Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
And that skill has a lot of value to people that don't have that skill or are limited by their own time so we get paid for it. Probably a decent number of years will have to pass before we can call programming 'just a skill' akin to writing.
If you're going to put ideas out that are borderline detached from the current reality it would be great if you gave your thoughts a bit more foundation so you're easier to follow, it just so happens that I saw what you meant but I can also understand why someone who is currently a programmer by profession would in some subtle way feel offended if you called their profession (which is a hard one!) the equivalent of a telephone user or a pencil user.
As for being ahead of my time, if you look at the job market today it's true that you do have a lot of people paid purely for their ability to code. These are mostly W2 employees, who work at the kind of places where you start out as a junior developer making 60 - 80k, and then make double that after 8-10 years. And given the current state of society, this is actually a pretty good career path.
However, we also have consultants who bill on a project basis based on value rather than skill, who might easily make 400k a year even as junior developers. (E.g. c.f. patio11's essays.) And we have entrepreneurs and founding team members who get paid largely in stock, the worth of which is largely determined by how much the market values the product.
It's kind of weird because as an industry we definitely need people who have ridiculously good technical skills, to the exclusion of all else. But for the most part programming is a pink-collar job that just happens to be done mostly by men. (In that it requires education, but there is a lot of downward pressure on salaries because the people involved are perceived as being largely interchangeable.) This is why I'll sometimes describe myself as a software developer, but never as a programmer or a software engineer. Because although I know how to code and I might even spend most of the day coding, I don't ever want to work at a job where I'm paid based on my coding ability.
Just to add my two cents, I downvoted your original comment because I thought it made no sense and was bordering on trolling. This reply is much more eloquent and puts it into perspective, so I've upvoted it. I think this is a completely valid and interesting opinion on the "worth" of a programmer, and it's not one that is ever really explored. Our industry tends to focus too much on the general "market value" of developers without considering that they are more than the sum of their skills.
That said, I think you're drawing a line where one does not exist in practice. Very few developers these days are paid to just crank out lines of code. At work, I'm not asked to write a function that takes certain inputs and returns a certain output; I'm tasked with building a feature for a product. This requires much more than the skill of knowing how to code: I have to have a good understanding of the product as a whole, how everything fits together from a technical perspective, and the end users' needs. The titles of "programmer" and "software developer" (and all the other variations) are used interchangeably because the distinction essentially doesn't exist anymore—if you hire a programmer, you're expecting them to know more than just how to write code.
I have a friend who also uses Python as part of his job, but he's a hedge fund manager. Although we're both ostensibly programmers, there is no way we'd be able to successfully do each others jobs, at least not without several years of training. Nor do I think that just knowing Python makes me qualified to be a professional biologist, astronomer, filmmaker, or whatever else people are using it for these days.
That's why I think it's weird to ask how much a programmer should make, since in most cases it's actually the analyst part of the job that determines how much value you're able to create.
Programming absolutely is a job. Its a thing people pay people to do for them.
> It's not even a skill;
Its absolutely a skill.
> rather, it's more of an active literacy.
Literacy is a skill. It becomes less of a notable skill when its common enough (near universal) in society, fading into the background. But programming absolutely isn't that common of a skill.
> Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.
You might have a case if you were talking about a "computer user" rather than a "programmer", but as it is, that's just silly.
But it's not like there's much dispute that being a translator is a job.
Anything has value as long as someone is willing to pay for that. Simple as that.
Is a Van Gogh painting worth 50-100 million dollars? It is if someone pays that much for it.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
If you think programmers are worth $0, then that's your prerogative.
However you must surely be typing these comments in a computer programmed by yourself, using an OS and reading it in a browser you wrote from scratch, otherwise why pay money (that ultimately will arrive at the pockets of the programmers) for something that is worth $0?
Do you feel they are all worth $0 too, or just programmers?
Sure, each was created by a pencil user. But they don't actually have anything in common, so asking how much money pencil users 'should' make doesn't even make sense as a question.
You are saying that a pencil user isn't worth anything, but you also recognize that a pencil user can write a script. You feel that it is the script which has value, and not the pencil user. So I suppose you're saying the programmer isn't worth anything, but the program is worth something.
That's one lens to view things, but it's also a gimped on its own. One should have multiple lens.
It's the whole basis of IP law and all the associated bits-and-pieces that allow all of us to make a living. Intellectual property has a shadow side, but this side is the one that keeps the IT world afloat.
The same laws that govern file sharing allow writers, programmers and other people skilled in some art to create enough value that they can make a living, sometimes even a very comfortable one and those writers and programmers that manage to hold on to the fruits of their labor long enough can do very well for themselves indeed.
> What would happen if you exercised clarity? Bad things?
Unlikely, but not everybody is equally capable of expressing their thoughts clearly. I should know, I've struggled with this for many years and only in the last 5 or so I've gotten better at that. HN has definitely been a tremendous aid in learning how to express myself more clearly to avoid being mis-understood.
Even if you just consider it a form of literacy, scribes absolutely were paid to do their work before literacy was as widespread
People don't pay for people to them to make money, they pay for people to build wealth.
People don't... wait I have to throw up. Will be back.
But really. Menial? Like teachers, doctors and kindergarten workers?
Societys true value is in something else than the value in the bank account.
A single person didn't build any of these billion dollar companies you're referencing; at some point they had to hire more people, who in turn "sold themselves" by your confused logic, to build the company.
Most of these halo companies have non-programmers who were brought in to monetize and grow the value in them. Sheryl Sandberg isn't a programmer nor I think the rest of that board. Eric Schmidt was an electrical engineer.
What 'hacker news' is or is not supposed to be upvoting is only fragmentary up to you, the value of your one vote which you may withhold as you please.
There isn't a day that goes by without some relative newcomer here saying with great authority what HN should or should not be. Hint: HN existed long before you arrived and the charter is broad enough that it is probably not possible for any single individual to pontificate on what HN should or should not be without considerable care about representing viewpoints different than their own. Your comment fails that particular test.
HN is made up from individuals from all walks of life, and some of us are currently in the job cycle where an article that gives information on how to improve their lives is important enough to share with others.
Making billions, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have nothing to do with the subject at hand, and if you recognize that the battlefield is the marketplace then maybe you can also recognize that programmers are active on that marketplace and that tools to help determine their value are in fact useful and worthy of discussion.
Since we are using natural language as real human beings our communication is context sensitive and this instance the context was the role of a paid position in a programming role. Don't go too philosophical without setting up the context, preferably with examples. And then think if you are actually saying something non-obvious.
Hmm, interesting. Wonder what i'm actually doing from 10-7 every day in that case.
At least without any further elaboration, your assertion that it's not a job sounds dowright doltish and the following analogy irrelevant.