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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I'm nitpicking a bit, but this stood out to me as a good example of why I've never wanted to be part of Java-land:

> He helped pioneer one of the most successful pieces of enterprise infrastructure that has stood the test of time. Yet he is humble enough to still code

I mean, doesn't coding being perceived as a "humble" job he's lowering himself to really say it all? It's rarely explicitly said, but coding is considered a low status activity in those spheres. That's why I avoid Java work. Other languages have cultures that respect the craft, rather than viewing it as something you grow out of.

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You left out the context: > still code even in front of a keynote audience

I think he's mainly saying that coding in front of an audience exposes you to errors which shows that you are human.

I left out that chunk, but only because I didn't think it changed the nature of what was said. The way I read the sentence it was the act of coding was the humble part; the fact that he did it in front of other people implied that he was "a man of the people". (frankly, I don't see how coding in front of people makes a person humble -- I would think it's unrelated. If anything it requires confidence, not humility).

It's rarely explicitly said, but coding is considered a low status activity. --overgard

(an example of why you have to be careful about how much liberty you take in your quoting)

> Other languages have cultures that respect the craft, rather than viewing it as something you grow out of.

Not really, in many countries there is the expectation that when you are over 40 you either are a solution architect (those that never code) or a team manager.

It is very hard to fight against this society bias, regardless of the programming language.

This has nothing to do with Java, and everything to do with being an executive at a company with over 100,000 employees.

I'm not sure I'd extrapolate what "java work" and related "spheres" are like based on one statement by someone who once worked at Oracle. I think if you were to pick, say c++, based on "respect" for the "craft" of developing in it you'll be wanting to avoid reading too many posts on HN and other places or you'll end up making the same daft decisions for that language too.

I work in C++ :-)

I'm not basing my opinion off that statement, but rather my previous jobs doing Java. I just found the quoted chunk summarized what frustrated me about that community.

I too prefer to work in c++ (or c#). But I work in java too, such as when I'm working on android. I never fire up Android Studio and sigh about the lack of respect random internet twats would give me if only they knew what I was doing. As long as I get paid at the end of the month it's all good!

> I never fire up Android Studio and sigh about the lack of respect random internet twats would give me if only they knew what I was doing.

You're painting this like sticking up for your profession is only for glory boys that want attention. People generally treat you like you expect to be treated, and when programmers pretend like our status doesn't matter we make things worse for all of us, collectively. To quote the Simpsons, "this is why we can't have nice things".

> As long as I get paid at the end of the month it's all good!

Sure, but your pay is largely based on the status of your profession.

I'm not asking for glory, but my personal opinion is that programming is a high skill activity with a large amount of business value that takes a long time to master. People are free to disagree, but it's not in my interests to participate in a community (the Java EE community, in this instance) that doesn't share that perspective.

Some programming is higher skill than others. A lot of web development isn't that well paid because html hairdressing is easier than, say, working on c++ compilers, or realtime embedded physics/maths, or whatever.

I think you have an odd view of business if you think that the pay you'd get is dependent on its status. For one thing, how do you determine its status? Some comment on a blog doesn't really cut it (who cares?). (Likewise, I'm not sure what form "sticking up for your profession" takes. Writing a comment in response to the blog?). I understand all manner of illegal activities - drug dealing, for example - manage to make the perpetrators a lot of money. Perhaps they're counteracting the disdain many people feel for them by posting on blogs?

Pay comes from a reward for doing work for people who will then use your work to make them more money. I've recently done work for banks and newspapers and they've never specified which language to use and wouldn't pay any less if they discovered what language I used. If you told people that there are a zillion shitty android apps written by newbie java developers who'd never programmed before and were written in a few days of their spare time i doubt many people would be surprised and it's clearly had no impact on the pay you'll receive as a competent java developer who keeps up with all the exciting frameworks.

Programmers get no respect - and its our own fault.

The computing industry is directly responsible for 1/3 of global GDP in 2016.

Its time that this is reflected in our paycheck.

Unions?

Those did work out well for the auto makers in the US.

And excellently in the sphere of teaching. I would be woeful to see devs operate with the same level of impunity with the toxicity that exists within our community...

Yes the teaching system is amazingly toxic. Ask anyone in US secondary education.

I hope we are all aware that this is not a black and white issue, that there are many ways to approach it and that there many ways to bring balance to an unbalanced situation.

