Programmers Should Plan for Lower Pay?

Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time. We're talking weekends and night of trying out stuff, hacking stuff, reading, learning, etc. It's often an invisible investment, because it's a hobby and it doesn't feel like work.

In the end, programmers don't really need to dig that far to reach a point where they're good at building stuff using enough layers of knowledge to make what they do absolutely obscure to others.

Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property; but programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options, HTTP status codes, API interfaces, etc. It seems like highly advanced knowledge to be able to solve a health problem from a set of symptoms, but from the point of view of the layman, solving a computer problem from an error message is about as magic as it gets.

Wage is based on the opportunity cost of the uncaptured labor value incurred due to employment. For software engineering, this is acute since with the same skills needed for employment one can make a competing enterprise to their employer and capture all the value.

Other professions require you to have large capital to do so, so the opportunity cost is either non-existent if you cannot access that capital or further discounted by the financing cost/risk.

Your end SWE wage ends up being the value you would otherwise be able to capture discounted to the expected value w.r.t your risk.

Companies profit on employment by having a lower risk in enterprising, thus a better EV, than their employees in the same enterprise for a given number of reasons—brand, preexisting customer base, speed, proprietary market analytics, etc.

Of course, high salaries will attract more supply over time, which will put pressure back down on salaries. The current dynamic is SO out of whack though- there is a ton of slack in the system.

This isn't a boom/bust thing either. There is SO MUCH business value that could be had if there were programmers available to build the software. I don't think we're even scratching the surface of everything that could be profitably built yet. I think betting on a big bust in software engineer salaries would be a bad move.

Hell, I've worked with a lot of people on the US side of the pond who have experience or are educatied and they can't rub two keyboards together to ship a product.

My observation has been the opposite: no matter how much you offer, a lot of companies STILL cannot hire enough engineering talent.

I think the reason for high programmer salaries in the U.S. is due to:

1. Culture that values engineers

In Silicon Valley and in many tech companies, the culture is that high quality engineers are highly valued and respected, and thus command high salaries. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft were founded by ex-programmers / ex-CS majors, so they understand the value that high quality engineers bring to the table and are willing to pay for them. Whatsapp was bought for $20b and only had 50 employees, 70% of whom were engineers.

In non-tech companies where tech is seen merely as a cost center, programmers don't make that much (eg. fashion companies). For the record there's nothing wrong a non-tech company not wanting to pay top dollar for engineers, some random ecommerce store probably doesn't need world class engineers, just like a semiconductor manufacturer doesn't need the best graphic designers.

I'm not very familiar with the UK so I don't know firsthand why UK engineer salaries are so much lower than in the U.S., but if I were to guess I'd say it's largely because their culture just doesn't value engineering talent like in SV.

2. Tech companies have a lot of money.

The big tech companies have very high margins. Facebook's market cap is $20m/employee, profit is $684k/employee and has a profit margin over 40%. Apple's market cap is $9m/employee, revenue is $2m/employee, gross profit margin is 38%, and they have $245b in cash. Even unicorns that bleed money (eg. Uber) are flush with cheap capital from VCs, with Uber having raised $20b to date.

Looking at it from this metric, it would seem that engineers are underpaid relative to the value they create. Not only just engineers, but labor as a whole.

Most of the people that are smart enough to be good are likely to be either doing something more interesting, contributing more to society, or making even more money than you are willing to pay them to sit in a chair and write code.

It's not that most people aren't suitable. It's that most of the people that are suitable aren't available and thus you have to pay more money to compete to pay the ones that are to sit in a cubical and waste their life helping you sell more ads.

My advice is similar: live on your base salary, and save a lot of it, so you will be fine even if your bonuses/RSUs/options end up worth nothing.

In the worst case, you save up a lot of cash before programming compensation drops. But even if that doesn't happen, it's still better to build wealth, save for retirement, and perhaps have the ability to retire early if you choose to.

I think we do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis

Demand never stops (at least never did in the last 50 years). If some demand was met with programming supply it ends that specific demand, but creates new demands in return. AI won't change that btw.

Now if you excuse me, I have to copypaste stackoverflow answers into my code so I can sell that as senior architectural consultancy work...

You're trying to describe a problem in a way that can be easily interpreted by both an irrational human, and a computer, a creature of pure logic.

If you write for just the computer, you've got an un-maintainable mess. If you write for just the human, it doesn't work properly.

