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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any evidence of saturation and as a hiring manager with a couple hundred person organization, I'm sure not budgeting for cuts or dramatic shifts downward in engineering labor cost.

As for programming jobs regressing to day-to-day job compensation, I don't see that as likely. In a good case (not even the "best" case), programming can create substantial multiples of the value created by a regular job. There's no reason for me to think that if we suddenly got more truly qualified engineers (that's a big "if"), that we wouldn't discover even more things that would demand qualified engineers to do and still be +EV for the companies.

Let me turn it around. What if you did know, with certainty, that programming jobs would regress in compensation. What would you do about it?

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Interesting point, and to be honest I'm not sure what would I do at this point, so far my main philosophy was that deep understanding of fields that you specialize in + years of experience would pull you through whatever has to come. This is why I asked the question, wasn't sure if that holds true or not.

Years of experience is completely over-played by a lot of people (and in my experience, it does seem specifically overplayed in the case of programmers from India, possibly because of the strong influence of Wipro and similar shops in that market, possibly because of cultural influences or other factors that I don't understand).

A Java dev with 7 years experience and a Java dev with 12 years of experience are "utterly the same" in my book. Without any other information, I'd be willing to flip a coin between the two. That might even hold true for all values 4 or greater; I'm not sure.

I'd much rather have someone with 2 years Javascript, 3 years .Net, and some hobby work in Haskell or Go, even if I was hiring for a Java project. That person shows they have passion for programming, not about getting a programming job. (Yes, someone on the team would need JVM experience.)

There are other hiring managers and many recruiters who just want "N years or more in X tech", so if you are more comfortable getting N+1 years in X tech, you'll probably be able to keep finding jobs, but to me "finding jobs" isn't the only (or even primary) point of working in our field.

To be clear: deep understanding of a specialty and able to work effectively on a team is great and should always bring value. Years of experience (once over a pretty low threshold) is mostly irrelevant IMO. See: http://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-...

> A Java dev with 7 years experience and a Java dev with 12 years of experience are "utterly the same" in my book

Most people will hire the 7, as he is generally about 10-20k cheaper... (see ageism problems)

Why would they be 10-20K cheaper, especially if that was 1 year of experience 7 vs. 12 times in a row?

I don't think this is an ageism problem at all. (I'm 45 by the way, supposedly squarely in the crosshairs of ageism in our industry.)

Ceteris paribus, I think we can all agree that someone with 2 years of industry experience is more valuable than a fresh college grad. Most would think that 4 years is more valuable than 2. Thus, it's appropriate that people in that stage of their career are getting promotions and raises in excess of inflation/CoLA increments, as this reflects a fair price for their increasing value.

At some point, if that same person stops really learning, growing, and differentiating themselves, their value stops going up (except for modest inflationary raises).

If that 12 year veteran is no better than the 7 year veteran but won't take a job offer at the same wage, then they damn well deserve to not get the job, IMO. That's not ageism; that's simple, proper, natural market forces.

Companies pay programmers to create value, not to be old or young. If I can create the same value as someone older or younger, I should be paid the same as them, regardless of age or years of experience.

Except you are missing how salary works.

It is never "You create X value. We will pay you .5x" (Outside of very niche places like Trading).

99% of the world is "Oh you made X at your last job? We can pay you X + 10k.

Hence the older dev tends to make slightly more salary than the younger dev, even if the skillset was similar. And by older, I mean years of coding not physical age. If a guy was a chef for 20 years and a programmer for 3, he is the same programmer age as a 3 year out of college guy.

I agree that many places work that way, particularly if they have no idea how much value a dev creates. I don't know if it's 99% or not; that seems high to me, and even at such places, if I go in with proof/truth that I made $500K at my last job, I'm not getting an offer for $510K as a dev...

500k will not lead to a 510k offer. If you aren't someone famous, likely true.

But if you have two identical guys going for 2 spots.. one guy last made 120, one guy last made 160. I bet their offers are 130 and 170, despite their IDENTICAL skills.

This is why the salary of your first few jobs after college matters so much. Screw it up by 10k and you can EASILY lose 200-300k of salary over your career.

Depends on the person too. The one with 7 years could be more experienced than the one with 12. I've seen some terrible coders (would struggle with FizBuzz level) with 10+ years experience.

I'd learn something new as a backup. In fact, I'm already trying to find that something to learn.

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