Programmers Should Plan For Lower Pay |
December 28th, 2019 |
| preparedness, tech, money [html] |
Programmers are paid surprisingly well given how much work it is to become one. Here's Dan Luu comparing it to other high-paid careers:
If you look at law, you have to win the prestige lottery and get into a top school, which will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you have to win the grades lottery and get good enough grades to get into a top firm. And then you have to continue winning tournaments to avoid getting kicked out, which requires sacrificing any semblance of a personal life. Consulting, investment banking, etc., are similar. Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice (e.g., investment bankers are paid better, but work even longer hours than lawyers).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.
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. 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.
What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well, and especially why this has persisted. People have a bunch of guesses:
Demand: as software eats the world there are far more profitable things for programmers to do than people to do them.
Supply: it's hard to train people to be programmers, fewer people are suited for it than expected, and bootcamps haven't worked out as well as we'd hoped.
Startups: big companies need to compete with programmers choosing to go off and start companies, which is harder to do in many fields.
Novelty: the field is relatively new, and something about new fields leads to higher profits and higher pay, maybe via competition not being mature yet?
Something else: I'd be curious if people have other thoughts—leave comments!
Specifically, I'd recommend living on a small portion of your income and saving a multiple of your living expenses. It's far more painful to cut expenses back than it is to keep them from growing, and the more years of expenses you have saved the better a position you'll be in. If you take this approach and there's no bust, you're still in a good place: you can retire early or support things you believe in.
If being laid off and unable to find similarly high-paying work would be a disaster, figure out what you need to change so that it wouldn't be.
(This isn't really specific to programming, but I think the chances of a bust are higher in programming than in more mature fields.)
Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, hacker news
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.
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
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.
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.
> Also, for the most part, isn't yet monopolized by lobbyists, corporatists and government working together to use regulatory capture to corner markets
When your flawed government has its own stage in the product life cycle
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?
There is no such thing as local demand for software engineers, instead you get tend to get paid more the bigger the project you work in is. This means that you'd expect software engineer salaries to be the highest where you have the highest concentration of them, such as San Francisco or New York. If it becomes illegal to gather such high concentrations of developers in one place then all of those high paying jobs will have to move elsewhere, as you can't sustain them without high concentrations.
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.
Uh, I am the OP, and that's not what I was saying?
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?
But that's because employees are the Factory Line in a way.
It's still probably a lot easier compared to other professions. Most need their employers to provide them with very expensive equipment to do their work. Programmers need little more than a laptop. That's a big difference, business-making skill notwithstanding.
"Successful business owner" doesn't mean creating Google, it could just mean having a 3-5 person IT consultancy and independent clients.
By that success measure basically any office worker can start a company just as easily as a programmer. The only advantage I can see for programmers is that a relatively small team can serve a very large number of customers, because software scales much better than other kinds of works.
> By that success measure basically any office worker can start a company just as easily as a programmer.
Yes, but nobody needs them. Companies can hire office workers by the ton, and office workers can't reach further than a small load of work. Software can.
That's a huge, huge advantage. Even doctors and lawyers can only serve a small number of clients. While software can be reused and enable large deployments. These margins make all the difference.
A good software developer paired with a talented marketer/salesperson together with a lot of work (400-800 hours each) have a decent chance.
They would probably be odds-on to succeed if they were chasing a niche in an established market.
This doesn't apply to companies like Facebook, Google etc because they're protected by a network effect.
It's likely that your employer will support anything you ask for to be a better programmer, but will support nothing that helps you to be a better business owner.
Dev lead (actual lead, not just a title) and product manager roles would definitely help, and developers can move into those. Granted that’s not everything, but you’ll need some of both of those to make it, especially product management, even if you’re solo.
You never know until you try.
Not with that attitude.
As a previous employer of SWEs, this is somewhat correct.
More accurately for me was salary was equivalent to the market price.
I needed to maintain a certain level of talent to be competitive, so I recruited and found developers at that level. After enough interviews and salary requests it's easy to ballpark the industry average for a certain level of talent and I'd hire the ones that were a good fit at a reasonable salary.
In my case supply was scarce but just available enough that prices were pretty stable.
As the supply of good developers increases it makes sense that the average salary request will drop.
This is economics 101 that no capitalist industry is immune to.
This is the right answer. Life isn't fair. Though, too, programming isn't as trivial as TFA makes it sound -- working with your mind is not backbreaking like manual labor, but it is still exhausting.
But TFA makes a good point: the level of compensation that programmers can demand may well fall more in line with that of other professions at some point. Thus one should not go into programming simply because current compensation levels make it attractive, nor should current programmers spend like drunken sailors. Caution is warranted here.
Software has been eating the world. We're probably far from peak software. Whether we're far from peak software developer compensation is another story -- I wouldn't know or make any predictions, informed or otherwise.
> Software has been eating the world. We're probably far from peak software. Whether we're far from peak software developer compensation is another story -- I wouldn't know or make any predictions, informed or otherwise.
Plus, we will reach peak software eventually - likely decades out of course
> Plus, we will reach peak software eventually - likely decades out of course
I'm amused by people who think that some tech will erase their tech job. Take ops automation (Ansible, not robots); some people think that it's about cutting tech jobs. Obviously there's definitely not fewer SREs today than there were sysadmins 20 years ago, far from it.
Until a major paradigm shift occurs, the need for software / tech can only grow in every economic niche.
A crisis is coming, it's not going to be a problem for those with IT skills / abilities, but for those without.
Software is poorly explained by economics so I question the validity of economic considerations in hiring or paying developers.
The thing that makes software different is scale due to low reproduction costs. You can easily envision the costs of adding new labor, for example, in building a car and directly map those expenses to increased production quantity. In that case scale of labor to scale of product is not exactly 1 to 1, but it’s close. In software that 1 to 1 scaling does not exist.
Perhaps the big difference is that few people working a car assembly line are engineers. Most of the labor is produced by manual labor and robots. In software the actual engineering is equally as rare but the distinction between engineering and button pressing (the manual labor) is absent.
To really prove that point many developers adamantly fear and oppose producing any form of original code. If you are terrified at writing original solutions to a problem how could the work possibly be considered any form of engineering? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883670
A software engineer is more like a car designer (or more general the entire R&D of car manufacturers). The number of car designers is independent of the number of cars you are producing, but if you want to have more or higher quality models you have to hire more of them.
Research (R&D) suggests some amount of intentional documented knowledge expansion, not mere personal learning. Every job has personal learning including scrubbing toilets and digging ditches. A person mindlessly smashing buttons will eventually learn to smash them faster with fewer mistakes but that isn’t scientific progress increasing understanding of product use cases. There actually is real research that occurs, with white papers, to test opinions and that isn’t what most developers are doing.
In this context I understand R&D as Research and (product) Development. Sure, that includes actual scientific research (say material science for better break pads) but also the development of that research into actual products (making a new, attractive, profitable break assembly with that great new materials the scientists came up with), as well as mundane product development (let's make a new truck by making slight modifications to last years model).
Programming can fall anywhere on that spectrum.
Low reproduction costs seems like a 90s thing.
If you are building proprietary, not-for-sale software, then low reproduction costs have nothing to do with excess value. Ditto if you're building cloud-y/online services.
On the cost side, too, software comes with extremely high maintenance costs that are often not accounted for ahead of time. These are so high that there had better be enormous excess value in the production and use of software regardless of the relevance of reproduction costs.
The real value of software lies in making the impossible possible.
Automation -made possible in the extreme by software - is extremely valuable. Even beyond automation, there are things humans simply cannot do, and even things that mechanical devices alone simply cannot do as well as software-aided ones.
It's hard to put a price on making impossible things possible.
Software isn't magic. It is either a product or a service the value of which is either a typical business question of marketplace penetration or internal expense reduction. That's it, but that isn't what this thread is about.
This is actually a great argument in support of OP's conclusion. Once starting a software-based business achieves a sufficiently high cost to entry (at some point most of the profitable problems to solve will be out of reach of a handful of programmers), I would expect pay rates to plummet.
I think the surface area of "problems that are possible to solve with a handful of programmers" is so that enormous that even if the capabilities of a handful of programmers stagnated, it would take decades or more to run out of profitable problems. Additionally, the capabilities of "a handful of programmers" increases over time as the best tooling available gets more capable, so the surface area of what is possible expands* over time as well.
* I'd argue that as tools improve, the number of solvable problems of a given value increases exponentially e.g. if you have a capability A and you introduce capability B, you can now do things that require only B or A and B, and if you then introduce capability C, that opens up (C), (A, C), (B, C), and (A, B, C) as new problems that are possible to solve.
Edit: For a concrete example, with tools like Stripe you can do payments-related stuff without being an expert in handling credit cards, and with tools like EasyPost likewise for physical mail, and with the combination of the two a single developer can now do any of the things that require either of those individually plus things like taking online payments and managing shipping on the best-cost carrier without any in-house staff and only a couple months of dev work.
First of all, the fact that any SWE you don't employ can start their own business, is just a boosting factor to SWE wage.
The key reason companies can and do pay SWEs relatively well is that these SWEs generate large profits for them .
That's the "opportunity cost" GP mentioned: yes, you'd have to pay the SWE $400k, but the cost of not employing them is several times that in lost profit.
Moreover, I'm not really seeing how the barrier of entry is going to increase substantially. In fact, it will probably decrease.
As software eats the world, there will be more and more "pure software" work, which means your only toolset is your knowledge. SWEs with large amounts of specialized knowledge and skills will increasingly be able to compete in these areas (security is a pretty good example). It doesn't have to be your typical company with a logo, brand, and office space - we're talking about consultancies and virtual businesses.
The places I've worked have had revenue-per-employee in the $200-300k range. That's total employees, not just developers (so, sales, accounting, HR, as well). Doing some rough math, it's been more like $15-25mm per developer.
Yes, it's the same for FAANG as well. If you just divide total revenue by total headcount, you already get seven figure numbers. But if you divide revenue by the engineers who generate it, you get a big multiple of that.
If you divide the total revenue by the number of HR employees, you will also get a much larger number. (Total revenue / total number of employees) will always be less than (total revenue / subset of employees).
This is not a very good metric.
HR, Accounting, etc. aren't directly revenue-producing. You could make a good argument that Sales headcount should be included, though.
Divide by number of product managers then, even higher per headcount.
In a company like Facebook, who is directly responsible for the revenue? And who is working support roles?
If you laid off 90% of HR, how will that affect revenue? What about laying off 90% of the engineers?
I suspect that at least one cost to entry that might be coming down the pike is a legal requirement to design secure and resilient systems / software liability. This might start in sectors deemed “critical infrastructure” but that line is increasingly blurred.
Most software products must stay relevant, so they need countinous improvement.
> Wage isn’t based on the difficulty of the job.
If by "difficulty" you mean "skill" then of course it is, in part. Why do baseball players make $30m and teachers make $30k? The demand for watching baseball is huge relative to the supply of people who can perform at a professional level.
Yeah, but speed running Mario is also really hard but pays nothing.
Demand.
Excellent comment. The killer feature of software is that it is utterly delocalized. Theoretically, you can capture the whole market whether you are based in SF, Berlin, or Calcutta. That has actually probably been somewhat reduced over time as governments have realized the benefits to protectionism (eg you can’t capture the Chinese or Russian market anymore if you’re a search engine), but it’ll likely remain generally true compared to other enterprises.
This effect is so powerful that even if your business has a strong physical component (Uber, Airbnb, etc) the scalability of software still puts you at a huge advantage.
As a doctor or lawyer, you tend to be limited to a radius around your immediate physical location.
Software is a weird beast that we haven’t really seen any equivalents to in human history.
It hasn't been reduced over time - if anything it has increased. The early online commerce ventures were completely nationalistic in their scope, which is markedly different from today.
Localization in the sense that you mean is a function of a lot more than the software: language, culture and law all play major roles.
You could say the same about Law. All you need to start a competing practice is an office, if that.
Its true. All you need is an office...and an very expensive degree...and clients. That's all
The parent comment's whole point was that an already-skilled worker can start a competing business with minimal up-front investment, and that the main benefit an existing company provides is its existing brand and customer relationships. Please read before weighing in.
To simplify you can say wage is based on supply and demand.
Supply and demand (SD) doesn’t tell you what the equilibrium price is, which is what we are concerned with. That’s what this analysis resolves, and in this context, the long term view of the wage; of which the wage reaches a state closer to the SD equilibrium. But you’re right that the direction of price is completely subsumed by SD theory.
Exactly. Very, very well explained.
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.
> 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.
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.
Maybe you are lucky enough to work on interesting things and don't need to be offended?
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".
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.
There are more factors than just supply/demand and use value. There's the sensitivity of productivity and employee turnover with respect to pay, and the replacement of costly performance quantification with a significantly cheaper rank-ordering system (usually informal via promoting your "best" few engineers).
The former leads to efficiency wages, and the latter to tournament theory.
Example of the first: there are two jobs with an identical market-clearing wage and expected net present value of productivity. The first is relatively unskilled labor - you train them for maybe a week, and they do pretty much average performance for however long they stay. The second requires a year of training during which they provide zero value, then stay an average of a year after that during which they provide double the value. A savvy employer would pay the market-clearing wage for the first role, and above that for the second. By doing so, employees of the second type would be unable to find a job that pays as well as what they have now (since the market isn't clearing), so they'll tend to stay longer and provide extra value.
Example of the second: corporations will pay CEOs much more than vice-presidents. The work that both jobs do is largely the same, and the disparity in value added between the two roles is much less than the salary difference. The spread is there to make sure that senior executives work really hard to be seen as a better choice than their competitors - now the board doesn't have to evaluate how well executives did in an absolute sense, but rather need only judge who the best candidate is for the top role.
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...
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.
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...
For a long time, law was also a thing that a lot of liberal arts majors from good schools sort of fell into when they had trouble turning their English or History degrees into a decent living.
Big Law still pays pretty well--although I assume the associate work life is as punishing as ever--but it's probably not a great career path in general for someone who is mostly chasing the dollars.
We saw this with programmers and the dot-com bubble. There was briefly really high demand and high pay, and then when funding suddenly disappeared there were massive shutdowns and layoffs. Many devs couldn't find work for years, and the market wage was much lower because there were so many extra devs. (College CS enrollment also plummeted then, which is one hypothesis for why CS training has been slow to scale up to current demand.)
Automotive factory work is another example, I think. Something like: there were high wages (with unions) in Detroit factories, and then competition first from overseas and from other US states led to a collapse in pay (along with a general collapse in Detroit).
I haven't looked into it, but I suspect that there was a time when some railroad workers were very well paid, which then went bust when one of the railroad bubbles popped.
I do feel that the dot com bubble was different. In that case, the whole industry was brought into doubt. "Maybe this whole internet thing isn't all it's cracked up to be." That notion is clearly ridiculous in 2019.
The much scarier "bubble" today is "actually most of this stuff isn't all that hard". There are probably also smaller bubbles to be had in AI, blockchain, venture capital, etc., but I don't think those will be nearly as broad-reaching as dot com.
The thing with dot-bomb was that there were cascading effects. All those startups were buying gear from the "Four Horsemen of the Internet" so their collapse brought down a bunch of the large firms as well. (And it was all mixed in with 9/11, etc.)
Today, even if there were a big ad-tech collapse, a bunch of highly paid Bay Area engineers might end up having to move back to Ohio but I'm not sure you have the same overall economic effects. (And, if it's mostly just a drying up of VC capital, the effects are even less.)
Airline pilots real wages have been decreasing for a long time. Starting pilot out of flight school makes like 28k for a lot of hours a week.
Yeah, I’m slightly familiar with that. Flying is a bit unusual since training is so much more expensive than other professions, and requires a lot of hours, so I guess you can consider the first few years like a medical residency. A low-paid training job.
http://www.aacadetacademy.com/CadetAcademy/career_progressio...
AA has an interesting program here, but I still think the best route for aspiring pilots, if you can get a pilot spot, is probably Air Force Academy. It’s very hard to get a pilot spot, though, and I don’t think it’s ever guaranteed unless you do the Army Street to Seat flight program, which does not require a college degree, but they mainly fly helicopters (maybe only?).
I often wish I had been a pilot... currently reading “Viper Pilot” by Dan Hampton which is a hell of a book.
Yes, and the consequence is that there is a shortage of pilots and prices are rising back up.
It's usually less exaggerated than that - stagnation while inflation or salary increases in other fields are higher.
This is a bit hand wavy... isn’t current comp due to a handful of tech companies that became very profitable very quickly, and a lot of venture capital money? Without either of these two factors I doubt wages would be at the same level.
Those companies became very profitable because technology made them so. It wasn't some accident that is here today and gone tomorrow. Technology is at the core of companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook. Without the technology, which is implemented by SWEs, none of these would exist.
Their number isn't declining, it's growing.
> Those companies became very profitable because technology made them so. It wasn't some accident that is here today and gone tomorrow. Technology is at the core of companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook. Without the technology, which is implemented by SWEs, none of these would exist.
Yes but don't assume that people in india, africa, or eastern europe are too dumb to do the same work. Nor do the outposts of the companies you mentioned pay the same US levels in those countries. There must be another component of this.
> Yes but don't assume that people in india, africa, or eastern europe are too dumb to do the same work.
Where did I ever assume that?!
> Nor do the outposts of the companies you mentioned pay the same US levels in those countries. There must be another component of this.
How about "they pay what they have to"?
In India, if they pay $60k/yr, plenty of talented candidates would work for them. In the US, if they paid that much, nobody would apply.
Simple.
Well the question is: why don't they replace the $370k/yr american employees by the $60k/yr indian ones? Why do they pay the premium for US employees? Except for defense projects, it doesn't matter where the code is made, US or India. The German software industry outsources heavily and tech wages don't reach the US levels. Why doesn't Google?
The answer would be: 1) they do, and 2) they can't
1) Google clearly hires plenty of people in India. Here's their new office in India, with allegedly ~10k employees: https://careers.google.com/locations/hyderabad/ . The assumption that Google is only hiring "expensive american employees" vs "cheap indian employees" does not hold
2) Talking about "american" and "indian" employees is misleading. Your question could just as well be "Why not hire for $100k from <midwest> instead of $370k in CA?" At that level of salary, you're talking about attracting top talent from around the world, who are often happy to migrate. The salary is a reflection of an arms race between tech companies - the same person isn't going to opt for $60k to stay in India - they will either take a $350k job in Facebook, a $300k job in Amazon, or at worst, a $100k+ remote job to stay at home(numbers are illustrative). You simply cannot attract the same talent due to how global(and competitive) the top-end of the programming marketplace is.
> Why not hire for $100k from <midwest> instead of $370k in CA?
That's not a realistic comparison. That's a comparison of an average-ish salary in the midwest to a far above average salary in CA. Realistically, it's more like $100k in the midwest vs $130k in CA or $370k in CA vs not being able to hire anyone in the midwest because there isn't enough volume to be able to find someone who's that much of an outlier.
> The German software industry outsources heavily and tech wages don't reach the US levels.
German SWE work doesn't pay well domestically. It's also struggling to attract talent. Probably a reason why Germany isn't known for its many profitable software companies.
> Well the question is: why don't they replace the $370k/yr american employees by the $60k/yr indian ones?
In the case of an engineer making $400k in the US, I suggest this is a fairly exceptional individual, with a level of skills and abilities that are rare in _any_ country.
Since that individual produces large profits for their employers, employers struggle to hire them at any price that is lower than their productive yield.
Strong SWEs can make companies like Google and Facebook millions of dollars per year. So these companies will gladly pay any six figure salary for these individuals.
Of course, if they can get away with only paying them $60k in India, they will. It's not their goal to pay well; it's a necessity.
They try to but it's not always that easy. When you outsource you often need a lot more people to do the same work since there is more overhead. So the total cost may not be that much lower and the output is less.
Not saying this is always the case but it has been like that at my company several times. IMO IT and business need to work close together to efficiently produce quality stuff that the customers want. This is way harder if you are separated by a sucky phone line.
Additionally, businesses learn after being burned a few times that throwing distant resources at software problems tends to make a bigger mess than they started with (no matter how good their PM may be). Often one good developer embedded within a domain in a company is worth more than an entire outsourced team.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but it's what I've anecdotally observed over my career to date.
Google would have to become a remote management company for that to happen. But Google makes so much money that they're not really under pressure to do that.
Outsourcing is a strategy employed by companies who need software engineers on the cheap and are less concerned about the non-zero difficulty of remote work/management.
I wonder if lack of competition has made them lazy when it comes to driving down costs. Each of the FAANGS is a monopoly or near monopoly in its niche and American regulators seem reluctant to deal with that.
Except for defense projects, it doesn't matter where the code is made, US or India.
Actually, yes it does.
Plenty of talented candidates would work for that price, and some would emigrate for 3x the salary and a visa. It’s a complicated and moving system I don’t think we are modeling properly in this discussion.
My point is that there are usually quite specific conditions and money flows leading to very good compensation for certain jobs, rather than a 'force' like 'Technology' which seems a bit magical to me. An example is when Ford starting offering higher wages to change the labour market dynamics [1]. Although yes, this was brought about by the industrial revolution, saying that doesn't really provide the crucial insight into why it happened and the effect it had.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...
Your initial comment talked about "tech companies that became very profitable very quickly" as if that's some sort of accident. I'm reminding you that it is not, but a direct result of their technological focus.
Technology is a force that makes employees more profitable. Work that used to require dozens of employees now requires just one engineer writing code for multiple computing devices. Nothing "magical" about it, it's the very nature and purpose of technology.
I didn't mean to say it was an accident, but at the same time surely you aren't claiming it was an inevitability?
It is inevitability. Increasing productivity is the goal of technology. Look at technology from the dawn of time, all it did was increase the productivity of labor, both individually and as a group.
Without getting into a huge topic - it also encourages a "winner takes all" set of conditions, in which companies with the right technology and the best employees control a disproportionate amount of the profits in their field.
Current comp is ultimately because computers and the internet are both the entertainment medium of choice (displacing film, radio, TV, and we know all of those industries and the supporting industries they spawned were huge) and a universal personal and business tool (with an impact as great or greater than the automobile did on both personal and business transportation and, as before, we know how big the auto industry and supporting industries became). Computing and the internet are so fundamental now that I do not expect this wave to stop until every person on the planet, no matter what their local standard of living is, has a personal smartphone within arm's reach 24/7.
We're not guaranteed to have no bumps along the way of course but, over the long term, it's really hard to envision a case where demand for developers, and consequently comp, drops drastically before this global saturation occurs.
I guess that depends on if you're talking about bay area comp or high comp elsewhere, which are on two very different levels, but still high compared to other jobs in their respective regions. For the bay area it might indeed be coupled to extremely profitable tech companies, but elsewhere there is still a very high demand for software engineers from SMBs.
A lot of mid-sized businesses want to gain an edge over their competition via custom software solutions. (The optimistic part in my also thinks that it's still the early days there, where companies in each niche are trying to uncover software driven upsides with fewer resources, and once those are found everyone in the niche competes over squeezing out the most of that opportunity, which requires a lot more engineering resources).
On top of that even moderately complex websites (search function + data pipeline leading into that) that a lot of 100+ people companies have require regular attention from a somewhat skilled software engineer.
So in conclusion, I think that high compensations might be driven up by "a handful of tech companies", but a lot of the demand is mostly uncoupled from that.
Those handful of tech companies need a boat load of engineers, restricting the supply.
A restricted supply means you have to play a higher price.
It doesn't matter what causes the lack of supply, its the lack of supply that causes price rises.
> Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries.
It's not clear to me that there aren't soft and hard caps on supply, even if everyone wanted to be a programmer because the compensation was so great. There are certainly aspects of intelligence, temperament, and personality that are needed to crank through information, organization, and abstraction problems as part of a team for decades of one's life.
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.
Managing your life is about balancing risk. Having 6 months in an emergency fund is golden when (not if) you get laid off or something bad happens like a car wreck or illness or whatever. During the course of your career, it will likely happen. When it does, not having monetary worry be part of it is golden.
You can also broaden your opportunities by paying off your house and not borrowing to pay for depreciating assets (cars and other things with wheels or propellers). Getting burned out and want to take some time off? It's a lot easier if you are not having to make a big debt payment or rent payment each month.
I'm curious - what percentage of pre-tax cash per year would you recommend saving? All of my friends are on my case for not "saving enough" because I'm living my best life, but I'm not sure what the appropriate number is if my net worth is increasing.
15% of your pre-tax salary saved for 40 years should get you enough to retire at a comfortable level compared to your current spending. Lots of tech workers do not get 40 year careers. If you plan on a 25 year career, you need to save more like 35%.
I save around 30 pretax...theoretically it’ll get easier with a TC increase. Don’t know how to save more without drastically reducing quality of life though.
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.
No. So you can be old and crippled and still live.
If you are assuming that you will always be able to work, making the wages you make today, then you will have a rude awakening the day that you cannot. Living below your means has been almost universally good advice since the dawn of civilization.
I do appreciate your sentiment however, in that there is a lot of advice from FIRE types who talk about even the most minor indulgence as some hedonistic waste of money. And it makes sense to remind those who go to that extreme, that spending money now can actually buy a little happiness. But I think you're being slightly disingenuous by taking the parent comment to the extreme of living off rehydrated beans when they're simply reiterating the idea of saving as a virtue.
> 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...
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.
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....
> 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.
I never said you should live on beans and eggs and skip vacations. Most engineers are paid well enough to live well on their base salaries while saving a reasonable amount of money.
What I'm advising against is stuff like spending so much on your mortgage that you will go broke if your RSUs drop in value or your annual bonus is less than you expected; in other words, live a lifestyle you can afford with your base salary.
> My advice is similar: live on your base salary, and save a lot of it
To be fair, that comment doesn't exactly align with advising someone against getting a mortgage they can't afford unless they receive a bonus.
I'm currently reading "Narrative Economics" by Shiller and it mentions propaganda historically being fed to the poor/middle classes in regards to saving as much money as possible (so banks could profit or earn commish off it)...I'm by no means against saving/investing money, but your original comment (and the multitude of others that are similar) makes me wonder how much of that propaganda is alive and well today.
> If you have left over savings when you die, you did it wrong.
which would be a fine statement if we knew exactly what is going to happen.
As we have no idea if we are going to live till 100, and drop dead in the act of procreation with one's 50th life partner, or die at 32 of bone cancer after 5 years of off/on chemo and other invasive procedures. One has to build in slop to cope with all that life might throw at you.
The amount you save is entirely up to you. Some people might be willing to live off beans if they save enough to move to a pacific island in 5-10 years.
Other people are contented to live a bit larger, because they plan to stay where there are.
As with all things you need to figure out your goal and plan for that, and have enough slop to account likley occurrences (family, illness, recessions)
Or retire at 40-50 and live the good life doing all the things you didn't have time for when you were working, without being crippled like people working regular jobs are when they retire.
And have enough left over so your spouse can keep living comfortably after you're gone. Even if they were a SAHP and thus had a gap in their retirement savings.
And have enough left over so your kids and grandkids can get a head start in society.
It's not just about you in this very moment...
There’s a middle ground which is to spend intentionally so that you’re not wasting money. You can set aside a percentage for purely fun stuff. But a lot of us waste money — we spend on stuff we don’t need, things with diminishing marginal utility. How many dinners out a month are really necessary to improve happiness — and at what point does it cease to move the needle? That’s subjective, and will vary from person to person.
It’s about being intentional.
This is an extreme, uncharitable interpretation of the parent comment.
I think on the types of salaries this article is referring to, you could happily do everything you want to reasonably do lifestyle wise while still save a safety net for the future. Travel, coffee and restaurant meals, expensive hobbies, nice neighbourhood. Should all be achievable.
If you want to play it safe, then you're really just trying not to leverage your wage into insane debt. You could live a decent lifestyle while putting money away and be financially fine if wages went down. But if you get loans for a $1.5m home and a $200,000 car you might find yourself with payments too high.
> So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of?
No, so you can retire early, as in your 40s. It's stated clearly in the article and not easy to misinterpret.
And if ageism in the industry is as bad as it seems to be, being able to retire in your 40s might be a pretty important consideration. If nothing else, it gives you a way to turn down work you don't like doing.
By this logic the eptiome of efficiency would require my children to die on the same day I die. I can't bring them with me after all.
I think there's a balance between what you and grandparent are suggesting, but it's hard to strike, and there seems to be a lot more advice about either retiring by 40 or yoloing it than striking that balance.
You seem to be fighting your own personal demon here. This is not what the parent commenter meant. If you can't meet basic needs, there is no point trying to save a lot of money. The advice becomes relevant as your income begins to rise above cost of basic needs.
This definitely flies in the face of what the economist Milton Friedman[1] perceived as our societal values.
I personally hope this kind of thinking isn’t the trend.
[1] https://youtu.be/km9OCw3f5w4
In my experience, people with this argument are often trying to rationalize exceptionally unaffordable hobbies, like leasing a top end Audi or Tesla every 3 years.
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.
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.
Interesting. Any examples of this kind of lower valued work?
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.
3rd reason: Difference in the net income, i.e., the money after taxes, the cost of living, different insurance structure per country. The 100k in the US is not comparable to the same amount in Germany, without taking everything into account.
I suspect your number 2 is the most important factor. Outside of big tech companies and those who have to compete with them, salaries are much lower. Possibly not low enough, given the lack of barrier to entry as in the original article, but still.
the UK thing blew my mind. I started at 53k/year in 2004, at lower than market rate because I loved the company and didn't negotiate harder. I'm at almost 4x that now and I live in a stupidly cheap metro with a scant half a million people. When I verified "Junior software dev" in london, jaw practically hit the floor.
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.
> 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.
Most doctors are doing simple glue stuff and think they're hot shit. You think I couldn't diagnose that cold, or a machine?
Most lawyers are doing simple glue stuff and think they're hot shit. You think I couldn't refer that case to another law firm, or a machine?
Most businessmen are doing simple glue stuff and think they're hot shit. You think I couldn't randomly guess at the market, but not outperform it, nor a machine?
>You think I couldn't diagnose that cold
I think you'd get the 90% case due simply to the preponderance of people who have a cold instead of some other, more rare condition with similar symptoms. Problem is you'd cause harm to everyone who doesn't have a simple cold because you have no idea what you're doing.
Comparing the knowledge needed to be a good doctor to what is required to throw up some bloated SPA? C'mon, get over yourself.
Doctors make a lot of mistakes too, just like programmers. But with doctors, it's easy to blame it on the vagaries of the human body. So even when the "cure" doesn't, people expect that because of the differences between individual bodies. This gives them a pass of sorts when they screw up, the medicine doesn't work, the side-effects kill you, you get a fatal infection in the hospital, etc.