We really play up the importance of "computer science" skills when hiring software engineers because that's what's taught in schools, and it is the basic requirement to write a piece of software that at least works as intended.

But in reality, you need both. You need good human communication skills (personal and written) as well as an understanding of the computer.

And things are just getting more complicated. In the late 80s to mid 90s, there was a hell of a lot you could do with a single developer. Applications were simpler, you could write that single threaded application to run on a desktop, and it would be acceptable. One person hacking away in a dark room on a CRT could get the job done. The communication wasn't as important.

But now (and by 'now' I mean the last 15-20 years), most applications involve multiple servers communicating, almost anything involves at least a small team of developers, (and at bigger companies large teams of devs have been the case for a long time).

So the human communication is also becoming more important. You can't get away with hacking away at something and throwing it over the wall as much anymore. This is fine.

But the two skill-sets are diametrically opposed and people who can't do either type of communication eventually wash out. People who can do both of these things are incredibly rare, and our education system hasn't even explored what it takes to produce this type of person. (How many engineers have you worked with who couldn't write or spell to save their lives? Single letter variable names?)

Anecdotally, hiring someone competent is actually very difficult. You do a screen (to weed out the candidates who know absolutely nothing), and they come in and they still can't do basic stuff like recursion and loops. Or they can't explain what they did.

The idea that the amount of sacrifice you make will be proportional to the monetary reward you receive seems very phony to me (especially in terms of time spent not productivity achieved). It implies you'll have to enjoy the things you do less to become rich.

I'm also one of the founders of http://levels.fyi, a compensation transparency tool for software engineers where you can get an idea of market rates today at different levels / companies. Stock compensation is a huge part of software engineer wages which means as long as there is economic progress and growth, salaries will grow. Competition also plays in the favor of software engineers – as it is a very horizontally transferable skill (generally), it provides software engineers a ton of leverage, giving companies no choice but to pay market competitive wages for top talent in the industry.

And if you think you’re safe in Ukraine or Bulgaria give it 20 years until a bunch of Africans in nearly the same timezone come in and undercut you, too.

The industry is not immune to bubble effects nor to catastrophic meltdowns (WeWork was obviously a huge, recent cautionary tale and very likely not the last), but to pretend not to understand where the compensation comes from is either lazy, wilfully ignorant, or both.

Being employed as a professional programmer in any capacity is winning the first round of such tournament. The compensation spread between this and the next-best non-tech option has to be high enough to induce people to invest in learning the difficult skills and risk the ordeal-based hiring tournament.

Efficiency wages also come into play here. When wages are higher than what's necessary to clear the market, people struggle to find new jobs, which both reduces turnover and makes employees more willing to put in discretionary effort.

Some combination of the two is likely responsible for outsized wages in the field. Efficiency wages is probably more the case for entry-level FAANG salary, tournament for the large jump over the first couple major promotions.

If you look at skilled blue collar rates (eg plumber etc) the difference isn’t even that big when you consider barriers for entry.

Senior developers in those same cities make 90-150k at 40-50 hours a week.

The doctor, once established, also has the advantage of generally not needing to consider moving cities for career advancement or to do more interesting work. This type of security is also quite valuable.

When we look at eye popping salaries, they usually belong to senior+ engineers in top tech companies in selected geographies. I know far more programmers making just above average wages rather than 1% type level of income. And considering some of the points made by other comments, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they should be paid well.

Only those lucky enough to get most of their income via stock grants should prepare for most of that value evaporating in case of a market crash.

Think of it this way- if he's right, you've insulated yourself from catastrophe. If he's wrong, you have given yourself a trajectory for permanent independence from employment.

For people so good at optimization problems, this seems a no-brainer to me!

Even in the same FAANG-companies, I am aware that there are people doing the same roles at the same level (and even sometimes in the same team) in London (a city was equivalent living costs as SF) who are paid significantly less than their Silicon Valley based colleagues.

I.e. all things being equal (same employer, same job, same level, same teams), people in SV get significantly more than people in other major cities (and it is not just like an extra couple of thousand, it is often like $150-200k vs $300-350k etc). I knew of someone who simply moved from SV to London (same team, same manager, same role, same level etc - just an office location change) who told me they got a 60% pay cut - i.e. the only variable that changed was location, everything else was the same.

