Analysis of compensation, level, and experience details of 19k tech workers

People keep saying this as if it’s an inherent property of unions but it simply isn’t true and the counter example is Hollywood where everyone from the hottest star to the lowliest extra are all in the union.

If you mean to other people/companies, yes. Hospitals are much more inclined to outsource to private radiology practices precisely because they're so expensive ($500k cash comp plus bonus seems the average for a couple years post-residency). Smaller and even mid-size hospitals can't keep a radiologist busy all the time, especially off-peak hours, so even with a retail markup it ends up being cheaper to outsource.

If you mean to AI/ML, those applications are incredibly specific, usually hit-or-miss depending on the model, and I'm not aware of any that are actually approved for clinical applications prior to a physician reading the study anyway (they may exist I'm just not aware of them).

You should do some research on how much mathematicians and theoretical physicists who actually do crazy feats of applied and/or pure math (as opposed to using some standard library sorting routine and calling that crazy feats of applied math) and put insane hours into incomprehensibly difficult problems get paid. (Granted, there’s seldom immediate effects on economy.) Then you’ll probably feel lucky.

This isn't mysterious: the legal profession is controlled by a corrupt guild engaged in regulatory capture, while engineering is more or less an entirely free labor market.

I guess they fall into the dumb-ass category of your binary classification of everyone as either software engineers or dumb-asses.

Well your lawyer isn’t running around telling everyone that what he does is easy and anyone can do it, he isn’t slagging off every other lawyer and telling you the contract needs to be totally rewritten in a very slightly different style every 6 months, he isn’t crowing about a lawyer shortage and calling for open borders to get foreign lawyers to make up the numbers...

Plumbers and electricians don’t do this either. In fact no one else is so eager to devalue their own work.

The general disempowerment of tech workers relative to lawyers, accountants, doctors, MBA’s and so on is 100% of tech’s own making.

Individual engineers tend not to do anything like that though. They work on tiny cogs that build up to a huge economic machine. No tiny cog is unimportant, but none of them have any real power either. Tiny cogs are replaceable.

An analogy would be suggesting people who design truck windshield wipers should earn millions because trucking is the basis of the retail and industrial economy, and without trucks everything who stop and we'd all starve. It might be true if you do a bit of mental gymnastics, but it's never going to change anything.

In the end, pain, especially financial, teaches; and its what helps people push themselves forward and up.

Bear in mind that the tradie who does the job is most likely not getting paid $90/hr. There's overheads and profit margins involved.

Why is it that these high $ software jobs in CA have not been outsourced to India?

It typically takes 4 years of undergrad + 3 years of law school + passing the bar exam to be a lawyer. If software engineers had to overcome similar hurdles to legally work in the industry, there would be significantly less of them.

Sounds like the definition of "something to prove."

True. An engineer can create much more value at a company with a thriving feature-driven business than at a stodgy low profit company.

>It's not just a matter of cranking more code faster. It's domain expertise, knowing what's hard and what's easy, what hard things are worth doing well,

A lot of that changes fast though - and the highest paying subfields of software seem to be new and/or fast-changing, e.g. web dev and ML, as opposed to say kernel programming). I don't think a person with 25 years of experience is like to have an advantage in things like domain expertise over someone with 15 years of experience in these sorts of fields, or what will be hard or easy in modern projects. The experience you gained 20 years ago is not going to be as valuable as the recent experience you gained in the past several years.

>how the social dynamics of teams help or hinder progress, and what's been tried before (both successfully and unsuccessfully).

Right, but this is getting into skills that are valuable in the management ladder, not the IC ladder. I doubt you'll see the same leveling off in pay at 15 years of experience when you look at engineers & engineering managers as a group.

The problem with bias is that it’s self-serving and lingers well past a first impression, like a compounding problem. Any bias exists to cognitively qualify a subjective decision in the absence of stronger criteria. The self-serving nature of bias is that it typically exists as a form of insulation filtering whereby things less like the person, or their proximity of comfort, are discarded for perceptions of compatibility.

Compatibility sounds important when building a team, however that factor is unmeasurable and often poorly defined in any existential capacity. Instead this is often an unspoken means of eliminating competition, diversity, and insecurity from a person(s) tasked to make a personnel decision without the soft skills to warrant such.

In my experience in the military you don’t need interpersonal compatibility, either real or perceived, to build an excellent team that cares for each other and achieves high performance.

Since the problems resulting from bias linger past a first impression the consequences of such are continuous. If, for example, bias is heavily present on a team a candidate who survives selection there will face frustrations moving forward when confronting or challenging the perceptions of the bias present. That person will be limited in career mobility internal to that organization.

> There are still plenty of places that must incentivize quality

That depends on who defines quality and how. At just about every place I have ever worked developers define quality in a way that is utterly foreign to business concerns or product quality at the end user. Without some highly specific written definition of quality I find it’s an excuse to reinforce like-minded opinions.

edit: alright, it was a bit snarky, but he’s basically advocating government intervention so can get more time off from work to run the household

I don't even understand how you could have seen that as an attempted refutation of statistical evidence, as opposed to my actual point, which is that I'm not going to quit tech because I know that I make way less than other people.

Do you understand that the only thing I'm calling out here is how drastic and irrational a complete exit is? That's my only problem with this. I wouldn't believe someone who cited a wage gap in tech as their primary reason for leaving, because it doesn't make sense!

It's one of the most comfortable and flexible middle-class careers you can have in the modern economy, and it's arguably the most lucrative when you account for barrier of entry.

It feels like you're framing my argument as "there is no sexism in tech" or "women shouldn't complain", when that isn't my stance at all.

To give an example: I spent almost two years making a hilarious $13k annually in Poland(where I'm from) while my employer was charging our US customers standard rates, so multiples of that.

When I switched jobs in 2015, my salary went up 2.5x.

This whole time I was making 40% of the market rate and nobody bothered to tell me.

Right. But you ARE going to get old and sick and someone else’s children are going to take care of you. You probably want them educated and doing stupid mistakes because they’re overworked.

I have a sense that Americans are just better at negotiating (taught to do it, and actually do it) than Brits. Anecdotally I know a whole bunch of people who could be earning a lot more (not only in software), but they have this sort of meekness that leads them to believe whatever number the other party says is what they have to take.

Individually that may not make up all of the difference, but collectively it probably does (e.g. the market depressing effect if most people don't bother).

This isn't 100% true, you never see the employers side of national insurance for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax