Programmers Should Plan for Lower Pay? - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/programmers-should-plan-for-lower-pay <comment><USER3> Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple, because they truly enjoy it and, many times, have learnt it as a hobby. Their career choice have never been a masterplan on winning big, but it just happened to be so, so they feel like they're fraud.

Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time. We're talking weekends and night of trying out stuff, hacking stuff, reading, learning, etc. It's often an invisible investment, because it's a hobby and it doesn't feel like work.

In the end, programmers don't really need to dig that far to reach a point where they're good at building stuff using enough layers of knowledge to make what they do absolutely obscure to others.

Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property; but programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options, HTTP status codes, API interfaces, etc. It seems like highly advanced knowledge to be able to solve a health problem from a set of symptoms, but from the point of view of the layman, solving a computer problem from an error message is about as magic as it gets.

<comment><USER4> > Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or > simple

In my experience it's exactly the opposite. People who do nothing but write glue code between major services think they're hot stuff.

One of my personal career goals is to stay as far away from simple glue code as I can. Unfortunately it makes up most of our field right now. But it seems like an especially precarious place to be.

<comment><USER5> There aren't a lot of areas left in CS where "clever" solutions are warranted. If you're writing clever code, then chances are you're doing a disservice to anyone who has to maintain the mess you're creating. Code is mostly just plumbing. Boring code is better 99% of the time.

<comment><USER6> The flip side of this is that _because_ digital plumbing is "boring", the industry is constantly seeking ways to avoid it. Writing assembly language was (usually) really boring, so we developed good compilers to do that for us.

I look forward to the day where I can send data from one place to another and not have to bother with file formats, text encodings, port numbers, network protocols, and so on. IP (and especially TCP/IP) is so prevalent today that we use "IP connection" and "network connection" interchangeably. Someday I hope we have that consistency at some other layers of the stack. I shouldn't have to say "send me that file -- what app did you use to make it?"

<comment><USER7> In fact, that's already been solved for the most boring of digital plumbing. The data is JSON (which requires UTF-8), and the port number either 80 or 443 - the library automatically handles that depending on if the URL starts with http or https. `requests.get(URL).json()` will grab that data for you (Python). That only covers a very specific but very prevalent use case, just like TCP/IP covers the most prevalent use case for networking.

What are you doing where that can't covered by that use case? Actually, I can think of tons. What are you doing that _can 't_ be covered by that use case, _but is still boring_?

<comment><USER5> Something I find myself doing repeatedly is implementing arcane protocols that were created long before JSON. Bit-packed mainframe protocols. After the second or third time of working with another binary format, there's no new knowledge to gain, and it's not interesting work. But it requires meticulous attention to detail and can't be automated. Most industries don't require you to solve _this specific problem_ but it's all variations of this. Shuffle data from one format to another format. Even if it's JSON, you're still moving it from one business domain to another, or one tech stack to another. Backend to frontend. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wage isn't based on the difficulty of the job.

Wage is based on the opportunity cost of the uncaptured labor value incurred due to employment. For software engineering, this is acute since with the same skills needed for employment one can make a competing enterprise to their employer and capture all the value.

Other professions require you to have large capital to do so, so the opportunity cost is either non-existent if you cannot access that capital or further discounted by the financing cost/risk.

Your end SWE wage ends up being the value you would otherwise be able to capture discounted to the expected value w.r.t your risk.

Companies profit on employment by having a lower risk in enterprising, thus a better EV, than their employees in the same enterprise for a given number of reasons—brand, preexisting customer base, speed, proprietary market analytics, etc.

<comment><USER9> I think the skillset needed to successfully start a company is quite different from the skillset needed to be a good programmer. I consider myself to be a decent programmer, but I would never be a successful business owner

<comment><USER10> True but a development machine is a bit cheaper than a steel foundry or an automotive production line. The barrier to entry for a new software company is orders of magnitude lower than other industries.

<comment><USER11> Also, for the most part, isn't yet monopolized by lobbyists, corporatists and government working together to use regulatory capture to corner markets. It's pretty extreme in some industries, such as telecomm with natural monopolies, but also in markets without natural monopoloes. People even get arrested/fined for ridiculous things like braiding hair, giving haircuts (such as to homeless), selling hot dogs, selling cookies, or selling diet advice, etc.

So in accordance with OP's theory, if this were to happen the salaries for devs would go down.

<comment><USER12> I'm confused: normally occupational licensing and other barriers to entry are modeled as _increasing_ pay by constraining labor supply. Why do you think I think the opposite?

<comment><USER11> I was just following a thought from the OP's theory. Although it makes some sense as follows:

Regulatory Capture involves not just occupational licensing, but artificial monopolies over products and services. For a current example, Facebook has been lobbying congress and even publicly stating that they want to work with them to regulate social media platforms and news media; and even though many can see some benefit to these regulatory laws, the trouble here is that critics argue these types of regulations tend to entrench large corporations who have the legal staff and dev bankrolls to deal with these rules. Actually, many industries, even historically cottage industries such as agriculture has been in modern time criticized in this way as having rules and subsidies written by large industrial, corporate entities which benefit large providers by creating barriers to entry for small competitors.

In short, they create legal barriers to entry to creating the next providers, such as the next Facebook. In accordance with OP's theory, as the opportunities diminish, the value of labor decreases.

But yes, traditionally occupational licensing increases cost and barriers to entry to providing a product or service and is modeled as to increase salaties and decrease jobs as labor supply is constrained.

This is an interesting comparison of orthodox economics as you have mentioned with a reasonable yet heterodox theory in the wild I've seen. I haven't seen OP's theory stated explicitly before. Have you? Unfortunately in economics, we are dealing with the science of studying human decisions and as such it is grossly impractical to create a true scientific experiment here to determine which theory makes better predictions. This is probably also partly why economics tends to be snobby, pretentious and inflammatory: it is ultimately a war of words and mathematical arguments when it comes down to it.

<comment><USER12> Uh, I am the OP, and that's not what I was saying?

<comment><USER11> What? You don't think you said something along the lines of the valuation of labor to a firm being tied to the opportunity cost of the product of that labor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> But... we understand EXACTLY why developers are paid so well. Economics (the same reason EVERY profession is paid the way they are). There are two factors that come into play for employee pay- 1. Supply/demand: When demand outstrips supply, prices rise. The demand for software so vastly outstrips the ability to produce it that salaries are being driven very high because 2. The marginal value that an employee can produce. This is a hard cap on the salary that any profession can charge, and is the primary driver for demand. So long as 2 is higher than the prevailing salary, demand will continue to rise, which will apply upwards pressure on salaries.

Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries. The current dynamic is SO out of whack though- there is a ton of slack in the system.

This isn't a boom/bust thing either. There is SO MUCH business value that could be had if there were programmers available to build the software. I don't think we're even scratching the surface of everything that could be profitably built yet. I think betting on a big bust in software engineer salaries would be a bad move.

<comment><USER14> _Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries. The current dynamic is SO out of whack though- there is a ton of slack in the system._

I understand all of this.

Are there any examples of industries where - for lack of better terminology - a salary "bubble" formed and later popped? For example, X job used to pay 100k and now it pays 50k? Probably better to exclude jobs that aren't around anymore because they were replaced by automation or don't make sense because of modern technology, at least for this question.

I guess I have an inkling that - ignoring things like economic downturns and lowering salaries due to high unemployment - employees will fight back against any downward pressure on pay, and once salaries go up, they tend to stay up. Sort of similar to what you see when an individual gets raises and jumps companies for an income boost - you rarely see someone take a job paying less than their current job.

All that reminds me of how people who graduate during recessions earn lower income over their careers[1].

[1] [https://hbr.org/2018/09/people-who-graduate-during- recession...](https://hbr.org/2018/09/people-who-graduate-during-recessions- earn-less-money-but-theyre-happier)

<comment><USER4> I've heard this basically happened with Law. 20 years ago lawyers were raking it in and everyone wanted to be a lawyer. Today an entry-level lawyer makes less the half what an entry-level programmer does, and with twice the student loans. There's a glut in the market. My girlfriend was a lawyer for a couple years before doing a bootcamp and she almost instantly started making three times what she used to. It's crazy.

<comment><USER14> I thought a lot of the pay changes with lawyers was due to tort reform and caps on punitive damages, but I am basing that purely on vague memory.

To be fair, first year lawyers at _top_ firms do earn comparable pay to programmers at good companies, maybe not as much as a full compensation package with equity, I'm not sure. But those lawyers who consistently rank at the top of their class and among their peers and stick it out and eventually make partner - they will make much more money than the average software engineer. See this link for some details on what top Texas firms are paying associates [0]. Partners at the big firms make a lot more than 190-300k - probably 2-3x.

The catch is that with law or investment banking you need to be at the top of your class and pedigree matters if you want to get the best jobs. With software engineering these days, a degree is becoming less and less important.

I think at the end of the day the person who enjoys being a lawyer is a very different type than the person who enjoys being a software engineer / coder, and I'd be surprised if there's much overlap between the two. I'm sure some people can be good at both, and certainly most good developers have the brains to get through law school and pass a test, but the work is so drastically different many people just won't be happy in the job, and, like what possibly happened to your girlfriend, they move on.

[0] [https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2018/06/25/major- te...](https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2018/06/25/major-texas-law- firms-boost-starting-salaries.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've worked with the overseas "talent" and if that is the best they can do, I'm not worried.

Hell, I've worked with a lot of people on the US side of the pond who have experience or are educatied and they can't rub two keyboards together to ship a product.

My observation has been the opposite: no matter how much you offer, a lot of companies STILL cannot hire enough engineering talent.

<comment><USER16> Yeah this. I've been in the industry almost 20 years and over that time have noticed a massive shift in recuitment processes.

The first couple of jobs I had the interview process was a conversation with barely any technical content (let alone being asked to write a single line of code). Nowadays there is a generally a barrage of technical testing.

I think companies are realising the huge difference between having top 20%ile programmers versus the rest. Where I am currently although we get plenty of applicants we simply can't fill all of the spots.

Agree with the overseas talent comment as well. The amount of technical debt they create is massive, the overhead in communication is too high, and the people aren't invested in the products the code they are creating.

<comment><USER17> > Agree with the overseas talent comment as well. The amount of technical debt > they create is massive, the overhead in communication is too high, and the > people aren't invested in the products the code they are creating.

Technical debt: As an oversee talent, cleaning up the technical debt created by (now left) US employee, we can see that both yours and mine experiences are anecdotal.

Slack Communication Me: 1. Question A, 2. Question B, 3. Question C US employee: answers half of the question B, general ramblings about A and C

Zoom communication Me: Lets get on zoom and figure this out right now US employee: lets schedule the meeting on 2 days, throw a PM and two more developers in it, so they can waste time too

So, I guess, lets agree that generalizations are not ok.

<comment><USER18> You just made the parents point about the overhead in dealing with offshore devs is too high to be productive.

Perhaps you'd like to expand on this technical debt you're cleaning up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It turns out that being a good programmer isn't simple or easy. I've seen many teams where everyone on paper looks like they should be a good programmer, yet only a few team members are doing the heavy lifting and the majority are really just in supporting roles and sometimes not even doing that so well or even contributing negative marginal productivity by creating bugs, technical debt, and team dissension.

<comment><USER20> Yeah but I think most of the time this happens because some senior developer edges all the other devs out. After a few months of this he's so productive with the code base that the others look like bad programmers

<comment><USER21> It's hardly a one dimensional thing though.

One of my coworkers is really good at churning out code in a short amount of time that will do the job. He's not so good at abstracting his code to make it more reusable, even when he has time.

Another coworker is a hard-working cleanup guy, he doesn't mind getting his hands dirty and spend several long days cleaning up a decade of cruft. But he doesn't always appreciate subtle differences in code, so sometimes introduces regressions.

Third guy we have has excellent domain knowledge which is invaluable, yet is an otherwise average programmer.

I've got my set of things that I'm really good at, and the things I'm not particularly great at.

We don't have a rock star dev, but we have people who are good at different things and we take that into account when planning and executing projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Programmer salaries are only especially high in the U.S. and a few other countries. In most countries, programmers don't get paid anywhere close to what SV engineers make. In the U.K. for example, programmers start at ~$32k/yr.

I think the reason for high programmer salaries in the U.S. is due to:

1\. Culture that values engineers

In Silicon Valley and in many tech companies, the culture is that high quality engineers are highly valued and respected, and thus command high salaries. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft were founded by ex-programmers / ex-CS majors, so they understand the value that high quality engineers bring to the table and are willing to pay for them. Whatsapp was bought for $20b and only had 50 employees, 70% of whom were engineers.

In non-tech companies where tech is seen merely as a cost center, programmers don't make that much (eg. fashion companies). For the record there's nothing wrong a non-tech company not wanting to pay top dollar for engineers, some random ecommerce store probably doesn't need world class engineers, just like a semiconductor manufacturer doesn't need the best graphic designers.

I'm not very familiar with the UK so I don't know firsthand why UK engineer salaries are so much lower than in the U.S., but if I were to guess I'd say it's largely because their culture just doesn't value engineering talent like in SV.

2\. Tech companies have a lot of money.

The big tech companies have very high margins. Facebook's market cap is $20m/employee, profit is $684k/employee and has a profit margin over 40%. Apple's market cap is $9m/employee, revenue is $2m/employee, gross profit margin is 38%, and they have $245b in cash. Even unicorns that bleed money (eg. Uber) are flush with cheap capital from VCs, with Uber having raised $20b to date.

Looking at it from this metric, it would seem that engineers are _underpaid_ relative to the value they create. Not only just engineers, but labor as a whole.

<comment><USER23> People on HN look at everything not just from a regional perspective, but that of a very small clique out of all of the professional programmers. FAANG companies have plenty of work that is beneath their SWEs, which they outsource, in some cases, to American companies that have a mix of American employees and offshore. They hire people in the US around $40-60K and increase pay very slowly. Nobody gets paid $100K, because (a) if you switch jobs, you only get an incremental bump in salary, due to not having the right kind of title and pedigree, and (b) you're competing with much lower paid offshore employees. Best case is $80-90K after ten years and/or relocating to a major metro area.

<comment><USER22> Interesting. Any examples of this kind of lower valued work?

<comment><USER23> I mean, it's not precisely lower valued. It's valued low enough by the in- house SWEs, that they aren't going to do a good enough job to prevent embarrassing headlines.[1] Therefore, the outsourcing company isn't going to _charge_ much less.[2] At the same time, they provide insulation from responsibility if something does go wrong. So they can _pay_ much less and capture the difference. The cultural gap[3] prevents their employees from working directly for companies like their clients so competition doesn't equalize wages.

[1]This is a reference to particular events of which I'm aware.

[2]e.g. an hourly rate equating to $250K/year, maybe more.

[3]I mean nerd culture, not "real" culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This isn't hard to understand at all. Programmers are paid well because you need a pretty smart person willing to work at a not very exciting job often offering few interesting challenges that will likely contribute nothing of note to society but has the potential to contribute substantially to the efficiency and profitability of your enterprise.

Most of the people that are smart enough to be good are likely to be either doing something more interesting, contributing more to society, or making even more money than you are willing to pay them to sit in a chair and write code.

It's not that most people aren't suitable. It's that most of the people that are suitable aren't available and thus you have to pay more money to compete to pay the ones that are to sit in a cubical and waste their life helping you sell more ads.

<comment><USER25> > a not very exciting job often offering few interesting challenges

I think the exact opposite is true. Maybe programming isn't as interesting as being a literal rockstar, but I think most programmers' second choice of job would be "real" engineering which is usually lower paid and in my opinion less interesting.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, he's saying I'm either not that smart, or that I'm wasting my life... I'm not sure what to be offended by here.

<comment><USER24> Maybe you are lucky enough to work on interesting things and don't need to be offended?

<comment><USER27> Some people like cross-words/sudoku; I don't understand it except I like my work too just for the sake of solving problems, which is basically the same thing. Some people find satisfaction in "uninteresting things".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> No matter what happens, his basic advice is sound: spend a small portion of your income.

My advice is similar: live on your base salary, and save a lot of it, so you will be fine even if your bonuses/RSUs/options end up worth nothing.

In the worst case, you save up a lot of cash before programming compensation drops. But even if that doesn't happen, it's still better to build wealth, save for retirement, and perhaps have the ability to retire early if you choose to.

<comment><USER29> Why?

So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of? Barely able to walk out in to the ocean, much less surf like you dreamed of?

Nothing is guaranteed. Quit living off rehydrated beans and eggs like you're winning a merit badge and start financially planning to see the things your heart desires.

If you have left over savings when you die, you did it wrong.

<comment><USER30> > old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of > living off > rehydrated beans and eggs

I'm continually baffled by this kind of reaction.

I spend ~30k USD per year - more than the average american and more than 99% of the world. I live in a nice apartment with a garden, a 10 minute commute from the centre of one of the most expensive cities in the world. I buy organic food from the local supermarket and eat out multiple times per week. This year I vacationed in Tenerife, Greece, Italy, San Francisco and Vancouver.

This is, by any reasonable standards, a life of luxury. And on a typical FAANG salary it would take ~7 years to save for retirement - [https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=13...](https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=130000&initialBalance=0&expenses=30000&annualPct=5&withdrawalRate=4)

You would think most people would be interested to learn that their level of wealth opens up the option of complete financial independence in a comfortable middle class lifestyle before the age of 30, but instead it's always straight to yelling about dried beans.

<comment><USER31> The last 10 years of life gets incredible expensive unless you children who want to be full time caregivers... $30K per year + social security likely will not cut it. $30K today will maybe just cover the in home assistance in a medium to low cost city. Unsure how inflation will affect things.

You'd need much more than that....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "we don't understand why programmers are paid so well"

I think we do: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis)

Demand never stops (at least never did in the last 50 years). If some demand was met with programming supply it ends that specific demand, but creates new demands in return. AI won't change that btw.

Now if you excuse me, I have to copypaste stackoverflow answers into my code so I can sell that as senior architectural consultancy work...

<comment><USER33> All we have to do to solve a software crisis is add few more frameworks and platforms. Then everything runs so slow that you can't implement anything new.

Problem solved!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Programming is a lot less science and a lot more art.

You're trying to describe a problem in a way that can be easily interpreted by both an irrational human, and a computer, a creature of pure logic.

If you write for just the computer, you've got an un-maintainable mess. If you write for just the human, it doesn't work properly.

We really play up the importance of "computer science" skills when hiring software engineers because that's what's taught in schools, and it is the basic requirement to write a piece of software that at least works as intended.

But in reality, you need both. You need good human communication skills (personal and written) as well as an understanding of the computer.

And things are just getting more complicated. In the late 80s to mid 90s, there was a hell of a lot you could do with a single developer. Applications were simpler, you could write that single threaded application to run on a desktop, and it would be acceptable. One person hacking away in a dark room on a CRT could get the job done. The communication wasn't as important.

But now (and by 'now' I mean the last 15-20 years), most applications involve multiple servers communicating, almost anything involves at least a small team of developers, (and at bigger companies large teams of devs have been the case for a long time).

So the human communication is also becoming more important. You can't get away with hacking away at something and throwing it over the wall as much anymore. This is fine.

But the two skill-sets are diametrically opposed and people who can't do either type of communication eventually wash out. People who can do both of these things are incredibly rare, and our education system hasn't even explored what it takes to produce this type of person. (How many engineers have you worked with who couldn't write or spell to save their lives? Single letter variable names?)

Anecdotally, hiring someone competent is actually very difficult. You do a screen (to weed out the candidates who know absolutely nothing), and they come in and they still can't do basic stuff like recursion and loops. Or they can't explain what they did.

</comment><comment><USER35> > Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice (e.g., > investment bankers are paid better, but work even longer hours than > lawyers).

The idea that the amount of sacrifice you make will be proportional to the monetary reward you receive seems very phony to me (especially in terms of time spent not productivity achieved). It implies you'll have to enjoy the things you do less to become rich.

I'm also one of the founders of [http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi), a compensation transparency tool for software engineers where you can get an idea of market rates today at different levels / companies. Stock compensation is a huge part of software engineer wages which means as long as there is economic progress and growth, salaries will grow. Competition also plays in the favor of software engineers – as it is a very horizontally transferable skill (generally), it provides software engineers a ton of leverage, giving companies no choice but to pay market competitive wages for top talent in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER36> Programmers in first world countries (and triply so the Bay Area) should plan for lower pay because there are increasing numbers of foreign (and some domestic-but-rural!) workers out there who're skilled and will take less pay than you and be happy about it _and_ will be able maintain a high quality of life in their area. I don't mean the outsourcing/body shops (though some good ones exist) so much as individuals in Argentina or Mexico or the Philippines. They're out there, they're good engineers, they fluent in English, and as more companies become remote friendly these people are going to start taking some jobs. The market is slowly, but surely, going global.

And if you think you're safe in Ukraine or Bulgaria give it 20 years until a bunch of Africans in nearly the same timezone come in and undercut you, too.

<comment><USER37> Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but there's been similar comments about India and China since the early 2000s. India alone has over 1.3bn people, and compensation there is still a fraction of what it is in the US. If it was all just a numbers game, there should not have been a single working developer in the US right now.

