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Stop complaining and pay programmers more

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Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#81

Post by ww520 »

[deleted] wrote: post #72
ww520 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors, dentists, and lawyers have legislated their jobs so that they can maintain monopoly through their guilds and licenses. That's why they can charge such a high rate. If programmers can get non-licensed programmers writing code go to jail, their rate would go up, too.

[deleted]

Here's this little secret how the dentist association controls the number of dentists licensed each year - they raise and lower the difficulty of the licensing exams each year. Guess who wrote the exams? The existing dentists, who have incentive to restrict the number of new dentists. They can raise the difficulty with frivolous questions that don't impact the dental competency but weed out a number of qualified candidates.

Same thing with doctors and lawyers.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#82

Post by enjo »

scott_s wrote: post #17
timr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people?" You've got it exactly backwards: it's not intended to deter the unqualified, it's meant to attract the qualified. And yes, high salaries do tend to attract good people. Maybe not exclusively , but it's an important factor. So, if the complaint is that "there are no good programmers" (and we assume that your screening process isn't totally arbitrary), th…

You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.

In my experience when someone is looking on the top-end of the salary range, they NEVER post that to a job board. It's done through networks and well established recruiters. I've never seen a $150k+ programming job, my only exposure has been through recruiters contacting me working on filling it.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#83

Post by [deleted] »

ww520 wrote: post #81
[deleted] wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Here's this little secret how the dentist association controls the number of dentists licensed each year - they raise and lower the difficulty of the licensing exams each year. Guess who wrote the exams? The existing dentists, who have incentive to restrict the number of new dentists. They can raise the difficulty with frivolous questions that don't impact the dental competency but weed out a number of qualified cand…

[deleted]

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#84

Post by pfisch »

mkramlich wrote: post #69
fleitz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only difference is in the protectionism of the other professions. Most of the barriers you mention are imaginary. Programming errors can have far worse consequences than medicine or law. I've never seen a doctor or lawyer make a rocket ship turn into the ground (Arian V) or oil pipelines explode (buggy versions of pipeline software stolen by Russia) or make airplanes refuse to execute commands ( airbus and apache…

The examples you gave are edge cases and exceptions -- relatively very rare situations. Most programming work is hum-drum, with errors being no big deal, and easily and cheaply caught and caught early. I was comparing cases "in the main" between these 3 professions. Also, by pointing out the cases that you did, you actually increased the strength of the point I was making: these 3 professions are very different and o…

What are you talking about? When you roll a new version of a high volume web app if it has bugs that don't get caught in certain scripts then you can literally cost people hundreds of thousands of dollars before it is fixed.

eg. A trading platform, an advertising platform, etc.

This is not that rare.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#85

Post by kranner »

timr wrote: post #19
scott_s wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.

"You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well." ...which is why you have a screening process. When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on: 1) Their screening process sucks. 2) They aren't attracting good programmers. High salaries help wi…

I'm trying to bring up an automated screening service at http://codeboff.in/ (self-promo alert) because I think we need way more of these, especially being the sort of people who could make them.

Edit: by 'we' I meant 'we as programmers'.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#86

Post by tbrownaw »

mkn wrote: post #18

If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems t…

> The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities.

I get the impression that the mechanism for that is that anxiety about getting/losing the incentives can starve the creative processing of mental CPU time and maybe lower your risk tolerance below the optimum. A flat salary shouldn't trigger that regardless of how high it is, and conversely a poor environment (antagonistic management, mandatory overtime if you're not meeting some almost-reasonable deadline, ...) ought to be able to trigger it even if money isn't involved at all.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#87

Post by JeffJenkins »

My impression is that most programming jobs don't give a salary range in the job description. If they do include one, the Dunning–Kruger effect[1] could make the more qualified people who are humble think they weren't qualified and they could decide to skip on the job.

If Salary.com tells me that the 75th percentile for my general qualifications in my area is 80k, I'm not going to believe that I'm qualified for a job paying 120k. My mind would resolve that discrepancy in favour of the job requiring something I don't have, not just they employer's willingness to pay well. This may even be true if they say why the salary is so high

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#88

Post by lowdown »

danudey wrote: post #65
baddox wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. If you're looking for very talented programming, chances are they'll already have a somewhat decent job. To pull them from that job to yours, you'll have to offer at least as much as they're already making. Sure, 60,000 USD a year may be plenty, but someone making 65k will probably immediately subconsciously ignore the ad (unless of course they're very displeased with their…

Well, you'll have to offer them equivalent worth to what they're making. I left a high-paying job at a company that didn't appreciate its geeks to go to a lower-paying job whose entire staff (except for three project managers and the accountant) were geeks. The founder started the company doing websites in Perl in the 90's, and grew it into a small-scale hosting/app dev company. It's still private, it's still owned b…

really, keep your "perks" - it is like giving a gift card. Just give me the cash and I will buy what I want.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#89

Post by fleitz »

stretchwithme wrote: post #79
mkramlich wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The examples you gave are edge cases and exceptions -- relatively very rare situations. Most programming work is hum-drum, with errors being no big deal, and easily and cheaply caught and caught early. I was comparing cases "in the main" between these 3 professions. Also, by pointing out the cases that you did, you actually increased the strength of the point I was making: these 3 professions are very different and o…

and I don't think everything a doctor or lawyer does is then thoroughly tested. And if you fail to meet the high barriers to entry for doctors and lawyers, the likelihood that you'll make disastrous errors is pretty high.

Is it? Or is it something we just believe? Doctors used to think that having paramedics would result in disaster.

I think the vast majority of times one needs to use the services of a doctor could be handled by someone with far less training and certification.

Re: Stop complaining and pay programmers more

#90

Post by ww520 »

mkn wrote: post #18

If you've been around yc for more than a month, you've doubtless seen a number of links to articles on motivation as it pertains to creative activities like software development. The consensus is pretty clear. Incentives hurt productivity in creative activities. This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems t…

Paying more money takes it out of the equation and let you fine tune the other incentives. Companies that can get great creative work out of people pay them such that money is not an issue.
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