How to avoid the software salary ceiling • Hacker News Board

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#71

Post by rwallace » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #66

dudul wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Mostly because managers are in charge of hiring and they would not hire someone reporting to them and making more than them.

I doubt that has anything to do with it. I've known at least one manager in the position of hiring developers who made far more than she did. In the end, you have to do your job. If that job requires that you hire people making more than you, tough!

Then you've known a manager who was mature and professional enough to place the welfare of the company above her own ego. Such managers should be the norm; unfortunately the actual state of affairs is that they are rare and precious. I hope her employer realizes how lucky they were to find her, and does whatever it takes to make her happy enough to stay.

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#72

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:41 PM UTC

eeprom1 wrote: post #60

moistgorilla wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is most obvious in front end web but the simple solution is to not be an "Angular JS specialist" but a "Front End specialist".

Right, but now you are back to square one. The solution to terrible market dynamics for grown-up programmers is to specialize. The solution to specialization risk is to become a generalist. I guess you could repeat this until you are 40, then get a nursing degree (not easy!), and actually start your life. :)

There is "specialist" like "Angular JS expert" and there is "specialist" like "web application development". Specializing on a single product is bad, but specializing on delivering applications through web technologies (notionally a more general title) is good.

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#73

Post by mattdeboard » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:43 PM UTC

gsarrica wrote: post #41

mattdeboard wrote: post #20

I agree with the premise of this article (if you wanna get paid, specialise) as it strongly echoes my own, perhaps limited, experience. I am a generalist. I like being able to solve problems across a wide spectrum of fields. Working at a startup for the last three years has given me plenty of time for that. The flipside is that I have not had much opportunity to specialise. I take pride in being comfortable diving in…

I know many companies who would rather have someone like you. Someone who they can give a problem to and they know you can solve it because of your wide knowledge base. "Sorry we can't give this problem to Bob to solve because all he knows is tech X." This is worth a lot to some people. It's also not that you know many things, it's that you can learn other things easily and quickly. (without training) The hard part i…

Exactly on all that you just said. There are places but they are hard to find. The intersection of "looking for a generalist" and "doing interesting and/or meaningful work" is tiny.

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#74

Post by t0mbstone » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:48 PM UTC

discardorama wrote: post #63

Unfortunately, the author does not offer much to actually answer the question posed by the title. He does complain about the whiteboarding during interviews, and would prefer to be taken at his word about his past experience. As an older engineer (much older than the author, I might add), I can understand the feeling; however, in my years of experience, I have seen too many people coast on their former laurels and co…

Whiteboarding during interviews is a way to filter out people who don't know how to whiteboard during interviews. That is all.

Some of the best and most brilliant programmers I've ever met were horrible at writing code on a whiteboard.

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#75

Post by discardorama » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 11:04 PM UTC

t0mbstone wrote: post #74

discardorama wrote: post #63

Unfortunately, the author does not offer much to actually answer the question posed by the title. He does complain about the whiteboarding during interviews, and would prefer to be taken at his word about his past experience. As an older engineer (much older than the author, I might add), I can understand the feeling; however, in my years of experience, I have seen too many people coast on their former laurels and co…

Whiteboarding during interviews is a way to filter out people who don't know how to whiteboard during interviews. That is all. Some of the best and most brilliant programmers I've ever met were horrible at writing code on a whiteboard.

I agree with you; I'm one of those who suck at whiteboarding. But I can't think of a better way to weed out the slackers who ride on the coattails of others. Trust me, I've been burnt many times in my career. I've seen presentations of my work with other people's names on them; I've seen patents published on my work; I've seen top-level "distinguished researchers" take credit for the work done by my team.

Generally, if the interviewer relies on other cues _along_ with whiteboarding (like working on the problem with the interviewee in a collaborative manner), then it can be a decent signal.

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#76

Post by mcv » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 7:04 AM UTC

dudul wrote: post #2

"Many people reach senior software engineer, and then they get stuck. They’ll still be a “senior” level developer 5 or 10 years later. For many, getting stuck is just fine. They like coding, and they don’t want to manage people, and the money is pretty good." I have a problem with this part. Basically, being a developer and not making it to a managing position is "getting stuck". I strongly disagree with that. Develo…

The article agrees with you that entering management is a cop out. If you want to keep growing as a developer, you need to specialize, is basically what the article says.

It's certainly opened my eyes; I'm very much a generalist, but I can see how, to get beyond a certain point, you need to specialize in something where quality really matters over quantity; you want to be able to provide value that two lower-paid people with twice the amount of time can't.

Security sounds like a great specialization, for example: a single great security expert can save a companies hide (which may be worth millions) in ways two average programmers won't.

UI/visual design sounds like another case where that's true. Look at Jon Ive. Having the product look better can mean you reach more people, which amplifies revenue.

I'm sure there are other valuable specialization areas where your expertise can multiply across a large organization.

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#77

Post by PopeOfNope » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 1:34 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #19

Good strategy, bad choice of specialties. There are lots of 3D graphics professionals working on video games, which is a notoriously over-worked, under-paid field. To hire 3D graphics professionals: 1. go to a video game hub, like Montreal 2. offer sane working hours 3. there is no step 3. Notice the complete lack of any mention of salary.