The explanation given for these "discrepancies" are that the lower salary outside of SV is due to "market rate", i.e. that there are not enough other companies in e.g. London competing for talent to support higher market rates, and that the FAANG pays "at the top of the market rate", so that is why salaries are lower in London despite living costs being the same as SanFran.

$150-200k is still a fairly respectable salary in London by the way (London average is approx £39K/$51K), but you still have a near-zero chance of buying a nice house on that salary (you might afford an apartment out in the outskirts that is 40-60 minutes away by train from the office in center of the city)

A lot of commentators here are talking about the profitability-to-the-company of a single dev, or the opportunity cost a dev is missing when taking a full-time position vs starting their own business. I think if that were true, there wouldn't be such a wild variance based entirely on location. The simple reality for me is that companies just pay the smallest amount they can get away with, and it just happens that in SV that needs to be high because there are a lot of competing companies looking for staff.

I.e. supply and demand.

I think the problem is that programming is more complicated than other jobs. Your value as a doctor is pretty much equal to the other doctor next door. That's not true for software developers.

One thing I noticed about open source software, is that most of the projects (even the big one) are mainly run by 1-2 guys. There can be a hundred contributors, but the heavy lifting is done by a single person or maybe a couple. This is different than say a hospital, where you can't have a single doctor doing all the heavy lifting.

Most software developers are paid shit (outside the USA and Silicon Valley) and are barely equivalent to other engineers or university educated folks.

> Consulting, investment banking, etc., are similar. Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice

Yes, because you open a consulting shop and work starts following. It has been mentioned here, before, that consulting in tech is more about building a reputation and managing clients than the technical skills. So not really that much different. If you are highly talented and have no network, you'll make exactly 0 as a consultant.

> but the combination of medical school and residency is still incredibly brutal compared to most jobs at places like Facebook and Google

What the OP misses is that Facebook/Google do not represent your average US engineer; let alone the average global one. Whether they are talented or lucky, they are the minority.

> big companies need to compete with programmers choosing to go off and start companies, which is harder to do in many fields.

Maybe they are going to startup route because the compensation for a skilled software developer is very low.

Writing software is like writing novels (not exactly but close). A few good writers are going to make most of the $$ while the rest are going to barely survive. My guess is that in the future will see more of this trend where you either go big or go home.

If google finds a way to run itself with 5k developers instead of 30k, that's a scary change

If on the other hand we develop tons of cool hands-on automation technologies that deliver lots of value but require programmer-like people to run them, that may sustain the labor demand for a while

there's an argument gap between 'AI is taking developer jobs unless you can do ML' and 'basic app development, even when non-fancy, is like pulling teeth and requires experts if you don't want to deliver crap that fails all the time'

I think we're still living in the 'basics are hard and require experts' world for 18-36 months and then the tooling fills in and starts to make magic easy

1. Wages are dictated by supply and demand.

2. Software has no formal entry requirements, anyone who can demonstrate competence can get hired as a software engineer.

3. The same set of traits make someone good at software development and other branches of STEM.

4. An increasing, if not already majority, of young STEM graduates are also more than familiar with software development. Many do it as part of their non-tech day-to-day jobs. They may not be able to start working as a software dev on Monday, but given a relatively short amount of time (a couple of months) to prepare, they can switch to software just fine.

5. Pay for software jobs is multiple times higher than other SEM jobs.

I do not see this situation as steady. Here is my speculation: If the wage gap persists, more and more STEM graduates would seek careers in software. This will increase the supply of labour in software and decrease it in the rest of STEM, until the wage gaps closes or at least shrinks significantly. At this point, the new wages for all STEM would be lower than current tech salaries but higher than current SEM salaries. Since the number of tech graduates is much lower than the number of all other graduates, the equilibrium point would be closer to current SEM salaries than current tech salaries.*

* Note: I don't know the statistics, but I presume that universities take roughly the same number of students in each STEM major. So a university may have approximately 100 graduates per year in each of software, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, ..., biology, physics, ... If for every 100 software graduates, there are 900 SEM graduates, and if only 10% of each SEM major's graduates decide to seek work in software, supply of labour in each SEM category would decrease by 10%, but for software it will increase by 90%. The effect on software salaries would thus be more steep. I acknowledge that this is a very simplified model, but I think it effectively demonstrates my point.

And now I'm in the situation, early 50's approaching, where I don't have a job lined up for the year, and am out there looking at the market again. I really, really don't like what I'm seeing - coders in their teens, making 1/3rd of what I used to make. Its really a saturated scene, so I'm thinking of other things I can do. Its long since past the point where I should've made myself wealthy by now - but long, long hours, over years, spent making wealth for others has really burned me out on the whole subject.