After recently reading of a whole company's IT staff being forced to train their H1B replacements under the threat of not receiving severance pay, and then fired as soon as the training was completed, the thought of unions does cross my mind.

> After recently reading of a whole company's IT staff being forced to train their H1B replacements under the threat of not receiving severance pay, and then fired as soon as the training was completed, the thought of unions does cross my mind.

You think unions would fix this? Has it stopped auto jobs from leaving the US? It sounds like we need to fix H1B laws, and giving tax breaks to companies moving overseas. Throwing in a union sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would actually work.

They do work out well in many European countries.

We do have unions for IT.

Does the best technology come out of these European union IT orgs? My understanding is Americans in IT make much much better pay compared to Europeans in IT.

I have seen what a union environment is like. Your pay is fixed based on the number of years you worked at a company, nothing else matters. It is a race to the bottom.

Do you do mostly 40h week, get your overtime properly paid and asked nicely to do extra hours on the weekends?

And have the opportunity to spend valuable time with family and friends?

I do.

They work very well for automakers in Germany.

True, but is the German law and trade agreements the same as the American law and trade agreements? Something working well in 1 environment does not mean it will work well in a totally different environment.

Agreed, but the data doesn't support the position that unions are inherently bad - they just don't suit the US or UK.

It is already reflected very highly. One needs only look at the stratification of classes in the bay area to see that. Do you really think that further stratification is needed?

To be fair, this phenomenon is almost entirely restricted to the Bay Area and Manhattan. Everywhere else, developers might make a little bit more than the average blue-collar specialist, but not that much. Most developers around the world are woefully underpaid for the value they deliver to the businesses employing them.

The entry-level pay of a developer is in the range of the maximum most office people in government jobs will ever make – is that high enough?

That's just not true in most parts of the world

To put this in perspective: a junior role in software in the UK will bag you 25k, which is roughly an order of magnitude lower than what you get as a senior civil servant.

25k is a decent civil servant salary well above the minimum starting pay. The only "senior civil servants" earning anything like that are the 2 or 3 at the very very top of the civil service on first name terms with the prime minister who have 40 years experience essentially running the country.

If you think a junior developer fresh out of college knowing a bit of javascript is in any way comparable in terms of the value they deliver then you're wrong. Simple as that.

Wat? There are plenty of civil servants on 40k, 60k, even 100k. People running large cities like Manchester are well into 200k and they are definitely not on first-name terms with the PM (although they do hang around in ministerial circles). MPs get less because they are lightning rods, which is a paradox but there you go. They are the exception, not the rule.

If you think programmers doing actual work in all sorts of businesses bring less value than bureaucrats hiding in quangos, I don't think we'll ever be on the same page.

But those aren't their first jobs after graduation.

25k is the minimum starting salary for a fresh graduate civil servant in the UK. Its often higher.

But these arnt particularly good jobs. Programmers often have the grades to go into professional services and finance. Those jobs start at 32k.

Very few programmers start at that level.

What's that cash equivalent of 100% job security, a gold plated pension and promotion on seniority?

Keep in mind that code is not useful or economically impactful without business and community management surrounding it.

I think that's demonstrably untrue -- open source and free software has had a massive economic and cultural impact with precious little of that originating from the involvement of business people or community leaders. (For instance, the GNU project or the linux kernel -- not to mention how many commercial products must use zlib). Business support almost always comes after the value has been created.

I would argue that free and open-source software tools have far more of an economic impact when they're used by companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, or otherwise packaged from consumer use.

I wrote a blog post responding to this: http://sonyaellenmann.com/2016/03/middlemen-are-crucial-open...

A lot of code would be more economically impactful without a business community "managing" it.

There's certainly a point to be made about code being channelled in good directions by excellent management. Unfortunately the median for tech management is nowhere close to excellence.

It's telling there's a lot of industry sweat expended on how to avoid hiring 1X or 0.1X developers. But you'll hardly ever see an SV blog post explaining how to avoid hiring/promoting a 0.1x CEO or VP - even though they certainly exist, and their ability to destroy value is so much greater than that of a single inept developer.

As for Java - Oracle isn't a very interesting company. It seems to have made most of its money running a collection of corporate patterns that work well to create profit - until they don't.

It's possible the OP's post is another sign the "don't" phase is getting closer.

I wrote a blog post fleshing out my views on this -- it took a while, but it's better than an off-the-cuff response would have been: http://sonyaellenmann.com/2016/03/middlemen-are-crucial-open...

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