What people get paid to work in journalism | Hacker News Reader

What people get paid to work in journalism

cjr.org

139 pointslaurex216 comments

I was in broadcast journalism for 20 years, and these numbers seem about right to me.

When I started out, small market media outlets would find ways to pay recent J-school graduates sub-minimum wage and make them feel grateful to even get that. A surprising number of journalists, even TV news anchors, will have second jobs in small markets.

A place that tried to recruit me in Indiana wanted me to report the news in the morning, then sell advertising for the news in the afternoon, and half of my pay would be sales commissions. Naturally, I turned it down. I dated a newspaper reporter who did her reporting second shift, then worked third shift at a small factory.

Once you get to a medium-sized market (30 and up), you can make enough to survive, if you don't have a lot of debt or expectations.

It really wasn't until I got into a top ten market that I was able to keep up enough to stop getting calls from bill collectors. Once I got into a top-five market, then I could live well.

I loved journalism. I loved reporting. I loved telling stories. I hated the pay and the industry and got out.

Seems like part of the compensation these days is influence - on Twitter, especially.

That can be turned into additional income through book deals, which in turn can be turned into movie deals, etc.

In a small market, there aren't going to be enough Twitter followers to be noticed for a book or movie deal. And even in markets large enough for those to be possible, they're one in a million or less.

What does it mean when a market is "size 30"?

The size of the viewing audience.

Here’s the list for the us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_televi...

How do people wind up working for seemingly big outfits at a young age? That seems like a recipe for a very slow to grow or advance career.

Also makes me wonder about my local news celebrities. But then my most easily brought to mind is a weather forecaster in a beautiful climate...

I’m wondering also what could be done to help increase those wages?

So with 15 years of experience as a New York Times editor, you make about 80% as much money as a newly hired software engineer at Google with zero experience. No wonder traditional media is bitter about the tech companies.

Jeez, are entry-level devs really making 180k at Google?

Yes. Sometimes more, sometimes a bit less. See https://levels.fyi

‘Entry level’ at Google means someone who is already top of their field so it’s not surprising.

Bollocks. I know quite a few Googlers, most of them hired well above entry level but also mostly not top of their field. Entry-level devs at Google, Facebook, etc. really are paid obscene amounts of money. Non-entry-level devs are paid even more, but it's not quite as obscene because at least they've done something to justify it. Don't listen to sour-grapes talk from people who washed out of FAANG interviews.

"Top of their field" isn't the right way to put it. Entry level at Google means roughly, someone with no experience, or maybe one year of experience. Usually a new graduation from college. However, based on all the interviews and so on, Google thinks they are one of the top new graduates.

Someone who is the "top of their field" and gets employed at Google, like someone that people in a specific technology would know of, would be making a lot more. It depends a lot on what that field is, but making over a million dollars yearly wouldn't be surprising for an individual contributor.

For a more "middle" statistic, someone who is average-quality for a Google engineer, and has five years of experience, would be making around $350,000.

My source is https://www.levels.fyi/ and the verbal descriptions of what exactly the levels mean come from working there. L3 is a new grad, L5 is a solid contributor with some experience, someone "top of their field" would be L6, L7, or more.

That's not new though. In 1984 a senior editor at the Times was making less than a junior bond trader at Pierce & Pierce.

Can confirm. Spent 12 years at a tech magazine and was making $70K at the end. Was laid off for being too expensive. Now I work at a large tech company and make double that. Oh, and no one threatens my life if I get a detail wrong anymore, so that's an improvement. Honestly, being a journalist is like working in a kitchen. Super high stakes and everyone is always 1 step away from complete panic and super stressed out, yet no one is paid enough to make that kind of pressure worth while. At least in journalism, you get access, a modicum of power, and the ability to change the world around you. As a chef, it's just insane pressure for no real world-changing reason.

In my senior year of high school I was heavily involved in my school newspaper. I and put more effort into that then I did 90% of my other classes and some of my best memories from high school are because of that class. My teacher would bring in local reporters in every so often to talk to us about the field and answer our questions, and there was a very common theme of 'landing lob in this field is hard, the work will always be hard, and you won't get paid very well' among most of the speakers.

Luckily for me I was also learning how to program in C++ in my spare time and decided to take some computer science classes my freshman year of college to see what the field had to offer.