Nevertheless, I'll pick myself up after a bit of a break, and get back into it. I'll do what I always have done: look at the scene, determine what the new hot framework/language/environment is, learn it, use it, and get a job applying it towards other peoples wealth.

I probably should have been finishing my side projects in all these decades - and boy, do I have a lot of them. More than likely I wouldn't be in this situation now if I'd finished some of these things and brought them to market.

Its just so exhausting, making other people wealthy, you know? (Really: the works I've contributed to have made many, many millionaires over the years... I should be one of them by now. But hey, those high salaries sure paid for a lot of trinkets...)

A friend of mine works only with html and client-side js.

Another only with Java.

I currently work product but have worked with a whole host of languages.

Another friend of mine is an infrastructure engineer.

Another is a lawyer who codes.

We are all “programmers.” There is a lot to be said about why ”programmers” are well compensated, but let’s first discuss what it is that is being said.

What is the specific anxiety being voiced about what group? I’m assuming it’s software engineers. But then what is “well compensated”? I can’t reply to the author because of how vague it is, but, in summary - you should always plan for lower pay regardless of industry, but as long as you provide increasing value to a business, and are much better at it than other people, you will not see lower pay.

Alternately, going with the assumption the author is correct, I'll clip a phrase: the market can stay irrational longer than you.

On the other hand, I’ve been wondering the same thing for thirty years now.

I have been doing some semblance of programming since I was 8 years old (now 39). I think it’s one of those things you kind of have to have a passion for or you can easily get burned out.

But I also think it’s one of those things that are more in demand than ever. If I was laid off I’d have to question why I was working for the company in the first place and didn’t see it coming. There are quite literally 7-8 LinkedIn messages from recruiters almost daily. I’m not sure many attorneys or physicians can say that. And when you are in demand like that you’re constantly leveling up your salary every few years.

Finally, I know or very few professions where every 3-5 years you need to completely have learned something new to stay ahead of the game. When I was 8 I was doing q-basic. I’ve had to learn over 12 languages since then.

A software product can scale to hundreds of millions of customers with just a few employees (ex. WhatsApp). This increases revenue per employee.

Software companies have much higher margins compared to other industries. You can attribute this to network effects and stickiness from lack of easy data interop between different vendors. This limits competition that drive down margins.

Hardware engineers in chip design command decent salaries also from leverage but the ability for a company to switch vendors limits margins, unless you have IP like qualcomm.

The difference between a doctor, lawyer vs a programmer is that a programmer emerges from a computer science program in a "larval stage". Most fresh graduates have very little experience in knowing how to structure code at the level of a senior software engineer. There are years ahead to, maybe, get to the point of mastery.

The professional fields, in particular Doctors, require that the residency graduate is more or less fully "baked" and can perform their role without error. That the residency is grueling is just an artifact of the way the profession organizes itself. Personally I think it is dangerous to require doctors to run long shifts. It is almost more of a test of physical fortitude.

There is the full gamut of intelligence and diligence in the medical community, just as in the software engineering community. Does a grueling qualification versus lifelong learning in other areas make one profession more valuable or not, I don't think so. As others have stated, economics has more to do with supply and demand.

I've seen plenty of open source code, proprietary startup code, corporate code and it is usually shit - full of premature assumptions and legacy mess. It's because writing good lasting code is super difficult even for great engineers. Moreover, running platforms usually need to be constant maintainance which drives up the demand even more.

Developers have an innate ability to keep creating more work for themselves by increasing the complexity of the solutions that they produce. Managers are completely obvious to this.

The monopolistic and highly profitable nature of software companies allows managers to keep hiring more developers, who keep creating more unnecessary complexity which requires more developers to maintain... A vicious cycle. There is no limit as to how much complexity can be created. Most managers still believe that the best way to speed things up is to hire more developers.

In reality, the best way to speed things up is to reduce the number of developers and to hire better developers. The problem is that managers, even highly technical ones are not capable of knowing what a very good developer is. A technical person cannot accurately rank other technical people who are better than them; they can only rank others who are at or below their own skill levels.

There is an old saying that the top experts in any field are those who know when and how far to bend the rules. This is especially true when it comes to software development but 99% of technical managers will disagree with that statement; they still believe in blanket one-size-fits-all approaches.