Could you be conflating 3d graphics artists with 3d graphics programmers? The former make 3d models for games. The latter writes 3d graphics systems to take those models and show them on the screen. The former is relatively low skill (as you say, it's a saturated market) the latter is very high skill (linear algebra).

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#78

Post by geebee » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

t0mbstone wrote: post #74

discardorama wrote: post #63

Unfortunately, the author does not offer much to actually answer the question posed by the title. He does complain about the whiteboarding during interviews, and would prefer to be taken at his word about his past experience. As an older engineer (much older than the author, I might add), I can understand the feeling; however, in my years of experience, I have seen too many people coast on their former laurels and co…

Whiteboarding during interviews is a way to filter out people who don't know how to whiteboard during interviews. That is all. Some of the best and most brilliant programmers I've ever met were horrible at writing code on a whiteboard.

I don't like whiteboarding interview, and I recently "failed" one. However, I can see the value in them to the employer.

To pass my whiteboarding interview, I needed first to review data structures and algorithms. It had been a while, so I went back to the textbook and got to the point where I could write mergesort, quicksort, dfs, and bfs, as well as do various permutations of sets (the sort of thing that you draw on when they ask you, for instance, to print all arrangements of a string), and could do this instantly (not by rote, through understanding, but "memorized" in the sense that I didn't have to reason through it, I could just write them on a whiteboard). Once I had that solid, I bought a copy of "Cracking the Coding Interview" and started working through the exercises. My goal wasn't to memorize, but to get to the point where I could answer medium to difficult level questions accurately on paper or whiteboard (no typing, no compiler) in 45 minutes or less.

I was unable to get to that point in the time I had to prepare. I should have asked for more time - I scheduled my interview for 3.5 weeks away, and I did devote a substantial amount of time to study. However, I lack the ability to get up to speed in that amount of time. You really do need to be razor-sharp at the whiteboard, and I just wasn't there. My guess is that I could get there in 3-6 months, studying about 15-20 hours a week. Others may not find this as difficult.

There was also a point in my life when I could probably have done this more easily. I have two kids, I'm married, I have a full time job, and there are a lot of demands on my time. It's far more difficult for me to shake 15-20 hours loose a week than it used to be.

Honestly, I do think that the ability and willingness to prepare for and pass an exam like this probably is a very strong indicator of success in the kind of environment where these developers will be working. In short, the constraints on my life and my own personal limitations that make it difficult for me to pass this exam would probably have reduced my value to an employer. They either need someone with more talent and an ability to get into this sort of form on shorter notice, or someone with more time who is willing to spend it on this sort of thing. I'm not happy about it, but there you go.

My broken record: companies are generally free to do as they please (within the limits of anti-discirmination laws, and so forth), but they should stop talking about a shortage of developers if this is how they wish to hire.

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#79

Post by Eridrus » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 8:33 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #76

dudul wrote: post #2

"Many people reach senior software engineer, and then they get stuck. They’ll still be a “senior” level developer 5 or 10 years later. For many, getting stuck is just fine. They like coding, and they don’t want to manage people, and the money is pretty good." I have a problem with this part. Basically, being a developer and not making it to a managing position is "getting stuck". I strongly disagree with that. Develo…

The article agrees with you that entering management is a cop out. If you want to keep growing as a developer, you need to specialize, is basically what the article says. It's certainly opened my eyes; I'm very much a generalist, but I can see how, to get beyond a certain point, you need to specialize in something where quality really matters over quantity; you want to be able to provide value that two lower-paid peo…

Security definitely pays more than web dev, but there is still a ceiling.

In fact, one of the things about security is that the benefit is completely constrained by how much you could possibly lose. You can't really create unbounded through security the same way you can through development. And in most scenarios where you are tasked with doing preventative work, it is hard to prove that you're really delivering value when breaches don't happen, or even if they do. The recent industry shift towards detection & response resolves this a bit since you can show all the things you have found on your network. But it's hard to use these metrics correctly (is more malware found a good or a bad thing?).

I've been trying to figure out how to make myself scale as a security expert, and the answer I came to was that I needed to work on software/platforms that could kill classes of bugs at a time, but it turns out it can be very hard to turn experience into software.

You can certainly have a lot of impact on offense as an exceptional IC, as evidenced by the 6+ figure .gov market for exploits, but its less clear to me how to have a big impact on defence (I say this as someone who has never worked defence anywhere, so this might just be my inexperience)

Re: How to avoid the software salary ceiling

#80

Post by bryanlarsen » Wed, Jul 08, 2015, 10:03 PM UTC

PopeOfNope wrote: post #77

bryanlarsen wrote: post #19

Good strategy, bad choice of specialties. There are lots of 3D graphics professionals working on video games, which is a notoriously over-worked, under-paid field. To hire 3D graphics professionals: 1. go to a video game hub, like Montreal 2. offer sane working hours 3. there is no step 3. Notice the complete lack of any mention of salary.

Could you be conflating 3d graphics artists with 3d graphics programmers? The former make 3d models for games. The latter writes 3d graphics systems to take those models and show them on the screen. The former is relatively low skill (as you say, it's a saturated market) the latter is very high skill (linear algebra).

Video game makers employ both, over work and under pay both. Artists make about $30k, programmers make $50k.