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What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

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Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#71

Post by dionidium »

eterm wrote: post #35
frogpelt wrote: post #18

Is it meaningful to compare the median annual income of software engineers to the average annual income of the general population? I'm legitimately curious, what is the statistical significance of an average versus a median?

"average income" as reported is usually the median. Edit: I'm not sure why I'm getting downvotes. Anywhere you read about average incomes from a serious source it'll be the median, no one uses "mean income" for average when dealing with incomes, since the distribution is so skewed. If you even just google "average income" it'll report you the median. Median is so completely standard when reporting on income data that…

Anywhere you read about average incomes from a serious source it'll be the median, no one uses "mean income" for average when dealing with incomes

This is demonstrably untrue. A search for "average income" returns articles referencing both median and mean incomes (and usually clearly distinguishing between the two).

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#72

Post by Thrymr »

lorenzhs wrote: post #52
turnip1979 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think SW engineers have to go through a lot of of specialized training that is short term in nature. Friends in the med field studied a lot to get the job but they hardly have to spend as much time as I do to keep up. I'm only in my mid 30s and a majority of the tech I use was invented after I graduated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_medical_education Doctors have to do 50-80 hours per year of certified continuing education thingies. That's probably way less than the average software engineer, but at least now we have a concrete number :)

That's formal continuing education. I'd like to see the concrete number for software engineers. There is no similar standard for continued training. Sure, software engineers are always learning new things, and many do so intentionally, but my guess is that the average amount of formal continuing education is far less than doctors.

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#73

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

cookiecaper wrote: post #70
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's uncharitable. They exist to keep quacks away - both professions are extremely sensitive and prone to fakery.

There is no need for onerous restrictions they place on admittance. It used to be that you became a lawyer by apprenticing in a lawyer's office and reading the text of the law. That's how lawyers came up for generations until the post-secondary boom in the 1950s. Now, that time-tested method is illegal in all but a small handful of states due to ABA guidelines. Of course, the superficial justification is that if you…

In the modern day the gatekeeping is starting to fail and there's "a metric shitload" of underworked lawyers out there due to the law school glut and wages are collapsing: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/05/the-collapsing-e...

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#74

Post by imtringued »

frogpelt wrote: post #18

Is it meaningful to compare the median annual income of software engineers to the average annual income of the general population? I'm legitimately curious, what is the statistical significance of an average versus a median?

It's not very meaningful but in general thanks to outliers at the upper income level the average is higher than the median income which means you are underestimating the ratio of median software engineer pay to average income which means that the multiplier could be much higher than the data tells you. If you're a software engineer this is good news for you but bad news if you are an average worker.

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#75

Post by imtringued »

paulmd wrote: post #31
_yosefk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm... How many people are fed by a combine harvester driver? How many babies and mothers are saved by the staff of a modern hospital, who drastically lower child mortality? If 10 future programmers are delivered by a single nurse, should she be paid 10x what a programmer makes? (Supply and demand I get, "force multiplier" I don't get.)

If a combine harvester allows a farmer to feed as many people as 100 farmers working by hand then they have a force multiplier of 100x. If you can train one nurse to deliver as many babies as 10 normal nurses then they have a force-multiplier of 10x. This doesn't necessarily translate into 10x or 100x the salary - farming is still an extremely capital-intensive business, probably moreso than it was pre-Green Revoluti…

The business doesn't care. They try to narrow down the potential employees to those who can do the job and then pick the cheapest.

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#76

Post by SilasX »

TrickedOut wrote: post #2

I really detest when software engineer salaries are compared to the salaries of the general population (often to cite how our sector is "overpaid"). Usually lacking from such simple comparisons: 1. Discussion of how software engineers have to go to college for 4 to 6+ years, but the general population is weighted towards those far fewer years of schooling 2. Discussion of downtime -- the amount of time software engne…

Also, software engineers are concentrated in high-CoL areas, which skews things.

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#77

Post by jacalata »

Gratsby wrote: post #57
V-2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of software engineers are autodidacts and never graduated in IT. I didn't (I have an MA in politics, obviously irrelevant to my profession). In general unemployment in IT is very low, and there's always a shortage of programmers, so job security is clearly above average. (And government administrations have IT departments, too). It's supply vs. demand, that's all there is to it. I'm not buying any of the above…

While there is a segment of autodidacts, it's not like people can become expert software developers overnight. Software developers work longer hours. I've never been in an environment where developers hang their coats up at 5:00 and go on with their carefree lives. And while unemployment may be low in IT, developers do not enjoy job security.

Longer hours than who?

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#78

Post by cookiecaper »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #69
cookiecaper wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you mention -- gatekeepers with teeth -- are a nightmare. They have eviscerated the medical and legal professions to the point of self-parody. They exist to keep otherwise qualified people out explicitly because they want to keep their wages high.

I don't want some yutz who came out of a ten week medical bootcamp doing rude things to my corpus.

There is a middle ground between 10 weeks of training and 10 years of training plus hundreds of thousands in debt. The AMA and ABA are out of control.

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#79

Post by Gratsby »

jacalata wrote: post #77
Gratsby wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there is a segment of autodidacts, it's not like people can become expert software developers overnight. Software developers work longer hours. I've never been in an environment where developers hang their coats up at 5:00 and go on with their carefree lives. And while unemployment may be low in IT, developers do not enjoy job security.

Longer hours than who?

The general populace.

Re: What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

#80

Post by beeboop »

jazzyk wrote: post #62
lorenzhs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you need to consider purchasing power parity. In many European countries, these things are paid out of taxes (but also provided at a lower cost in total), so you can't just deduct/ignore them.

We pay taxes in the US as well :-) Maybe a bit less than in Europe, but we get very little in return (no subsidized daycare, no 30 days of vacation, etc). US tax revenue is mostly spent on maintaining all the 170+ military bases around the world, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, etc.

60% of federal budget is social security, unemployment, medicare, and health spending. 16% is military. I think the bigger problem is that money spent in healthcare doesn't go nearly as far as it does elsewhere due to bloated healthcare costs.
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