<comment><USER36> I don't think India and China are the threat to US software jobs. It's Latin America: same timezone(s); shorter/easier flights (because of the timezones as well as the distance) with easier visa requirements; far greater cultural familiarity and/or similarity (in both directions); lots of people who speak excellent English (in Latin America) and a fair few people who speak Spanish now in the US; less fear of IP theft; no trade war.

Somewhat minus the timezone, a lot of these things apply to the Philippines, too.

<comment><USER38> Latin America is less of a threat simply because of population size. All of Latin America combined is half the size of just India or just China individually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What a poorly written blog post. This is proto-apocalyptic in the same way that Zerohedge is. The author may not understand why the software industry has high compensation, but Wall Street does. High margins, low op-ex, data moats, often winner take all dynamics, broad applicability, capability of cannibalizing incumbent industries, ease of deploying investment capital...even accounting for the dot com bubble, technology is the product and acceleration of industrialization, which in and of itself produced some of the highest concentrations of wealth in history.

The industry is not immune to bubble effects nor to catastrophic meltdowns (WeWork was obviously a huge, recent cautionary tale and very likely not the last), but to pretend not to understand where the compensation comes from is either lazy, wilfully ignorant, or both.

<comment><USER12> None of what you write explains why more people haven't switched into the field, bringing wages down. Other fields work high wages have far larger barriers to entry.

<comment><USER39> So that's why this doesn't make sense to you. You're refusing to think like an investor, only like an employee. Comparing one field to another field from the perspective of a laborer is useless, because the job and career only exists in context of the business itself. Until you can talk about investibility, this will remain a mystery to you. You've unintentionally demonstrated the difference between a programmer and a product savvy software engineer.

To try to end this on a bit more of a constructive note: think about the difference between the _firms_ that employ software engineers/marketers/salespeople and the _firms_ that employ highly paid folks in medicine and law. How do the unit economics breakdown? In what ways are certain aspects favorable and unfavorable to an investor?

<comment><USER40> I'd always thought it was because the marginal cost of a developer is 0, right?

That is, developers build software, then they go to work on the next thing while company can sell existing software.

Each additional unit of software sale doesn't have a developer cost component (unlike for example, shoes, where the labor cost of the worker is factored into making each additional shoe).

Is that close to what you're saying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Programming is a field where quantifying worker output is prohibitively difficult, but ranking workers is relatively easy. As such, it's a prime candidate for Tournament Theory - instead of measuring worker output, do some kind of informal rank-ordering and hand out larger prizes to the winners.

Being employed as a professional programmer in any capacity is winning the first round of such tournament. The compensation spread between this and the next-best non-tech option _has_ to be high enough to induce people to invest in learning the difficult skills and risk the ordeal-based hiring tournament.

Efficiency wages also come into play here. When wages are higher than what's necessary to clear the market, people struggle to find new jobs, which both reduces turnover and makes employees more willing to put in discretionary effort.

Some combination of the two is likely responsible for outsized wages in the field. Efficiency wages is probably more the case for entry-level FAANG salary, tournament for the large jump over the first couple major promotions.

<comment><USER42> Quantifying worker output being prohibitively difficult means rankings are not easy at all. In big corps the top ranking is given based on things like knowing the right people and taking credit for other peoples work. At least there is some fairness in the industry via standardized leetcode interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Programmers are paid well because businesses that depend on their labor are making ridiculous amount of money. It's a skill that not everyone is cut out for despite what nyt wants you to believe just like not everyone can be a professional writer.

If you look at skilled blue collar rates (eg plumber etc) the difference isn't even that big when you consider barriers for entry.

</comment><comment><USER44> In your average rust belt type city, your average cardiologist is making 400-450k at 50-60 hours a week.

Senior developers in those same cities make 90-150k at 40-50 hours a week.

The doctor, once established, also has the advantage of generally not needing to consider moving cities for career advancement or to do more interesting work. This type of security is also quite valuable.

</comment><comment><USER45> Are programmers overpaid in the first place?

When we look at eye popping salaries, they usually belong to senior+ engineers in top tech companies in selected geographies. I know far more programmers making just above average wages rather than 1% type level of income. And considering some of the points made by other comments, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they should be paid well.

Only those lucky enough to get most of their income via stock grants should prepare for most of that value evaporating in case of a market crash.

<comment><USER46> > Are programmers overpaid in the first place?

Seems unlikely. Companies don't typically pay someone at a loss -- they hire folks because they expect to make a profit. Wages, almost by definition, are less than the value of the worker.

Programmers are like any other wage laborer, and should be pushing to own more of the value they produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> So much kneejerk reaction to this perspective - it's understandable, I suppose. If you are leveraging your lifestyle against your skillset to the fullest extent possible, the idea that it could be unsustainable would be extremely threatening.

Think of it this way- if he's right, you've insulated yourself from catastrophe. If he's wrong, you have given yourself a trajectory for permanent independence from employment.

For people so good at optimization problems, this seems a no-brainer to me!

<comment><USER48> That's also the premise of Pascal's wager. By their reasoning, believing in God has a low risk, and high reward. You pray a bit, go to church, and you could end up in heaven. Whereas not believing in God could either be inconsequential, or land you in hell, low reward, high risk. So a betting man should always choose to believe in god. Of course we know that's not how it plays out.

I have had fun with this thought of risk recently. It seems risk is hard to communicate between people, because sometimes people conflate the occurrence rate of the risk with the negative effects of the risk in question. So it's a low occurrence rate for an oil drill to spill, but the damage is the death of the ecosystem around it. You could argue the risk is both high and low for different reasons yet I don't often here people clarify that detail when talking about risk.

In the scenario of my wage dropping, I would say it's a low risk for me, both because of my location and the economy my wage is based on, and because the damage of my wages dropping is low because I haven't leveraged my earnings. Little damage is to be done, AND the likelihood of a drop is also low.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager)

<comment><USER49> > Of course we know that's not how it plays out.

Do we? I find his reasoning perhaps a little incomplete but still compelling. We don't have to benefit of his presence to fill in gaps in his reasoning, but a lot of the supposed gaps have to do with a misunderstanding of Christian "belief" (pisteuō).

[https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?t=n...](https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?t=nasb&strongs=g4100)

But this isn't analogous to Pascal's Wager anyway. That wager leans heavily on the concept of infinite positives and negatives. As great as being a successful programmer is, it's nowhere near infinitely better than alternative occupations and employment scenarios.

So we're really talking about cost/benefit analysis with incomplete information... which describes most important decisions in life.

<comment><USER50> Yes, the assumption that believing in a god that doesn't exist is only a minor negative in life is wrong and therefore the whole wager falls flat on its face. Of course, each person decides this on their own, but we know without any doubt that it's not a generalisation that can be made about everyone or even a significant percentage of people. We know this due to numerous counterexamples (myself included). In fact, it's purely opinion and conclusions simply cannot be based upon this assumption.

<comment><USER49> Your opinion is valid, but your reasoning is circular. You're basically saying there's no way there is a hell, so there isn't a good reason to avoid hell.

The argument is that a life fully wasted on false assumptions is still better than an eternal hell.

The same reasoning can be used to discount all sorts of black swan events, including programming becoming unviable some day, if we want to come back on topic. Pascal was basically arguing for respecting the ultimate black swan event, with the understanding that infinities skew any pragmatic calculations.

<comment><USER50> No, that's not my argument at all. I said nothing at all about hell. I have no idea where you got that from, but surely not from my post.

My argument is that believing in a god that doesn't exist is much more than the mere inconvenience that Pascal makes it out to me. It actually degrades life to the point where it might not be worth living. This is, of course, an evaluation that one can only make for themselves, but one that many have made.

I'm saying that believing in god simply on the off-chance that he might exist, is vengeful, wrathful, and a piece of shit (as described in the bible) and will judge you on petty shit (as also described in the bible) in exchange for a life that's not worth living, where suicide is the best option, is not a wager any sane person would take. If it was as Pascal says, a minor inconvenience at worst, then Pascal's wager would make sense. Since it is a life-altering change that leads to one of the lowest possible qualities of life, then the wager no longer makes sense as the person faced with the wager now has to live a horrific life on the infinitesimally small, asymptotically to zero chance that said god above might exist.

And that's before you get to the possility that if a god might exist, other gods might exist. How do I know that believing in the Christian god (which Pascal's wager is based upon) won't send me to hell when the Islamic god judges me. Or Zeus. Or Mars. Or Aphrodite. Or the Jewish god. Is he the same? No one knows. Or maybe an Aztec god. Or one of the thousands of religions of the world that have gods. Or some other imaginary deity. So which one should I believe in when I can only choose one out of thousands? Pascal and the entire church don't make a case for their god being the one in over two thousand pages of ranting.

Pascal's wager is beyond fucking absurd. Then again, the idea of god itself is beyond fucking absurd as well. Especially for someone sane who wants to live their life as best as they can, not based on some imaginary wager and imaginary forces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think it needs to be a "simple" supply and demand thing.

Even in the same FAANG-companies, I am aware that there are people doing the same roles at the same level (and even sometimes in the same team) in London (a city was equivalent living costs as SF) who are paid significantly less than their Silicon Valley based colleagues.

I.e. all things being equal (same employer, same job, same level, same teams), people in SV get significantly more than people in other major cities (and it is not just like an extra couple of thousand, it is often like $150-200k vs $300-350k etc). I knew of someone who simply moved from SV to London (same team, same manager, same role, same level etc - just an office location change) who told me they got a 60% pay cut - i.e. the _only_ variable that changed was location, everything else was the same.

The explanation given for these "discrepancies" are that the lower salary outside of SV is due to "market rate", i.e. that there are not enough other companies in e.g. London competing for talent to support higher market rates, and that the FAANG pays "at the top of the market rate", so that is why salaries are lower in London despite living costs being the same as SanFran.

$150-200k is still a fairly respectable salary in London by the way (London average is approx £39K/$51K), but you still have a near-zero chance of buying a nice house on that salary (you might afford an apartment out in the outskirts that is 40-60 minutes away by train from the office in center of the city)

A lot of commentators here are talking about the profitability-to-the-company of a single dev, or the opportunity cost a dev is missing when taking a full- time position vs starting their own business. I think if that were true, there wouldn't be such a wild variance based entirely on location. The simple reality for me is that companies just pay the smallest amount they can get away with, and it just happens that in SV that needs to be high because there are a lot of competing companies looking for staff.

I.e. supply and demand.

<comment><USER52> If employed under UK law then your London friend will also have massively improved employment rights. UK is not fire at will like the US. To contrast US-UK salaries you need to compare to the London contractor market where SV salaries are possible - but with zero employment rights like the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> > we don't understand why programmers are paid so well.

I think the problem is that programming is more complicated than other jobs. Your value as a doctor is pretty much equal to the other doctor next door. That's not true for software developers.

