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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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