American programmer salaries are so far above the country average that complaining is just ridiculous.
In fact, you might even want to start a placement agency! On one side, you recruit young starry-eyed talent, and feed them a constant stream of images/rhetoric about how tough everyone but them has it, so their salary expectations stay low. On the other side, you hook them up with "Google, Apple, and others" who "generate enough revenue to pay people more" but are looking for bargains.
Everybody wins! (Except the developers.)
BTW, I am an employee and not a employer. I would certainly like to make more. But at some point (certainly at 150k) you just become an out of touch complainer if you're still unhappy with your wage.
Depending on where you are, 100k barely supports paying for a house to raise a family without a 60 minute each way commute. Many of the places that have very high paying programming jobs just so happen to also have astronomical costs of living. SF? Check. NYC? Check. If you know C++ stupidly well, I know a very high paying job in a relatively low cost of living city (Atlanta) working for a bank. Can they find enough people at those astronomical payouts? Nope. They're constantly looking, less than 1/100th of the applicants can even get through the programming test.
People are simply paid what they can get demand given their skills, inclination to negotiate, and a motivated company to hire.
Additionally speaking, many of the people who demand the 150-450k salaries have run their own businesses, have skills other than programming that are very valuable to the employer (I know my fees are justified due to lots more than my not inconsiderable programming ability), and could do considerably better than 100k out running a business.
If a corporation wants to keep them, they should pay them what it takes.
Or are you saying no one should ever make more than 100k, including brain surgeons and law partners? Cause they're whiners?
I'm saying if you make 100-150k a year, sitting on your ass, doing something you enjoy then perhaps you should feel pretty fortunate. Stop thinking about the few % above you and consider the vast population below you.
This isn't about average programmers. This is about this tiny pocket filled with overachievers who work stupidly long days for a jackpot and have a very high exposure to running their own businesses.
100k in silicon valley puts you in the top 47% of the people who live there, which means you're in the commute forever or live in a dinky house dialemma. (The average salary there is $96,299). It's one of the few cities in the world worse than where you live for housing, and housing there costs 2x as much for little places (rentals) and 1.4x for buying as Vancouver. How do you enjoy your 4 bedroom home? Oh wait, you can't even afford that where you live (most likely). Now imagine being able to afford 1/2 of what you DO have in housing.
So you live in vancouver, should we tell you to stop bitching at $54k?
Relative salary is important for purchasing some goods, namely housing. As a person who lives in a city almost as bad in that respect, I'm surprised you don't have a better feel for that.
(Note I keep saying "there" etc. I live in Atlanta, a much more reasonable cost city for businesses that don't need stupidly good people to really work).
Raising your threshold a little – to 150K! – doesn't fix the problem. If your work is worth 500K – generating more than that for someone else – and you're paid 150K, you're being cheated. You have the right to be angry, complain, point out the discrepancy to others, and vigorously pursue competitive alternatives.
Yes, this may appear ungrateful to those making do with far less. But their remote estimations aren't relevant to the intimate dyadic relationship between an employer and employed, where both fairness and efficiency require salaries to be set by negotiation over value delivered each direction. Let third-parties express their displeasure through progressive taxation schemes or the construction of alternative economic systems... not by telling developers to be happy with a lower share of their own output.
I was with you up until this point. You and the person paying you both agreed to the compensation you get. If you don't like it then you have no right to "be angry".
You can however try to renegotiate your compensation.
s/paid 150K/offered 150K/No really. They told us during salary reviews that "Financial Forecasts aren't looking good!" and "There's going to be another GFC and that's why you're only getting a $1K raise". That's when I decided to quit.
Then they made a big song and dance at a company event about how we'd made 13M in profit. Yeah, VERY convincing guys.
How much the janitor makes doesn't figure into the salary for a programmer, except as an indirect consequence.
The software industry is one of the few industries where a single person can create mountains of value all by themselves. Comparing software engineer salaries to janitor salaries makes no sense as janitors aren't creating multiples of their salary in value for their employer.
The best solution I can come up with is options/stock and salary... That way creating more value DOES help them get more income, subject to the vagaries of the stock market.
Unfortunately, as wonderful as it would be for everyone to receive their exact value in return as a percentage, that's HARD... It's hard to quantify and it's hard to justify.
If you're too lazy to cross the street than 100k probably is overpaid for you.
