81–90 of 124 posts
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. John Adams US diplomat & politician (1735 - 1826)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"1 - virtually no supposed 5x or 10x programmer makes even 2x more. If people are really 5x, why on earth don't I see $300-$500k salaries? [...], it would be an enormous win for employers" Some reasons you don't see higher salaries: 1. It's very hard to measure the difference in programming ability directly. Good programmers also tend not to realise just how much better they are, and are generally unwilling/unable to…
I don't buy the hard to measure argument. CEOs at large companies make a tonne of money. This is usually justified by saying that they are more skilled than the average CEO but this kind of skill is also hard to quantify. Why does this argument work for CEO pay but not programmer pay? If there was really a shortage you'd see salaries for programmers going up. Instead there are documented cases of companies colluding…
Because it's much easier to measure performance of CEO's, at least artificially. If Google does well, then you (supposedly) know that Larry Page is doing well. That's how the market treats it, at least. But can you really tell me that you're able to tell me which of the 10's of thousands of engineers that Google has is responsible for that success?
Also, there's the issue of leverage. Just like a programmer can build software that is used by millions, and therefore has a lot more leverage and creates more wealth, so a CEO usually influences even more customers than the programmer. Paul Graham has an article about exactly that - the idea of a startup is to give e.g. programmers a lot more leverage than they usually have.
And arguably, the fact that a few engineers can build WhatsApp and earn billions is an example of that in action - getting more leverage by building a company, proving success, then gaining the money it gives. But the average exceptional programmer, while being 10X better at programming, won't necessarily also be better at business or money generation, etc.
Lastly, the fact that there are cases of companies colluding to keep pay down proves the opposite of your point - that salaries should have been even higher!
I think it is important to avoid using the term STEM and specifically dissect it in the discussions about shortage. Computer Science is a very peculiar part of STEM and not all of the STEM fields face the same challenges. As Hadi Partovi of Code.org put out eloquently in his testimony before Congress[1], there is a difference between enrollments in Computer Science and STEM in general. For instance, in US high school…
I think it is important to avoid using the term STEM and specifically dissect it in the discussions about shortage. Computer Science is a very peculiar part of STEM and not all of the STEM fields face the same challenges. I think there's a bit of a rhetorical issue with this, though. The dominant narrative is that we have too many people doing soft, fuzzy, weird, useless liberal-arts degrees. Studying things like lit…
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. John Adams US diplomat & politician (1735 - 1826)
brilliant - except the implication that liberal arts should be all we need by now
I think it is important to avoid using the term STEM and specifically dissect it in the discussions about shortage. Computer Science is a very peculiar part of STEM and not all of the STEM fields face the same challenges. As Hadi Partovi of Code.org put out eloquently in his testimony before Congress[1], there is a difference between enrollments in Computer Science and STEM in general. For instance, in US high school…
I think it is important to avoid using the term STEM and specifically dissect it in the discussions about shortage. Computer Science is a very peculiar part of STEM and not all of the STEM fields face the same challenges. I think there's a bit of a rhetorical issue with this, though. The dominant narrative is that we have too many people doing soft, fuzzy, weird, useless liberal-arts degrees. Studying things like lit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also possible for there to be a shortage of qualified workers and a surplus of qualified workers...this is a point that people often miss. Qualified US workers have this annoying tendency to be unwilling to uproot their life and move to where the jobs are. Foreign workers coming from other countries don't have this issue...they're moving anyways, so they move where the jobs are. And hi-tech jobs cluster in certa…
How did you get from "It's also possible" to "both sides are right"? Is there actually a shortage of mobile qualified workers in the US? If so, what is your evidence?
[0]: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/05/art1full.pdf page 9 [1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/highest-...
I think the same is true for doctors and dentists. Do very few people want to be company executives or politicians? Is there a scarcity? I don't think so.
Sometimes people are well paid because they are setting their own salaries (many believe bankers have hijacked banks from the shareholders), others are setting the rules within society (politicians), or interpreting those rules (lawyers), or just getting close to those who do (lobbyists, bureaucrats, special interests).
In short the wages of workers are dependent partly on their position of power within society .. of which supply and demand is just one element.
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> it's that very few good engineers come in the door I have one possible answer for this issue: Well, no one in the Valley (to best of my knowledge) really advertises that they are going to pay a meaningful multiple of what's considered the market rate to potential employees. So from the potential employee side, it is reasonable to assume that they are going to get paid around the "market rate". The Valley seems to b…
I think we pay very well because when we do find a good person, we offer them enough to get them unless there is some non monetary reason they went with another company. We do not have a problem with people turning down offers, we have a problem with finding enough good people. Another interesting wrinkle to this is the fact that hiring someone at a high salary is a big gamble. How confident can you really be after i…
Are wages purely determined by supply and demand though? There is a tale I remember about an economics professor who dumbfounds his class by pointing out that there is a huge surplus of economics students across the country who all want to work for Goldman Sachs. But the wages/bonuses don't fall to reflect the oversupply. I think the same is true for doctors and dentists. Do very few people want to be company executi…
similar: set of waiters who want to be actors is huge, set of known actors that a studio can say 'his face on the poster will bring in an extra 50 million cinema tickets' is miniscule. That's why all the waiters are acting for free in film student projects and Tom Cruise is a millionaire.
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"two $150K incomes supporting a few kids are at best "comfortable" by the standards of our grandparents" No. This is a gross exaggeration and extremely out of touch with economic reality.
That was my reaction; I'm not sure how someone could have any historical knowledge and think that. My grandparents were, I think, fairly typical middle-class Americans. They raised 2 kids in a ~1200-sq-ft house in the Los Angeles suburbs, which was considered pretty big. Ate out only on special occasions, maybe 8-9 times a year, never just because they didn't feel like cooking. Did not have "help" to mow their lawns,…
The result is a society in which people find it quite easy to obtain what their parents would have called frivolous luxuries (sushi), but quite difficult to obtain what their parents would have called basics (an affordable house in a good neighborhood).