Here's my take: Looking at a programmer as a single type of profession is relatively useless - what matters is domain expertise. Example: If you are a decent C++ programmer without any specific domain expertise then your salary in the US is some amount of dollars. If you are a decent C++ programmer with intricate knowledge about how the Google Adwords auction works then your salary is probably at least two times higher. So if you compare programming salaries you really need to look beyond what they are programming in and start looking at what exactly they are programming.
Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
71–80 of 350 posts
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#72> 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…
The american public education system is abysmal. But the ones in russia, china or india is pretty good, if you're smart. And the smart ones then immigrate to the highest paid country they can.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car. In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much b…
An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus. The whole "democratic" decision-making process takes time and leads to a sequence of decisions spread throughout the time domain, which, taken together, might lead to a suboptimal result compared to what might be achieved by following the steps of an "enlightened benevolent dictator".
The problem with that is that dictators usually fail to be sufficiently enlightened or benevolent.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#74What a weird analysis.
1) A lot of correlation can be meaningful only if you can extract independent variables and have a big enough N.
Given the complexity of human society, we would need 100000 countries to meaningful correlations.
2) "rich oppressive country" is extremely correlated to wealth and "English skills". Silicon Valley is an excellent example.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#75It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…
Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car. In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much b…
Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the
communication is.
We had a lot of fulltime employees working in other countries. The company paid pretty well, and we were essentially paying US salaries to folks living in countries where that would be considered very, very good money.
This, combined with the cultural issues you mentioned, resulted in management mistakenly thinking it was doing a good job -- privately, the foreign engineers shared my concerns, but they were not willing to "rock the boat" and bring those concerns to leadership.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#76Just one idea here not mentioned: software is essentially just business logic run by computer.
In that sense, you need customers for software, and wealthy countries have it.
Silicon Valley might skew more toward global software products, but I’d take a wild guess that most software is actually more local in scope.
That banking or insurance software you wrote in Indianapolis might not work at all for non-US companies, or it is perhaps internal and company-specific.
So, in that way my unscientific guess is that the USA has a huge number of corporations that need internal software or locality-specific software.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#77author is using the wage data from last decade or less it seems. It s an overinvested market and I don't think programming value is correlated with pay at all , at least judging for the overall bad quality and incredible bloat of software coming from america in the past decade , as compared to 1 or 2 decades ago.
And obviously the money thrown in programming is at an all time high. As other markets like biotech begin to make big profits the monetary value of programming will equalize and go down everywhere.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why is programming difficult to offshore" Lack of professionalism and absence of a professional engineering culture in many of the places you'd seek to outsource to save money. Doesn't mean that professionalism doesn't exist, it's just that the ones that have it are already busy with their own thing and not interested in being low-cost labor
Or they've emigrated in search of those higher salaries already. I used to work in a relatively "low salary programming culture" and it wasn't just the salary that sucked in that location, the programmers did too. Smart people either emigrated or ventured into a profession that made $$$ (typically real estate, management or finance). Eventually I left too.
Out of curiosity if I may ask, in which country did this happen and to which profession did you move after?
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#79> 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…
The american public education system is abysmal. But the ones in russia, china or india is pretty good, if you're smart. And the smart ones then immigrate to the highest paid country they can.
That's definitely what I see - I would think it would be easy to find hard data to back that up (although poking around, I haven't been able to find it myself).
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car. In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much b…
An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus. The whole "democratic" decision-making process takes time and leads to a sequence of decisions spread throughout the time domain, which, taken together, might lead to a suboptimal result compared to what might be achieved by following the steps of an "enlightened benevolent dictator".
> enlightened benevolent dictator
These are extremely hard to find, and anyone who thinks of themselves as one is missing at least one of those properties.