The spectrum of talent is extremely broad, much broader than everyone realizes. IMO, even the most talented, most acclaimed CTOs and project managers will fit somewhere in the middle of the technical talent spectrum so they will miss a lot of talent.

High wage: The high wage problem is simple and is only around specific regions of the world, Silicon Valley pays more comparatively higher than the other parts of the world. The data showing the salary median $140K seems to not include the salary median for other regions which I'm assuming is around only $20K. So, based on this assumption the median salary for SWE all around the world might fall somewhere around $20K-80K.

Cost of knowledge acquisition: This is also specific to region, the average cost to graduate from an ivy league school costs about $100K-200K, however if you compare this data to the other regions the average cost should be < $20K. This also impacts the salary one makes, after having graduated.

Layoffs: This is something everyone is concerned about, irrespective of their region or place of work, however since the market size is very huge and there are lot of opportunities around the world, getting a job is not that hard.

I wonder which medical residency is she at? My wife is a resident at a pretty busy hospital in NY metro area. She is in her first year as well and doesn't do more than two night floats a week and no more than 60-65 hours a week. I also know so many other doctors (friends/acquaintances of my wife and via my ex-landlord who owns multiple family houses which he rents out these up-and-coming/current medical residents in NY metro area) and NO ONE works even close to 80 hours a week.

This is not to mention that it gets much better after the first year, and by the third year, you're only supervising most of the first years and simply studying for Step 3 (board) exam (if you haven't taken it by then).

I wonder if people tend to exaggerate when it comes tho how much time they spend for work because it makes them feel good/justifiable to the amount of income that they (eventually) receive. Having quit medical school after second year in my home country (SE Asia) and having seen my wife (then fiance) studying for Step 2 and 3 exams, I personally believe that medical studies mostly requires memorization (a LOT of it) and we would be surprised how little critical thinking skills and scientific knowledge (not recent ones they've memorized off the books, but I'm talking about things like physics, math and even chemistry) your average doctor has. They forget it all in a year or two after med school for sure (I can't possibly recall more than 206 bones that I learned in Anatomy in 2nd year!)

It is very hard to predict economic boom and bust cycles but even harder within industries and sectors.

STEM employment and mass layoffs are no exception. Those in the industry will remember the AI winter (over three decades even in sheltered academia and now going through a boom) and mass layoffs of programmers after the dot com crash.

The scar tissue extends further to those with memories of rocket scientists and engineers becoming New York cab drivers in the 1970s after the glut of engineers after JFKs call to put a man on the moon.

Key thing is adaptability. Only certainty in life is the compounded interest on your mortgage and bank loan.

Example article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/the-changi...

Other jobs don't scale like this and therefore there is a limit to how much a single person can make.

That said, I read an article last week that mentioned 70K CS graduates a year in the US, a figure that surprised me that it was so low. I think it is an open question what the value is ofa CS graduate degree is, but an undergraduate degree seems like a great start to a career in software.

Restrictions like HIPAA and such make it difficult to outsource labor on the software side.

It’s clear engineers are overpaid in the US relative to developer salaries in other wealthy countries. That makes me uneasy, but we got here without a well defined union or cartel to restrict inflow of labor.

These factors mean that business can create investment cases, and investment cases provide pay.

If (real) Moore's law vanished today I believe that there would be 5-10 years more innovation before the train stopped. But real Moore's law isn't over yet so I don't think people need to worry.

The big Valley companies who own the $$ firehose that is the ads business hire like crazy and pay top salary not because they need the talent -- most of what they're building with all this talent isn't adding to their bottom line -- but because they can't afford for that talent to go elsewhere and then compete with them.

From my perspective its always a mistake to think you're safe and things will never change. The perceived rarity of any skill set should trend down over time if possessing the skill is valuable.

It is a lot of work to become a good programmer. It's just that most programmers are naturally interested in it and do it in their spare time.

> Then you have to win the grades lottery

Err... grades aren't assigned randomly.

If you cannot use a resource efficiently at all, wasting most of it, then it is not surprising that you end up with a shortage. When faced with this situation, management can: 1) admit that they are the problem, and get much better at allocating programmer effort wisely, a task that will be very difficult even once it's well understood (which it currently isn't). Or... 2) hire more programmers, paying whatever is required to get more

That's a good advice regardless of your profession, the only good thing in this blog - rest was rubbish, to put it mildly.