Yes, the salaries for journalists are low but another factor is that even those poorly paid full-time staff positions are hard to get.

For CS students about to graduate, there are recruiters competing with each other at campus actively looking to hire you. On the other hand, the newly minted Journalism/English/Communications majors often struggle with freelance gigs with low rates[0]. They hope to impress editors and get their "foot in the door" to a salaried writing job.

[0] https://contently.net/rates-database/rates/

The same is true for most fields of academia, the arts, or professional sports.

In fields where people are doing things primarily for love, they are willing to accept comparatively low salaries, crowded labor markets, and poor conditions to get a chance to do what they love for a living.

Source: am physicist.

has more to do with scarcity of talent and demand rather than "things people love to do." Coding pays well because it is important and few people are smart enough to do it well. Service sectors jobs are not fun and pay poorly and there are a ton of job seekers relative to demand due ot low cognitive barriers to entry. Most job that would be considered "fun" either have low demand and or low cognitive barriers to entry.

I'd say physics is a lot harder to do than your average SV developer's job. Even more so playing sports at a level that brings in real money.

What is "physics" as a job? The problem with physics is that there are few applied physics jobs compared to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs. Similar things can be said about CS, there aren't very many CS jobs and I'd say it's comparable in difficulty to physics.

> The problem with physics is that there are few applied physics jobs compared to CS and applied CS (software developer) jobs.

Isn't every engineering job essentially applied physics?

that is why there are two variables: difficulty and demand. There is more demand for coding than physics work.

Except coding jobs that are heavily sought after also pay a lot less than those that aren't, and often have worse conditions. See for example, game development. It can be as tough as working as a software engineer at say, Google, but pays significantly less because of how many people want to get involved in the industry.

That's exactly what op's saying.

The idea that few people are smart enough to code well is probably the great myth of our field. When people say that, no doubt they're thinking of Febrice Ballard (and, human nature being what it is, assigning themselves to that same category). Spend some serious time as a consultant working with software developers in reality. Most of the day-to-day work of most software development shops is straightforward, trainable, and less complicated than a lot of other white collar jobs.

Every competent woodworker does stuff that is at least as intellectually challenging as routine software development. But you don't see a lot of people saying "few are smart enough to cut mortises and tenons".

I would pay good money to watch someone who considers themselves in the group of "the few smart enough to code" try to trim a room with crown molding.

I think if they were taught (i.e., if they looked it up on youtube), they'd be pretty good.

I remember about 20 years ago being just fascinated by the folks hired by my dad who came to do construction at our house, the key thing I learned watching them was that you needed the right tool for the job at hand (and you don't even have to own a lot of it -- you can rent from Home depot a lot of the big tools).

Insofar as smart coders are good engineers who know what tools to use and follow directions, they'd be pretty good at it. I do most of my car work in my garage myself, and I'm planning to build a room in my basement next year myself. Not only is it not that hard, it's actually extremely fulfilling and fun to do it yourself.

As a beginning amateur woodworker with an extensive Youtube education, but now being overseen directly by an actual professional woodworker, and without intending any snark or malice, let me just respond to that: "hahahahahahahahaha".

Watch someone hand-cut a dovetail (heck, watch 10 different people hand-cut them), then get a chisel and a coping saw and a marking gauge and try it yourself. It is not easy, even if you (as I did, to little effect) condense all the video tutorials you watch and the chapter in the Tage Fried book into written step-by-step plans.

You can absolutely do it! I'll eventually be able to do it semi-competently, I think. But I doubt you'll get there without learning to respect the challenge at least as much as you respect the work that went into getting you to a comparable level of coding aptitude.

That's the "status economy" for ya.

You're either fighting to get it or fighting to hold on to it.

"Get a job doing something you love and you'll never work a day in your life."

If I had a dollar for every time I heard something along those lines while in schlol, I really wouldn't have to work a day in my life.

Advice like that is repeated ad nauseam in acadamia and I loathe it. Schools (at least in the US) do a terrible job at setting realistic expectations for labor markets. Worse, I think they are guilty of misleading students' perceptions of the market in fear of them otherwise dropping out.

When it comes to overcrowded labor markets, I put most of the blame on academia.

