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Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

blogs.law.harvard.edu

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Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#31

Post by MatthewPhillips »

paulbaumgart wrote: post #23
beeffective wrote: post #7

Why doesn't the pay reflect the supply and demand? I consider myself a decent developer with 9 years of industry experience in several domains and my salary is only $88k. It sounds like based on the demand, I should be pulling in a lot more.

Where are you located? Geography is still a big factor in hiring decisions, so demand is not evenly distributed. In Silicon Valley, $88k is what good-but-not-great fresh college graduates get paid.

The point still stands, unless you work for the handful (or less) of companies that pay FU money to their engineers, you're still paid equivalent of what a Dentist makes, and much less than what a good salesperson makes in a much much smaller city.

I think the answer is that the demand isn't actually very high. Programming is still considered a cost center for most companies, the quality of the product is determined by how much they are willing to spend on salary, not vice versa.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#32

Post by npsimons »

jpatokal wrote: post #16
coldcode wrote: post #2

Why isn't there a glut of baseball players who hit .408 in the major leagues? Because it's a rare person who can hit a ball thrown at nearly 100 MPH 40% of the time. Software engineers are common but people who deliver quality product after product is a rare bird. Programming at a high level is not as easy as this author seems to think.

Philip Greenspun, aka "this person", has a pretty solid resume when it comes to programming. http://philip.greenspun.com/personal/resume

Great coder can't understand why there aren't more great coders around. Film at 11.

Perhaps Greenspun has "suffered" from working with too many great coders, or finds programming easy, so he can't understand why there aren't more great coders around. Maybe if he studied more sociology, or IQ statistics, or hell even economics (in the form of market demands) he'd be better equipped to understand why there aren't more great coders.

I know who Greenspun is, and I have a lot of respect for his programming chops, but this comes off as someone either disconnected from reality, or someone thinking that because they are expert at one thing, they are expert at everything.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#33

Post by gte910h »

solistice wrote: post #29
sehugg wrote: post #11

by now most of the world’s programming would be happening in low-to-medium-wage countries and that customers wouldn’t have to pay a lot for high quality software. But it hasn’t happened (e.g., see my posting about California’s state government spending $327 million on a straightforward ecommerce site Uh, the reasons government IT projects are typically huge wasteful boondoggles are not because programmer salaries are…

I was puzzeled over that number too, as putting up a site like that, even if you are buying the servers from scratch and hire a first rate web dev, shouldn't cost more than 10-20k$. I went through to the linked artice, and appeareantly, most of it went for consultants. I mean there are consultants out there that are worth their money, and I bet the site is kai-zen optimized very nicely, even though I can't tell, but…

I am also guessing there is a backend component that isn't on yet?

Additionally, gov't is traditionally entirely unwilling to agree to strict requirements, so require vast overbidding

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#34

Post by arunabha »

Its easy to run, all you need is a pair of shoes(not even that in the extreme case) and a bit of open space. I wonder why we don't have olympic runners in every neighbourhood ?

More seriously, I suspect its a consequence of the 10000 hour rule applied to a discipline which builds some of the most complicated structures known to man. It takes a lot of training, formal or informal and a lot of good feedback to make a good software engineer. Plus, CS is not the easiest of disciplines to study.

That, along with the fact that good practitioners, in almost any discipline are by definition the top few percentage.

The bigger question would be, as the profession matures and builds up an institutional body of knowledge like civil engineering, would the number of 'good enough' engineers rise.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#35

Post by potatolicious »

beeffective wrote: post #7

Why doesn't the pay reflect the supply and demand? I consider myself a decent developer with 9 years of industry experience in several domains and my salary is only $88k. It sounds like based on the demand, I should be pulling in a lot more.

What part of the industry, and where are you located? The increased demand is not uniform across all sub-fields of programming.

Here in NYC someone who understands modern web backends can easily be into the high $100Ks to low $200Ks.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#36

Post by srdev »

tempi35 wrote: post #9
ben336 wrote: post #5

The article starts with the primary assumption that programming is a commodity skill, then is astounded when the world doesn't back up his theory. Not exactly going to learn a lot like that.

Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon? Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.

Programmers are, in essence, creative problem-solvers. That skill set is difficult, if not impossible, to commoditize. Building a house well may require some creative problem-solving, but it is not as frequent or as important when compared to programming.

So in short, that's not a valid comparison.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#38

Post by pekk »

VLM wrote: post #6

"But that doesn’t explain why people in the Philippines or China aren’t training themselves en masse to be able to soak up the $30-100/hour jobs that would be readily available to them" Rentacoder is readily available, its just that word on the street was most jobs paid about $5/hr. Amazon's Mechanical Turk has some extremely fuzzy stats and not much more than anecdotes but earning around $7/hr has been reported. Hig…

The reason there aren't ten places you can do that is because it isn't at all clear how to compare your specification to others which may sound similar, but vary over orders of magnitude in difficulty or time required. If you want to fix that, then provide a more precise specification, e.g. in a format which lets machines compare your request to others in the past, and which lets you easily verify that this is exactly what you are asking for (implying an extreme form of "waterfall" process).

This would get rid of a ton of the risk of software projects. On the other hand, providing a really complete specification is nearly what programming is; by the time you have nailed one down you have done most of the real work.

Most of the market not only can't provide such specs, it isn't what they need. They need to pay for time in some kind of iteration process. Those who have pretty precise requirements and know what they need, are best served going to highly specialized vendors who have done the same kind of thing a million times and can therefore schedule and price precisely. But many of those already are selling that product for $29.95 or $300 or $3,995, with an option to buy extra services.

You likely already know where you can find code to import a CSV into a database to specialized requirements. Or at least you know who you could pay to tell you exactly what to buy. You just don't want to pay extra for these things.

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#39

Post by gte910h »

tempi35 wrote: post #9
ben336 wrote: post #5

The article starts with the primary assumption that programming is a commodity skill, then is astounded when the world doesn't back up his theory. Not exactly going to learn a lot like that.

Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon? Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.

Programming is far closer to architecture than house building

Re: Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

#40

Post by paulbaumgart »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #31
paulbaumgart wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you located? Geography is still a big factor in hiring decisions, so demand is not evenly distributed. In Silicon Valley, $88k is what good-but-not-great fresh college graduates get paid.

The point still stands, unless you work for the handful (or less) of companies that pay FU money to their engineers, you're still paid equivalent of what a Dentist makes, and much less than what a good salesperson makes in a much much smaller city. I think the answer is that the demand isn't actually very high. Programming is still considered a cost center for most companies, the quality of the product is determined…

Judging from how much attention all the good software engineers I know get from recruiters and from conversations I've had with people actively hiring, the demand in SF/Silicon Valley is incredibly high. I have personally taken advantage of this demand through lucrative contracting gigs.

Sure, crappy companies in dying industries might not be able to compete, or might not even realize that they're failing to compete, but why care about them? They don't make the market for people who are actually good at software.

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