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Comment by wrong_variable | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

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.

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