One thing I noticed about open source software, is that most of the projects (even the big one) are mainly run by 1-2 guys. There can be a hundred contributors, but the heavy lifting is done by a single person or maybe a couple. This is different than say a hospital, where you can't have a single doctor doing all the heavy lifting.

Most software developers are paid shit (outside the USA and Silicon Valley) and are barely equivalent to other engineers or university educated folks.

> Consulting, investment banking, etc., are similar. Compensation appears to > be proportional to the level of sacrifice

Yes, because you open a consulting shop and work starts following. It has been mentioned here, before, that consulting in tech is more about building a reputation and managing clients than the technical skills. So not really that much different. If you are highly talented and have no network, you'll make exactly 0 as a consultant.

> but the combination of medical school and residency is still incredibly > brutal compared to most jobs at places like Facebook and Google

What the OP misses is that Facebook/Google do not represent your average US engineer; let alone the average global one. Whether they are talented or lucky, they are the minority.

> big companies need to compete with programmers choosing to go off and start > companies, which is harder to do in many fields.

Maybe they are going to startup route because the compensation for a _skilled_ software developer is _very_ low.

Writing software is like writing novels (not exactly but close). A few good writers are going to make most of the $$ while the rest are going to barely survive. My guess is that in the future will see more of this trend where you either go big or go home.

<comment><USER54> To back this up, if you need a surgery, you want to go with the surgeon who has done at least 100 surgeries of the specific type you need and who has done a fair number of them recently. A skilled and experienced surgeon is key for best outcome in many surgeries. However, the comp from the insurer is going to be the same regardless of skill level.

<comment><USER55> On the same theme, if you need surgery and are a high skills athlete who can make millions off of that surgery you won't pay the going insurer rate

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py I think it depends the 'how good, how fast' curve of automation

If google finds a way to run itself with 5k developers instead of 30k, that's a scary change

If on the other hand we develop tons of cool hands-on automation technologies that deliver lots of value but require programmer-like people to run them, that may sustain the labor demand for a while

there's an argument gap between 'AI is taking developer jobs unless you can do ML' and 'basic app development, even when non-fancy, is like pulling teeth and requires experts if you don't want to deliver crap that fails all the time'

I think we're still living in the 'basics are hard and require experts' world for 18-36 months and then the tooling fills in and starts to make magic easy

<comment><USER47> Yeah, I can't see CRUD app development providing top-tier salaries for more than 5-10 more years.

<comment><USER56> What CRUD app companies pay top tier salaries currently? They all pay much less than GAFAM from what I have read.

<comment><USER47> Most engineers at GAFAM (or whatever the trendy acronym is) are doing CRUD work.

<comment><USER57> I prefer FMAGA.. because of the ambiguity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "How easy it is to become one" much to every talented engineer's chagrin. If I had a dollar for every engineer who writes unmaintainable, non-tested code that doesn't scale or even manage a company's current needs particularly well I'd be rich. I think we need to go in the opposite direction and I know I'm not alone in that thinking.

<comment><USER28> > If I had a dollar for every engineer who writes unmaintainable, non-tested > code that doesn't scale or even manage a company's current needs > particularly well I'd be rich.

A lot of those engineers you describe are rich too, because engineering pay is not tied to skill as much as to being in the right company, e.g. FAANG companies pay large salaries to average engineers and startups pay low salaries to pretty much everyone.

<comment><USER58> Yes and often startups are the ones taking a risk to solve more challenging problems with technology versus the FAANG like companies who operate in large or multiple markets that have predictable money in them for example ads or e-commerce. The pay and overall wealth in tech are tied to some ethically questionable problems and the fact startups can't pull top talent to solve hard problems that are still potentially vastly profitable is worrying. I expect things in the startup world to be even more uphill at least with tech talent in the next decade unless there is a major shift in incentives, this however, will require either restructuring the average equity agreements or early investments with larger money for larger salary for key early employees.

<comment><USER59> > " _Yes and often startups are the ones taking a risk to solve more > challenging problems with technology versus the FAANG like companies who > operate in large or multiple markets that have predictable money in them for > example ads or e-commerce._ "

Never worked a FAANG, I see. They have plenty of risky projects with challenging technology problems that they spin up to try to enter new markets. You don't hear about most of them because, like most startups, they often don't work out and die quietly.

<comment><USER60> A lot of FAANG engineers also work on infra, OS, security, private/public cloud, tooling, etc. which have impacts on the company bottom line but aren't necessarily visible as external products.

It's not just 100 people doing ads and 30,000 other people playing ping pong and trying to outsmart each other with Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> There is a kernel of truth in this article. Consider this:

1\. Wages are dictated by supply and demand.

2\. Software has no formal entry requirements, anyone who can demonstrate competence can get hired as a software engineer.

3\. The same set of traits make someone good at software development and other branches of STEM.

4\. An increasing, if not already majority, of young STEM graduates are also more than familiar with software development. Many do it as part of their non- tech day-to-day jobs. They may not be able to start working as a software dev on Monday, but given a relatively short amount of time (a couple of months) to prepare, they can switch to software just fine.

5\. Pay for software jobs is multiple times higher than other SEM jobs.

I do not see this situation as steady. Here is my speculation: If the wage gap persists, more and more STEM graduates would seek careers in software. This will increase the supply of labour in software and decrease it in the rest of STEM, until the wage gaps closes or at least shrinks significantly. At this point, the new wages for all STEM would be lower than current tech salaries but higher than current SEM salaries. Since the number of tech graduates is much lower than the number of all other graduates, the equilibrium point would be closer to current SEM salaries than current tech salaries.*

* Note: I don't know the statistics, but I presume that universities take roughly the same number of students in each STEM major. So a university may have approximately 100 graduates per year in each of software, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, ..., biology, physics, ... If for every 100 software graduates, there are 900 SEM graduates, and if only 10% of each SEM major's graduates decide to seek work in software, supply of labour in each SEM category would decrease by 10%, but for software it will increase by 90%. The effect on software salaries would thus be more steep. I acknowledge that this is a very simplified model, but I think it effectively demonstrates my point.

<comment><USER62> Anecdotally so not worth much, but I keep telling all of my acquaintances in SEM, law and other paths who struggle with making ends meet to try their hand at programming, even if it is not their preferred vocation, and so far none would get past very basics introductory tutorials without giving up, if ever giving it a chance at all.

I feel there is something similar to how many people get traumatized about Math in high and middle school that scares them into even believing they could learn about CS. But it's just what I've personally seen.

<comment><USER61> My experience is the opposite of yours. Could it be possibly a function of age? Because a significant number of young engineering graduates I know have gone into software development jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I've been programming since I was a teenager in the 80's, and have seen it all. Really. I went from being a god-like teenage computer genius, to an over- the-hill "old guru guy", with all the pay scales in between. I've done some big things, and I've done plenty that I'm not proud of.

And now I'm in the situation, early 50's approaching, where I don't have a job lined up for the year, and am out there looking at the market again. I really, really don't like what I'm seeing - coders in their teens, making 1/3rd of what I used to make. Its really a saturated scene, so I'm thinking of other things I can do. Its long since past the point where I should've made myself wealthy by now - but long, long hours, over years, spent making wealth for others has really burned me out on the whole subject.

Nevertheless, I'll pick myself up after a bit of a break, and get back into it. I'll do what I always have done: look at the scene, determine what the new hot framework/language/environment is, learn it, use it, and get a job applying it towards other peoples wealth.

I probably should have been finishing my side projects in all these decades - and boy, do I have a lot of them. More than likely I wouldn't be in this situation now if I'd finished some of these things and brought them to market.

Its just so exhausting, making other people wealthy, you know? (Really: the works I've contributed to have made many, many millionaires over the years... I should be one of them by now. But hey, those high salaries sure paid for a lot of trinkets...)

</comment><comment><USER64> #define PROGRAMMER

A friend of mine works only with html and client-side js.

Another only with Java.

I currently work product but have worked with a whole host of languages.

Another friend of mine is an infrastructure engineer.

Another is a lawyer who codes.

We are all "programmers." There is a lot to be said about why "programmers" are well compensated, but let's first discuss what it is that is being said.

What is the specific anxiety being voiced about what group? I'm assuming it's software engineers. But then what is "well compensated"? I can't reply to the author because of how vague it is, but, in summary - you should always plan for lower pay regardless of industry, but as long as you provide increasing value to a business, and are much better at it than other people, you will not see lower pay.

</comment><comment><USER65> Contrast to the examples given: Veterinarians, who basically do the med school thing but don't get anywhere near the pay output. Or the social status, it would seem.

Alternately, going with the assumption the author is correct, I'll clip a phrase: the market can stay irrational longer than you.

<comment><USER66> I often heard it as: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

<comment><USER65> That's why I trimmed it where I did, as the author feels they have become rational. If -- if -- they are, no guarantee on timing for everyone else waking up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> On the one hand, I've been wondering the same thing for the past thirty years.

On the other hand, I've been wondering the same thing for thirty years now.

</comment><comment><USER67> The best part is, that unlike medical or law you can also do it from virtually anywhere.

I have been doing some semblance of programming since I was 8 years old (now 39). I think it's one of those things you kind of have to have a passion for or you can easily get burned out.

But I also think it's one of those things that are more in demand than ever. If I was laid off I'd have to question why I was working for the company in the first place and didn't see it coming. There are quite literally 7-8 LinkedIn messages from recruiters almost daily. I'm not sure many attorneys or physicians can say that. And when you are in demand like that you're constantly leveling up your salary every few years.

Finally, I know or very few professions where every 3-5 years you need to completely have learned something new to stay ahead of the game. When I was 8 I was doing q-basic. I've had to learn over 12 languages since then.

<comment><USER68> > I'm not sure many attorneys or physicians can say that

As someone who worked as a lawyer for 6 years before switching careers to software (after 4 years of self-teaching, mind), I can say that in the one year I've been professionally employed as a dev, I have already received several multiples of the number of recruiter messages during the totality of my time practicing law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> On Twitter, there are lots of validations about how easy it is to be a programmer. This all seems to be based on piecing together a few NPM packages.

<comment><USER70> Conversely, there are a lot of places on the internet that think that unless you have a BS in Comp Sci, and work in Silicon Valley, Bay Area, or NYC, you aren't a "real programmer", you're just some code monkey that can throw together a few npm packages. I think programming doesn't get compared to art as much as it should. There are certain metrics of "good" and "bad", but there is a lot of gray are and subjectivity.

In the golden age of Disney animation, you'd be a fool to say any of their animators were bad artists, but there were definitely better among them. There are also perfectly mediocre comic book artists who still make a healthy living. There is art with quality that is entirely subjective. All of this applies to code. The best senior dev on the backend team of a small company is probably a garbage coder compared to the new guy at some Bay Area startup. Code that one team calls elegant and amazing may be called overly complex and unnecessarily clever by another.