With programming, if you are designing the control system for an aircraft and it fails, people will be able to find out exactly what failed and why, and who to blame.
It's hard to compare doctors and programmers, because there are many levels of medical professionals, just like there are many levels of programming.
Doctors have physician assistants and registered nurses along with EHR medical databases the hospitals subscribe to for aiding in their patient diagnosis and medical workup via always up-to-date medical coding insurance industry practices (for billing patient health insurance $$$). Any exotic infections/diseases or surgery are farmed out to specialist doctors who are also following medical billing guidelines and a narrow workup to diagnose patients within their specialty.
Lawyers have paralegals that dig through the case studies and case law for them along with law databases like LexisNexis.
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.
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?"
I've been thinking through this for a while now and I've come to the conclusion that the details keep getting more complicated faster than other things can automate them. For example, I remember a time when software served ascii and when the Canadian government asked to buy a version of some software we were writing for the Americans the reason the head of the company said no was because we'd have to support French and that meant non-ascii characters.
Now, UTF-8 is a given and there is a mess of potential issues. No longer are byte-by-byte comparisons reliable, especially in some languages like Vietnamese.
Your example of IP connection and network connection is true, but overall connections are more complicated. Some clients can't use HTTP2, some clients are behind firewalls, some clients need CORS support, etc.
And plus there is this accelerating wave of advancements everyone is trying to keep up with, but that come with real investment. Upgrading OSes, programming languages, frameworks, libraries. Figuring out how to keep data secure.
I really don't see things getting less complicated as time goes on. At least not until we have some real form of AI, but even there I have my doubts because there will always be tradeoffs.
That's why we have libraries and frameworks to do complicated, human-facing bits. If you're rolling your own dateTime, it's a bad idea, but fortunately other people have solutions for this. If you want to get into the nitty gritty you can but you do so at your own peril, similar to how the vast majority of people are not reinventing TCP/IP.
It'll take a bit of evolution to get there depending on how new the problem is, but it also took a bit of evolution to get where we are today, and nothing is ever perfect.
My argument is that, as a function of time, there are more things to consider, not less. Abstraction works to a point, but it doesn't keep up with the growing complexity.
Except by the time those libraries and frameworks become stable and well documented enough for serious use, we decide to reinvent the wheel and move on to something new.
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 ?
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.
I think you are coming from a common perspective for people on HN and elsewhere in IT, where you can just install anything and provision any equipment to install it on and direct others to do the same.
A lot of people aren't in a position to do this. I think actual plumbers also have to deal with similar constraints.
It's nice to not be constrained, but it's also more impressive to do a good job under severe constraints, IMO.
There aren't a lot of areas left in CS where highly generic clever solutions are warranted. There are plenty of cases where a specific business has specific needs and the solution to those needs is more interesting than glue code.
Agree 100%. Programmers that love 'clever' code should think twice about using it. Writing code that can be maintained over a long time is many times more important than saving a few bits here and there by using clever coding.
I don't think they're talking about clever code, more about challenging solutions. Plenty of problems that have challenging solutions, though they are not often easy to recognize.
I'm in the opposite opinion, CS is filled with clever things we taken for granted. A lot of stuff in this field are innovations or clever stuff already figured out. The remainder is a puzzle like approach to fit it all together alongside moments of novel innovation and puzzle solving.
The flip side of this is that our industry has a huge affection for laziness, incompetence and anti-intellectualism. The moment they get their first job, a lot of people seem to forget that this field is a profession, where learning things is actually a part of the job. Instead, they freeze their development at junior level and whine at anything that's beyond what they know. Often times when I see actual complaints about clever code, the code isn't really all that clever - it's the complainer who can't be bothered to take two hours off and read up on a feature of the language or library they're using 40 hours a week.
When seeing something one doesn't understand, the default reaction of an intelligent person should be to ask oneself what one should learn to comprehend it. It shouldn't be dismissing it as "clever".
"simple glue code" tends to be the part that has the most value added. We can keep building new frameworks and technologies over and over again but the real value is in using them to solve business problems.
Right. The problem is that it isn't terribly hard to do. It certainly doesn't require a CS degree. Any reasonably smart person can do it after a three-month boot camp. This is why there's a correction on the way.
This is largely true. However, I've been cleaning up and scaling those systems glued together by dilettantes for years. My salary has been increasing, on average, 10-12% yearly for quite a while. I'm in management now and my primary job is to find and manage 1) people who glue together APIs to solve business problems AND 2) people who can fix the problems created by group #1. There is very little overlap between the two.
I welcome more boot camp grads. The amount of work for both groups is growing. I don't see salaries for devs falling. They may flatten out for some business problems/areas, but new and/or underserved will always appear.
People have been saying there's a correction (or bubble burst) on the way for the last several years.
It's very much a "correctly predicted nine out of the last five recessions" kind of situation.
Having worked with people coming out of a three-month bootcamp, I strongly disagree. The havoc these people wreak on your codebase for the first 6 months to a year after their boot camp makes them completely counter productive to have around.
Incredibly thorough code reviews helps reduce this, but at that point it slows down the skilled members of the team too much for it to be worth it.
Completely agree. As a boot-camper myself, I would have been an absolute disaster for the first 6 months (really, longer) of my career. It was exactly working with experienced people who had the time to provide rigorous code reviews, and my own desire to learn from these people, that prevented me from totally messing up our codebase and eventually brought me up to speed. But even today, I acknowledge that my knowledge is very shallow compared to anyone with a four year degree. And I think the job security provided by that degree — which comes from the ability to do good work on things besides just web applications — is increasingly valuable as the number of developers increases (even though developers can work to overcome this knowledge gap).
Glueing together code gets complicated fast as you start adding more pieces to the system.
There is a reason why so many projects end up being a giant mess.
Most people aren't smart enough to make it through a bootcamp and those who do still need years of experience to be fully productive.
Sometimes it is very hard to do. I am now responsible of a platform that has over a thousand, unique configuration, servers and hundreds of database servers. Putting this together is so easy, it was done by a few guys with no CS degree (not that the degree matters) with a few months of on the job training. It is a mess, it will take about one year to clean up the mess and get it right (for example, just paying the licenses we need on the servers we need will save ~ 60% of the licensing costs). Try leaving a terabyte database on the capable hands of a 3-month boot camp graduate and see how long it will work and how.
There's a definite bubble at the junior level. I feel it will be self limiting as and when the bootcamps start failing to place people and people stop seeing it as a way to easy wealth.
That sounds good, but ultimately seems pithy. Going back to the recent "my business card runs Linux" post, board bring up and PCB design is far from "simple glue code" and far more niche than web dev. Except that pay rates for that segment of the industry are lower than a bootcamp graduate can make in SF,
The issue of precarious is also a bit "the grass is greener" sort of view. In 5 or 10 years when the industry again looks different, bootcamp level web dev work may be as precarious as you project. But right now, what's more precarious, specializing for one company in a corner of the industry where there are only a small handful of companies, or working for a company that you the employee, could easily replace?
I think, therefore, we should try to use different labels for different kinds of developers as much as we can.
E.g. "software engineer", and "programmer" should be labels for different roles/capabilities, as should be "computer scientist". Using the terminology incorrectly should be frowned upon, similarly to how this goes in other disciplines.
As jefftk's comment says, the field is too .. protean and ill-defined to do that. We can barely agree on "frontend" and "backend". There used to be separate "analyst" and "programmer" jobs, enshrining that would have prevented a whole load of efficiencies.
It's also why there's so much difficulty in bringing wages down by just training more programmers: it's much harder than it looks. Teaching people to program is far more unreliable than other disciplines; the degree of self-starter on-demand continuous improvement required is very high. Other professions (e.g. actuary) may have a big hill to climb, but the requirements are written down and there is a clearly marked path up the hill. In software you may wake up to find that someone has moved the entire hill during the night and you have to make your own path, again.
I'm not sure the field is mature enough yet for us to be splitting things up like that. I've worked in performance critical code, research science code, website optimization, ads infrastructure, browser testing, experimentation frameworks, dumbphone mobile payments, and other things, in C, C++, Python, JS, Bash, and Java. Most of my coworkers have a similarly wide range of experience.
These have a lot of core skills in common, both hard and soft, but it's such a mishmash of things that trying to impose precision via labels doesn't seem helpful to me.
Perhaps this is due to the location where you work.
Similarly in the UK I have done bits of everything from IC design, IC design software, ARM assembly, webserver (Zeus), network engineering, sysadmin, web apps, Windows CE, and even some actual soldering. Small companies are great for this.
I'm in Boston, and more than half of the above were while working for a single company (Google)
This! I think Rob Pike said it best in his initial talk about Go: there are two kinds of developers...programmers, and engineers. programmers want to build things, engineers are constantly monitoring and maintaining existing structures. the terms "builder" and "gardener" are also used in this context, but I always felt that the classic usage of "engineer" was someone who would maintain, monitor, and keep systems alive...whereas a programmer is tasked with building that system in the first place. Not saying that programmers shouldn't be responsible for the correctness of their own work or anything, nor should engineers never build anything from scratch, it's more a matter of your preference and what you personally like to do in your job.
But what is a "computer scientist", really? Is it just some theorist who sits in an ivory tower and tells us all what to do? In my opinion, a "computer scientist" can actually be either a programmer or an engineer (or maybe have both in their blood? who knows). It's someone who is less concerned about building things for today, and more concerned about how computers are going to work tomorrow. It's a wholly separate role from us "construction workers" who have our boots on the ground and are actually building things...the scientists are concerned with how we're going to build things tomorrow. I don't know if Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, or Russ Cox still work on actual systems code anymore or whether they just figure out how to improve the Go language, but assuming that they only work on Go full-time, that to me is the role of a "computer scientist", though for example Ken Thompson is also a "programmer" because he likes to build things.
...except that people tend to use there words with reversed meanings too :| If a programmer wants to sound fancies he/she uses the term "software engineer".
Also, separating "building" from "maintaining" (when "maintaining" means more than running / scaling / securing, and also includes adding features) is a a recipe for disasters! The builders/creators start creating unmaintainable messes because it's not their job to maintain them.
I don't think these kinds of distinctions help in software... we need different ways to look at the problem...
Also this lack of separation is kinda what makes software dev a cool field to work in... I love the hacker mentality and if it ever fully dries out I'm gonna quit working in this field and move to a fresher/younger one.