You're taking that quote way to literally. It means if you do something you like, it won't feel like work.

It has nothing to do with job security.

Lots of people competing for a small number of jobs does tend to put downward pressure on wages.

Reporting, like teaching, sadly falls into a category of jobs where the demand (for the jobs themselves) far outstrips the supply of jobs. It seems almost wrong because journalism (and teaching) is so important to our collective understanding of the world, but the other side of the coin is that it is that very importance which makes the jobs so desirable.

you forgot the important part -- ability to leverage others to make them pay you.. it is the "elephant in the room"

>ability to leverage others to make them pay you

That's an interesting phrasing. In other words: ability to provide a valuable and scarce service that people are willing to pay for?

Background: I'm an engineer who has previously worked on research related to misinformation and built data tooling for news organizations, and I now work at a news organization myself.

Journalism is in a bad place in the United States. The number of journalists has shrunk dramatically, particularly at the local level, over the past decade. (In case it isn't immediately clear that journalism is a public good, the decline of local news has been linked to increases in local corruption and borrowing costs/debt as well as a decline in civic engagement in communities: see https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/l... for a roundup).

I think there's a lot of work to be done from a number of angles in this space, including exploring new and innovative business models for news organizations; leveraging advances in technology and data science to improve existing products; and encouraging shifts in consumer attitude (similar to the way that attitudes towards paid entertainment content - movies, music, etc. - have shifted over the past 15 years).

I sincerely believe news orgs are hugely (not wholly) responsible for their own demise. I'll explain using print news as an example.

For newspapers, the internet changed the competition field, from one or two competitors to dozens (maybe hundreds).

When that happened, US news consumers noticed some things. A multitude of (or maybe most) editors & journalists are profoundly, unconscionably lazy.

I'll offer some Examples.

1) Lots of ink but not a lot of news gathering: Most (hundreds?) US news orgs all lead w/ the same ½doz headlines - and those are likely Reuters/AP/UPI reprints. How many national stories are in play any given day? Six? I think there are dozens and dozens - and they're all ignored in favor for whatever editors think is sexy. (I suppose editors tend to have similar tastes.)

Local stories are likely to be original. Well, except when they're parroting press releases. Or worse - they're parroting PR without any analysis or historical context. In this case the readers are given no tools to tell if the PR is crap or not. This turns the journalist into the official spokesbot of the police, government or local corporation. It's publishing but it isn't journalism.

2) Fluff: Sports journalism. Celeb journalism. etc. Is it journalism? Lets go in that direction some more. Stamp collecting journalism. Paint swirl journalism. Concrete curing journalism. There are people who like those things. Is that enough?

Consider this. Journalists are afforded extra 1st Amendment protections, to encourage them to unearth and reveal misdeeds by the powerful. The intent seems to be to help citizens learn where their rights and liberties might be being eroded. Reporting that depends on those protections would seem to be a strong candidate for what constitutes journalism.

I suggest that reporting on paint swirls and sport stats is probably a pretty safe thing.

3) Lastly, uneducated journalists: One example. During the Obama administration I'd participate in journalism chats. I had a regular question. Did the reporters know that Pres Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all previous presidents combined?

Now this could be a good or bad stat, depending on one's perspective. Regardless, it was an undeniably powerful, historical statistic. Depressingly, that stat wasn't well known by journalists. In fact most journalists seemed resistant to believing it or they felt the stat misrepresented some larger situation.

This lapse was a terrible thing. Whistleblowers have always been a incalculably valuable to journalists, who were oblivious to what seemed to be a crackdown by that administration.

(Fortunately, that's changing a bit & whistleblowers are suddenly revered again. Or at least that's the lip service.)

Conclusion: To me, if news orgs want to survive, they each need to bring something to the table. Some do. Some are exceptional. Some are consistently exceptional. Some screw it up occasionally but that's reasonable in the larger context.

But if news orgs are largely reprinting others' content, then they are largely not serving a critical public function. Worse, they're abdicating the duty inferred by their extra constitutional protections.

I believe those news orgs should die.

I think your reply misses a powerful factor: economics.

Newspapers used to rely on print advertising to make the majority of their money. And they made enough of it to do a good job.

