Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

Sometimes you inherit a bad system, so how do you fix it while keeping your releases in stride. That's not easy, especially when then original designers aren't there anymore. Speaking of which, what's the best release stride for this company? You might have to adjust design for that too. Was this weird code done on purpose, is it a bug, or were they trying to hack around a mistake somewhere else? Time to roll the dice, because you need to change it. How do you minimize the collateral damage if you are wrong?

You also need to consider your limitations like network and persistence storage. That's a huge part that many haven't even considered yet. How are networks designed today? How is data persistence designed today? What are my options and what are my limitations with this company? What type of reports does this company need? That's a big one. How about failover, what does your system do when the network or database quits? Do you lose any data? Are you sure? How important is it to not lose data? It's not that bad if Facebook loses a post, but it sure is bad if a bank loses half of a transaction.

Programming has a lot of levels that we don't even realize until we hit a new one. Turning good specs into working code is level 1. It takes a hell of a lot of brainpower and abstract thinking to just do that.

1) programming seems to be one of the only "hard" professions that pays well (compared to math researchers, hard science researchers, or even things like some social work -- that's really hard in entirely different ways). Of course I'm probably missing some hard stuff that pays well

2) programming seems to be the "hardest" of the high paying jobs mentioned. Once you get them, banking, consulting and law jobs actually have a lot of mindless or not super challenging work

Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.

The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface.

While there are specialisms, such as game development or embedded development, most programmers are expected to be generalists. You may find yourself needing to write networking code, and there's a whole bunch of knowledge that goes along with that. Or, many programmers end up having a working knowledge of cryptography.

Sure, almost anybody can learn JavaScript or Python, and write code, but learning a programming language is only 1% of the job.

The biggest impediment to much larger participation in the top tiers of software engineering is imposter syndrome and the elitism of the industry when faced with a trainable candidate. Every startup aims to hire someone who can "hit the ground running" and who doesn't need an assist from anyone.

Also, the largest tech companies have chosen to use LeetCode-like problems almost solely to assess candidates, which are unlike most tasks done on the job most days. These tend to select for people who trained specifically for the interview and for coding competitions, such as ACM.

> The second most common comment that I hear is that, of course programmers are well paid, software companies are worth so much, which makes it inevitable. But there’s nothing inevitable about workers actually being well compensated because a company is profitable. If we look at this list of the most profitable companies per employee, we see companies that pay well, like Alphabet (Google) and Facebook, but we also see hardware companies like Qualcomm, Cisco, TSMC (and arguably ARM now that they’ve been acquired by SoftBank) that don’t even pay as well software companies that don’t turn a profit, and that the compensation between the software companies that are listed isn’t very strongly related to their profit per employee.

The relevant barriers to entry perhaps aren't to programming-the-skill, but programming-the-business-activity. In other words, the barriers to entering business of profiting from programming. And that makes software engineers higher priced commodity because there is higher competition from other companies, but also self-starts.

Hardware companies don't have pay their engineers as well because those engineers have a harder time leaving for other businesses. There are fewer capitalized companies, and self-capitalizing a chip HW business is very difficult. (and arguably the many smaller company options in that industry are rapidly consolidating - so employer options are going down rapidly).

So in the end software is paid well perhaps because the software profession deals with business areas which yield high value return on the labor, _and_ the low capital business barriers to those activites supports higher competition for software labor.

Artificial barriers-to-entry though, such as the licensing requirements for doctors/lawyers, are unique to some specific professions. Hence why they are worth highlighting.

It truly is amazing how people outside of a field always seem to have the best idea of how long something in that field takes to do.

That's not to say that the job isn't hard... but lots of jobs are hard. Dealing with the constant loss of people around you if you work in a retirement home or hospice is also hard; but those jobs aren't rewarded equally.

Barriers don’t refer to how hard a discipline is skill-wise, they refer to how hard it is to enter the discipline. Law and medicine are also hard disciplines, but they have actual barriers to entry that cannot be surmounted by self-study. In this sense (which is the sense that the article means), programming does not have those barriers, no.

Considering that, unless you’re going to mount an argument that programming is objectively harder than those other fields skill-wise, it doesn’t seem productive to talk about an orthogonal “barrier” to entry that the other two also share. They are all difficult, so we end up in the same position.

Your comment here has spawned a large thread of people talking about how hard programming is (which frankly seems a bit self-congratulatory for this community, to be honest), but that’s completely separate from the core point being forwarded in the article; vis-a-vis, that programming is interesting and unique precisely because it has such a high compensation for a field without a central body limiting the supply (among other things). Law and medicine are also hard fields, and lawyers and doctors would be happy to explain why they’re difficult and have their own “skill-based” barriers aside from the licensing ones.