Most people with engineering titles are primarily busy creating whatever represents "glue code" for their particular field. Most white collar work is like the saying about dissertations in the humanities: The transfer of bones from one graveyard to another.
> 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.
Integration platforms are getting good. The API integrations that make up a lot of my work might be better done with them in not too long. It's already reached the point where some clients speak with me only after an integration platform hasn't met their use case.
In my opinion if you can write glue code between major services, you're hot stuff.
One of the easiest assignments I ever had was to write code between two services. It was easy as hell but it looked impressive because both services did impressive and complicated things.
In fact, I think it helped me get my current job.
Or maybe it is impressive.
If I'm working on a blind, handicapped user's interface and someone figures out how to connect OK Google's speech recognition in a few lines of code, and it's legit and allowed by their terms, it's still impressive. Who cares if you don't know the first thing about speech recognition?
It's not impressive. The problem is, no one yet realizes that any person who can learn algebra can achieve this level of skill in less time then it took to pick up algebra. That's what I mean by "you can learn it at a bootcamp." You can hire a random homeless person off the street and in a couple months have him be a competent junior programmer. I'd be willing to pay minimum wage for that level of skill and like you said, that's probably all I need for "glue code."
What's going on right now is a bubble. People perceive these skills to be "hot stuff" when in fact it is just "average" or even "below average"
When the bubble bursts all programmer wages will go down after everyone realizes that programming is a skill akin to driving or algebra. Anyone can do this trivial work.
First of all, please don't use "random homeless person off the street" this way. It's insulting and also many homeless people are highly intelligent.
Try "random walmart shopper" (a box store that everyone visits.) or just random person.
As for your claim that a random person can learn to write glue code, well, we're going to disagree.
>First of all, please don't use "random homeless person off the street" this way. It's insulting and also many homeless people are highly intelligent.
>Try "random walmart shopper" (a box store that everyone visits.) or just random person.
Random Walmart shoppers are people too and they can be intelligent as well. I use the word homeless not to imply lack of intelligence or to insult, but to imply that even a person with no ability/capability/desire of getting a job can with minimal training gain those skills.
>As for your claim that a random person can learn to write glue code, well, we're going to disagree.
Can any person learn algebra? Can any person learn arithmetic? Can any person learn to read an english book? All of these things, seem trivial to learn, but they are not trivial at all. It is only because of the context in which we learn these things do we find it easy later in life, but fail to remember that at the time of learning, these concepts are just as hard as programming.
Programming is not easy to learn just like how reading english is not easy to learn at all. But make no mistake, just like how basically anyone can learn to read english, anyone can learn how to program. Some people have talent for learning languages others don't, but with time, everyone can learn it. That's how cheap this skill is.
The very existence of bootcamps hinges on this concept that anyone can learn. People walk out of a bootcamps thinking they have talent or were taught incredible skills. The reality is, everything they learned is available online for free. They paid money to learn because they lack the self control to do it themselves.
So do you think the average person off the street (the random walmart shopper) can go through a coding bootcamp successfully? I don't think so.
I think the people who can go through a coding boot camp successfully have great arithmetic skills, great reading skills, and can easily solve 2x-7=11 for x in their head in a moment 100% of the time. (Basic algebra 1.) And can read any generic software manual easily, if the manual doesn't assume too much prior knowledge and is written at a basic level.
I don't think the average walmart shopper can do it.
Do you disagree? What do you think the baseline skills are for people who go through a coding bootcamp successfully? Maybe you have more experience with those people than I do. I think of them as intelligent, educated people with above-average SAT scores but without specialized programming training, who decide to go through a boot camp. They're curious, motivated, smart. But they're not programmers.
>I think the people who can go through a coding boot camp successfully have great arithmetic skills, great reading skills, and can easily solve 2x-7=11 for x in their head in a moment 100% of the time. (Basic algebra 1.) And can read any generic software manual easily, if the manual doesn't assume too much prior knowledge and is written at a basic level.
Anybody can do what you just described with practice and training. The typical high school education along with programming is achievable by the typical person.
>I don't think the average walmart shopper can do it.
Stop insulting walmart shoppers.
>Do you disagree? What do you think the baseline skills are for people who go through a coding bootcamp successfully? Maybe you have more experience with those people than I do. I think of them as intelligent, educated people with above-average SAT scores but without specialized programming training, who decide to go through a boot camp. They're curious, motivated, smart. But they're not programmers.
I don't even think you need to go through a bootcamp to get the baseline skills needed for your typical "glue code" job.
Anybody can learn programming. People who go through a bootcamp typically have enough skills to do the job but they likely may not have enough skills to pass a coding interview. Coding interviews are, unfortunately, harder and unrelated to the job.
I disagree, the fact that you can go to a bootcamp to learn this shows that you're not.
Isn't an alternative explanation that bootcamp actually makes a person hot stuff, despite not teaching much?
For example maybe if you went to bootcamp, you (crimsonalucard) would be hot stuff when you came out (even if you've been programming for 20 years), due to exposure to all the external services you'll be able to glue together.
The fact that your glue code will have runtime O(1) (a single call) instead of O(n^n), but only for up to 4, as the poor kids do something like have four different if statements for 1 to 4, and each one is a nested for loop, and over 4 it silently does nothing, is less relevant than the exposure to the API's at all.
In other words, maybe terrible programmers can be hot stuff writing the latest glue code - even if it's brittle and barely works.
With all the services huge companies are exposing, this wouldn't surprise me.
You're just redefining what being "hot stuff" is.
Under that definition, anyone on the face of the earth can be "hot stuff." You don't even need to go to bootcamp. Just read some online tutorials, make a website. Done. You're just calling the average person "hot stuff."
In my opinion, you're only hot when you know how to do something that is rare, very hard to learn and in demand.
I see a difference between a web site and a web site that exposes a service that on the backend connects API's of two different companies that do the heavy lifting.
There is a difference. But the difference is trivial. Making a backend or a frontend that connects to N amount of API's isn't impressive at all. Any fool can learn this concept.
In fact that's all a modern website is. The old way involved servers rendering pages. Now The frontend interfaces with an API. Efficiency at the cost of complexity.
You want to know what's impressive? Writing a compiler. Writing an OS. Nothing is simpler than interfacing with an API.
If writing glue code is your job and you're getting paid a lot of money to do this stuff then count your lucky stars because truly anyone can do that job.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Dunning-Kruger.
Folks in the middle of the curve are blissfully unaware how much there is to know and how many difficult problems must be solved to put together those backend services they are gluing.
>Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property
You're making a lot of assumptions on the hobbies people have based upon your environment.
About the only thing the two fields you listed differ from programming is actual legal barriers of entry.
s/nobody/insignificant minority/
"programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options"
ha. case in point.
You are implying the amount of difficulty / effort put in by programmers is as great as for other highly paid professions. I just don’t think this is true for most cases. I’ve worked at 2 of the FANG companies where compensations is on par or higher than doctors / lawyers / consultants etc. Sure we all pulled some nights and weekends and did some reading and experimentation on the side, but for the most part it was off to the pub / go home at 6. My evenings and weekends were mostly spent doing “normal” things like playing games, hanging out with friends etc. outside of startups I don’t know any programmers pulling 80 hour weeks regularly, including side projects and self learning.
I don't know any lawyers or doctors pulling 80 hour weeks regularly without billing extra for it.
I know quite a few lawyers at the larger firms doing 70 - 80 hour weeks on a regular basis. The goal of course is making partner, but few will get there. Consultants and bankers ditto.
You don't know any doctors who have ever done a residency?
I wouldn’t say that “Regularly” means “only during the first 3 years of your career”
and 4 years of medical school. A programmer can earn enough to retire before a doctor finishes their training .
I guess you need to get a job like game programming to see hours like that on a regular (career) basis.
I happen to have a hobby of reading law cases on intellectual property that was sparked by my business being affected by IP issues.
I used to read all kinds of cases as a hobby even before that, for fun. I remember reading through much of Ross Ulbricht's trial documents and comparing it to what his advocates were claiming, which was enlightening.
Yep. The SCO UNIX trial and the ongoing oracle v google cases are exceptionally fun reads. Other notable public narrative vs reality cases included OJ Simpson, the Zimmerman guy, and what’s happening right now with Trump (the treason word gets thrown around so often yet no one actually know what that means legally)
Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, providing aid and comfort. It's in the Constitution.
undefined in that sentence: almost every word. "Levying"? "War" ? "Enemies"? This is why we have both a Constitution and a body of law. The Constitution uses words, the law defines what they mean.
Those words are not difficult to define or understand. Only a nihilist claims nothing is inherently knowable.
It's possible to understand what treason is, just as it's possible for something to skirt the edge of it and require more nuance and thought.
The words Paul Davis used are defined in the constitution, it’s a legal document. Everything has a legal definition. Legal texts are interpreted by the judicial branch which sets the limits of nuance and thought. As Paul Davis showed, however, not everyone reads legal texts as a hobby.. so one should really delegate that work to someone who does (just like I won’t ask my plumber to create some ML models for me)
that's a load of phooey.
Trump got elected by the people, he can be judged by the people.
This argument you're making is the same mindset that causes people to argue that since freedom of speech is only applicable to the government, we shouldn't strive for the ideal in every aspect of our society.
It's looking at the problem exactly backwards.
Excuse me? I didn’t say he couldn’t be judged, I’m saying people are saying he has committed treason when he literally has not. Which is the difference between public opinion vs reality. I don’t consider my plumber an expert in AI, so I won’t expect him to have the best insight into my job. Likewise, folks who don’t wish to take the time to read legal texts should probably defer to someone a bit more knowledge than them. So call trump crooked, ugly, whatever.. but if you say he’s the nicest and happiest president ever would be just as false as saying he committed treason.
Just like OJ being not guilty based on facts (reality) but everyone already judged him as guilty. Same with Zimmerman. Same with Ulbricht.
Please don’t mistake my post for support of any particular view.
So you believe OJ and Ulbricht were innocent, and the respective civil and criminal court cases finding the opposite were mistaken?
This is true, I had neighbor cringe hard when I didn't know how much to charge for assistance. The only way for me to somehow value what I do is to compare how much usual jobs charge even. I dont like this because it causes inflation and unworthy motives (and probably harms society). But it's how I manage to not die giving time for free.
One other way would be to demonstrate true mastery, but with the breadth of computing and its ever changing nature it's borderline not possible.
"Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property;"
I don't know anyone who likes learning about bones, but I have actually met a guy, who was really passionate about quirks of IP related laws (my company hired him as consultant to clarify some mundane and fuzzy issues we had with usage of fragments of published academic books). He could talk for hours about various cases he worked on and was citing paragraphs of some obscure laws, going with true passion into detailed analysis how a given case looks in view of local Polish, Romanian, EU and international regulations. I would compare him to Rust, Lisp advocates easily.
> 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.
Who’s to say those that went to school didn’t enjoy the learning process of their degree? They are by this definition giving up free time in order to learn something and are as well making a great investment in not only time but money as well.
I think that this needs to be reread as “Programmers who are passionate about what they do usually end up being the best at what they do” since if you think about it, they are dedicating ~40 hrs a week to their hobby. Who’s to say someone can’t excel in a hobby if they can’t dedicate more than that? What about people who have more than 1 hobby?
the amount of programming/hour you get at a job vs on a hobby project is very different, though, and tends to go down as you get more responsibility.
Not that the other work you do instead of programming, like problem decomposition, spec authoring, review, etc., isn’t useful for improving your programming skills, but not having to coordinate with anyone means you can just write code on a hobby project.
I recently lead a project and even with a tight schedule and trying to focus on implementing as much as possible I spent maybe 30% of my time programming.
Note further that I don’t really do any programming outside of work and don’t think it’s necessary or even useful to spend that much extra time programming. Iterating implementation ideas like a scientist is the only way I’ve improved and that’s fairly independent of time spent.
Wondering if I'm a fraud because I can name about as many bones as bash commands.
chmod's connected to, access permissions
(Maybe I'll come up with the whole song if I ever teach CS in grade school.)
sudo !!
Most people do not have a habit of reading the law, however this is a path to becoming a lawyer in a few states, including California. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/want_to_avoid_the_cos...
> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones)
Cite?
Let me guess, you're a self-trained coder.
There is a reason senior role hiring almost never cares about degrees on your resume.
Instead they’re looking at your community contributions and work experience.
This could be a temporary condition.
The principal value in my CS courses was access to systems and compilers (!) that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Most of the people ostensibly hired to present the content didn't add much themselves (one was great, and we're still friends).
However, I've been really impressed with the depth and breadth of the coursework I've seen by way of close friends and younger relatives lately. A robotics class now seems like it might actually deliver on the promise of providing more knowledge in less time than designing/building/programming/etc a complex autonomous robot on your own (for example). You can still do it, but it's going to take a lot longer than just taking the bloody class, or you're going to miss out on a lot of depth/context.
Have you seen the actual coursework or just the end result?
To borrow from my graphics programming class from ~2008, we didn't actually do much. Every assignment, we were given an almost-working program, and the assignment was just to fill in a single function - the one I remember offhand was a simple linear interpolation.
Granted on the flipside, with my information retrieval and data mining courses, we weren't given any code to start with and had to implement everything completely from scratch.
that was a shitty graphics programming class.
In mine, which was pre 2000 (I'm old), we were doing matrix multiplication by hand to ensure we understood how the underlying transformations worked, building our own renderer's, and so forth.
Yes and no. One of the big problems with coursework at the undergrad level is you aren't typically actually practicing idea and model genesis. This is an important skill, and one that those hobbyists have practiced a lot.
Entirely temporary. I was rejected by google from 2006-2012 because I didn’t have a degree. Suddenly they need more programmers and they drop that requirement. Never mind I have formal CS training, they required a piece of paper.
I would not be surprised during the next recession that employers fall back to arbitrary demands like degrees or obscene amounts of experience.
Probably some. But competent employers will never fall back to degrees. They will always focus on... competence.
Not always true. For example, the AI/ML craze brought a lot of academics into industry and also brought a lot of their politics. For an AI/ML job at most places, prepare to be judged based on having the right credentials (good degree, school and publications) and looked down upon as scum if you don't have right ones.
Or again relevant experience. No one is gonna say no to a person coming out of e.g. Netflix’s search dept or Facebook or has decades of big data experience, regardless of their education.
What is “formal CS training”, if not a degree?
Possibly attending but not graduating (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind).
I spent time going to college but never graduated. I finished all the required CS courses and a bunch of optional ones plus a few grad level CS courses then left to migrate a Fortune 500 bank off of COBOL. My resume after that was a who’s who of fortune 500s and deeply technical positions but google said no degree, no job. I believe that was the founders attitude towards hiring which has since changed
People who combine their natural interests with their work are intrinsically motivated. As such they tend to put in more hours and that has a compounding effect over time. Teaching oneself also has that effect.
If John Carmack had a twin who wasn't so inclined and just did programming as a 9-5 career, there's no way they'd be as skilled as he is. Plus they'd probably wait until being taught how to program instead of starting to teach themselves as a kid.
I mean it’s true. I’m honestly not even that good of a coder (I didn’t do CS in college and I tend to “hack” a lot) but I’ve been living and breathing code for hobby projects and then work for the last 25 years, and I’m 35. I spend entire days coding nonstop (working on a side project after my job) and I’m still constantly learning. Boot camps or even college degrees are no substitute for this experience.
I "self-trained" at coding before going to CS school. I don't have a citation for my claim (but it seems like a very reasonable theory to me).
> Nobody has a hobby of learning the law texts on intellectual property
Speak for yourself buddy, i enjoy pulling up the Cornell law or my local jurisdictions legislative website to fully understand the laws around me. In college my hobby was reading the laws about public nuisances and noise violations (and none of our parties were ever shutdown!). I still do this today to fully educate myself. Along with other nonstandard hobbies like flying planes, studying neuroscience or genetics, and owning a server farm for fun..
> Many programmers have a bias in thinking
I think the odds of finding hobbies outside of software and hardware on HN is probably lower than the general public, but the very reason we have specialists in other fields is because of their dedication to their hobbies!
They were exaggerating, there are going to be counterexamples but their point still stands...
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.
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
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.
Sometimes but usually I think the primary factor is the personality of the junior engineers. I think to be successful you have to like learning independently and have a good work ethic. Most places don't have strong mentoring programs and as you mentioned some programmers won't mentor for whatever reason
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
There is a flip side to this: check my other comment. "Overseas talent" is not invested in the product because most companies don't treat "overseas talent" as equals. My experience as "overseas talent" is that US companies bring their own technical debt which they are powerless to fix and they blame us for their incompetence.
Your experience is vastly different from mine.
I've worked at 7 different silicon valley companies in my 35 years of employment, though the last 20 have been at two particularly high flying companies. Approximate half the staff is foreign born, some US educated and most foreign educated. I see no pattern to skill levels between US born and foreign born coworkers. Maybe it is because these companies draw top talent, and can afford to pay for it, I have this experience. You might be cynical and think I'm a "meh" level employee who is easily impressed, but my pay grade and annual reviews say otherwise.
The comment suggested people who still lived overseas. The foreign born talent you work with lives in the US now. If anything it suggests the best talent moves to the US for the better salary and quality of life.
My company has significant teams in many countries. Daily I work with people from all over the world. I've certainly worked with some excellent people who worked in China and in India and had never set foot in the US. But you are right, the majority of the people I work most closely with are in the US and so I know their characteristics the best.
You are both making different points, because I agree with both of you. Some of the best engineers I’ve worked with have been foreign born, and I’ve also seen disasters happen due to outsourcing to foreign talent. These are two vastly different groups we are talking about. The best foreign engineers almost always end up working for well paying product companies. The other end of the spectrum, foreign or US, often end up at contracting companies that compete on price.
I think a lot of the good practices and skills necessary to ship good quality software are not documented well (or formalized). That's why working with good teams and learning from good devs (or profs) is what determines the quality of a developer.
Also, time and again we see posts here lamenting the hiring process in this industry and we haven't cracked it yet. This adds to the demand-supply gap.
Anecdote: I have interacted with some of the 'overseas talent' and they were excellent programmers but lacked communication and hadn't fully figured out the mechanics of working in teams. Others from the same background but who decided to get a higher education from US had better exposure and generally fared better.
Totally agree. Successful software engineering has almost nothing to do with clever programming tricks and everything to do with writing software that's empathetic to being within a commercial and team environment. That means writing software that takes into account that it will be read by others, used by others, and inevitably changed by others.
Interview processes at so many software companies don't do a good job of selecting for it. They still look for algorithmic competence and next to nothing about teamwork and structuring software projects.
I’d argue that many of these practices and skills are in fact non documentable/teachable (see the oft cited problem of teaching recursion/pointers to CS students, and that’s just one of many fundamental required things that are way more formally defined compared to “leading a team to ship consistently good software”). I’m sure many of us have seen very motivated, well intentioned junior developers who struggle very hard to push and improve their skills and still get completely left in the dust compared to the engineers who just seem to have a knack for it.
In this way software engineering resembles traditional craftsmanship more than any other discipline.
Methinks this is a property of a new (~50 yrs) industry, rather than an inherent property of programming.
Whereas programming itself has somewhat solidified, most of the programmer management/learning/etc. state-of-the-art still deals in nasal demons, i.e. much is still seat-of-the-pants experimental.
I think if you play the game of finding the lowest bidder to do the job you'll definitely run into folks who aren't good on both sides of the pond.
If you pay the buck you can hire excellent engineers in India, China, Eastern Europe & other parts of the world. No wonder Amazon/Google/Microsoft have a large developer presence in these markets.
I've worked for US companies and I'm amazed how low quality their talent is in general compared to talent in Europe. Then I realized that US companies can afford to buy top 2% talent in the EU, but most of them can't afford to do the same in the US. So this leads to a very frustrating situation where you're smarter than most of your US colleagues, but they still tell you what to do because they hired you.
Just as in other fields, Europeans tend to outpace the U.S. when it comes to book smarts, but lag when it comes to things you can't/don't learn in school. They're great at building exactly to requirements, but less skilled at handling the unexpected or coming up with something novel. There's a place for both skill sets, fortunately.
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.
"we don't understand why programmers are paid so well"
I think we do: 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...
It might be pretty straightforward.
GDP is 2x higher than in 2000Real GDP per capita is up 25% since 2000, so some category of workers must have gottenat least 2xmore productive in that timeframe, so their real income should be2xhigher. That seems like a plausible story for the software engineering career.This simplified model is consistent with my inside view. I can help sufficiently big companies save $millions/yr, or earn $millions/yr more, by writing software that streamlines some detail of their internal processes or external interactions. And my ability to do this is obviously much higher thanks to all the tools that exist today that didn’t exist in 2000: cloud computing, tons of third-party APIs, ubiquitous mobile phones with fast chips and internet connections, huge high-resolution monitors, Stack Overflow, etc.