It's much harder to report original stories when you have no revenue. Nowadays, advertising revenue is mostly driven by clicks, hence the rise in clickbait, reprinting of Reuters/AP/etc. (as opposed to "real" local stories) and fluff journalism as you mention. Local news has been hit the hardest because these newspapers made more of their money, percentage-wise, from advertising and classifieds.

(Also, worth noting: the link I provided contains studies showing that local news nowadays provides an important net good to society. So while you may be of the opinion - anecdotally - that all local news is just PR, that hasn't been found to be true in the academic literature.)

As to your third point, the prosecution of whistleblowers was heavily covered during the Obama administration. While I obviously can't speak to the specific conversations and interactions you had, it seems to me that you're tarring journalism with an incredibly broad brush by calling journalists uneducated based on a few chats (also, journalists cover a wide variety of subjects - were the journalists you were chatting with covering national politics?). There are more and less educated journalists, just as there are in every profession.

Obviously the old models don't work for journalism, and a lot of the onus is on journalism to change and to innovate. But if we value journalism as a society, some of it is also on us to change the way society works. I think the challenge is not dissimilar to what we saw with movies/music in the early 00's when piracy was rampant. The rise of streaming and the willingness of the general public to pay for entertainment media again has been a game-changer in that industry.

The flaws and issues I brought up weren't caused by post-1995 realities. They were what news consumers had been given for a long time, in exchange for their subscription dollars & eyeball time.

The demise of news kingdoms happened when it became impossible for us to ignore what we were getting for our money.

Going forward, the economics issues are as stark and complex as you say. A new challenge is they're being used to justify feeding us the same diet of crap (not exclusively - wonderful exceptions abound) that our parents were served.

In the midst of all this is a comprehensive lack of self-awareness by news orgs who exist to state reality in helpful terms. Step One should be clearly stating the core reasons that quiet Americans lost their trust in the press. It's been 20 years and news orgs are still unable (again, lots of exceptions like CJR) to discuss these crippling flaws. How can any economic solutions help if news orgs offer little more than fluff, recycled content and 1st-impression reporting?

I don't agree with your assertion that "the demise of news kingdoms happened when it became impossible for us to ignore what we were getting for our money," and I haven't seen any literature which would back up the argument that people suddenly woke and realized "we ain't paying for this shit anymore." There is, however, plenty of literature showing that with the advent of the internet the shortfall in print advertising was not made up for by online advertising.

The "diet of crap" that you bemoan has always existed to a certain extent because of economics. More people want to read about celebrity gossip or sports than the CJR. The internet has simply exacerbated this issue because the online advertising model rewards eyeballs and clicks, and what you would call "crap" content generates more of them.

Your rebuttal places responsibility for what news orgs print - on everyone but the news orgs.

So your argument seems to be this. News orgs have to defer their 1st-Amendment-inferred duties in favor of printing pap because otherwise they'll go broke. In the mean time they're going broke.

Americans have more sources of pap than ever before yet that is the arena where news orgs want to compete. Like news orgs, you appear to have zero concern with this plan.

As an aside, did you know that House voted to reauth Sect 215 surveillance? WaPo barely mentions it in their own article. https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/11/19/house-pa...

I doubt you knew because 1000 news orgs are thoughtlessly, compulsively covering [SUPER SEXY STORY] today, to the exclusion of all else. I don't know how much other critical information I'm missing bc (like every day) the vast bulk of news orgs can't be bothered to fulfill their constitutionally-protected purpose for existing.

Do you have a specific argument as to why news orgs are not earning their collective death? Other than some belief that they should continue to profit at pap, I mean.

I would like to see this for other fields. It seems as if few really understand how the other half lives, which is a general cause for confusion, and the unwarranted animosity that can arise from it, in society.

You could also apply the principle to diets: I feel as if weight management is so difficult for so many because they have no real idea of what their meal frequency and portion size are in the grand scheme.

In fact, can anyone think of any examples of issues that affect most of the population, wherein lack of general knowledge of the spread of circumstances leads to more amenable outcomes, individually or overall?

I've seen this information gathering exercise be successful in other fields during conferences. These aren't your company peers so the fear of offending/being offended by your co-workers doesn't exist.

edit: just curious about the downvote, any reason?

For software engineering, levels.fyi is my go to

/r/sysadmin did one recently

Link to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...