At the end of the day, being a programmer _is_ easy. Being a great programmer is hard. Like many things in life, you can get a lot better if you practice at it a lot more, +/\- the "talent" modifier. But at the end of the day if you can do basic 8th grade pre-algebra, and speak english, you probably have the education needed to be able to program professionally, its just a matter of learning the syntax and patterns.

<comment><USER71> "The best senior dev on the backend team of a small company is probably a garbage coder compared to the new guy at some Bay Area startup."

Just because someone shows up in the bay area it doesn't make them instantly good coders/developers/programmers. Just because a company is in the bay area it doesn't make the dev team good either. Usually the great devs are at fangs or working at a cool startup. There are a lot of companies with little hope and a lot of teams without solid experience.

The best dev at a small company could be the best in the world or the 5th worst. From what I have seen is a lot of good developers end up at a small places because of the challenge and/or lifestyle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Author is in a personal bubble and doesn't know it. Most of my European programmer friends make less than their sales department. I bet it must be the same in most of asia, india, etc.

<comment><USER73> Living in EU and having changed a few countries in the last decade, I can confirm this. Programmers are paid absolutely average salary, typically less than most other engineering professions.

Programmers being highly paid must be an US thing.

Consultants can certainly be paid (way) more than average, but this is not something I've seen for regular employee positions.

<comment><USER74> "Pay is low in Europe" isn't really true. It's a statement based on the (very frequent, deliberate and problematic) conflation of the EU with Europe. Wages for programmers are pretty high in parts of the UK, Switzerland, and some other places. In provincial Germany or French classical engineering firms, yes sure, wages are much lower. But then developer wages outside of California are nothing special in the USA either.

<comment><USER73> I'm not sure about California, but as I was interviewing for some positions in Zurich, the wage adjusted for cost of living in there, and excluding Google (which has a presence there), is also average. I lived in Paris for some years and the same was true. I have several friends scattered across Spain, Germany and France in several big cities and nobody is getting rich. Maybe I'm missing the cool working positions.

I never ran any estimate for London since I never had an opportunity to work there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> What a horrible argument. Other professions have guilds that demand sacrifice rather than focus on skills, and programmers get paid well without that... and? Most business managers are far smarter than this post assumes. People pay more and more money for software because they experience and measure the value that it provides. Until the world is saturated with software solutions we are unlikely to see a major drop. According to the department of labor the demand for software engineers has continued to grow, not fall. Sure, 4 week bootcamps won't suffice for many tasks, but the fact that those folks are getting hired says there is still a lot of low hanging fruit.

</comment><comment><USER76> The article doesn't mention two very important things working in the programmers favor - leverage and margin.

A software product can scale to hundreds of millions of customers with just a few employees (ex. WhatsApp). This increases revenue per employee.

Software companies have much higher margins compared to other industries. You can attribute this to network effects and stickiness from lack of easy data interop between different vendors. This limits competition that drive down margins.

Hardware engineers in chip design command decent salaries also from leverage but the ability for a company to switch vendors limits margins, unless you have IP like qualcomm.

</comment><comment><USER77> This seems reasonable for the SF Bay Area. We're getting close to the next recession. The last two times (1999 and 2008) San Francisco and San Jose emptied out, foreclosures everywhere, traffic way down, layoffs.

<comment><USER78> A part of me can't wait for this to happen. The pretenders and hucksters get cleared out. Good people and good ideas have a chance.

<comment><USER28> Good people and good ideas need funding, which dried up pretty bad during the last recession. The startup market got hit harder than any other part of tech. The established tech companies as of 2008 survived the downturn and IIRC most of them didn't even do layoffs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I would argue that a good developer has spent many years learning and perfect their art, more so than any residency. Over the last 25 years have been continually learning, reading papers and journals from CS and mathematics, as well as online sources. I suspect most developers need to spend time at least reading and honing their skills across their career. To be fair many doctors read medical journals and may attend seminars.

The difference between a doctor, lawyer vs a programmer is that a programmer emerges from a computer science program in a "larval stage". Most fresh graduates have very little experience in knowing how to structure code at the level of a senior software engineer. There are years ahead to, maybe, get to the point of mastery.

The professional fields, in particular Doctors, require that the residency graduate is more or less fully "baked" and can perform their role without error. That the residency is grueling is just an artifact of the way the profession organizes itself. Personally I think it is dangerous to require doctors to run long shifts. It is almost more of a test of physical fortitude.

There is the full gamut of intelligence and diligence in the medical community, just as in the software engineering community. Does a grueling qualification versus lifelong learning in other areas make one profession more valuable or not, I don't think so. As others have stated, economics has more to do with supply and demand.

</comment><comment><USER80> Demand for software folks is so incredible (anecdotal), it's hard to see salaries falling anytime soon. As a mechanical guy, I envy the job selection. Software jobs outnumber mechanical 10:1

</comment><comment><USER81> There seems to be a premise that a programming is actually easy and we are slowly realizing it. Who else finds it flawed?

I've seen plenty of open source code, proprietary startup code, corporate code and it is usually shit - full of premature assumptions and legacy mess. It's because writing good lasting code is super difficult even for great engineers. Moreover, running platforms usually need to be constant maintainance which drives up the demand even more.

<comment><USER82> What company writes lasting software nowadays? Most of the consumer facing stuff i use gets rewritten (worse, but fancily) for no apparent reason every 2 years. I can name products

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Programmers have their own cartel but instead of focusing on reducing the number of entrants in the field (e.g. by demanding special universities or certifications), it works through job creation.

Developers have an innate ability to keep creating more work for themselves by increasing the complexity of the solutions that they produce. Managers are completely obvious to this.

The monopolistic and highly profitable nature of software companies allows managers to keep hiring more developers, who keep creating more unnecessary complexity which requires more developers to maintain... A vicious cycle. There is no limit as to how much complexity can be created. Most managers still believe that the best way to speed things up is to hire more developers.

In reality, the best way to speed things up is to reduce the number of developers and to hire better developers. The problem is that managers, even highly technical ones are not capable of knowing what a very good developer is. A technical person cannot accurately rank other technical people who are better than them; they can only rank others who are at or below their own skill levels.

There is an old saying that the top experts in any field are those who know when and how far to bend the rules. This is especially true when it comes to software development but 99% of technical managers will disagree with that statement; they still believe in blanket one-size-fits-all approaches.

The spectrum of talent is extremely broad, much broader than everyone realizes. IMO, even the most talented, most acclaimed CTOs and project managers will fit somewhere in the middle of the technical talent spectrum so they will miss a lot of talent.

</comment><comment><USER84> There are three different problems the post talks about: 1\. High salary 2\. Layoffs 3\. Cost of knowledge acquisition

High wage: The high wage problem is simple and is only around specific regions of the world, Silicon Valley pays more comparatively higher than the other parts of the world. The data showing the salary median $140K seems to not include the salary median for other regions which I'm assuming is around only $20K. So, based on this assumption the median salary for SWE all around the world might fall somewhere around $20K-80K.

Cost of knowledge acquisition: This is also specific to region, the average cost to graduate from an ivy league school costs about $100K-200K, however if you compare this data to the other regions the average cost should be < $20K. This also impacts the salary one makes, after having graduated.

Layoffs: This is something everyone is concerned about, irrespective of their region or place of work, however since the market size is very huge and there are lot of opportunities around the world, getting a job is not that hard.

</comment><comment><USER85> > My sister is currently a second-year medical resident, and "incredibly > brutal compared..." feels like a understatement to me. She works 80hr weeks, > often nights, helping people with deeply personal and painful issues that > are hard to leave behind when you go home. This is after four years in > medical school, with still at least a year to go before starting to earn > doctor-level money.

I wonder which medical residency is she at? My wife is a resident at a pretty busy hospital in NY metro area. She is in her first year as well and doesn't do more than two night floats a week and no more than 60-65 hours a week. I also know so many other doctors (friends/acquaintances of my wife and via my ex-landlord who owns multiple family houses which he rents out these up-and- coming/current medical residents in NY metro area) and NO ONE works even close to 80 hours a week.

This is not to mention that it gets much better after the first year, and by the third year, you're only supervising most of the first years and simply studying for Step 3 (board) exam (if you haven't taken it by then).

I wonder if people tend to exaggerate when it comes tho how much time they spend for work because it makes them feel good/justifiable to the amount of income that they (eventually) receive. Having quit medical school after second year in my home country (SE Asia) and having seen my wife (then fiance) studying for Step 2 and 3 exams, I personally believe that medical studies mostly requires memorization (a LOT of it) and we would be surprised how little critical thinking skills and scientific knowledge (not recent ones they've memorized off the books, but I'm talking about things like physics, math and even chemistry) your average doctor has. They forget it all in a year or two after med school for sure (I can't possibly recall more than 206 bones that I learned in Anatomy in 2nd year!)

</comment><comment><USER70> Every employment is in the benefit of the employer. They pay you money because you make them money. They aren't going to pay you 100k a year if they could fire you and only lose 50k in profit. You make them _at least_ 100k a year. Also, not all coders are paid 65k a year out of college like this guy. I personally know coders only making 45-50k a year.

<comment><USER86> > They pay you money because you make them money.

What meaningful work is not happening with science or technology because of the cost of labor?

<comment><USER87> Basically everything? The reason most jobs are so hard to automate is the lack of dependencies having API's you can work against. If we had a billion engineers they could automate probably 90% of white collar jobs we have today simply by throwing human brute brain force at all edge cases. And you know, doing all that labor would definitely be worth it even though it sounds like a waste. That is why software engineers are paid well, and why they will continue to be paid well for a long time forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Not unhelpful to look at the history of STEM employment and unemployment.

It is very hard to predict economic boom and bust cycles but even harder within industries and sectors.

STEM employment and mass layoffs are no exception. Those in the industry will remember the AI winter (over three decades even in sheltered academia and now going through a boom) and mass layoffs of programmers after the dot com crash.

The scar tissue extends further to those with memories of rocket scientists and engineers becoming New York cab drivers in the 1970s after the glut of engineers after JFKs call to put a man on the moon.

Key thing is adaptability. Only certainty in life is the compounded interest on your mortgage and bank loan.

Example article: [https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/the- changi...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/the-changing- pattern-of-stem-worker-employment)

</comment><comment><USER89> This is a pretty awful article. Programmers get paid a lot the same reason why managers get paid a lot. You can increase your productivity by increasing your node/headcount. While you're asleep you can still serve customers.

Other jobs don't scale like this and therefore there is a limit to how much a single person can make.

