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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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.

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