Real and non-artificial? Could it be?! :P

Many, perhaps most, people have trouble with the basics of programming. Pointers, functions, even basic iteration are concepts that cause a lot of people to flunk out of introductory programming.

Maybe intelligence isn't the right word (after all how smart is it really to sit in front of a computer all day shuffling bits around?), a certain way of thinking or aptitude might be better. Education doesn't overcome this, training only partially overcomes this, experience doesn't necessarily overcome this. I bet most of us in the field have come across individuals with high levels of training, perhaps even very "intelligent" individuals who simply fail to fit concepts together in a useful way. Who get the pieces, who can answer quiz questions, who know facts and trivia, but simply cannot bring it all together into a useful, coherent, maintainable whole in a reasonable time frame. And I don't see this barrier being broken.

Anything that can be taught by rote memorization can be automated. Anything that requires higher levels of abstract thinking may never be automated.

My father has been responsible for every chemical (including, explicitly, explosives) factory in the entire country (Hungary, 80s) and later for just one pharmaceutical company for those "side effects" to stay rare. They do not stay rare without some very stern rules.

That is incorrect.

Look at the programme of study for a chemical engineering undergraduate degree [1]. It doesn't cover anywhere near the same content as an undergraduate chemistry degree [2].

[1]: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/chemical-engineer...

[2]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/ug/courses/chemistry-depart...

"How is it possible that programmers are paid so well without these other barriers to entry that similarly remunerative fields have? "

My initial thought was that there are people who get it those that don't. But you can teach many people the tools of programming. It's using those tools to do something interesting that seems to be the challenge. By interesting I suppose I mean something exceeding some level of complexity.

This makes sense, I don't see our schools teaching anything too complex - it tends to be compartmentalized.

What faith in the system :). The truth I think is "it's who you know" more than "what you know". The best paid engineers are ones who spend a lot of time positioning themselves to get well paid. Why that is bi-modal I can't be sure - but my guess is that once you hit a certain network effect you start to make a lot more.

Is it not possible to engineer in isolation on real world complex chemical engineering system?

I try to do that with software, and most software can certainly benefit from stricter isolation (e.g. looser coupling), but most software teams - even well paid ones - often have an in-built bias against investing in less tangible work which means that you ultimately end up with these complex systems are that hard to reason about.

Not that I feel like I should be complaining about this if it is indeed the reason I'm paid well.

As someone trained as a chemical engineer who now is a Data Engineer (SQL & Python pipe fitter), feel free to add me to your anec-data :-)

To offer my own anecdote: In pure/theoretical Chemistry you conveniently ignore in-situ solvation effects to think about mechanisms of the organic reaction.

Then in the real world, you can't replicate someone else's paper because of humidity differences between your lab and the author's.

Allow me to take an alternative argument: Highly-driven students, especially those driven by money, became ChemEs to earn a lot of money and prestige. They looked up highest paying majors and chose ChemE for these reasons. I think it is now obvious SWE is very high paying and prestigious -- perhaps more so than ChemE -- so these highly-driven people switched. It had nothing to do with the topics intrinsically, but rather ChemE was largely perceived as the hardest/most-prestigious field and now SWE is.

I'm not afraid of a superior person taking my job. They would be no better at it than I am. I would probably be more productive if I were less intelligent (or on booze, but employers frown on that).

Maybe you were born in the right place for the economical opportunity for someone born “lower” (please be generous with my terms here), but maybe it’s that these others were born “higher” to a place where higher education is easier to accumulate granting them a severe advantage competitively should you have to compete in an economic arena on the same level.

Or do we accept that being born to an economic disadvantage due to whatever factors mean you should be solely relegated to your caste of manual labour, service occupations, or direct servitude?

Second to that problem is what value does higher education really have in application in what are varied circumstances.

My understanding was the founding of the US was quite counter to that idea— and it’s one ideal that many countries have thankfully sought to incorporate.

Though I think you’re on to a problem—one that includes the consideration that current rules don’t exactly line up with the values we might wish to pursue as a (human, global) society. Partly because it might be necessary in what appears to be a period of transition.

There are thousands of developers making fractions of what their equally talented counterparts make in the US.

Is it perverse to go swimming because you were born near a beach? Is it perverse to visit the Louvre if you are Parisian? Is it perverse to go to a good university because the universities in Elbonia aren't good?

You're not entirely wrong, but that's a very limited view on how the world works. It's not all random. We're not all rolling dice and separating into "haves" and "haven'ts".

Once upon a time: Somebody's parents moved to the coast. Somebody's predecessors funded and built the Louvre (and managed to keep priceless things safe despite war, disease, famine, etc.). Various parties spent decades (or centuries!) of history recruiting and utilizing world-class talent, raising world-class capital reserves, and building world-class facilities for their universities.

