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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

That's unnecessarily rude. Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years. The parallel still holds. Times will be hard relative to the recent peak, but compared to just about every other industry we'll still be pretty fat and happy.

I know that's pretty thin consolation for people who are struggling to find jobs while their classmates from one year before were the subject of bidding wars. It's not what I wanted to hear myself when I was struggling through the tech cull ten years before dot-com. But it's still true. If anyone washes out of the industry now it's probably not because of COVID-19.

OP is supposed to be a message of hope in dark times. Most people are more resilient than they realize. Software jobs will continue to increase over any time span longer than a year or two. We'll get through this. It's sad that so many here are trying to turn a positive message into a negative one.

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> Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years.

In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.

> In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.

Teaching/Academia isn't a real job and can be replaced with the internet

Teaching/academia being a job has nothing to do with the comment you replied to, and even if it were, I'm curious how would you replace academical research "with the internet"?

It baffles me that you can even write "academia isn't a real job" while the entire planet is desperately hoping for biomedical breakthroughs. Almost all of the people working on COVID have advanced degrees; many of them work in academic labs.

As for teaching, if you want to be intubated by someone who once a post about it on Medium, well...best of luck.

What places and professions are you talking about? I'm genuinely curious. I've worked with programmers outside the US and Europe, and my impression was that programming was still one of the "easier" ways (in terms of training and credentials) to reach the upper economic strata.

Even in the U.S. I’m not sure where this myth of SWE being the most well paid industry comes from. Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations. They all pay much better than 95% of all software engineering jobs. It’s also well known that to be an incredibly high paid SWE, you need to be at a large public tech company. That means you’re making a huge bet on their stock - the folks making bank there do so because their equity has appreciated massively. I think one reason for the pervasiveness of this myth is that engineers talk about the fact that they are paid well. Folks in other industries are much quieter about it.

Software is one of the best paid and fastest growing fields that doesn't require a post-graduate degree plus years of resident/associate toil before you pay off those student loans and start getting ahead. Finance might be even better, but not everyone has the stomach for it. There are a lot of very unpleasant people and attitudes to deal with. A lot of the worst tech-bro-ism comes from contact with finance.

> the folks making bank there do so because their equity has appreciated massively

That's not entirely true. The salary scale is way higher than other places. For example, just my salary at one of those companies is higher than my total comp at a company outside the circle, and I was well paid by any standard there.

> one reason for the pervasiveness of this myth

It's always possible to look up at people making even more, and feel like you're not paid well enough by comparison. But it's also worth considering the many times more people making less, compared to which we're very well paid indeed. For some of us, the empathy outweighs the envy.

I generally agree with you. But many people say that software engineering de facto pays the best without acknowledging other options. I also think opinions are colored by media and public opinion. I’ve met many, many investment bankers, and 98% of them are really nice people that I enjoy hanging out with. Fundamentally I think people need to examine their skill set and the work environment in which they thrive the most in order to pick a career that will be most fruitful with them.

The high-paying finance and big-law jobs are exceptionally competitive. You have to compare that to the pay at highly competitive jobs like at FANG, not just a bog-standard SWE job.

High-paying medical specializations take far more education than SWE does. You start your career at 30, not at 22 like SWEs do.

> Even in the U.S. I’m not sure where this myth of SWE being the most well paid industry comes from.

Because it basically is.

> Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations.

Selected finance jobs aren't an industry, neither is “medicine in certain specializations”, neither is big law (law as a whole is an industry).

> It’s also well known that to be an incredibly high paid SWE, you need to be at a large public tech company

To be incredibly highly paid within SWE, sure. SWE is still highly paid compared to the rest of the world outside of those firms, and an unusually accessible high-paying field, without any post-baccalaureate education requirement, or even a firm requirement for an in-field bachelor's degree.

Note that there are similar (and often much bigger) cliffs in other highly-paid industries (which your allusion to “big law” implicitly recognizes.)

> Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations. They all pay much better than 95% of all software engineering jobs.

But the stress levels and amount of hours you have to put in for both finance and law are exponentially higher than being a SWE. I honestly can't remember the last time I had to work 60-70 hour weeks, non-stop for months on end as a developer. The amount of stress in those industries also pales in comparison to the stress of being a SWE.

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