Tech Jobs Lead to the Middle Class, But Not for the Masses
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also, this can be extremely high-impact to a business. Consultancies exist at this technical difficulty making lots of money but also delivering lots of value. Go into a non-tech business, notice how 1000 man hours per month are essentially updating Excel files, automate most of it with a Python or VB script, and save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You don't need to feel attacked or nervous that these jobs exist. "Software [Developer|Engineer|Architect]" has no legal definition and the title is meaningless, which is why hiring developers has overhead where you need to check far beyond what the resume says to assess a candidate's true skill.
It's great that $50-80,000 salary jobs can exist for people who have a modicum of software development talent. I'm very happy for these people.
I mean, the latter requires a higher education, which is something that doesn’t exactly rain on people below the middle class, it also pays better and the problems are more interesting, but I know which of the two I’d personally prefer.
This doesn't necessarily correlate with either remuneration or work environment. There are plumbers in the Bay Area who make more than a theoretical physics post-doc and deal with a lot less stress, but most people would agree that getting a Ph.D in theoretical physics requires more skill than becoming a plumber.
Plumbing is critical skilled work, taking years to master, and is paid accordingly.
I imagine plumbing is also very stressful, at times, such as when you're being careful not to flood a building, or avoiding breaking something that would require ripping open a floor to fix.
Though plumbing guild training sounds not entirely different than academia. (And postdocs tend to get paid poo because the market, and their guild, permit it.)
We should also be careful of to avoid the oopses of: "Brain Surgeon - That Mitchell & Webb Look, Series 3 - BBC Two" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
Compare to programmers (of all levels), where there is basically endless demand in most big cities, and in the top say 15 tech centers in the us probably a few 100k jobs are available in total. I'm sure Seattle has 50k jobs.
My impression was that these jobs have always existed but are disappearing, we used to call them support developers but that is a job title that seems to have disappeared lately, the jobs themselves seem to be disappearing in our rush to make everyone "full stack" interchangeable parts. Management sees the skill overlap and seem to think their roles can be replaced by real developers, which is a terrible term but I can't think of a better one, this may even be part of the problem.
The even bigger loss is that they could be great entry level roles for bringing less experienced people into the industry.
Most WordPress sites I’ve seen for small businesses are using some type of managed services where the person isn’t dealing with the server.
You people live in a great country.
Other employers are small businesses which have a need for a developer and pay the lowest they can get away with.
Cost of living is really low here. You can get cozy two room apartment for under $200 / month. There are a lot of "boarding houses" where you can get a room and a shared bathroom for $35 / month. A small studio apartment may be as cheap as $100 / month. Young adults here will often say with their family though unless they are working in a different city.
I feel underpaid. :(
If you want to get paid more, find a position where your work has a direct and measurable impact on revenue or profit and your compensation will flourish. And if you're already doing that without the pay, then it's time to find a new employer.
Not a statement hiding in a question :|
That kind of early exposure made it much easier to understand vector fields later on.
A friend of mine wanted to give back and started teaching programming to disadvantaged kids.
He was shocked to ultimately discover that for most of his students, they simply didn't seem to be fundamentally capable of the abstract thought required, and it didn't matter how much time he spent with them. He came away from the experience fairly disillusioned, and I also never expected the difference in ability to be so extreme.
I personally really wonder -- is this something "genetic", like an athletic ability? Is it something learned, but somehow acquired at a young age? Is it a mindset, that we just haven't figured out how to communicate? Or a question of motivation, if it seems "hard" to think that way?
Homeless in my city has grown by 200% in the last 4 years. We regularly have new homeless show up in Bloomington, IN because we try to care for and support getting out of poverty and homelessness... However this is exacerbated by communities all around shipping us their homeless. Greyhound Therapy is a thing, and it happens more than you think.
The homeless problem is getting worse, by far. Wages have stagnated, rents inexorably go up, and overall cost of living goes up as well. Sure, some company makes more money, but the result too is people move. Sometimes it's to a different apartment, and sometimes it's to Main St. The big problem why "we" don't see it are the city, municipal, and state governments don't want to make a count of it. It's embarrassing - and the thought is 'If we don't count it, they'll go away'.
We in IT have been relatively immune, but I too suspect that will go by the wayside in the coming decades with the factorization and commodification of programming and IT administration.
For me, the biggest such time was being a conscript in my small European country. Not a great time, but holy shit, did it open my eyes to the existence of people I would never have thought were real!
Emigrating to California was comparatively a mild culture shock. Turns out I had more in common with muslim Pakistani software engineers than farm boys from half an hour outside my home town.
