse to go swimming because you were born near a beach? Is it perverse to visit the Louvre if you are Parisian? Is it perverse to go to a good university because the universities in Elbonia aren't good? You're not entirely wrong,…
If you actively promote or passively allow politicians and legislation that bars other people from having a shot at earning those things themselves, then yes.
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Seriously. A lot of comments in here are "Well it's hard so we deserve it!". There are thousands of developers making fractions of what their equally talented counterparts make in the US.
Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality. Not that we all deserve huge salaries, but code quality important.
Cheap offshore developed code is usually not the same quality. Pay people the same and it's amazing what you'll get.
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…
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Few if any of the 300 applicants were overqualified for that garbage opportunity. Can you describe on how they were overqualified? List a bunch of certs and techs? Good programmers aren't fighting over scraps for underpaid government positions working with JBOSS, they get snapped up immediately when they hit the market. Five years to saturation? Yea right. Readers who just deleted emacs in despair should keep in mind…
While I can't speak to the GP's experiences, I'm guessing you're in SV (most likely), NYC, Chicago, RTP, or Austin based on your remarks on how quickly developers get snatched up. However, those of us living outside that handful of cities have a totally different experience, regardless of how good we are or how much experience we have. There just are far, far fewer jobs outside that handful of American cities. And ma…
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I don't think that the code created for example at Google Warsaw is worse than code created at Google Mountain View (you can even check yourself, people in Warsaw work on Kubernetes, which is open source). And yet, the Warsaw salary is maybe 30-50% of the salary in MV.
But wouldn't you live a whole lot better in Warsaw on 50% than in Mountain View on 100% of that relatively high Google salary?
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I guess the grass is always greener. I'm a lawyer who lurks here occasionally. Most legal jobs involve 60+ hours of work, being on call 24/7, and there is pretty much no legal equivalent of a 10Xer because almost all work is billed by the hour. There is no way to make a contract that's 10x as valuable as your competitor's, and certainly no legal equivalent of scaling to the degree of Google or Facebook. Law is incred…
Software keeps working after the work is done. That’s the key differentiator, not the brain power. This leads to economies of scale on two fronts. 1) scale for the low end. As an engineer, I’ve made a game where I have customers worldwide that pay me something like 25 cents a week. A lawyer can’t really do work that scales out at the low end like that. It’s not a brain power thing, it’s just the nature of the work pr…
Programmers definitely have leverage due to scale, but lawyers also have a lot of leverage when dealing with cases that have large $$$ amounts tied to them. Traders obviously have leverage by using large quantities of capital in their trades.
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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…
I have an issue with that: law school and medical school certainly do not teach you how to practice law or medicine. Computer science sounds akin to both: you get theoretical underpinnings (many of which are outdated or will be unneeded for your specialty) but all your actual learning is on the job.
Programming education is totally ad-hoc and you can be a great programmer even with a degree in agriculture.
In Seattle, salaries are definitely bimodal (at least from my experience over dozens of offers from me and fellow classmates). Many mid/small corps are paying ~75-120k base with x stock which is of course not worth anything yet. Most large competitive firms are paying more around 115-150 with 15-75 in stock. So an explicit divide between the mid/small companies and the large tech giants exists here.
are those new-graduate salaries? what experience level?
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If people don't like the concept, they don't really understand it. The way the word is often used and even the word itself, absolutely that ruffles some feathers and rightly so. They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their vict…
There's a good reason many of us dislike current usage of word "privilege", and to your credit, you avoided it. Lots of times the word "white privilege" is thrown around by relatively well-off people in urban areas, and that usage is extremely hurtful and frankly stunning if you're a poor white person living in a small town in say, W. Virginia. You work multiple minimum wage jobs and still barely scrap by, watch frie…
Even accounting for the racial makeup of those states, I know far more white people than non-white people from poor states who are now making great money.