Clean the data, normalize, make some multiple regressions and you may have something interesting

Edit: The data is honestly a mess. Good luck to anyone that want's to make any analysis. They should have done a proper form.

On the Google form, under the Salary header, there's a text box. Which imho is fine, given the inherent complexity of the potential input (some salaries are annual, others are by the hour or by the story, with a cap on the latter), and without adding multiple fields to the form.

Thanks for linking to the real data. Why does everyone call themselves a "cis", though?

Cisgendered, means they identify as the gender they were assigned at birth and are not transgender or genderqueer (Queer in this sense doesn't mean gay, it means they have some combination of gender traits that doesn't fit neatly into either male or female).

Here I am thinking that gender is observed at birth, not assigned.

The practice is commonly referred to as sex (or gender) assignment.

These gender/orientation demographics are important to identify demographics that may be receiving a disproportionate salary.

Honestly, that doesn't look as bad as I thought it would be considering all the reports of how journalism is dead. US median wage for those with a bachelors degree is about $62,000 dollars a year [0] which seems similar to the median in the sheet from eyeballing it.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-educatio...

Not to suggest they aren't also struggling, but mostly-national outlets with a strong or exclusive web presence aren't the epicenter of the crisis in journalism--they're the outlets weathering the storm.

Newspapers, particularly local and regional ones, are the epicenter of the crisis--and they are being hollowed out. This AP article (https://apnews.com/a0409119ab71400b944662fc770593a0) is a good place to catch up.

(Anecdata, but FWIW: GateHouse, mentioned in this article, acquired my hometown paper in the past year. My mom has variously worked residential and single-copy delivery for this paper for decades. My stepdad worked delivery, managed a delivery district, and was an early employee in the paper's online operations. Subjective, but their stories, firsthand and from friends, make it hard not to see it as an extractive vulture operation.)

The median household income in NYC is ~$51k: https://project.wnyc.org/median-income-nabes/

Agreed. That being said, you need to separate Manhattan from the outer boroughs. There is tremendous inequality in NYC.

That'd be excellent pay in most of rural America (the ~99%).

That’s not what the 99% means. Most Americans live in a city. Relatively few people love in rural areas.

How many people actually pay for news? I certainly don't, not in the traditional sense of paying for WSJ or NYT subscription (I donate to youtubers that cover current affairs).

Most revenue from news must come from advertising, and I think advertising is a poisoned chalice. It makes the news organisations beholden to corporations they should be reporting on, and fulfils the adage "news is what they don't want you to hear, everything else is PR".

Chomsky and Herman discuss this in Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Good video / overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34LGPIXvU5M

For the NY Times, the assertion that most of their revenue comes from advertising just isn't true. 60% of their revenue now comes from subscription fees, and advertising's slice of their revenue has shrunk consistently.

https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-required/5gNimvTR/New...

To be fair, getting high percentage revenue from subscriptions is a very recent phenomenon, and the NYT is one of the exclusive few (arguably the only one) that is finding this strategy and trend to be viable.

I think they're mainly benefiting from the Trump era. When it ends, I think their subscription numbers will plummet, since there won't be so many shocking things happening every day.

> I donate to youtubers that cover current affairs.

Where do those YouTubers source from? Most likely it’s more established news organizations.

Wow, reporters make squat. Editing is a bit more lucrative.

Leaving aside copyeditors, etc. editors tend to be more senior. Furthermore, a lot of "editors" also write stories; it can be more an indication of seniority than an indication that they just assign stories and edit other people's work. (Which there's often not a huge amount of these days.)

Its not great but its not terrible. Just software is way overpaid.

Median Household Income 2017

Bronx $37,397 Brooklyn $56,942 Manhattan $85,071 Queens $64,509 Staten Island $79,201 New York City $60,879 New York State $64,894 United States $60,336

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income-taxes/med_hhold_i...

> Just software is way overpaid.

That indicates to me how underpaid most other jobs are, not that programmers are way overpaid.

Or, you know, the market is dictating the rate.

The market is rarely as good at setting prices as its most ardent defenders claim. (Or, to be fair, as bad at setting them as its most ardent critics claim.)

