Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

blog.cerebralab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 350 posts

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#341

Post by ric2b »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #273

You don't get good software by dumping a bunch of requirements on a low-paid remote team and pressing "blend." You get good software when you have programmers who share your schedule, who share your culture and mission, who don't struggle with language barriers, who care about the needs of their teams and stakeholders because they know them personally, who feel goodwill towards you and the product they're building fo…

Sure, but if management moved to these countries instead of programmers moving to the US you could achieve the same thing, and those managers would have great cheap teams. And lower cost of living for themselves as well.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#342

Post by ric2b »

snovv_crash wrote: post #208
commandlinefan wrote: post #32

> 3. Most "good" programmers move to the high-income countries > Again, fairly hard to find data on this I'm surprised it's hard to find data, but yes, this consistently matches my observation over the past 30 years and four different geographic locations: very few American programmers are American at all. When I did my master's in CS 15 years ago, I was almost always the only person in the room born in the United St…

This fits. It is called "brain drain", where the smart people leave low-income areas to go somewhere they will be paid more. And why shouldn't they, if a company will pay them so they have more in savings in the rich area than they would have even earned in the poorer area?

However this should push down the salaries in the higher income areas and push up the salaries in the lower income areas due to lack of workers. That doesn't seem to happen much.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#343

Post by ric2b »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #117

The answer is given, immediately in the first paragraph: "If the market is all-knowing and all-optimizing, how can this be?" This is an assumption we have about the world, and it's a true assumption for competitive markets, where new companies/busiensses can freely enter, where barriers to entry are low. But, with software busineses, barriers to entry are extremely high and this results in businesses that are far les…

> But, with software busineses, barriers to entry are extremely high and this results in businesses that are far less competitive on price and thus price of labor.

Really? I would say it's one of the lowest, where you can start a global company with less than 20 people with very low costs that then increase sub-linearly as your customer base grows.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#344

Post by snovv_crash »

ric2b wrote: post #342
snovv_crash wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fits. It is called "brain drain", where the smart people leave low-income areas to go somewhere they will be paid more. And why shouldn't they, if a company will pay them so they have more in savings in the rich area than they would have even earned in the poorer area?

However this should push down the salaries in the higher income areas and push up the salaries in the lower income areas due to lack of workers. That doesn't seem to happen much.

If it was average Joe's moving, sure. It's the cream of the crop though, the opportunity makers. It grows the economy where they go and shrinks it where they leave.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#345

Post by frank2 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #165
austincheney wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a part time military officer (extreme authoritarian culture) and a corporate software guy (no interpersonal structures to be heard of) I find that this is a common assumption but it’s actually quite wrong. First a little background: The military is a highly confrontational culture, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In that kind of culture you tell people the disagreement immediately without tripping over pleasa…

> Superiors are generally better about considering the advise of their experts because the decision maker owns all risks and consequences. Even though it still does not literally happen anymore, there is still the tradition of the captain going down with the ship. The captain's authority was unchallenged on board the ship. But, if the ship sank, the captain paid for it with his life. This would inherently cut a lot o…

What does literally happen still in the US Navy, I heard, is that if a warship sinks, the ship's commanding officer's Naval career is over even if everyone involved knows that the sinking was not actually the officer's fault.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#346

Post by titanomachy »

worldsayshi wrote: post #55

My take: 1. Software industry is partially an oligarchy. A few companies make a huge amount of money. A large amount of companies make less but still a sizeable amount of money. 2. The amount of developers needed in the really wealthy companies is limited. The wealthy companies don't need to compete that much for talent but they also don't need to keep down the salaries that much. 3. There is a cost associated with d…

This is the best explanation I've been able to come up with as well. Other explanations don't seem to explain the massive difference in compensation between the US and e.g. Canada, which has a similar level of development, education, and per-capita wealth. Google[1] doesn't exist at a large enough scale in Canada to shift the market meaningfully. Canadian companies simply aren't profitable enough to even contemplate paying like Google.

[1] Using "Google" here as a proxy for companies that pay like Google.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#347

Post by monksy »

bigiain wrote: post #297
monksy wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be said that there has been a counter-culture that has been militant in trying to get rid of this. They're enforcing speach codes via code of conducts. (I.e. look at some of the recent examples including Linus Torvald (and the number of people who piled on), donglegate guys, etc)

To be fair, Linus has admitted to and shown himself capable of being an asshole, and the donglegate guys are people I would not want working with my sister. You can be cynical and sarcastic without being personally abusive or a sexist troglodyte. The "militant counter culture" you speak of definitely does exist. But codes of conduct didn't start appearing out of thin air, they exist because they need to exist. Anyone…

Your sister can't handle nsfw language? I don't think that should be endorsed in the work place. (That was at a conference function between 2 people).

They exist because projects have been bullied into doing that. On top of that the conditions were pushed in. Do you really need to have a thing to say "don't deadname"?

Expectations of conduct have, and continued to, existe(d) before that and they were enforced. The only thing this does is to try to give people who don't like how a group is run room to bully the people running it.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#348

Post by titanomachy »

thewarrior wrote: post #198
dxbydt wrote: post #172

imho american programmers are in for a world of hurt. Day of reckoning is coming. Its just not today. So if you say its today, you naturally get the derision and downvotes. But that doesn’t mean there is no such day. Just 2-3 days ago we sent 2 chaps into space. 50 years ago with far more primitive software we sent them to the moon. And you are bitching about how your software profession is so fragile it’ll be messed…

The day is closer than most here on HN think. TikTok is doing extremely well and rapidly gaining users. They demonstrate a good knowledge of everything that SV typically does and are based entirely out of China. These arguments about culture are laughable. TikTok is basically the engine of culture now among teens and is playing a big part in the current protests. Zoom has its engineering based in China. This means tw…

| IntelliJ ... is built entirely out of Russia.

While they do have offices in Russia, JetBrains is a Czech company.

Overall though, I agree... there are a lot of people with their heads in the sand.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#349

Post by matz1 »

PeterisP wrote: post #315
matz1 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you could throw it at a python interpreter and run it then that wouldn't be english.

I'd argue that "precise and clear enough description" means using a subset of English that's more complicated and much, much more verbose than python. Have you read laws? That is the style of language that tries to make a "precise and clear enough description" in English, but it does not go far enough, it's still not sufficiently precise to be applied directly, you would have to use something like 'super-legalese' fo…

>So even if you had a system that could accept English, nobody would want to use that because it's difficult to express precise and clear enough descriptions in English

Yes but in the future this can be solved by the smarter AI.

Essentially that what a lot of developer do, they turn other people idea or english description into working code.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#350

Post by pydry »

sireat wrote: post #230
pydry wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore. I'm still a software developer. Just not there. It's ironic that the country had a serious case of silicon Valley envy and would try literally anything to clone some of that valley magic. They threw a lot of money around in pursuit of this goal. They'd try anything, that is, other than decent, internationally competitive pay and working conditions.

Curious where did the money go then if it did not go into competitive salaries?

Grants for startups that were relocating from overseas, free office space for tech startups, grants for various kind of tech company masquerading as hot startups and funding for programming courses to train up more programmers.

If you ask a lot of tech founders what they really want the answer is usually going to be free money, free stuff or cheaper programmers. That's what the Singapore government attempted to deliver.

Post reply on HN