Hacker News Reader

Comment by mAEStro-paNDa | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't appear to me that the parent implied that these salaries come from thin air. It seems much more obvious that this person is pointing out just how disproportionate it is compared to other very crucial professions, with no obvious labor differences for why this is.

Chalking it up to it being the "market rate" sort of ignores how the market has failed for these other professions. They have to deal with the cost of living just like people in tech. The issue with the new grads, as the parent pointed out, is the attitude. Most could care less about this. That deserves critique.

I should also add that this dynamic does play out in other parts of the country. In other states in the US with much lower costs of living, nurses and teachers for example still have an average salary that is much lower than that of those in the tech industry, especially software development.

View on HN

> with no obvious labor differences for why this is

One difference that stands out to me is that the supply of people who can perform the job is constrained.

Other professions may be crucial - indeed, the truck drivers who deliver supplies to all stores from which we purchase daily goods are crucial - but that job in particular can be performed by almost anyone with minimal training.

Words like "crucial" don't have much meaning as far as determining job compensation: it's a supply/demand interaction. If the supply of people who can perform the job is not constrained, because the job is relatively easy to get into, then that will suppress the compensation.

It's difficult to obtain a computer science degree and perform at the level required to solicit job offers from the kind of companies that pay new graduates $200k. Imagine for the sake of argument that these jobs require an IQ of 125 or higher: then only about 5% of the population will be capable of performing at that level. (This is just an example. I'm not saying that I think programming has a particular IQ requirement.)

This is also reductive. If market value was the sole driver for selection of profession, we would suffer a critical lack of specialists in a variety of fields.

...as we do... E.g., K12 and University CS professors.

tbf, I think far more people can do jobs where they talk to people and teach (teachers) and take care of people and nurture (nurses), than jobs where you look at a screen all day, do abstract symbol manipulation and spend most of your focus inside your head building structures of code and programs.

I showed my relatives how you 'follow the line of execution' in a program running down all the instructions. They sat back in shock, thinking how alien that job would be and how so few people are probably able to do that, and that i should be lucky (?) to have the skills to think that way.

Not only that, here we are talking about software engineers who are the best of the best, probably less than 1% of all applicants.

As someone who has done both professionally, I think you're severely underestimating how hard teaching is. I think it's much harder to teach well than to code well.

Don't forget, too, that good teachers are experts in the subjects they teach. Teaching computer science or math well requires the same facility with "abstract symbol manipulation" that working as a software engineer does.

I didn’t mean to single out teachers specifically — as parent was using them as example — but I meant that in general , professions where you have more human interaction is more desired by the majority of the human population .

But it isn't really required that teachers teach well. If I were to try and give an honest assessment of the teachers (specifically primary school both public and private) I've had I would say maybe 5% were good teachers, 5% were genuinely bad and the rest just kind of coasted by having students do rote memorization.

If you have done both professionally, then by definition, you can code. I think your parent poster's point is that too few people can. They are not saying that teaching is easy.

It's almost as if it didn't matter how crucial the work you do is, and instead what you make is determined by how much leverage you have and perhaps in part by how close to the money you are.

Thank you for elegantly saying what I was trying to say. You were able to put a much finer perspective on it that appears to be more digestable than my comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com