31–40 of 56 posts
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I think even in the Silicon Valley the salaries other than the selective big guys has not even kept up with inflation. A 2 year-experience developer still gets between 80-100k or less. This is what was being paid in 2000 as well. The situation is probably the same elsewhere. Of course, my numbers above are from my own poor sampling.
And without consideration of inflation.
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Very true. What % of developers are writing C++ however? I'd think it's a reasonable assumption that they're going down (and a cursory glance at Indeed shows this). So some jobs will always pay well; the average salary should go down if the average skill need goes down however. (Ignoring for the moment that some lesser skilled development jobs actually pay better as a result of demand)
If we take ruby, you still have to know ruby, rails, js, jquery, sql, quite a few libs, html, css, be familiar with ie/webkit/firefox, be aware of sql injection, xss, csrf and stuff. Do not forget http, rest, be able to understand caching, dns, proxying, load balancing. It's a lot of knowledge. In 2002 you could get away with a perl script! use CGI;
Maybe this isn't the case in the middle of the country where businesses don't realize that a 10x programmer is easily worth 2x the salary of a brand new programmer.
Ruby may be easier to pick up than C++ but the entire web stack still requires quite a lot of knowledge. Especially when you start talking about scaling databases, distributed systems, fault tolerant cloud architectures, etc.
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If you are introducing bugs that will at some point need to be addressed while "working fast", that'll cut away at a lot of the added value.
This is where experience helps. You know how to be efficient without sacrificing code quality and you also get a better intuition for tracking bugs that you do have.
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What is / will drive wages down is making the process of becoming an (experienced) programmer easier, by lowering the per case work needing done and lowering the barrier to entry (compare writing C++ in 2002 to 2012), and the resources available) and that most use cases are best suited by high level dynamic languages like Python or Ruby, which have significantly less work investment to get results compared to old fav…
What's up with C++ in 2002 and today? If you knew C with classes in 2002 (MFC style) you were good, if you knew GoF patterns you were elite. Today you have to know STL, auto/smart/shared pointers, all kinds of right casts, you have to know boost (a huge code base) and on top of that you are expected to know C++0x (or how is it called?) with its lambdas, autos and stuff, while still understanding the whole "classic" C…
C++0x is easy to learn. For example, autos is just the ability to say "auto myFloat = 5.0;" and it will default to float.
Lambdas in C++ is fairly easy. right casts? trivial [especially with auto].
Templates of templates of templates are easy as well.
64-bit? ARM? The whole point of C\C++ is to make yourself not assembly. You shouldn't worry about 64-bit vs 32-bit as long as you use proper things.
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But these are not necessarily "beginner" jobs: these unemployed people may have been hired back for the same types of jobs they had before, but at lower salaries. If you've been unemployed for a couple of years, you're probably willing to settle for less money just so you could have a job again.
Some such instances could conceivably be a simple market correction, too. Some localities particularly entangled by the housing bubble could have had inflated tech salaries as part of general market/cost-of-living forces.
Another possibility is that there are companies hiring "software developers" for jobs that most HNers wouldn't find interesting because the level of software development is low and hence has a lower waged associated with the value generated.
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What is / will drive wages down is making the process of becoming an (experienced) programmer easier, by lowering the per case work needing done and lowering the barrier to entry (compare writing C++ in 2002 to 2012), and the resources available) and that most use cases are best suited by high level dynamic languages like Python or Ruby, which have significantly less work investment to get results compared to old fav…
What's up with C++ in 2002 and today? If you knew C with classes in 2002 (MFC style) you were good, if you knew GoF patterns you were elite. Today you have to know STL, auto/smart/shared pointers, all kinds of right casts, you have to know boost (a huge code base) and on top of that you are expected to know C++0x (or how is it called?) with its lambdas, autos and stuff, while still understanding the whole "classic" C…
About a decade ago I did a lot of MFC/C++.
Form what I see here in Australia one of the reason nobody cares about MFC and ATL is for the last 5 years C++ has been pretty much dead on the Windows platform.
Over here in Oz C# and .Net are the kings of the Windows platform.
So does this mean the U.S. needs to issue more work visas?
Yes, because there is a shortage of X workers until wages hit the federally mandated minimum.
* Many (I wouldn't say most but at least a sizeable minority) American programmers and IT workers display reservations regarding the policy of issuing visas such as H1Bs for a large number of foreign workers, because it's perceived as unnecessary or perceived as catering purely to the interests of megacorps. I wonder, do those software developers elsewhere) have a problem with buying products manufactured in China or other countries with low wages? Buying stuff made in China, including from American companies that outsourcing to China, effectively lowers American blue collar wages below the mandated minimum.
* It seems a lot of people on HN are favourable to policies allowing working from home. Most companies still don't have such policies, but I suspect that if telecommuting ever becomes commonplace (e.g. due to software development process or technological changes), it will depress salaries far more than the measly 60~80k H1Bs per year have ever done. For every H1B holder there are certainly many others who are skillful enough programmers and speak English, but cannot work in the US due to the limited number of visas, or don't have a degree, or don't want to take the risk of working under the constraints of H1B, or simply don't want to move to the US for any old reason.
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Yes, because there is a shortage of X workers until wages hit the federally mandated minimum.
Two related thoughts that always occur to me in these discussions: * Many (I wouldn't say most but at least a sizeable minority) American programmers and IT workers display reservations regarding the policy of issuing visas such as H1Bs for a large number of foreign workers, because it's perceived as unnecessary or perceived as catering purely to the interests of megacorps. I wonder, do those software developers else…
Or live in states with poor economies and no tech jobs of their own and are willing to work for less than what a Bay Area programmer is.