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Is fixing Wordpress really bottom-tier programming jobs? I know people who do that as freelance consultants, and they have a lot of freedom in their lives. Compare that to some enterprise developers who get hired right out of the university to build exactly what they are told, when they are told for long hours until they turn 36 and get replaced.

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.

Skill-wise, absolutely. Demand-wise, absolutely not. I'm a freelance developer now, but before I was a senior engineer at an international software company. I've considered several times pivoting to productized Wordpress consulting because of how easy it is and relatively scalable vs other kinds of software development. The level of demand for basic Wordpress setup/configuration is really pretty astounding.

I think he's talking about the skill level, defined roughly as how much background knowledge you need to perform the job + how much judgment & concentration + how much creative/analytical thought.

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.

I don't think plumber vs. theoretical physics post-doc is a great example.

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

Dude come on, theoretical physics is harder than plumbing. We dont need to leap to the defence of plumbers here.

This discussion is nonsensical. If a theoretical physicist is so over-educated that he can figure out how to parlay his skills and knowledge into a $200K+ job in Quant Phynance, insurance, or as a full-fledged Data Scientist, then he/she needs to reskill on street smarts.

It's not all about getting paid the most for some people. I think a challenge for the case of physicists that want to work in that field is that there are more of them than are jobs.

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.

It is interesting how the trade profession system of apprentices, journeymen, and masters resembles that of the academic system of grad students, postdocs, and PIs.

> 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.

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.

I work 9 to 6 on one of the most prestigious companies of the country, write high-quality C++ and Java for a complex domain almost on daily basis, and only make $15,000 a year.

You people live in a great country.

Are you willing to say what country and what company you work for?

At least which country...

That's great pay. I know a lot of developers in the Philippines who make around USD $300 / month.

$300 a month is astoundingly low. What can they be doing for that amount of money, I'm amazed the cost is living is so low. If they got remote jobs to first world countries they could make 30 times as much if they could do java or c++.

It's difficult to get jobs like that though.

Yeah, but a 1000 a month for a remote worker who can do java would be feasible. Think about how much you could outsource with just one person's salary. Of course that's the fantasy of moving work away. I don't want that exactly, I'm fortunate and privileged to be an american programmer. But I need to justify my high salary by being very productive, careful, use good techniques and use good engineering practices.

There's an agency here which employs developers for different sorts of client work. Some of them I talked to were doing Javsacript and others were .Net. The employer is Swedish.

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.

Have you looked into working remotely? It can be tougher for international developers but there are companies out there that will pay American rates.

Those are American salaries, you should account for cost of living and possible lack of employer-covered pension savings cost with that.

And here I am debugging TCP stacks, reverse engineering custom network protocols, writing ISRs in assembly, and doing fullstack, embedded, and native development while making that same amount.

I feel underpaid. :(

Just because a profession is challenging or time-consuming does not mean the pay will be commensurate. Those little Wordpress sites are often responsible for significant amounts of small business revenue and the people who keep them running smoothly are paid accordingly.

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.

It depends on where you are working and the industry you are working on. But if you are doing all of that, and not pay over 50k, it sounds like you are underpaid. The two factors that can lower salaries are lack of exposure to cs fundamentals and theory (usually because you don't have a degree), and working in a non-tech town where they don't pay as much.

If there is one thing i learned in life, there is only little correlation between how much you are paid and how hard your job is.

which requires some understanding of how websites work, web servers, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, a plugin ecosystem, backups, etc. It is quite simple for a software pro, but light years beyond what someone untrained could do.

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.

Still plenty of room for custom configuration and plugins. Lots of things people want that you can charge for outside of VPS administration.