51–60 of 122 posts
I thought that this was one of the better articles published via Tech Crunch lately. I would be interested in reading more articles from Vivek Wadhwa and highly encourage guest writers on Tech Crunch.
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The variation in productivity between programmers is somewhere from 1 to 10 to 1 to 100 (although I like to point that for a certain level of problem difficulty there's a cutoff below which productivity is 0 (ADDED:) ... and then there are those who's contribution to the organization is negative, but that's a different problem...). If it were the case that "salaries reflect the value you provide to your employe" we'd…
> The variation in productivity between programmers is somewhere from 1 to 10 to 1 to 100 I agree with your sentiment, but I think you're missing something important: it is possible (and, unfortunately, quite realistic) for a low-level programmer to be "negatively productive". For difficult problems, it may simply not be possible for someone without the required skill and experience to find a solution. Even for easy…
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How many of them are normal, full time permanent employees vs. contractors? The major issue I perceive here is that things are ugly for people wanting the former and many aren't cut out for doing the latter.
They're mainly contractors, by choice it seems. But as far as I'm able to tell, things are ugly for anyone who wants to be a perm employee these days.
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> ompeting neck & neck with people twenty years younger willing to work 60+ hours a week for half your salary My probably naive question is, how come you earn twice as much in the first place? Shouldn't salaries reflect the value you provide to your employer, so that either 1) you don't earn as much because you're actually worth less than the 60+ hours working kid, or 2) you earn twice as much because the hours you d…
The variation in productivity between programmers is somewhere from 1 to 10 to 1 to 100 (although I like to point that for a certain level of problem difficulty there's a cutoff below which productivity is 0 (ADDED:) ... and then there are those who's contribution to the organization is negative, but that's a different problem...). If it were the case that "salaries reflect the value you provide to your employe" we'd…
Ha, I hadn't thought about this aspect at all, thanks. But would you necessarily need to assume the pay should be directly proportional to performance? Perhaps earning double as much when you're 10x more effective is more reasonable, and then triple at 100x - say, a logarithmic scale? Also, productivity and hours spent are both only partially reflecting the total value someone brings.
Well, in any case, I was thinking about _some_ kind of system where your value would be expressed and not some irrelevant metric like age.
I don't get why someone who is older should get/expect a higher salary, all things considered. To me, it seems like this should be a free market thing. And by free market I mean on a global basis. On the other hand, I am in my late 50s, and I don't think that I have ever suffered from age discrimination (but who knows). Experience over the last 14 years as a consultant, working with a few very skilled people in Russi…
Experience. That experience means you don't have to pay for your worker to be spending half the day trawling google or api documentation to learn how to do x when they could be writing code. You also pay for the code to be maintainable, well written, flexible, robust. An inexperienced programmer will write shitty code, no matter how good they think they are, regardless of the number of books they've read. Finally you…
re: 60% discount just on principle: not the case. I have had a reasonable amount of customer feedback that they feel they get better value at the higher rate when I am on site. I would be curious if a good percentage of consultants are able to get the same rates regardless of working on site or remotely. One big win for me with my setup: I like to work early in the morning and often at night, and I like to hike during the day (I live in the mountains, 2.5 hours from the nearest International airport - fairly remote) and this allows me to work hard (and do a lot of writing) without burnout. That said, it is a lot of fun to work on site also, even if it cuts into my lifestyle.
So, we should be taking care of our own career growth? Shocker. Yes, there will be a point where your salary will not grow. But that salary is usually higher than most other skilled professions. (Note: this is an assumption; if I'm wrong, that would be interesting.) My experience has seen very little "mastery" in programming; after about 5 years, most engineers hit about the same level of ability. (Note, I'm not sayi…
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> ompeting neck & neck with people twenty years younger willing to work 60+ hours a week for half your salary My probably naive question is, how come you earn twice as much in the first place? Shouldn't salaries reflect the value you provide to your employer, so that either 1) you don't earn as much because you're actually worth less than the 60+ hours working kid, or 2) you earn twice as much because the hours you d…
Salaries don't only compensate for performance, they also compensate for responsibility. Do you want to be the person that loses the company some amount $x, comparable to your yearly salary, when you make a mistake? Or are you willing to lose the company 100($x) for making the wrong decision, be fired for it, and have your entire team looking for jobs? I tend to think of it as "how much of the buck are you expected t…
People can't control their age so there is an inherent insecurity there. Combine that with a small amount of actual discrimination and confirmation bias; now you have a "dark secret".
Here's the real story: First, the 'suits' want only 'fungible', 'compliant' workers. Second, the 'suits' do NOT want any workers who might have some technical qualifications that might be powerful, compete with the suits, and scare the suits. Third, likely highly experienced, older programmers can get good work via 'body shops' around DC. Fourth, one common tech personnel policy is to hire people as young as possible…
Go find a better company to work for. All of those issues are company-specific. Sadly, most companies have at least some of the problems. And I find your McDonald's story insulting: talk to me after you run one a single McD's by yourself and then you'll be able to convince me that a programmer should get paid more. Dealing with people is hard. Dealing with short term employees is harder. Dealing with people who don't…
You're both saying that the owner of the McD's will earn more money than the programmer, and that this is absolutely fair and reasonable.
So, we should be taking care of our own career growth? Shocker. Yes, there will be a point where your salary will not grow. But that salary is usually higher than most other skilled professions. (Note: this is an assumption; if I'm wrong, that would be interesting.) My experience has seen very little "mastery" in programming; after about 5 years, most engineers hit about the same level of ability. (Note, I'm not sayi…
All that said (and a lot is certainly true (except you're leaving out the unskilled and/or unlearning types of programmers :-) ), it's widely perceived that there is serious, unreasoning (aside from cheaper salaries, which is often a false economy) age discrimination in our field and that it's particularly strong in Silicon Valley. Doesn't matter if you're skilled and learning.
But there are skills past simply becoming proficient in new tools. You could "master the tool", like knowing the details of the JVM memory model, and very importantly, be capable of identifying very hard problems that you can solve that those "young guns" can't.
It is incredibly rare for me to find an experienced programmer that can sell anything but their past "obsolete proficiencies" to me. Most of them sell me on the fact that they've simply been good with X+Y number of tools, where Y of them are now no longer relevant. But they never focused on developing deeper skills that might have relevance (big data problems, etc).
It's the constant shift of tools that adds a lot of this tension. Yes, we need to be able to pick up new ones (languages, frameworks, etc) quickly, but if broad proficiency is how we define mastery, this has little relevance to businesses.
I'm not saying this is easy. How do you unambiguously describe a programmer's skillset past the languages and frameworks they say they know, especially in a way that might be "future-proof"? ("I optimized my system to display 30 frames a second!" "Wow, my phone does that now...") Ultimately, if we can't clearly describe why people's experience is better, it will be hard to justify paying them more, once you become proficient with that particular toolset. Thus, I don't sense real age discrimination as much as a simple inability to sell the value of our experience.
Of course, some programmers are WAY more valuable than others, so this is a problem that isn't just about age and experience. Hiring practices sure haven't matured at all during my 10 years on the job. But, until the finance guy can see why a guy with 25 years of experience but with 3 years with tool X is more valuable than the guy with only 5 years of experience but all 5 with tool X, well, you're not gonna see the money flow.