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Comment by slededit | Hacker News Reader

The uncomfortable fact is other professions treat their employees like cogs (hiring booms then mass layoffs), or their customers like crap (ever wait an hour for your set time appointment at the doctor?). The determining factor is really the price of the professional.

Software development is in a real interesting situation as its transitioning from a low status job to a high status one. As this progresses you'll see more and more "the customer is always wrong" style blog posts. They are already pretty common already.

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I would liken any status in software to superstardom in sports. If you're in demand for exactly the right thing, all the doors open. But if your real calling is something with no extant "pro league", you are viewed as a hobbyist without relevant skills.

Knowing 6502 assembly was a pretty sweet skillset, back in the day.

obscure / outdated knowledge can pay off as well.

This is not my experience of the tech industry?

I'm not sure I've had any job in the last twenty years where I met all the listed requirements.

My impression is that employers want some skill that it's sometimes possible to puzzle together from (but is rarely directly stated in any reasonable way) on the requirements list, then they want you to pass a poorly done faux IQ test.

Then there's a bunch of social stuff, which I don't really understand well enough to treat as anything but random noise. I mean, I can see that it's there and that it's not random, but I can't really see how to change it to my advantage.

Hiring is hard, and nobody, as far as I can tell, is any good at it. But being too specific about what skills they want is not a problem I've personally seen. (Not in the last 20 years in silicon valley, anyhow)

Similarly interested in the way you see status.

The way I see it, the lowest point may have been the 60s, then it briefly rose in the 80s to "wizards", continued to rise 'till the early 2000s, and now is in sharp decline, as everyone and their dog is now a software developer.

Software developers were never the hero’s of the story. It was always the prettier people egging them on for the greater good while they talked about how smart they were.

That’s changed lately. With the need for ever more developers the average skill has gone down but that is orthogonal to status in society.

Softward development is a very inconsistent status and status depends upon what is aimed for greatly. Outsourcing to cheap labor was considered a cost cutting panacea until it backfired horribly.

Apparently Japan considers programmers low prestige still for one.

I can get an appointment with my doctor, quicker than I can get a programmer assigned to a task at my workplace. I go through fewer gatekeepers at the doctor's.

Because you're the client. You seeing your doctor will always make the doc more money.

To carry this metaphor a step further, you asking for help on a ticket is more like going to the emergency room. If your ticket is a tummy ache you're going to wait. If it's a gunshot wound to the chest you're going to have all the best staff on hand immediately to put out the fire.

True. Another difference is that it's illegal for me to be my own doctor, but I can be my own programmer. ;-)

Is it? I mean, practicing medicine on other people is illegal in the US, as I understand it; and you can't obtain certain drugs. But I think everything else the doctor does, you can do to yourself without fear of legal penalty?

In the US anything you can legally do for yourself, medically, is not done by the Dr. Other than research.

What’s your basis for determing status?

In my experience it massively elevated my status 15 years ago thru now, where it seems to have no effect and perhaps anchor me away from higher level jobs given the value of the output and scarcity of 10x engineers.

I’m happy enough as a simple IC if they pay and treat me well, but that’s not been the case in 5+ years which has me in retirement from the field.

You’re saying there’s less status now than 15 years ago and you’re retired now? Can you talk about your experience, very interesting!

Status normally follows money (with enough gestation time). For the simple reason to get money you need to convince someone who already has it to give it to you.

The inverse is also true, while a Noble title will get you a good spot at a traditional restaurant in London - for the most part nobody cares now that they don't employ half the village.

It seems to be reversed or less related in software. As programmers went from curiosity to wizards (high-status), their salaries went up, but these days coders are dime a dozen, but the salaries are still high due to what seems to be a combination of adtech boom and demand still outpacing supply.

Anecdotal, but the way I sampled the status question is this: 15 years ago, when I told someone I can code, I was seen as some sort of genius. Fast-forward couple of years, and the exchange started to go like this:

"What do you do?"

"I'm a software developer."

"Oh cool. Like my boyfriend and my brother."

You and I take the same situation and see it very differently.

My impression is that most people don't see intelligence as a good thing; not socially, at least.

15 or 20 years ago, if I said I was a programmer outside of my chosen peer group, people were more likely to respond like I was someone not worth associating with socially.

Now, people almost treat it like any other high earning professional. My impression was that then, it was only a job you went into if you didn't have opportunities in business or law or whatever. Now? it's on the standard path to both of those, and catching up (but still not there) on renumeration.

My impression is that a lot of the people who came into the industry after me were the sorts who would have gone into business or law in the '90s. This makes me seem a lot more socially normal than I was when I was younger.

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