What does this statement tell anyone reading it? Or, in pretentious terms, this involves an argumentum ad temperantiam (fallacy that you can compare two unquantified extremes and get something useful)

We haven't even begun to see the ceiling for experienced engineers imo. We hit $500k TC not being a completely-unthinkable offer for anyone other than extreme domain experts way earlier than I expected.

That the market is manipulable should be evident from the quantity of money that is spent on lobbying legislators about it, and how much opposition there is to unions.

Belief in a totally free and natural self-regulating market is just as bad an appeal to Naturalism as to say we should eschew health care because people were meant to die if they get sick.

There is very, very little money in politics given the power that’s at stake.

> (in case you’re keeping track: all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

"The market is dictating the rate" is pretty tautological. The interesting questions are whether the market is rational, whether this is what we as society want the market doing (which is not to imply regulation, just that we could collectively decide to prioritize other things), whether existing regulation is influencing the market in some way, etc.

It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant. It isn't obvious to me that these two companies have approximately the same hiring budget, or if one has a higher budget than the other than giving market offers to start negotiation instead of above-market is a winning strategy.

> It is a little confusing to me that tech salaries are broadly consistent between various forms of tech - e.g., without negotiation or stating an expectation, I got offers within $10K of each other from a tech-heavy hedge fund and a tech-heavy advertising giant.

From your first paragraph I get the feeling you might be familiar with this, but for others the term this is alluding to is called elasticity. Essentially a little change in supply and a little change in demand aren't always worth the same. What you experience (and what others have measured) suggests the demand for competent software developers (the company side) is relatively inelastic compared to the supply of competent software developers (the employee side). Put another way, if they tried to pay you less the number of applicants they got would go down quite fast. Put even simpler, the market for software developers is a seller's market.

What do you think the average wage should be? I'm getting the impression that a lot of people think $100-200,000 a year should be the 'norm' for many jobs, but I'm not entirely sure myself.

I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement.

Using the Raleigh metro area, for example, that works out to about $90K/year, not including retirement:

https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/

To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market.

> To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market.

Or, perhaps even more common, something wrong with the housing market.

> I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement.

I'd definitely agree with this.

And I'd also partly wonder whether this could be used to sell companies/the well off on better housing/land use/rent control policies too, since in many places, the only reason the expectations have gotten so high is because the system is simply broken/completely unaffordable.

For someone to get the kind of lifestyle mentioned in central London or near Silicon Valley, you'd need at least a couple of hundred grand a year. Maybe this would change if people realised that the more they fight affordable housing, the more it'll hit them/their companies financially having to pay out for their workers to live in such broken systems.

Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly.

For what it's worth, I'm of the opinion that the long tail of high-paying jobs (which I count myself in, to be clear) is having a negative effect on the cost of living by making it easy for us to drive up the prices of limited resources like housing near an urban core, restaurant reservations near an urban core, etc. If you curtail that somehow (my preferred approach is heavy taxation, but you could also regulate salaries or perhaps encourage the free market to charge people disproportionately more if they make more money), I suspect the problem will fix itself, and <<$100K salaries will start to go farther.

Then you don't need to solve the problem of where we get more funding for journalism / taxi driving / whatever from.

> Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly.

The economy is more complicated than that. Debt allows people to continue to purchase beyond their means and obviously there's massive debt in the economy right now. With higher salaries, prices could stay the same but there could be less debt.

Sure, but the reality is I have greater access to debt (credit) with a greater salary. I can buy a house in the small town I grew up in, in cash, but instead I'm going to get a mortgage and buy a tiny place in this expensive big city (and participate in this big city's increasingly expensive housing market). I don't think it follows that if you pay everyone more, the appetite for debt goes away. I think you'll just get inflation, and the same amount of debt after adjusting for inflation.

On the other hand, one of the primary advantages that the US has over Europe in hiring software engineers is that they pay them dramatically more. If US companies started paying less I could see software engineers leaving for countries with higher standards of living.

Total compensation in the United States is $10 trillion. There are about 190 million people aged 18-64. If you gave everyone a job paying the same salary, everyone would make about $53,000. (If you make more than that, you benefit from income inequality!)

So no, the data shows that these jobs are paid a normal amount, while programmers are vastly overpaid.

You can't just decide overpaid = anyone over mean, underpaid = anyone under mean.