Inventing new industries gets so crazy, we end up leaving things in legacy repos for decades. A complete normalization/standardization for the entire engineering spaces would be both wasteful and unnecessary (what, requiring everyone to know all of the industries and languages before they can get hired?)

Even if you get to the point of AI programmers who can replace people, you may run into a incentive problem because AI would have no use of money.

Also this line:

> Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice

Is a doozy and not at all how modern economies work.

I do agree with the general sentiment though. The mechanisms controlling supply and demand of SDEs are not well understood and it is much easier to imagine a shock to SDE supply/demand than doctor supply/demand or lawyer supply/demand. That being said, this would result in a reduction of employment rather than a reduction of wages for those lucky enough to continue being employed.

This person appears to be spending half of their income on charitable donations every year, though, which is admirable but not a smart financial decision. (They've spent one million dollars on it! A million! With a standard savings rate, just throwing that into a bank account would ensure that you could just live off of the interest from that for the rest of your life in some countries.)

I'm not saying that you should be a scrooge with your dollars, but there's a reasonable amount to give and there's an amount that (while great!) means you should expect consequences from it.

Even if you're making far below FAANG rates, just by living within your means you'll be able to have a year or two's worth of padding saved up (especially if you're willing to move to a less expensive area while the theoretical crash happens) in no time at all.

To post an anecdote from a Hacker News comment:

Saw this happen in Houston in 2014. Engineers that had started their careers just after the housing crisis bounced back were sitting cozy on their 150k/year (in Houston that's gobs) roles, not really putting much into savings because "there's always Wells to drill."

When prices dropped from 90$ to 44$ a barrel, I saw candidates do some pretty stupid shit. Nuked the [remainder] of their savings on a new f150 was a classic drama played out over 2 weeks that my whole team was involved trying to talk him down in. Others had to move in with their parents, take roles in deer Park that were something like 2.5hr commutes one way, drop everything for a Saudi role and move out there... Their freedom of choice was essentially yanked away.

The only one that seemed to be handling it well was a fresh 3 years in engineer. No girlfriend, kids, house, and buckets of savings. He moved to Vietnam and weathered the storm on a beach, taking tiny sips of his savings.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281509

If you're living within your means, you have nothing at all to worry about. It's really not that hard, and it'll save you a lot of stress when push comes to shove.

Edit: Changed a word because it came off too hostile. The line I changed is quoted by 'saagarjha below, if you're curious about what it originally said.

This was written before a Facebook engineer committed suicide in September: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death-was-....

The good ones, if they know their own value, get paid well.

I'm currently paid well. They went through 50 applicants before getting to me and now rely on me to keep multiple systems running smoothly that run a 100 million dollar company.

I do have a college education, but have been working on some sort of code almost every day since I was 13 years old (now I'm 40).

Many of the things I do for work are easy...mostly because I know the systems so well.

If you look at it from a value perspective the very best programmers are capable of generating an incredible amount. We’re dealing with a shortfall at least in part due to the rapid evolution of the industry, and the immaturity of the discipline.

I can see a future where there’s balance and incomes are lower but not in the near future.

It’s pretty simple. If programmers are easier for companies to find then pay would drop. If restrictions are applied making programmers more difficult to find such as limiting entry into the field like limiting H1B visas or requiring programmers to jump through the hoops of becoming a “licensed” programmer then pay would go up or stay the same. Nobody really cares how much “effort” is required to do your job.

productivity, supply/demand

Businesses can create and capture value faster with technology - they compete for the talent that will deliver that

People are paid well when what they do is in demand AND few people can (and want to) actually do it.

It's that simple.

Not that many people can be decent programmers. There's a matter of cognitive ability: quantitative i.e. IQ, but also probably probably qualitative in that it may take a particular mindset. There's also a matter of interest, which is probably why few women choose that career.

It's very likely that the next decade will be the decade of automation, with a boom in robotics and codification of most routine tasks. A shift to AR and speech based interfaces will also require much deeper expertise than hacking together CRUD apps.

If you get used to living on 1/2 of what you make, or 1/4 of what you make with a partner, you'll pretty much always be fine. Not having kids also helps.

Set the bar low, and plan for the worst. Planning for the worst is also a good practice in programming. :)

Every software project is bespoke at this point, custom made to fit the situation.

Also consider that the iPhone only came out in 2007. In 13 years smartphone penetration has reached billions of people. Which is a gigantic increase in the demand for software.