I honestly don't think it will last, though. Economically, it just doesn't make sense. My recommendation to any of my fellow US developers: save as much as you can while the money is good.

The whole world uses operating systems, browsers and development tools made in western countries.

Couldn't you say the same thing about other professions?

I find this quote confusing. Historically, the poaching of highly-skilled foreigners has been an important step in developing mere import substitutions into products which can be competitive on a global scale.

The Tudor government (Henry VII-Elizabeth I) kicked off its finished-wool-import-substitution program by poaching skilled weavers and machinists from the low countries (e.g. Flanders, Holland, France). Then, as the export of finished wool goods grew, so did restrictions on the exportation of raw materials and the importation of finished wool. Nearly 100 years later, England had the ability to drive European countries to famine by simply banning the export of raw wool.[0]

In the early 18th century, France started poaching British watchmakers, weavers and metalworkers; Britain responded by outlawing the emigration of skilled workers in 1719.[1]

With that context, I find it odd to hear that U.S. immigration policy has started to work in opposition to the what I believe is the largest benefit of immigration. What incentive is there to keep highly skilled workers, along with their advanced knowledge, out of the U.S.?

[0] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 40-42

[1] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 129

It's almost impossible to immigrate to England (much harder than the US), yet programmers in SF are far better compensated than those in London.

You're a programmer. Maybe you're decent, maybe you're not. It is VERY unlikely that the "millions and millions" of "infinitely more talented" Eastern European/Indian/Chinese programmers you mention actually exist. And even if they did, there are many societal and economic reasons besides "US Immigration Laws" that would prevent them from coming here and taking your job for an order of magnitude less money.

Don't discount your other abilities that much.

Of course, salaries are largely determined by the industry one is in. If you can position yourself at a place in the economy that attracts large amounts of money (per person) then you will be able to siphon off a relatively large amount for yourself.

As software embeds itself in everything we do, developer earning potential will reflect the industry one is in.

High tech firms like Apple and Google make huge amounts of money per employee, so people that work for them make huge amounts of money too. Not just software developers, but also people in sales and strategy, etc. Same for people in finance.

But they all have to pay the same because it's a signal to their clients that they are the best. If they paid less than their clients would consider their firm second tier not top tier.

And Google is hiring the same devs as everyone else. Having worked in a large company and seeing several people move to Google. They got some smart devs who stood out on their team, but they also got mediocre devs. The average dev they poached was definitely better than the average dev who worked there but it was a moderate difference in degree not kind.

Is this not the lump of labor fallacy?

I think you misunderstood the O-ring explanation by citing that idea as an example. It doesn't mean building AI. It applies to any of those fields you mentioned. Good people in field X work together with other good people in field X in top firms -> multiplicative productivity.

A mechanical engineer designing a new manufacturing technique or robot is most certainly using their field to automate their field. Most of computing exists because electronic engineers used their field to automate their field. Software is not unique in this respect.

Most dedicated software engineers exist because this new basic skill hasn’t yet gained widespread adoption as a basic skill in other disciplines. But with time it will, and the number of dedicated software engineers required will decline.

If profit per "average" developer is $1 million, then the company is way better off paying $100k extra (i.e. double) to get developers that are 20% more productive than the average - and if the company doesn't do that, then their best people get poached by companies who do.

And while it is impossible to hire the mythical "10x developer", it is not all that hard to find the "1.2x developers" if you are willing to pay double to get them...

Law firms aren't allowed to form C corps, which limits their size and would keep them off that list. I would expect top law firms to be in those ranges in for profit per employee, but they're much smaller so it isn't a fair comparison.

2 of the top 6 in that list are in medicine.

That's been the case for at least a century. A lot of people at the coasts with few in the middle.

Consider how basecamp works for example

https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...

https://www.wageunion.eu/

What does that have to do with what you should be paid?

My degree has provided a small and consistent boost over my career. It didn't make me significantly more valuable as a new starter.

I think Western Europe has a harmful fixation on a persons credentials.

In the time it took you to gain four degrees an American dev could have gained 6-8 years of experience and be operating as a senior.

Large compensations enjoyed by engineers in the AMZN, FB, or MSFT is not derived from "investors paying more to fund their work", as these companies haven't been dependent on investors' capital in a long time.

I don't like, however, my work as a programmer. The tasks are just too mundane. I spend multiple days on a RESTful CRUD controller, just because there are so many (IMO useless and even obfuscating) layers of abstraction. The only challenging aspect is the lack of conventions and documentation.

When I was in Germany, mechanical and electrical engineers were typically making more than me. Same reason.

A few american software companies are making over a million yearly per developer. 200k for a new grad is nothing to them.

You're right that investors probably spend more to fund the work of programmers in VC backed startups, but nobody forces them. They could simply start investing in more companies outside tech hubs (or even outside the country).