If a brain surgeon is a hard job and takes 15 years of school, and a crossing guard is an easy job that you just show up and stand with a sign... both should be paid 53k? I think a lot of people would have a problem with this.

I don't really follow the argument you're making here or how it connects to 'js2's original argument, but I'll make the obvious observation that there are extraordinarily difficult jobs that don't tend to pay well (professional classical musicians, for example), and easy jobs that pay better than the mean (garbage collectors).

Garbage collecting may be "easy" in a cognitive or skills sense, but it's unpleasant, surprisingly dangerous and hard on the body.

Sure. My point is that supply and demand does not in fact map directly to talent and difficulty.

It has a very high correlation. Also ability to generate money.

Pro NBA player and pro violin player are both hard. The pro NBA player is paid more, but he generated a lot more wealth. Most orchestras rely on donations just to keep the lights on.

It's hard for me to see how you didn't refute your first paragraph with your second.

This is a straw man. I made no statement about income inequality and I'm not calling for everyone to make the same amount.

The economy doesn't obey immutable laws of the universe. It works the way it does because of rules that we constructed[1]. Nothing prevents total compensation in the US from being higher allowing everyone's salaries to rise. With more progressive taxation, we could reduce the amount of inequality.

[1] e.g. per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...

> Labor's share of GDP declined by 4.5 percentage points from 1970 to 2016, measured based on total compensation. The decline measured for wages and salaries was 7.9 points. These trends imply income due to capital (i.e., asset ownership, such as rent, dividends, and business profits) is increasing as a % of GDP.

You implicitly did make an argument about income inequality when you said that other jobs are underpaid compared to software developers. You're now walking that argument back, which is fine, but you should just do that, rather than accusing people making the obvious rebuttal of attacking straw men.

> So no, the data shows that these jobs are paid a normal amount, while programmers are vastly overpaid.

You are speaking a lot these days about the ills of socialism in contrast to capitalism. Programmers being paid well is a great example of capitalism at play. If you're a great programmer, you can make a lot of money. This is now common knowledge, and it should encourage more people to get in the field. It's an example of capitalism working well, why do you have a problem with this?

The only person in this entire thread talking about socialism is you.

1. I didn't say he was speaking about socialism/capitalism in this thread, I said he'd been speaking about it a lot lately. [1]

2. It wasn't meant to be a snark (though I can see that it came off in a bad way, and I regret that), it was a genuine question taking in consideration his stated views in past comments, and I actually just really wanted to hear his thoughts

3. While I have your ear, and while I see that you seem to be defending rayiner against any critique he receives; presumably you guys are thus on the same page on this, so I would like to hear your response on the question I posed to him: programmers getting paid a high wage is a manifestation of capitalism, what's your problem with it?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21520234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21446484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21439347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21438960 etc.

I'd answer that question, though my answer would be boring, but for the "you seem to be defending rayiner against any critique he receives" barb, which is both uncivil and incorrect. What is true is that I tend to read all of Rayiner's comments, because he thinks differently than I do and writes carefully, and I find his perspective valuable. I do not, on the other hand, find the enterprise of trying to hound him off threads useful.

I would like to apologize for the barb, and then pose the same question. Programmers getting paid well is a result of capitalism, they are valued and in low numbers -- if this was not so, if they were in great numbers, they would not be paid as well. This is basically capitalism. Where do you take issue with this?

I'm generally positive about capitalism. I think software developers are not going to make anomalously high incomes forever and if people want to enjoy it while they can, mazel tov. The corrective to software developer overcompensation isn't to artificially restrict their income; it's to break down gatekeeping barriers to the profession, which is what I think will happen.

Got it, thank you for sharing your thoughts.

> it's to break down gatekeeping barriers to the profession

What are some good ways to break down these gatekeeping barriers, in your view?

I feel like you’re reading more of a value judgment into my post above than intended. When I said “programmers are overpaid” I mean in the very specific, arithmetic sense described in my post. Programmers are overpaid relative to what an even distribution of income would produce. (So are doctors, lawyers, advertising professions, and indeed almost all white collar professionals.) The point was merely to refute the idea that jobs paying $60k are “underpaid”—the economy doesn’t produce enough for all jobs to pay like programmers make.

I don't understand this argument. You could instead lament that "journalists are overpaid" or "software developers are underpaid" with ample evidence for either. Looking at medians or other aggregate stats doesn't prove much of anything.