In Sacramento you could probably get away with being the only wage earner in your family too, because the cost of living is just cheaper. In Palo Alto there is simply no way that you could live comfortably on that money if you have a partner and child, unless your partner also works and makes a high income.
Now granted, at the end of the day you have live in Sacramento -- which is a cultural backwater, scores R+6 on the Cook PVI, and has 4 ultra-conservative talk radio stations -- to stretch your dollar like that. And it's questionable whether there are any jobs that would even pay so much for a similarly experienced engineer.
But the point is that you can't say whether $120k is too much or not enough until you consider all the costs incurred to make that salary.
Moreover, so what if people in Kansas or North Dakota have less purchasing power than me? I live in a place that is cosmopolitan, diverse and has a higher average IQ -- and there's a higher cost associated with living here. This is like telling someone who drives a Mercedes that he can't complain about his engine needing service because someone, somewhere else in the world, is driving a Ford.
Plus, everyone on all sides could be accused of whining, because the entire technology industry is well off compared to most people. When a VC complains about terms on a deal, you could ask, why are they whining when they're already well off?
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
Rent Per Month
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre 1,202.29 $ 2,433.33 $ +102.39 %
Apartment (1 bedroom) Outside of Centre 1,093.54 $ 1,500.00 $ +37.17 %
Apartment (3 bedrooms) in City Centre 2,660.64 $ 3,965.49 $ +49.04 %
Apartment (3 bedrooms) Outside of Centre 1,754.56 $ 2,692.00 $ +53.43 %
Buy Apartment Price
Price per Square Meter to Buy Apartment in City Centre 5,897.44 $ 8,250.00 $ +39.89 %
Price per Square Meter to Buy Apartment Outside of Centre 4,376.52 $ 6,000.00 $ +37.10 %The free enterprise system - the American way - is also about bringing down the price of goods. If you work, you just happen to be one of those goods.
I shall call this phenomenon occupational narcissism.
The only thing I can think of is "mother", but that's a cheeky answer.
When the idea behind a device is more like, "Here's how we're going to use magnets to align the polarization of water molecules in the body, measure those changes, and map those back to construct an accurate image of the inside of someone's body. Now program it for me.", the original inventor creates a whole lot more value than someone who says, "It's like Facebook for dogs. That uses PHP, right? Now program it for me."
Explain how any developer has done this recently.
We're hardwired to respect individual stories, not tales of aggregate success (affecting millions of lives in a small positive way)... which is why it's only when those small effects are made tangible by specific personal stories does it sink in.
This is why politicians talk about how the impacted the life of some small child or working mother, etc etc..
Maybe it means engineering isn't as valuable as we think. Or maybe it means engineers aren't as good at wielding their power.
I think it means more engineers do it for love of the work. And there's no gating body/cartel to protect it.
I make it my mission in my professional life to capture as much of that value as I can and do with it as I see fit. Which usually means spending it in productive ways with businesses that enrich the community.
I can definitely appreciate the work, as I'm a business owner. I know this kind of objectivity is a bit strange, but I have both employees and clients, so I see both sides of the table on a regular basis. I'm just calling it like I see it.
So if you could be getting more elsewhere, then the others who are splitting up the profits are getting more compensation than they created value - others who are getting far less than their market value aren't part of the negotiation, unless your employer is thinking of hiring them.
In short: If you're thinking of working in Finance, and your employer has no intention of hiring a starving programmer from another country, then you're underpaid. If your employer is looking into outsourcing, and you're not searching for jobs, you're overpaid.
Employers will only pay as much as it takes to keep you from leaving. At 150k a year the ratio of people who would be willing and capable of replacing you is pretty high.
The point is that if you don't take it, people above you do.
It's not returned to some global pool of good-will.
Salaries will affect the price of your service. That price is paid by everyone else who doesn't work for your company and passed along. You are taking a bigger share from everyone.
Neither is any more immoral than the other and neither captures more than their fair share of value.
But in reality, in any organization of sufficient size, you have a lot of people who don't actually do anything creative clamoring to capture that excess value generated by the people at the bottom (and at the top!). These are the people you are trying to push out, not the productive, well compensated people.
Suppose the toolmaker maintains these profits by keeping his thumb on the wood-seller who can barely support his family selling 80 cent pieces of wood. If the toolmaker paid the wood-seller $1 or $1.30, this would be more in line with what the wood is worth. The fairness of these price points can be argued.
Now we're back to considering whether engineers are underpaid!