Are you are Muslim ? If I dropped you in the middle of Pakistan I am pretty sure you would have nothing in common with most people in Pakistan.
BurningFrog is not Muslim. BurningFrog was pointing out that religious difference between BurningFrog and BurningFrog's coworkers (muslim Pakistani software engineers).
>If I dropped you in the middle of Pakistan I am pretty sure you would have nothing in common with most people in Pakistan.
That's pretty much the point BurningFrog was making. BurningFrog has a lot of similarities with software engineers willing to move to California even if they're of different religions and nationalities. But BurningFrog was very different from "most people in" "[BurningFrog's] small European country". And BurningFrog is similarly very different from "most people in Pakistan".
To be fair, one reason I got along so well with people from every corner of the planet writing software in Silicon Valley was just that I had learned about strangers in the military.
What is the solution? I haven't a clue. Maybe an education system similar to Germany's, though I doubt that would catch on in the US.
I also say that the problem people are bothered by is human suffering. Even if you don't like how meritocracy is conducted today, like maybe you feel that 50% of positions in society are not sufficiently merited, and even if you could snap your fingers and magically sort people by potential like an oracle, you are still left with a meritorious race where few people win and losers suffer bad.
As a society we should contemplate more deliberately the fate of losers.
I met my wife, who helped “smooth out” my moods, and went from someone who couldn’t hold down a job at Walmart to a software engineer making many multiples of what I did just five years ago.
Even with the stability it mostly allowed me to take adderall without horrible behavioral side effects like compulsive gambling.
You’re right though, for me I was basically forgotten and nobody cared at that point. It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom sleeping on my moms couch that things got better. I feel like I was pulled up out of a hell I didn’t know I could escape from.
Then you have the old problem that in many companies HR will still want a degree cert.
I think technical and professional education should be always available to people - it helps us all if people can reach their potential after all.
So I do think it is to a large question of motivation and time. That is why so many programmers, even those with qualifications, are self-taught. Of course it helps to be smart, but programming isn't unforgiving enough that you can't be average. So that isn't really the barrier.
I think that's really important. Most good programmers are very persistent.
The saddest part is dealing with those who weren't cut out to do this yet somehow ended up in the profession. They may well have missed their true calling in life and go on to wreak havoc in organizations where you get to witness their frustration and perpetual confusion on a daily basis.
For him it seems way better than the alternatives, really. Dev work pays really well.
We might not be good at augmenting intelligence but it’s pretty easy to ruin potential, and all of these things are far more likely to happen to a disadvantaged child.
The reason the book's controversial is that it builds a case that intelligence has a genetic basis, and some races are smarter (on average) than others (although there's tremendous individual variation, and environment / upbringing plays roles too).
If that's indeed the way the world actually is, would that be a truth our society could accept?
On the one hand, I'm no racist, nor do I aspire to ever be one. On the other hand, I want to say that I aspire to a proper scientific worldview, understanding the world according to evidence and reason. If I dismiss The Bell Curve's argument, am I being properly skeptical of unproven claims, or am I just going along with societal pressure and my own wish to live in a world where race really doesn't matter?
I don't know if it's due to innate intelligence, upbringing, environment, attitude, or what. But there are millions of people out there who just don't seem to be able to master the abstract thinking required. And I'm not sure they'll ever be able to, regardless of how much education we give them.
What should our economy do with those people going forward? For social stability and ethical reasons, we ought to give them a path to decent middle class lives. How do we make that happen?
I think the key's that from 1880 to 1980, we invented mainly technologies that pulled more and more people into the labor force. Now we've started inventing technologies that push more and more people out of the labor force.
How do we reverse the trend? What kind of technology can we try to invent that pulls in a huge number of people to work, the more laborers, the better?
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44bmmq/why_agi...
Yes, yes it is. It literally is. Maybe you need some additional sorting of raw materials in, maybe the machines (the teachers, the mentors) have a relatively low number of cycles in their lifespan (number of students they can teach), maybe there's more sorting on the output (just like chips are sorted after production), but at nation-scale software engineers are definitely mass-producible.
If you'd read the site guidelines and take the spirit of HN to heart, we'd be grateful. We're trying to be less hostile and a bit more interesting than Internet Default, if you know what I mean.
Isn't that like what people at Costco make for running a cash register and being friendly?
And who do you think has more job security?
edit: To be less coy about it, if you are any good at this stuff and are only making "above $40k", you are getting f-ed.