It appears to demonstrably rebut the comment to which it responds, which implies that the problem isn't that software developers make six figures, but rather that everyone else doesn't.

Relative: http://whopayswriters.com

Low pay, long hours, difficulty of obtaining employment, low long term stability of employment for most places.

The state I used to live in had two newspapers employing maybe 1000 people between them.

Now, there is one newspaper that went bankrupt and lost the building they were in. For several months, there was no statewide newspaper. The bankrupt newspaper was resurrected and now employs less than 20 people, and is primarily an AP news reprinting service with two pages of local news on the weekend.

I worked there one summer in college and briefly after college. I filled in on the city desk a few times, and it was an interesting experience putting out a good daily rag that had excellent content for the most part.

The resurrected paper doesn't even have their own printing press anymore. A local print shop runs them out.

> A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job based in New York City, that seems barely livable. A deputy editor with the Times with 15 years experience reportedly makes $145,000, but those kinds of figures are the exception rather than the rule. A senior video producer at USA Today makes just $50,000.

Nothing wrong with any of those salaries. It's more than I earn.

Do you live in New York City? I think that's the point.

The spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SP3Sqqdv6R8chFamjtgd...) could use some normalization and sanitation, but this would make some very interesting data stories.

I tried to find data on media trends to cross-reference the salary data with industry revenue to get a better understanding, and the best source I could find was Pew Research (https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/digital-news/) but it only covers Digital News.

Overall, my initial gatherings from perusing the spreadsheet are:

- Don't expect to see Software Engineer salaries in the dataset (6-figures is the exception, not the norm).

- Biggest surprise was a Reporter in Boston with a 22-year career making $62k/yr.

- The most frequent locations seem to be NY, DC, Boston, and LA (perhaps unsurprisingly), so I'm not sure how capturing that is of wider domestic and international salary information/trends for the industry.

Another question: I wonder how profitable these companies listed in the spreadsheet are, and how much their owners are making?

Journalism has never paid great. And a lot of jobs for those who weren't at the top of the heap weren't that great in other ways as well.

The stark contrast is with software jobs at a few companies in a few locales. But, in general, it's hardly surprising that journalists often end up in other, sometimes adjacent, jobs that value being able to deliver quality prose quickly.

I know a lot of people who have worked as journalists who work for tech companies in various roles.

As one of the founders of http://levels.fyi, it’s great to see transparency enter journalism. We’re working on some new tracks including media / publishing and hope to provide some nice visuals alongside some of the data.

One of the things that we do on our site is collect official offers anonymously, which we use to benchmark non-verified submissions. Might be interesting here too!

This links to the U.S. Department of Labor's prevailing wage database. Sort by geography, then job: https://flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx

This seems to be a direct link to "Reporters and Correspondents", for employment and wages through May 2018: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes273022.htm

For every 1 good journalist and editor that has their career stagnate because they are not sensational or biast (or bends the knee to management agendas), there 4 shitty journalists and editors that progress because they are masters of bullshit and manipulation.

The salary and cut throat competition is why the worst rise to the top and we have this cesspool of a news feed we see now on a daily basis. I just stick to WSJ, Bloomberg, and this website to get the headlines that actually matter and ignore the rest of the bullshit.

It's harsh, but it really just comes down to supply and demand. The barrier to entry is basically zilch, and lots of people want to do it. Same story with acting.

Frankly (and this is just my opinion here), a lot of reporting is just very low value. Analysis is shallow, or just plain wrong. I find that reporters are way too credulous, have limited quantitative faculties, and tend to start from a narrative and find facts to fit that narrative.

Talking about this reminds me of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, in which people read a news article about something they know a lot about and realize it's riddled with errors (and then promptly forget about it; I try to avoid that second bit). I so often read things that are either only part of the story or incorrect. Is it any surprise that there's limited value in reporting that can be inaccurate as often as it is accurate?

I don't think this will ever be "fixed". I just try to pay for news sources I like, and that's probably the best thing anyone can do (right now that's thecity.nyc and ProPublica. I also pay for WSJ and NYT, just because they get shared around so much and the paywalls annoy me).

And judging by how crappy content they produce they are overpaid ...

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