I think coding pays well because it requires constant learning. You might get off the ground with some technology, but you'd better be completely re-invented every 5 years or so.

We're not that far removed from active collusion between tech corporations to suppress wages and labor mobility.

There are ongoing efforts to pump up the labor supply to keep wages depressed; however software just doesn't scale, and throwing more mediocre labor at it doesn't produce positive results.

> Summary: we don't understand why programmers are paid so well

Who's "we"?

> Programmers are paid surprisingly well given how much work it is to become one

It's a lot of work to become a good software engineer, and also requires certain talents and traits that not everyone has (just like doctors and lawyers).

> When I compare it to how I started programming right out of college, making more money for 40hr weeks and no on-call, I feel embarrassed.

I think this type of sentiment is toxic among engineers. You shouldn't feel embarrassed for charging market rates for the work you do, in fact you should be proud of yourself for making a good living with honest intellectual labor.

> I think we should treat collapse as a real possibility

I see exactly zero reasons in this text justifying this conclusion.

> Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice

This is a simplistic and profoundly incorrect view of economics and world in general, this is not how the world works.

The market isn't the only reason you might be paid less in the future.

Seems pretty well understood to me: we generate a lot of value through the work we do.

So as long as there’s awful work, there will be a market for high paid software engineers.

Gonna use this gem next time my wife asks when my hair will grow back.

The article literally states several reasons programmers are paid so well yet states "What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well".

It's very similar to the arc of professional athletes, as the mental abilities needed for programming degrade at a comparable rate to physical abilities.

In addition to saving, unionize if and when you can.

I hate to be a gatekeeper, but do people not realize that teaching a bunch of people to code and being a constant advocate for the "everyone should learn to code" thing will eventually flood the market with supply and lower salaries across the board?

You've gotta have some self-interest. It's possible to be an advocate for education without cutting off your own feet...

[1]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/programmers-should-plan-for-lower-p...

Isn't it just Jevon's Paradox but applied to labor?

I hope he realizes his experience is also a rather privileged one. Many people, in particular women and black people, have a much different experience.

Within the law, everyone acknowledges that the market is bimodal. The top new graduates make salaries pretty comparable to entry-level FAANG: just under 200k base to start, going up to the 300+change base toward the end of the "associate" period (7-8 years in), with bonuses adding between 15k at the low end and 100k at the high end.[1] And that's all cash, not stock. (At that level, student the difference in student loan burdens seems like rounding error to me.)

Super-senior lawyers at those firms (partners) make significantly more, and probably more than anyone except ultra-ultra-superstar software engineers (like ML people at DeepMind) or moderately successful founders make.[2] Although this conceals a lot of difference, because very successful partners at the richest firms make quite successful founder/NBA money. But it's probably not worth considering those, because it's very hard to make partner at a biglaw firm.

Just focusing on the first 7-8 years of biglaw career that gets lawyers to that 3-400k level, the real question is: what % of new law graduates get that kind of job, compared with what % of new CS graduates can get FAANG-level jobs? And how much worse are the outcomes for the non-FAANG-level software engineers vs lawyers?

For lawyers, about 15%, give or take, are getting those biglaw jobs---very much concentrated in the top 20 schools or so (basically, you go to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc., you can walk into those jobs; further down the rankings you have to be in some top % of your class). And the median for the others is around 55kish, which is your small firms, your public service jobs (public defender, legal aid, prosecutor, etc.).[3]

What does this comparison look for CS grads? Are CS grads at non-top schools mostly getting 60k/year jobs churning out wordpress extensions or are they still making 6 figures?

Also, where do CS salaries even for FAANG folks top out? When you're ten years in, are you still getting what you got at 6 years in, for e.g.?

[1] https://abovethelaw.com/2018/11/biglaw-firm-announces-bonuse... (this is one firm, but the high-fi firms tend to be all fairly lockstep with one another)

[2] all partner mean in 2016: 877k; equity partners (the real partners) 1.1m---it's probably higher now. Median is a bit lower, however, and there are tons of outliers to drag those means up. https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/department/cdo...

[3] https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart-in-...

We really need an universal basic income (UBI) at some point, or there were will be billions of people but very few, livable wages jobs as the billionaires and potential trillionaires vacuum up an increasingly skewed power-law distribution of the new wealth created, while billions of people live in favelas.

See also: the TED talk on deep learning: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...