> What drives the demand for engineers isn't the number of things sold, but rather the number of kinds of that thing. The variety of chips is still growing, but not proportionate to chips sold, because the numbers are mostly coming from the handful of chips used in servers and mobile devices.

This. What matters here is not ubiquitousness of software, but rather it's bespoke nature. Every major corporation is employing thousands of developers (either in house or via some outsourcing arrangement) to write and maintain software according to the company's unique needs. This is the most important driver of demand for developers, and what differentiates us from other technical fields.

Most people I know in IT industry understand this deeply even if not talk openly that their 1/4-1/2 of Google pay is decent case scenario. It is also reinforced by the fact average salary for software engineer in valley is about $120K and not $500K + unlimited meals, bus rides and what not.

People here are select bunch and talk about 500K pay so often, it starts to look common when clearly it is not.

That is the dirty little secret of our industry. You need to do your day job AND on your own time, keep your skills up to date, and/or work on open source and/or write a blog or something. There was a post on there the other day on how keeping up to date with k8s is a full-time job in and of itself, well you need to do that - and a bunch of others - in your free time, in the full knowledge that what's hot today might turn out to be worthless in a year or two.

People on the outside, even those aspiring to get in, I don't think fully realize the commitment of those making the headline salaries in this field. Just as you won't make it as a banker unless you LOVE making deals, so much that you'd even do it for free...

I would definitely advice people to learn programming, but not necessarily to aim to become programmers.

What I found really interesting was going one step further and using programming to solve "higher order" problems, such as data science or artificial intelligence related problems. I'm not talking about implementing something in Tensorflow. That again is just programming. I'm talking about implementing something in Tensorflow to solve a specific problem and seeing the result of that. The programming part is beside the point, it is a means to an end.

I think you really need to dig deep and ask yourself why you are writing code at all. The act of writing software itself is not that intellectually stimulating once you've mastered it well enough. It is just one layer of abstraction. Think about what is the next layer of abstraction you can build on top of your programming layer.

That cuts against every labor demand projection.

Frankly, even mediocre programming jobs are a great option for most people. The lower mode is still much more than most entry-level jobs pay.

I'm glad I did not treat it seriously.

This has likely steered some students who otherwise might have found a niche in other fields to try out coding and choose it as a career (out of both satisfaction and salary prospects).

My thoughts exactly. Demand for programming is growing faster than the supply of programmers. Not only is demand growing because ever more devices demand an ever-growing amount of software, but also because every already existing line of code in production needs somebody to keep it from falling over. This compounding effect further escalates demand.

Right. You see this in 1st year CS major attrition rates and programming related MOOC completion rates.

I'm sure you'd see the same pattern if you looked at finance grads. The top ones who went to work for investment banks, hedge funds, etc. are pulling down large salaries, the rest are making much less working for small to medium size companies.

Source (in French): http://bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com/emploi/metiers-du-numerique-les...

£130K feels like quite a lot of money to me.

Honestly I think its more down to experience.

I know relatively inexperienced developers chasing every new tech on the hype train. And I know others that have been around a while and recognise the new tech as a rehash of something from 20 years ago, with some new marketing.

(To be fair I think you need some enthusiasm as well as the experience otherwise you get the "1 year of experience ten times" developers).

In the end, it all comes down to: why are these people, who could do it, not moving from the Netherlands to the UK or US?

They are probably 'comfortable' in the Netherlands, whatever that means.

The best are the US, Denmark, Israel.

Germany has a higher median income than the UK, but the UK pays better in programming. Sweden's median income is quite a bit higher than both Germany and the UK, but Germany and the UK pay close to what Sweden does.

Canada is at half the rate of the US, drastically below where it should be based on median incomes.

The worst is France by a wide margin. The average software engineer salary there is around $38,000. Almost one third that of the US.

Switzerland pays very high (still below the US), but their median income is extremely high.

New Zealand has a considerably lower median income these days versus Australia, but only pays about 15% less for programmers than what Australia does.

~/s

New grads at Facebook who received a return offer as an intern get a bit over 200k/yr total comp. to start.

> Any way you look at doing software development as a career you come to see that it stinks.

I don't see how being able to make several hundred thousand dollars a year with a few years of experience while working at a major company in a safe and clean environment is a bad choice.

What are the alternatives though? Lawyers work much longer hours and only the ones who went to top schools and get into top firms make more. Doctors make more but have 6+ more years of education and training. Finance is competitive and also has long hours. Programmers have it pretty good.

I'm not sure that's true. I've lost track of the number of software engineers I know who are in at least the low 200's Total Comp (in Texas).

Common? Probably not. Rarified? Not as much as you think. There's two just on my current team.

Just because you make an app and publish it to the App Store doesn't mean that it is "distributed" to anyone at all. There are massive costs to marketing apps because apps are commodities.