</comment><comment><USER90> I think that the article is probably correct. I retired from a job managing a deep learning team and we usually had many undergraduate computer science and software engineering undergraduate interns working in our lab. Uniformly, they were highly motivated, knowledgeable, and did good work. Thirty years ago, I used to interview and hire computer science graduates from UCSD: we got some good people, but in comparison, the modern undergraduates seemed more experienced and prepared. Perhaps this is just showing a major improvement in computer science education.

That said, I read an article last week that mentioned 70K CS graduates a year in the US, a figure that surprised me that it was so low. I think it is an open question what the value is ofa CS graduate degree is, but an undergraduate degree seems like a great start to a career in software.

</comment><comment><USER91> Someone recently recommended the book, "The Value of Everything." I'm part of the way through, and it's super relevant to this conversation. What this comes down to is, what is value, and how do we measure it? The author of this post throws their hands up and says, "we don't know why wages are high for programmers." That, however, doesn't mean a reason doesn't exist. But the point is an important one: if you don't understand what your value is, you're in the dark as to whether you're over or underpaid, and unprepared for structural changes that could affect your lifestyle — because you're unaware of what affects your value in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER92> The comparison to doctors is an interesting one, but also a very poor one. Doctors run a cartel in the traditional economic sense. The AMA pushed to restrict the number of residency slots, and what's more is that Medicare incentivizes teaching hospitals to prefer specialists over general practitioners. Doctors are certainly overpaid.

Restrictions like HIPAA and such make it difficult to outsource labor on the software side.

It's clear engineers are overpaid in the US relative to developer salaries in other wealthy countries. That makes me uneasy, but we got here without a well defined union or cartel to restrict inflow of labor.

<comment><USER12> In the article I'm saying it's surprising that programming pays so well, given that all of these other high-paying fields have high barriers to entry, unpleasant working conditions, or both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Programmers have high wages because the value of new implementation is very high. This is driven by innovation in business applications and practice, but also by (the real sense) Moore's law - real sense in that the improvement in computing power effectively available creates available value.

These factors mean that business can create investment cases, and investment cases provide pay.

If (real) Moore's law vanished today I believe that there would be 5-10 years more innovation before the train stopped. But real Moore's law isn't over yet so I don't think people need to worry.

</comment><comment><USER94> "We don't understand why the sky is blue, so you should prepare for it to suddenly become green"

<comment><USER95> You really should, a green sky means a tornado might be about to hit: [https://news.wisc.edu/curiosities-why-does-the-sky-turn- gree...](https://news.wisc.edu/curiosities-why-does-the-sky-turn-green-before- a-tornado-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> My personal theory is that programmers are paid so well right now in order to _stop_ them being productive for other companies more than they are to harness their productivity.

The big Valley companies who own the $$ firehose that is the ads business hire like crazy and pay top salary not because they need the talent -- most of what they're building with all this talent isn't adding to their bottom line -- but because they can't afford for that talent to go elsewhere and then compete with them.

</comment><comment><USER97> The market is bifurcated and similar to law. Most people make comparatively little but the best of the best make several times the average worker. The company I work for happily rejects > 99% of applicants and I am certain greater than 90% of people employed as software developers would never be able to solve the engineering challenges I solve in a manner as cost efficient and performant.

</comment><comment><USER98> Google has $1.39M in revenue per employee, along with awesome profits. Apple has $2M revenue per employee. These companies are not typical. The public company I work for has revenue of $200K per employee, and almost zero profit. So, if you work for one of these outliers, you're probably safe. The rest of us are a different story.

<comment><USER99> Are janitors who work for Apple or other 2M/employee get super high wages ? If dev becomes as widespread to hire from, why would it be different ?

<comment><USER55> If a new janitorial shop opens up in your town it might drive down revenue for your janitor shop

If a new tech company is created they might compete with yours but they could also add more value (tools, products, technologies) to your tech company

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I mean this is already true from my perspective, and not very surprising. Back in the early 90's when I was a C++ programmer I was making about what I make now in absolute numbers, but of course the dollars went a lot further back then. There were fewer gigs, but also fewer people qualified to do the work. Today most code is written at a significantly higher level of abstraction, there are more programmers and more projects, the money and perks are still good but the market is more competitive than it was back then. It's also _far_ more fragmented into tech silos, which should work against my theory I guess... but idk.

From my perspective its always a mistake to think you're safe and things will never change. The perceived rarity of any skill set should trend down over time if possessing the skill is valuable.

</comment><comment><USER94> Also, law and health industries are heavily regulated, so there is an artificial restriction of competition, sometimes quite ridiculous. For example, to provide telemedicine service in Russia you should certify your call center as a clinic, with all the stuff like clean rooms and so on :)

</comment><comment><USER101> > Programmers are paid surprisingly well given how much work it is to become > one.

It is a _lot_ of work to become a good programmer. It's just that most programmers are naturally interested in it and do it in their spare time.

> Then you have to win the grades lottery

Err... grades aren't assigned randomly.

</comment><comment><USER102> In addition to all the other reasons mentioned here, another idea: managers don't know how to use programmer talent very efficiently. Of all the things programmers are told to do, 90+% of them are useless or worse than useless, in that they simply make long-term maintenance worse without adding value.

If you cannot use a resource efficiently at all, wasting most of it, then it is not surprising that you end up with a shortage. When faced with this situation, management can: 1) admit that they are the problem, and get much better at allocating programmer effort wisely, a task that will be very difficult even once it's well understood (which it currently isn't). Or... 2) hire more programmers, paying whatever is required to get more

<comment><USER103> Very true, all the managers and their managers.. and theirs, who's technical skills have since atrophied, live in these hierarchies and its a great place for good and bad programmers (mostly bad programmers), to hide, get paid, be lazy, nice pension and not talk to anyone much, project gets binned, move onto another one. The large non-tech companies usually have this issue.

<comment><USER102> True that, but even managers who were good programmers sometimes don't have a great ability to figure out which features, either user-facing or architectural, are a good idea and which are not really going to impact the bottom line. I saw it at tech companies as well. In at least some cases it was based on a need to impress VC's more than to get things done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> The answer is pretty straight forward: programming scales in a way none of the cited jobs do.

<comment><USER55> Surprised this wasn't mentioned in either jefftk (doctors) or luu (electrical engineers) posts

Doctor's scale by spending less time with each patient giving a crappier experience for everyone

Software has very low design/reproduction cost vs chip manufacturers

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Quote: "Specifically, I'd recommend living on a small portion of your income and saving a multiple of your living expenses."

That's a good advice regardless of your profession, the only good thing in this blog - rest was rubbish, to put it mildly.

</comment><comment><USER106> Whenever anything gets streamlined in our industry (better work process/compiler/editor/language), successful company instead of letting go skilled workers end up branching out into more products and regions.

Inventing new industries gets so crazy, we end up leaving things in legacy repos for decades. A complete normalization/standardization for the entire engineering spaces would be both wasteful and unnecessary (what, requiring everyone to know all of the industries and languages before they can get hired?)

Even if you get to the point of AI programmers who can replace people, you may run into a incentive problem because AI would have no use of money.

</comment><comment><USER107> A collapse in __wages __seems unreasonable. Wages are almost always sticky and so wages will go down at most at the rate of inflation.

Also this line:

> Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice

Is a doozy and not at all how modern economies work.

I do agree with the general sentiment though. The mechanisms controlling supply and demand of SDEs are not well understood and it is much easier to imagine a shock to SDE supply/demand than doctor supply/demand or lawyer supply/demand. That being said, this would result in a reduction of __employment __rather than a reduction of wages for those lucky enough to continue being employed.

</comment><comment><USER108> This article is basically just asking people to live responsibly, which is something everyone should understand intuitively.

This person appears to be spending half of their income on charitable donations every year, though, which is admirable but not a smart financial decision. (They've spent one million dollars on it! A million! With a standard savings rate, just throwing that into a bank account would ensure that you could just live off of the _interest_ from that for the rest of your life in some countries.)

I'm not saying that you should be a scrooge with your dollars, but there's a reasonable amount to give and there's an amount that (while great!) means you should expect consequences from it.

Even if you're making far below FAANG rates, just by living within your means you'll be able to have a year or two's worth of padding saved up (especially if you're willing to move to a less expensive area while the theoretical crash happens) in no time at all.

To post an anecdote from a Hacker News comment:

 _Saw this happen in Houston in 2014. Engineers that had started their careers just after the housing crisis bounced back were sitting cozy on their 150k /year (in Houston that's gobs) roles, not really putting much into savings because "there's always Wells to drill."

When prices dropped from 90$ to 44$ a barrel, I saw candidates do some pretty stupid shit. Nuked the [remainder] of their savings on a new f150 was a classic drama played out over 2 weeks that my whole team was involved trying to talk him down in. Others had to move in with their parents, take roles in deer Park that were something like 2.5hr commutes one way, drop everything for a Saudi role and move out there... Their freedom of choice was essentially yanked away.

The only one that seemed to be handling it well was a fresh 3 years in engineer. No girlfriend, kids, house, and buckets of savings. He moved to Vietnam and weathered the storm on a beach, taking tiny sips of his savings._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281509)

If you're living within your means, you have nothing at all to worry about. It's really not that hard, and it'll save you a lot of stress when push comes to shove.

Edit: Changed a word because it came off too hostile. The line I changed is quoted by 'saagarjha below, if you're curious about what it originally said.

<comment><USER12> _> This person appears to be spending half of their income on charitable donations every year, though, which is admirable but not a smart financial decision._

The number of people in the world without sufficient food, clean water, basic medical care, and other human necessities is far too high. As someone lucky enough to be paid as well as I am, if I didn't try to do something about this I don't think I could live with myself.

Donating 50% is clearly not the financial choice that will leave us with the most money, but that's not my main goal.

Here's what our spending looks like: [https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending- update-2018](https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2018)

<comment><USER39> I would find it challenging to make the same decisions you made. To place 10x the amount you spend on childcare in charitable donations is certainly your prerogative, but will your children feel similarly? How much have you saved to make sure they can go to college without debt? Perhaps start a business someday? How much of your charitable donation goes to direct aid of the end recipient, and how much is skimmed off the top in administrative overhead? Is the end organization subsidizing a wealthy individual minimizing tax exposure?

<comment><USER12> _> will your children feel similarly?_

I don't think we're neglecting our children at all. They have good childcare, plenty of time with their parents, and everything they need. I don't expect they will resent our choices here.

 _> How much have you saved to make sure they can go to college without debt?_

Saving for college doesn't make much sense: the good schools have a price discrimination policy where the amount they charge is the amount you can pay. If you're not rich enough to pay the sticker price, each dollar you save is a dollar more you'll need to pay to the school.

 _> Perhaps start a business someday?_

If they have good ideas they'll be able to convince people to fund them. Capital is far more accessible than it ever has been. I'm not worried.