The tech entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant talks a lot about how “leveraging yourself up” is the key to getting rich. E.g. these days Joe Rogan makes $1M for recording a 90-min podcast because he built a following. He has distribution as leverage.
Programming in the internet age is an unprecedentedly huge source of economic leverage on human capital. A doctor or lawyer sells an hour of their time with a limited impact multiplier - they benefit one patient or one party in one case. In contrast, it keeps getting more common throughout the economy for an hour of a programmer’s time to give value to thousands or millions of customers. Plus, the programmers are constantly getting better tools to get 10x more functionality built in that hour of time than was possible a few years ago. For example, building a basic form to accept a credit card payment has gone from taking days to minutes thanks to Stripe, a company that launched in 2010 and is now worth $30B. But they didn’t just make themselves rich, they added to the leverage that the rest of us have. It’s a real leveragefest.
It seems like software will continue to “eat the world” and add tons of economic value for a while. At the very least I’d confidently bet on another decade where supply increases much more slowly than demand, and the gap between career appeal of doctors/lawyers and software engineers will widen further in that time.
Why not use per capita real GDP (+25% since 2000)?
Ah right yes, ok so not a huge increase. Meanwhile, I've seen real value of entry-level programmer compensation packages at least double since 2000, probably more like triple.
I think my point about GDP growth helping the outside view is this: *some* significant chunks of sectors in the economy are getting significantly more productive. What kind of workers are producing more value? What are the characteristics of a job that enables more value creation? One where there's more leverage, i.e. an hour of work produces more economic value, without a corresponding increase in supply. And any sector where the leverage on time is increasing say 5x+ per decade is a good bet for an area where supply is trailing demand.
Something I didn’t see addressed here or on Dan Luu’s blog post are productivity (as the main economic reason for wages) and scale ( as an amplifier for SWE productivity )
A SWE is made more productive by the tools available: fast cpus, internet, cloud, OSS, mobile
Cloud and mobile then amplify the value that the modern SWE brings to a business - but not to all of them
Businesses are not charity, they will pay less if they can
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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
I've seen a bunch of people switch into the field, realize that they HATE writing code and promptly leave the field. It's easy to forget on a site like this that very few people actually enjoy programming. You're translating human ideas and language into something a machine can understand. That's not most people's idea of a good time.
What makes you think people haven't switched?
A question I have is, what do you mean by "less"? Dan Luu is citing programmers making on the order of $250,000 to $300,000 total compensation, but as a programmers who has made his entire career outside of the Bay Area, I have never seen anywhere near compensation that high. What if the phenomenon is that salaries in the Bay Area are skewed upwards, perhaps due to the cost of housing? In that case, perhaps only programmers in the Bay Area need to worry, as tech firm expansion outside the Bay reduces salary growth, but programmers outside of the Bay will be relatively unaffected (and might even benefit, as demand in other markets increases).
I'm talking about the top end of the market, which is almost entirely in the US though not confined to the Bay Area: NYC, Boston, Seattle, etc have similarly high levels of programmer pay at high-paying companies. Ex: I'm in Boston and making ~370k.
So how much should a hypothetical programmer making, say, $120,000 a year worry? Another way of phrasing this question would be, do you expect the median programmer salary to decline or do you expect the variance to decline so that most programmers make about the same amount of money?
Alternative hypothesis: for most of human history returns to analytic abilities were anomalously low due to the bottleneck of geography limiting returns to scale.
I had a similar realization many years ago but I have a very different (and lonely) perspective. Nobody seems to get it, maybe someone here will.
I realized this (unfair income) in 2011 as a junior in university, right after I got an internship at Facebook. They paid me $6000 / month and I had only been coding for one year (literally). Previously I dabbled in multiple other majors and my internship offer was higher than the full time salary of my peers in other majors (whom I respected deeply).
I saw this as an opportunity. During my internship and my senior year, I taught my highschool friend how to code while he completed his major in econ. I figured if it only took me one year to get into facebook, he could do it in two. A year after I got a job at a startup, he got a job (105k base).
My girlfriend at the time graduated with a stats degree and was doing customer support. I thought maybe I could get her into coding too, and I did. A year later she got a job (115k base).
Then I had an idea.... could I teach anybody coding? I reached out to a kid I knew back in high school who had a 2.0 GPA. I figured his life sucked and it did (he was a uber driver). Things didn't turn out so well, I got impatient and I used my power as a senior engineer to get him onto my team at (105k base). Today, he is a much better software engineer making 190k base with alot of RSUs.
During my time at Google I decided to revisit my original question, could I teach anybody coding, no matter their background? So while I was working I reached out to my local community to see if people wanted to learn coding. 12 students showed up and I could no longer focus on my work so I left Google to teach full time.
Then things got interesting. Students wanted to quit because they needed to support their families. So I started paying them, 2000 / month. 7 students were paid, the remaining I made sure to tell them that I can help if they needed money. Thankfully, they did not need my money.
Within a year (2017-2018) I went bankrupt. I needed to answer the question, "could anybody learn coding, no matter their background?", so I painfully cleared out my 401k. Thankfully, my wife got a job as a software engineer (135k base) so I was able to find a job myself.
Eventually, all the students got a job. Every single one, from one who is 40 years old without coding background to another without a college degree. The lowest offer was around 115k.
My RSUs are coming up in 4 months (90k). In addition to my salary, I'm going to use it to accomplish my goal in 2020: to create a coding bootcamp at public libraries so that anybody regardless of race and background could have a safe place to learn how to code and build cool things together as a community.
After I finish I will write about the experience, but not now. I just wanted to share my journey so far because I think it is important to know that you don't have to spend what you earn. You can help the people you care about, only if its one person at a time.
The idea of paying your students for studying sounds fantastic! Maybe you could make a contract with them that they will return you the money if they get a software development job (similar to how Lambda School does it, except they don't pay their students, only teach them for free).
An interesting analysis would be to find the relevant reference class. What other group is/was similarly overpaid, for how long and for what reason?
From my other comment:
Another example of a sector that's seeing much higher economic leverage is white-collar work serving high-cost-of-living countries/cities from within lower-cost-of-living countries/cities. E.g. English-speaking workers from our neighbor Mexico where real income per capita is only 28% of the US's, can now create more value on their time by working from home and copy editing articles, or doing phone customer service, or graphic design, and even management-level work like marketing strategy and project management.
Unfortunately remote workers' leverage increase here is partly zero-sum because it decreases the economic leverage that local workers get from their location. But it's actually positive sum because poorer people tend to benefit from a wealth transfer more than richer people lose. It's also positive sum because some jobs are only worth paying below the local living wage. E.g. a San Francisco company might be able to afford paying $12/hr for a customer service representative, which is far below cost of living in the SF Bay Area, but not bad in Mississippi.
Remote work has also created higher leverage on the value of everyone's haven't-gotten-dressed time or currently-babysitting time, regardless of their previous baseline.
Also note that one type of remote white-collar work is programming. Companies hiring their in-house software engineers offshore to work remotely, or contracting with offshore software consultancies, is also an increasingly common practice which is helping other economies and raising US GDP while reducing US programmer salaries, but the US salary effect is small because the whole world's programmer supply is still not keeping pace with global demand growth.
I'm not sure remote work is as advantageous as you think it is. If remote work were so obviously superior, we'd be seeing programming rapidly evolving to support remote work, both here in the US and offshore. Yet, that's the opposite of what I'm seeing. I'm seeing more and more companies bring their programming in-house. I'm also seeing more and more companies insist on programmers being in the office, rather than working remotely.
I'm confident that the larger trend is the opposite of the examples you've witnessed. Sure, big companies who wake up to the importance of having engineering resources might first get the idea to hire them in-house, but remote work is clearly a huge trend throughout the economy. One way to understand this is that even "in-house" often means that a company's own employees are working across national/international offices or working from home.
I'm not so sure about that. The trend I've seen at larger companies, such as Google, has been towards more people coming into the office. Moreover, even at startups, once the company reaches a certain size (around 20 developers or so), the trend I've noticed is to encourage workers to co-locate in an office. It's the rare company, in my experience that manages to stay remote while having a workforce of hundreds or thousands. In fact, I can only name one: Zapier.
If remote work were so much more advantageous for programming productivity than co-locating people in an office, then I'd expect to see many more examples of medium and large corporations embracing remote work than I do.
I think coding just generates a ridiculous and growing amount of value. Look at this list of companies with large earnings per employee. Note that they all specialize in some form of tech or finance. With a regular job, you're bottlenecked by how much work you can accomplish as an individual. With programming, the value you generate is proportional to how much value your code generates. A Lawyer might generate 100,000$ in value per year. The company that makes lawyers 5% more efficient generates 5,000$ / lawyer*year. The lawyer has to dedicate his life to doing that. The other does it once and moves on to something else that goes on to produce even more value. It might even be the case that they are worth even more, but companies are under paying them. This is before factoring in that developers get more and more powerful each year. Computers become more capable, the internet gains new users, and software development tools become more sophisticated but easier and more intuitive to use.
Poor understanding is in the map, not the territory. I started to write a comment arguing that this is incorrect, that the factors which cause programmers to be well paid are straightforward and aren't going to go away. But instead of that, how about a bet.
Here's the US Bureau of Labor Statistics series for 2nd quartile nominal weekly earnings of software developers (applications and systems software): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254530600A. They didn't seem to have mean, median, or other quartiles. There are other series for different subsets of programmers, like web developers; I chose this one arbitrarily. The series is not inflation adjusted.
I will bet up to $1k at 4:1 odds that the 2030 value in this series will be greater than or equal to the 2018 value, which was 1864. So $1k of my dollars against $250 of other peoples' dollars.
(I'll accept bets in order of their comment timestamps, up to a maximum of $1k of my dollars. Bet is only confirmed if I reply to accept it. Winner must remember to email to claim bet winnings. Bet is cancelled if the US Bureau of Labor Statistics discontinues the series or doesn't publish a 2030 number for any reason. Non-anonymous counterparties only.)
I'm not sure we disagree. I was thinking more like a 15% chance. This is high enough that it's definitely worth being prepared for, but I wouldn't take 4:1.