$40k/ year in Georgia may be a liveable salary, and if this is an entry level job for him there’s probably the possibility to increase that salary by a 1.5x factor or more over 5 years if he can continue career growth (not sure exactly what a cybersecurity job path looks like, but I assume there is some upward mobility or increased ability to transfer to other higher paying tech roles).
The median salary in the US is less than 32,000/year. Do you think half the country is failing at "living" in anything but a totally fantastical definition of the word "living"? It's a cheap propaganda term--obviously--so why use it? Is it just habit?
Personally I started my career on what was probably a similar salary to this person’s 40k (adjusting for inflation.) I had my own experience in mind when I used the term liveable - thinking about being able to afford an apartment on my own and eventually save up to buy a car rather than use public transit/bike exclusively.
Obviously, people do make do with less. Sometimes that means stuff like spending 4 hours a day commuting on multiple buses or something, or juggling multiple jobs and increasing stress levels, etc...
The median household income for a married couple in the US is about $80,000, so two people making $40,000. Although that’s poverty level in San Francisco, that’s a problem with San Francisco, not the country. It’s among the highest in the entire developed world, and a very comfortable life in most places. (Particularly so if, like many Americans have done over the last few decades, you move to a sun belt state where your dollar goes a long way.)
Maybe if you have no children, live in a low-tax area, have an awesome deal on homeowner's insurance and a fantastic health insurance plan, and neither you nor your spouse ever get laid-off or injured.
Otherwise, that's cutting it pretty close.
Areas with cheaper housing typically don’t have $30/hour nannies.
The risks are that the house price and the job are usually super correlated.
I sold real estate in Alabama (with some of the lowest property taxes in the country) 15 years ago. Even back then, on $230k, you'd be looking at around $1500/mo at today's rates, ~$1500/yr property tax, ~$2000/yr homeowner's insurance.
Unless a person is 100% OK with being a wage-slave, cracking a $21,500 nut every year--when you've only got $60k/yr pre-tax--is not a good situation.
Net pay on $70,000 in Maryland for a married couple is $4,750 per month. (Maryland is not a low tax state.) At that wage level, your job quite likely includes health insurance. (Excluding people who are on Medicaid, Medicare, or military insurance, 84% of people in Maryland have insurance through their employer.) But let’s pretend it doesn’t. For a family of four with two kids making $70,000, an ACA Silver plan in Maryland is $538. About $1,700 for housing and health insurance combined, leaving almost $3,000 a month for saving and other expenses. That’s a very comfortable middle class life.
Say your earnings are split $40k/$30k, a typical split for a married couple. The higher earning person losing their job will reduce the household income to $50,000, raising the housing expense to 29%—still within an acceptable range.
Drop the fam back to $60k, and that "$3,000 a month for saving and other expenses" drops to $2167--and I would put special emphasis on "expenses": few hundred a month for vehicles, a few hundred for groceries, occasional co-pays (that can get pretty big as you get older and have more things wrong with you), emergency repairs, school clothes, etc.
There will probably be some left over if both parents are employed--not a lot though. I guarantee that the average family will go deep into the red if mom or pop are unemployed for more than a few months in the $200k house + $60k/yr combined scenario.
What the lenders will do is neither here nor there--given that most will do just about anything for a short-term buck. We all saw how that movie ends back in 2008. I just happened to see it over and over again.
What is so objectionable about telling people to give themselves a little more wiggle-room?
Software development (I hate the term "coding") is not a manufacturing job, as much as some company wants it to be. And apprenticeships at body shops isn't going to create software developers, it's just going to create terrible software with obvious rot and decay as the years go own.
Sure, the professional developers are paid well. However the more Jira and agile ideas takes over, you become more replaceable. Why? You're just a card-filling machine dealing with feature requests or problem reports.
And sure, the next developer may fill less cards, but they will improve with time.
And if you don't work in a protected area (federal, etc), then you can buy card-filling devs for 1/5 to 1/8 of US... And have them QA'ed for less than 1 USA dev.
Face it: I, a sysad, am a service worker. And devs are line workers. We're well paid, but so were factory workers at one time.
There is constant, never-ending pressure to turn it into line work and we need to be aware of it. A lot of software running (barely) in the real world is written this way.
We should not build complex systems that way, but plenty of systems are not very complex.
It's fine if line work + hardcore CS positions exist simultaneously. This fighting over the boundaries of where the profession starts and ends is tiring and we should just accept there's a stratification of developer skill levels and start adjusting our attitudes and training accordingly. Development is all of these things because development is a huge job market.
You can't abstract your way out of doing the line work and only have hardcore CS positions in the job market.