 _> How much of your charitable donation goes to direct aid of the end recipient, and how much is skimmed off the top in administrative overhead?_

It sounds like what you're getting at is, what are the actual effects of our donations? The majority of our donations have been to GiveWell's top charities ([https://www.givewell.org/](https://www.givewell.org/)) and their recommendations are extremely well researched, and the money goes a long way (ex: [https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf](https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf)).

As an aside, the fraction of the donations that go to overhead vs directly to the recipient isn't a good way to measure the effectiveness of a charity. For example, imagine two charities:

A) Spends 95% of your money building wells, and 5% on administration.

B) Spends 80% of your money building wells, and 20% on administration.

Sounds like A is better, right? Except if B is using that administration spending on making sure they build wells out of materials that will stand up to heavy use over years, in places where the wells are most needed, and on checking up on past wells to make sure they're still in working order, a donation to B could easily result in far more benefit than a donation to A.

 _> Is the end organization subsidizing a wealthy individual minimizing tax exposure?_

I'm not sure why you would think this, or what sort of mechanism you're imagining. The charity we've donated the most to, the Against Malaria Foundation, distributes long-lasting insecticide-treated bednets in areas with high levels of malaria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> > Medicine seems to be a bit better from the sacrifice standpoint because > there's a cartel which limits entry into the field, but the combination of > medical school and residency is still incredibly brutal compared to most > jobs at places like Facebook and Google.

This was written before a Facebook engineer committed suicide in September: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death- was-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death-was- suicide.html).

</comment><comment><USER110> Economy grows because of increasing productivity and programmers have been the forefront of increasing productivity. As long as this continues to be true, I think programmers will continue getting high pay

</comment><comment><USER111> I... don't think that's true. There's more jobs being created and more and newer technologies, and not every skill is universally applicable. If anything students should be more prepared to learn and apply themselves because there are actually lucrative careers waiting for them (assuming they choose to go into this field). Once the machines start writing their own code and scripting their own automation and plugging in their own power cords... well, then we've got bigger problems

<comment><USER103> How "lucrative" it will be at the end only seems to play a small factor, it's all just too abstract for some people to understand how they can go from Hello World to 100k a year. Out of 2 college classes of pure cs and cs/business students 200 or so students (graduated 2017), I only think 25% (maybe less) went on to actually write build software/web/apps.

Also once machines smart enough to writing their code i'm sure we will have much bigger societal issues then just us programmers. I see that point written/said so much it's the biggest platitude of the decade.

<comment><USER111> Isn't that true of anything you don't understand? That is to say it's not always easy to connect a -> b -> c with only a cursory understanding of something. But trivially we can see that technical expertise is valuable - <USER2> surprisingly (still) increasingly so at that. Furthermore, knowing how to solve problems will always be valuable. As far as your statistic goes, that's quite a hand-wavy and unsupported assertion. To what population does this generalize? What is the source? And if only 25% are going on to careers as developers, does that not imply that the labor market isn't necessarily growing fast enough to outstrip available need and thus lower salaries?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> I disagree. There is a large supply of programmers. There is a small supply of good programmers.

The good ones, if they know their own value, get paid well.

I'm currently paid well. They went through 50 applicants before getting to me and now rely on me to keep multiple systems running smoothly that run a 100 million dollar company.

I do have a college education, but have been working on some sort of code almost every day since I was 13 years old (now I'm 40).

Many of the things I do for work are easy...mostly because I know the systems so well.

</comment><comment><USER113> Perhaps it's elsewhere in the comments but these same programmers build models that are as capable as a person at diagnosing illness, or identifying relevant case law in litigation.

If you look at it from a value perspective the very best programmers are capable of generating an incredible amount. We're dealing with a shortfall at least in part due to the rapid evolution of the industry, and the immaturity of the discipline.

I can see a future where there's balance and incomes are lower but not in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER114> This whole thread seems ridiculous... where has hacker news drifted?

It's pretty simple. If programmers are easier for companies to find then pay would drop. If restrictions are applied making programmers more difficult to find such as limiting entry into the field like limiting H1B visas or requiring programmers to jump through the hoops of becoming a "licensed" programmer then pay would go up or stay the same. Nobody really cares how much "effort" is required to do your job.

</comment><comment><USER55> > we don't understand why programmers are paid so well

productivity, supply/demand

Businesses can create and capture value faster with technology - they compete for the talent that will deliver that

</comment><comment><USER115> > Programmers are paid surprisingly well given how much work it is to become > one

People are paid well when what they do is in demand AND few people can (and want to) actually do it.

It's that simple.

Not that many people can be decent programmers. There's a matter of cognitive ability: quantitative i.e. IQ, but also probably probably qualitative in that it may take a particular mindset. There's also a matter of interest, which is probably why few women choose that career.

</comment><comment><USER116> Software is eating the world and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Chips are getting cheaper, 5G is coming and machine learning is opening up a ton of opportunities for automation.

It's very likely that the next decade will be the decade of automation, with a boom in robotics and codification of most routine tasks. A shift to AR and speech based interfaces will also require much deeper expertise than hacking together CRUD apps.

</comment><comment><USER117> If you've ever tried to hire a developer its pretty clear why they're paid so well. Very good ones are a huge boost to your business and hard to find.

</comment><comment><USER118> Whether or not programming salaries will go up or down in the next x years is anyone's guess. Everyone should plan for lower pay, regardless of what their profession is.

If you get used to living on 1/2 of what you make, or 1/4 of what you make with a partner, you'll pretty much always be fine. Not having kids also helps.

Set the bar low, and plan for the worst. Planning for the worst is also a good practice in programming. :)

</comment><comment><USER119> Programming is a high value / very low social skill profession. (Bottom tier.) As such, it will continue to be exploited by apex social predators.

<comment><USER120> It's practically 2020 - the "nerds vs jocks" model of society is long dead. You're working with an outdated stereotype of programmers as social outcasts and loners that, even when it was relevant decades ago, was mostly reinforced by technical rather than social limitations. In modern reality, the web has been mainstream for decades, there are children's books about coding, and the apex social predator of the common developer is a developer with VC funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Diseconomies of scale are the biggest barrier to pay decreasing at this point. The more software you have the more engineers you need to build and maintain it.

Every software project is bespoke at this point, custom made to fit the situation.

Also consider that the iPhone only came out in 2007. In 13 years smartphone penetration has reached billions of people. Which is a gigantic increase in the demand for software.

</comment><comment><USER122> I don't know if I'm overpaid, but I do know my tc has gone up a lot over the last decade and it wasn't really anything I did. I consider this a bonus. If it stays this way, great, if not it was good while it lasted. I lived pretty well on 1/4 my current tc, and I don't see any reason to up that. So worst case I get to save up a bunch of money while the gravy is flowing.

</comment><comment><USER123> I imagine eventually the pay will go down, as the most useful software is already written and some aspects of automation creep into coding. (But I've been thinking that way for about 30 years now.)

I think coding pays well because it requires constant learning. You might get off the ground with some technology, but you'd better be completely re- invented every 5 years or so.

</comment><comment><USER82> Not all devs, San Francisco/faang devs. Author works at google, its easy to do the math: google slurping a huge chunk of the advertising market and splitting it to a few thousand people. It s enormous pay, fueled by monopoly/gateway/cartel dynamics. No, developers dont offer the productivity boosts that they did in the 80s, lets not kid ourselves

</comment><comment><USER124> Programmers are still wildly underpaid relative to the value they create.

We're not that far removed from active collusion between tech corporations to suppress wages and labor mobility.

There are ongoing efforts to pump up the labor supply to keep wages depressed; however software just doesn't scale, and throwing more mediocre labor at it doesn't produce positive results.

</comment><comment><USER125> > Given how poorly we understand this

> Summary: we don't understand why programmers are paid so well

Who's "we"?

> Programmers are paid surprisingly well given how much work it is to become > one

It's _a lot_ of work to become a good software engineer, and also requires certain talents and traits that not everyone has (just like doctors and lawyers).

> When I compare it to how I started programming right out of college, making > more money for 40hr weeks and no on-call, I feel embarrassed.

I think this type of sentiment is toxic among engineers. You shouldn't feel embarrassed for charging market rates for the work you do, in fact you should be proud of yourself for making a good living with honest intellectual labor.

> I think we should treat collapse as a real possibility

I see exactly zero reasons in this text justifying this conclusion.

> Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice

This is a simplistic and profoundly incorrect view of economics and world in general, this is not how the world works.

<comment><USER126> > It's a lot of work to become a good software engineer, and also requires > certain talents and traits that not everyone has (just like doctors and > lawyers).

Sure, it takes work to be a software engineer, but I don't think it takes all that much. You can be a pretty decent one with a few years of work.

<comment><USER127> As far as I can tell the current job market disagrees with you.

It seems like there's two markets for software engineers at the moment: The market for fresh bootcamp & collage grads, which is swamped with job seekers. And the market for mid/senior engineers, which is desperate for talent. If you're a senior engineer its very easy to find well paid work at the moment. But thats really not the experience of most fresh grads. I've spoken to plenty of junior software engineers who send out dozens of resumes for each call back for an interview.[1]

If you could be a decent software engineer with a few years of work, companies would happily hire collage grads. But despite being desperate for talent, most companies don't want to hire average junior developers for any price. The top 15% or so of each graduating class finds work easily enough, but most software companies consistently say no to anyone in the bottom 85% or so of each class.

And thats pretty good evidence that most people can't become decent at programming with only 3-4 years of study. Even amongst the top 15% or so of each graduating class I bet most people started programming long before their freshman year. I know I did.

(And to be clear, I'm not saying that companies filter based on marks in collage classes. As an industry we interview people and assess them as fairly as we can. I'm saying most people are demonstrably not very good at programming after "only" spending 3-4 years studying CS in collage.)

[1] Source: As part of my current role I've chatted with, and technically assessed around 100-200 fresh grads in the last year. Our hiring bar is calibrated off the companies we work with, and we say no to the vast majority of fresh grads from bootcamps and universities.

<comment><USER126> I think the ability to be hired is orthogonal to how good of an engineer you are.

<comment><USER127> If that were true, the best paying companies would fill up with charlatans with mediocre engineering skill but who interview well. But at places that think a lot about their interview processes, we don't really see that happening. Most of the engineers I've met who work at Google and Facebook are very capable.

(That said, I've certainly worked with entire teams of atrocious engineers at consulting companies and banks and places like that, who are paid well in excess of what they're worth.)