I handle this uncertainty via diversification.
I've dumped portions of my income into purchasing and building rental properties.
Can you talk more about retirement and earning to give? I see you max out your 401k, but am curious how much you have saved for retirement and how much you think you'll need. Retirement fears have been the only cause of trepidation when I think about earning to give.
By "we don't understand", you mean "I don't understand". There is no great mystery; programmers are paid as well as they are because of the amazing efficiency improvements their employers get by automating work. If you think about how much money you make your employer (or even better, talk to your company CEO or someone close enough), you'll see that in fact, programmers could be paid a lot more if they were aware of their impact.
Whether it's "fair" or not is irrelevant - you can accomplish a lot with little effort, and that's it. If you think salary should depend on effort and not impact, your employers will be more than happy to let you believe that and pocket the difference. And I'm not writing this to change your mind, but to try to mitigate further spreading of this "we are paid more than we deserve" mindset/myth. Please go to daedtech.com and start reading; you may or may not agree with everything, but you definitely need to be exposed to these ideas, they will help guide your career.
Finally, of course you should be saving some money, but don't live like a monk if you don't have to. Just be ready to adjust if something happens.
I'm not sure I'm following. Janitors are also great; nobody would really want to step foot in a business or storefront if it had trash everywhere. Without a janitor you would lose most if not all of your business quite fast. Yet janitorial work is low paid due to the high supply.
Most such roles can be said to have a high impact on a company. It is easy to see how isolating any role in a company you could hypothesize that they should be paid 10x what they are since without their role the company would be in ruins. Unfortunately this is not accurate to reality.
To my understanding, that is the point of the argument being made: why are programmers paid so highly when there are so few barriers to becoming a programmer, meaning that the supply of programmers should be higher than it is? If programmers are so amazing and high achieving then there should be many people lining up to become one (as the argument theorizes this is easy).
If a janitor quits, a new janitor can be hired the next day with minimal disruption. If a programmer quits, it will be half a year before a newly hired replacement can have acquired the context, they may bring expertise about your business to a competitor, and there's a significant risk that the replacement hire will be bad. Projects and businesses do sometimes fail because their programmers quit. This means that even if there were an oversupply of programmers, it would still be worth paying them well in order to increase retention.
What we don't understand is why this has persisted: the barriers to entry are low, the pay is high, why don't people shift into the field and bring up labor supply?
The barrier to entry is higher than you think, it just takes the form of a talent requirement rather than a training requirement.
Also, smart people often live in a bubble of other smart people. Get out of the bubble and then try again teaching programming.
Recently I got a temporary side job teaching "computer skills" to random people. Most of them had serious problems understanding the "IF" statement in Excel.
They are? I know several people who've pivoted to becoming software developers. I think it's just that growth in demand is keeping up or outpacing growth in supply.
I used to work as a software engineer. As the company I work for has grown a lot, I now no longer write code, but do software design, and hire new team members in different positions, inluding PMs, visual design, usability design, backend programming, and frontend programming.
It is extremely difficult to find good programmers, especially frontend programmers.
I'm pretty sure that the reason here is not that it is difficult to become a good programmer, but that a lot of people choose not do, for a number of reasons.
Two reasons that I have personally encountered:
For visual design positions, we get a large number of applications from many qualified people. Applicants are highly diverse in age, gender, interests, and so on. But hiring for software engineering positions, we get few qualified applications, and they're almost exclusively men below 35 years with often a very similar profile. If we search for people who have less common abilities (e.g. for full-stack developers), we basically don't get qualified applications.
This is in a city that has one of Europe's highest-rated technical university that produces a lot of comp sci graduates.
One intersting data point here is that game studios tend to pay developers much worse than other companies, and offer much worse benefits. The reason for this is likely that developers want to work at game studios, and that many more apply there.
Also, one other thing to consider is that software is eating the world. There are very few products that are not in some way dependent on software, directly or indirectly. Even things that ostensibly don't depend on software were probably created using specialized software, and were produced by companies that run on specialized software (e.g. process management software).
Consequently, when we find qualified applicants, they basically dicatete salaries. We are dependent on them, we can't grow without more people who write software. They are not dependent on us, and there's nothing we can offer that other software companies can't also offer.
I don't think the growth of our dependence on software will stop any time soon. Even if a lot more people started studying comp sci right now, that would only only lead to more growth, and thus increase demand further, at least for the foreseeable future.
Being a good software developer is very very difficult. Only a few percent of the population have the wiring, the wattage and the inclination to do it for long enough to be very productive.
Compare coding with portrait painting or composition for orchestra or pro golf - anyone can learn the basics of them, but very few can become good enough to be paid for them.
I don't know how to say this except, you are wrong.
I've been trying to prove you correct since 2011 by teaching every low-ranking society person and I succeeded every time. I saw a college dropout (with multiple Fs on her transcript) become a good engineer, I saw a 40 year old become a good engineer.
Last year my dad (60 years old with 0 coding experience) picked up coding and I think he's gonna do great.
I had hoped that you are right so I could have the same sense of job security, but the belief that "being a good software developer is very very difficult" is wrong.
It may be helpful for you to start seeing things from a different perspective, better sooner than later.
That's not the question being posed. The question being posed is whether your dad is now in a similar enough reference class to you to be considered a substitute for you, and thereby lower your salary.
I'm inclined to agree with Mark Roberts here. Not everyone has the mental horsepower and right ticket in the lottery of fascinations to be a programmer. It's like with any other trade skill. Can I do woodworking? Absolutely. I can knock together small projects fairly easily. But do I have the aptitude and interest in woodworking to become a professional carpenter? Absolutely not. Can I do plumbing? Sure. I've replaced my own sinks and faucets. But do I have the aptitude and interest to become a professional plumber? No way. Why is programming any different?
You touched on something important here. The most important hurdle I have to overcome with students is making them feel empowered and needed so they care about coding. Afterwards, the problem solving skills become easier to teach.
If you are the only carpenter in town and your family needs a home, you can absolutely care enough to become a professional carpenter.
You can also develop the aptitude and interest to become a professional plumber if you feel valued and people around you needed a great plumber.
I disagree and what I've seen and read of people doing their own construction work seems to back me up. If you're the only skilled person in town and you need a home, then you'll probably be able to knock something together. But will that structure be safe? Will it keep out the rain in a storm? Will it keep out the wind in winter? Will it work reasonably well immediately after you've built it or will it require constant patching for months or year before it finally becomes usable?
All of these questions have fairly direct analogs to programming. I do think there are differences between programmers that speak to aptitude differences, rather than differences of experience. When comparing two programmers with roughly equivalent amounts of experience, I have noticed that some programmers just "get it", whereas others don't. Their first solutions are faster (often algorithmically faster). They've thought through more edge conditions. Their code is simpler and easier to read.
I agree that even a less talented programmer, perhaps with coaching and assistance, will eventually be able to arrive at the solution that the more talented programmer arrives at immediately. But it doesn't matter. By the time the less talented programmer has found the best solution for problem 1, the more talented programmer has moved on to problems 2, 3, 4 and 5. This is definitely noticeable over a 6-12 month period, and it's likely that the less talented programmer will be eased out of the organization.
I don't know if these differences are due to IQ or the lottery of fascinations. I suspect it's both. However, it is plain to me that there are differences in ability between programmers who have equivalent experience, and these differences do go some way towards determining who is successful as a programmer and who isn't.
I don't think your experiment gives much evidence that "anybody" can learn coding, just that it isn't very strongly correlated with social status.
The thing is, you don't have to actually be particularly good at software development in order to get a high-paying programming job. Even mediocre or very junior programmers can easily break six figures, something that's much harder even in other intellectual labor positions in the Bay Area (e.g. technical writing, which is what I do). So, while I don't disagree that being a good software developer is very difficult, I definitely don't think that explains away the issue discussed in the OP, and I definitely disagree that "very few can become good enough to be paid for" software development.
(Source: I work for a software recruiting company where I have access to information on both the skill level and the salary of thousands of software developers.)
I think that automation can save a lot of money, for a company. As an individual, if you automate something for yourself, you probably spent more time analyzing the problem and writing the code, than the task took originally. But in a company, you can automate a repetitive task of hundreds of people. And those people made errors when they did it manually, so you also improved the quality. If you save 40 people 1 hour a week, you have already paid your salary. Actually, the company now got 1 extra hour from those 40 people forever, but they only paid you for the automation once.
Well, that would be the ideal case. Then, the programmers would be drowning in money.
But in reality, programmers often spend a lot of time adding features that don't really save costs, just because someone thought they would be nice to have (why read the numeric constant from a configuration file, if you can have a configuration dialog, preferably as a REST service?), or because the idea of having a program makes everyone suggest that it should also do this and that, things that would be completely crazy to do by hand, and become "not crazy, but not profitable either" when automated (the company used to calculate some value once per year, now it is calculated every 5 minutes every day, and you have an on-call duty during Christmas in case the server stops being responsive). Also, the people who make decisions don't really think it through, and then they keep changing their minds during development, so the programmers have to rewrite the code over and over again. (But the programmers need to do "sprints" and keep their tasks in JIRA to make sure they don't waste time doing unproductive things, such as studying new technologies.)
As a result of these two things, the programmer salaries become what they are.
There is also the problem that companies usualy can't distinguish between good and bad programmers, so the bad ones are overpaid, and the good ones underpaid, to make it work on average. Similarly, junior programmers are somewhat overpaid and senior programmers underpaid.
Also, good programmers keep learning all their life. But the company is usually not going to pay for any of that. ("Why would we pay anyone for learning X? If we ever need a person who knows X, we can simply hire someone who already knows.")
In my experience, companies are inflexible. When you read the online debates, the company owners typically complain "we need someone who knows X, Y, Z, and we keep looking for years and can't find anyone", and the audience asks "so how much do you offer?", and the boss says the number, and the audience goes "but that's below the market wage, you should add 50% and people will start coming to you", and the boss goes "no way", and the audience goes "so offer some other benefit, such as part-time work or remote work", and the boss goes "no way", and that's the end of the debate. (That's an equivalent of me precommitting to never buy bread for more than 10 cents, and then writing blogs about national bread crisis, while walking around shops that are full of bread. It's not about crisis, it's about my stubbornness about how much things should cost.)
One of my internship mentors at Google told me their average software engineer generates $1 million dollars of value for the company every year. So I don't think it's any mystery why they're paid so well.