Huh, it is already happening. I see everyday so many web services are created via auto generating scaffolding tools like Spring boot etc. One just fill in environment details, bits of JSON parsing and service is ready to be deployed.
Good for you that where you work people are intelligent enough to read Fred Brooks. Most places, including the ones with fancy gleaming buildings, open office floors, lounges with couches and organic smoothie bars are just making CRUD services with some cloud backed data storage. More so terminology I see at work is more inspired by factory floor not some intellectual venture.
If all it took was some scafolding, some database columns and some html and sprinkle, you should be a millionare by now?
To write good code, you need to understand the whole program (or at least a very substantial part of it), why certain decisions were made in the past, the potential ripple effects of a “simple” change, etc.
This means that it’s impossible to just swap devs out like factory line workers, otherwise you’re just creating more bugs.
For similar reasons, you can’t paint half a canvas and then hand it over to another painter and have him finish it...
Agile do not make developer replaceable. If anything it empower developers to become on equal footing with everyone else.
> And sure, the next developer may fill less cards, but they will improve with time.
I saw projects outsourced to huge teams in India failing to deliver. Reality of software development is that unless you have right mix of experience, skill and people you might never deliver.
Programming require both engineering and creative skills. Some class of problems cannot be brute forced by large number of young bodies.
I'm not saying that this actually works better, to be clear. But I would bet it works cheaper for the time horizons that the folks making those decisions care about.
Toxic companies will twist a good process and make it horrible. It is not Agile or Scrum to blame.
Doing so in an attempt to commodify its application is not inherently bad.
Doing so in an attempt to commodify its application is definitely bad for developers' careers.
"Commodify of application" is a good thing. This means that your team is flexible and can adapt to changes. It mean that there little of key person dependencies. It makes you go for holidays without worrying that your team will be able to finish a new service because you are one of two people that can navigate AWS :P
Just a perspective thing I wonder
That's why I equated Sysads as service workers. Some assistance may be 5m, and others may have looked like a 10m issue but turns into 3h timesink. We're serving others, or serving machines for serving others.
Whereas I see Agile, or the Kanban system, to be set up to send work to either internal or external devs. The only reason why real factories don't use international work is because sending lines and parts is onerous on a short cycle... Whereas software Kanban seems fit for each other.
Sure there's dev work that requires specialty knowledge, but most dev work is a CRUD web app with a DB backend. And those jobs are especially prone to outsourced via a thousand cuts.
It's easy to write them, but writing the right ones is much harder. Automate or outsource that and you become a trillionaire. Yes, seriously.
It's turning out to not really be the case and the successful stories are comparatively few and far between, while the rest of America falls further and further behind for reasons largely not of their own making.
Should that not be talked about?
I fully agree, FWIW. Perhaps it's where my interests have typically lain, but as a developer whose primary job has been to automate other tech people--sysadmins mostly, but developers as well--this has been on my mind for about a decade now.
I don't know what the solution is.
Well, if we're intellectually honest as software developers, we also "...create terrible software with obvious rot and decay as the years go on [sp]..."
Sometimes, we are our own worst enemies.
The typical tech job is more like someone getting paid 30k a year to delete porn from Facebook or draw boxes around pictures of stop signs.
No it's not.
There are approximately ~1.3 million people in the US doing software development at extremely high income levels for the top 3/4. Median pay $107,000.
840,000 computer support specialists ('tech support') earning a median of $54,000.
600,000 computer systems analysts earning a median of $90,000.
300,000 computer programmers, earning a median of $84,000.
170,000 Web developers with a median pay of $70,000 per year.
165,000 computer network architects earning a median of $110,000.
120,000 database admins earning a median of $90,000.
100,000 information security analysts earning a median of $100,000.
28,000 Computer and Information Researchers, earning a median of $120,000.
like I love people praising the maw of capital (startups rule the world yay!) and simultaneously inveighing against. you have an issue? unionize (but you'll be excommunicated from the church of capital for trying to).
As far as creating software that last for years, I also think you overestimate the longevity of most software that is being used today.
Then again I've never strived for comfort, just the rarest thing of all... equality.
I work with a bunch of data analysts teaching them programming for data analytics and machine learning. If I use the term "software development" the managers think it is out of scope for their job ("that's something IT does, not our group"). But when I use the term "coding" the managers don't seem to mind. They need to grow up and appreciate what it takes to develop analytics software.
I like what you said "apprenticeships at body shops isn't going to create software developers, it's just going to create terrible software with obvious rot and decay as the years go own." These junior apprentices produce stuff that barely works, and it is rotting crap whose "technical debt" never disappears, and eventually requires a senior software engineer to rewrite it after it fails.