And yes, there's also plenty of blog posts from people with solid engineering skills who don't interview well. I've interviewed a few people like that, and I've fought tooth and nail for them. But angry homebrew developers on twitter don't tell you much about the hiring process for the average engineer. And in reality most people who can program effectively at work can also program well enough during a job interview. I'm genuinely sorry if you're not one of those people, but until someone comes up with a better assessment process, we use what we've got. I'm all ears if you have ideas for fairer processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> One point I haven't seen in the article is familiarity with the software system: The longer a developer works for you, the more implicit knowledge about this particular software system will they accumulate. This knowledge is specialized enough that keeping an individual may be cheaper and less disruptive than training new hires.

</comment><comment><USER129> We can speculate on where the market will go, but obviously, yes, programmers (and everyone else) should plan for lower pay because there's a reasonable possibility your pay will be lower, and part of financial stability is being ready for such possibilities.

The market isn't the only reason you might be paid less in the future.

</comment><comment><USER130> "We don't understand it"? Source?

Seems pretty well understood to me: we generate a lot of value through the work we do.

<comment><USER28> So do doctors, as per the example in the article, yet the barrier to entry is much higher for them.

This is not about value created -- it's about the dynamics of the labor market. If there were a bunch of people who could create as much value as you, but demand a lower salary, companies would hire them instead and pay them less.

<comment><USER131> It is about value created. A programmer who can find a way to extract $1 per year, from a million users, is worth $1m. But doctors are constrained by their personal 1-1 relationships: no doctor can handle a million patients.

<comment><USER28> It is about supply and demand in the labor market, full stop. People aren't paid based on the value they create. They are paid based on how hard it is to find other people who can do the same thing.

<comment><USER132> People are paid based on both the value they create, and how hard it is to hire them.

If someone being hired will provide $10 of value for the company, then that is the ceiling for their wages. On the other side, the floor for their wages is the lowest price sometime will accept to provide that value to the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER133> There's a lot of awful work that many software engineers simply don't want to do and naturally the ones that do work the awful stuff do a pretty piss poor job because it's hard work.

So as long as there's awful work, there will be a market for high paid software engineers.

</comment><comment><USER134> > not something that will definitely happen, or that's going to happen on any > certain timescale, but something likely enough to prepare against

Gonna use this gem next time my wife asks when my hair will grow back.

</comment><comment><USER135> I'm confused.

The article literally states several reasons programmers are paid so well yet states "What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well".

</comment><comment><USER136> The REAL THREAT to developer salaries is GROWING OLDER.

It's very similar to the arc of professional athletes, as the mental abilities needed for programming degrade at a comparable rate to physical abilities.

</comment><comment><USER137> Unless you expect computers to start writing programs for themselves (I suppose possible at some point), demand for programmers will only continue to grow. And finding good programmers is hard.

</comment><comment><USER138> I think, as others pointed out, we do know why. It's basic economics combined with the fact that it doesn't scale as well as other things.

In addition to saving, unionize if and when you can.

<comment><USER139> I think unionizing works in a market where the workers are more easily replaceable. Not so in the case of software engineering.

I'd rather negotiate with my employer/find another employer that would pay the same/more than unionize.

<comment><USER138> > are more easily replaceable

I believe the article was alluding to a future where that may not be the case. Also, you can do both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did anyone read the comment by user _randomsong_ [1]?

I hate to be a gatekeeper, but do people not realize that teaching a bunch of people to code and being a constant advocate for the "everyone should learn to code" thing will eventually flood the market with supply and lower salaries across the board?

You've gotta have some self-interest. It's possible to be an advocate for education without cutting off your own feet...

[1]: [https://www.jefftk.com/p/programmers-should-plan-for- lower-p...](https://www.jefftk.com/p/programmers-should-plan-for-lower-pay#lw- ftocr9cDfYtyQj9x2)

</comment><comment><USER71> It was easy for him landing that job but what happens is the environment is changing quickly whatever he knows now he will have to pivot.

</comment><comment> chroem- > Summary: we don't understand why programmers are paid so well.

Isn't it just Jevon's Paradox but applied to labor?

</comment><comment><USER140> In my country I'm getting less than a school teacher with the same level of experience.

<comment><USER126> What country would that be?

<comment><USER141> I'm not OP but I'm in the Netherlands earning ~3k a month.

Reading these American salaries always makes me contemplate moving there..

<comment><USER140> Wow yeah that is low. As a grad that might make some sense but if you have any exp that is low.

Is that 3k in USD?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER142> I find it more curious that doctors are paid so little than programmers are paid so much.

</comment><comment><USER143> > _When I compare it to how I started programming right out of college, making > more money for 40hr weeks and no on-call, I feel embarrassed._

I hope he realizes his experience is also a rather privileged one. Many people, in particular women and black people, have a much different experience.

<comment><USER126> Even if women and black people make a fraction of what a white, male software engineer would, they're still comparatively quite well off. _That's_ how much a software engineer makes.

<comment><USER143> The point is women and black folks generally _don 't get jobs_. It doesn't matter how much a software engineer salary is if you can't even get hired. Or they do get hired but for the really shit positions. And a "fraction of" an entry-level male software engineer position is in fact shit pay.

<comment><USER126> 70% (or whatever the fraction is) of 100k isn't horrible. I don't know much about hiring rates for underrepresented groups, so I won't comment there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER144> Programmers need to Unionize!

<comment><USER145> A fair response to those focusing on labour market dynamics. If you look at the profits generated per employee at top companies there's plenty of room for engineers to capture more and more of the pie.

Similar things are going on in startups these days. Early employees are getting screwed even in cases where their startup is hugely successful. In those cases there's opportunity for enormous increases in compensation for engineers if better bargaining means the founders and particularly the VCs take less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> The comparison to lawyers is interesting. I don't think law is all that different from software, but would love to hear from those who have more info about the software market.

Within the law, everyone acknowledges that the market is bimodal. The top new graduates make salaries pretty comparable to entry-level FAANG: just under 200k base to start, going up to the 300+change base toward the end of the "associate" period (7-8 years in), with bonuses adding between 15k at the low end and 100k at the high end.[1] And that's all cash, not stock. (At that level, student the difference in student loan burdens seems like rounding error to me.)

Super-senior lawyers at those firms (partners) make significantly more, and probably more than anyone except ultra-ultra-superstar software engineers (like ML people at DeepMind) or moderately successful founders make.[2] Although this conceals a lot of difference, because very successful partners at the richest firms make quite successful founder/NBA money. But it's probably not worth considering those, because it's very hard to make partner at a biglaw firm.

Just focusing on the first 7-8 years of biglaw career that gets lawyers to that 3-400k level, the real question is: what % of new law graduates get that kind of job, compared with what % of new CS graduates can get FAANG-level jobs? And how much worse are the outcomes for the non-FAANG-level software engineers vs lawyers?

For lawyers, about 15%, give or take, are getting those biglaw jobs---very much concentrated in the top 20 schools or so (basically, you go to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc., you can walk into those jobs; further down the rankings you have to be in some top % of your class). And the median for the others is around 55kish, which is your small firms, your public service jobs (public defender, legal aid, prosecutor, etc.).[3]

What does this comparison look for CS grads? Are CS grads at non-top schools mostly getting 60k/year jobs churning out wordpress extensions or are they still making 6 figures?

Also, where do CS salaries even for FAANG folks top out? When you're ten years in, are you still getting what you got at 6 years in, for e.g.?

[1] [https://abovethelaw.com/2018/11/biglaw-firm-announces- bonuse...](https://abovethelaw.com/2018/11/biglaw-firm-announces-bonuses-and- updates-their-salary-scale/) (this is one firm, but the high-fi firms tend to be all fairly lockstep with one another)

[2] all partner mean in 2016: 877k; equity partners (the real partners) 1.1m ---it's probably higher now. Median is a bit lower, however, and there are tons of outliers to drag those means up. [https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/department/cdo...](https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/department/cdo/document/2016-partner- compensation-survey-web.pdf)

[3] [https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart- in-...](https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart-in-the-legal- industry-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-law/)

</comment><comment><USER147> The author didn't mention that another possible reason programmers are paid so well relative to other careers is that the same amount of programming work scales better than conventional work. By that I mean, one hour of programmer work can bring business value to all the users of the software, which can be in the millions/billions. On the other hand, one hour of work in most other conventional jobs typically only brings value to one person or several people.

</comment><comment> non-entity What about those of us who are already on the "low" end? Or is this something that's more pr less only going to sleffect off the people getting paid six figure to write CRUD apps?

<comment><USER148> I believe that the author is mistaken in their judgment. Demand will rise since software is becoming more complex and difficult to maintain rather than easier. However, the closer your position is to "webmaster", the more likely your job will disappear and be replaced with jobs that require a more advanced skill set.

<comment><USER149> this is an important point. long ago just being able to write html and use ftp could get you a cozy job. the problems being tackled now often require advanced skills in machine learning and data science. as the requirements go up, software development may begin to more closely resemble medicine- high pay but also lifetime learning and high demands

<comment><USER12> Most software development at high paying places like the FAANGs still does not require ML or data science. It's understanding the problem, figuring out what to treat as your constraints, figuring out the best changes to make to the current system to satisfy those constraints, getting other engineers on board with your proposal and handling feedback, making your changes, writing automated tests for your changes, writing appropriate monitoring, etc. These are the kind of skills that me and most of my coworkers have learned on the job, and we're happy to hire junior engineers who can code but don't know the rest yet. Which seems very different from medicine to me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> Deep learning / ML / AI have long-term implications to affect essentially all non-manual jobs, including the subsets of knowledge workers, office jobs and programming. (That's in-addition to putting 90-95% of truckers, the no. 1 job in the US, and ride-for-hire workers out of work within 10-20 years.) Self- programming systems, given enough computing power and tech progress, will be A Thing™. At that point, we will be very close to one or more technological singularities as well, which will have even larger implications and knock-on effects to productivity, job availability and technological era.

We really need an universal basic income (UBI) at some point, or there were will be billions of people but very few, livable wages jobs as the billionaires and potential trillionaires vacuum up an increasingly skewed power-law distribution of the new wealth created, while billions of people live in favelas.

See also: the TED talk on deep learning: [https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn)

<comment><USER74> I used to believe this but don't any longer.

For 'cookie cutter' business software development you don't need AI to write the software. Better frameworks or even just a respin of tools like MS Access would be much more impactful. Yet we see relatively little progress in the space of RAD tools, which were a big thing in the 1990s but have largely been killed off by the web. How many frontend devs even use a visual UI designer these days? Mostly they write HTML either by hand or using mashups of JavaScript and XML like in React. If anything dev productivity has gone backwards, and expecting AI to fix that doesn't make much sense.

To start with just one big problem - even the best AI can't really conceptually understand something like a business domain, and business customers often struggle to understand what software can do or articulate what they really want.

AI will contribute in some areas, probably with small workflow and performance optimisations. It isn't going to radically change anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER151> I think the interviews are stifling supply. Most of these jobs don't need someone who can solve algorithms.</comment>