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Comment by mgolawala | Hacker News Reader

I think the point the OP is making is that the benefit of this efficiency gain is passed on to the technology teams that implement and maintain those intelligent inventory tracking systems. They are the ones getting paid the higher salaries. They are the ones making the the store workers more efficient.

What makes you feel that Software developer salary is linked to computing power? In fact, even if we were to consider it a fair comparison, computing power, if measured by Moore's law has doubled every 2 years. Software Engineer salaries have lagged far far behind.

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>What makes you feel that Software developer salary is linked to computing power? In fact, even if we were to consider it a fair comparison, computing power, if measured by Moore's law has doubled every 2 years. Software Engineer salaries have lagged far far behind.

Honestly, I don't think there is any relation between developer salary and computational power. I was just reaching for a possible explanation for this[1] that fits with the theory that people are paid based on their productivity. It is my belief that people are paid based off the supply and demand for their labor. Productivity only serves as a ceiling for compensation and even then, that is only in the long term. Plenty of people are paid more than their production either over the short term or when productivity is difficult to measure. An employer's natural inclination is to pay people as far below their level of production as possible while still filling the job.

It is my belief that the reason that low skill wages have stagnated is not because their efficiency has stagnated. It is because their supply is outpacing their demand. The supply of software developers is not keeping up with demand so their wages are increasing. Neither has anything to do with productivity in my opinion.

[1] - https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/5n4R_Osks_fVsVmedxJKsp9zPu...

That graph is not very well laid out; in order to see the effect it purports to show, you'd want to scale the SWE salary to all salaries to compare them; otherwise, you're just looking at "SWE is paid more than most occupations" → "SWE is still paid more than most occupations". Both clearly experienced growth, but did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally?

The SWE line in that graph grows by ~74%, and all other occupations by ~57%. So, the title seems probably correct, plus or minus the accuracy of my eyeball in reading those. But that's not how to present that…

(And also, the sin of not putting the Y axis min at 0, to exaggerate the effect.)

As a SWE myself, looking at the potential cost of housing if I ever decide to start a family, I'd mostly say SWE's wage growth hasn't kept pace. All other occupations are just getting hosed even harder. (My opinion here is that it's somewhat housing cost/supply: too little supply is driving the cost up, and wage increases are likely to just push that further. What is needed there is increases in the supply, moreso than wages, for housing specifically. For wages, I do think the minimum wage is too low, and has not kept pace. See also this graph: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/precariou... )

Housing, Healthcare and Education. Those three have eaten up a larger and larger chunk of people's paychecks over the years.

In regards to the cost of housing, I came across an adage a while back that has stuck with me, "Housing can either be affordable, or a great investment, not both". I think the real solution is a change in policy for housing to no longer be treated as a great investment. Not that I have high hopes of this ever coming about.

What would that look like? Would you disallow non-occupant ownership?

Build housing and keep on building until prices stop rising.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af...

> Like so many other global first-world cities, Tokyo is experiencing explosive population growth, increasing by 1.6 million people since 2000. And unlike practically every U.S. city, it has almost no empty land. So it has responded through vertical growth, tearing down old structures and replacing them with high rises at a pace light-years ahead of anywhere in modern America. As FT’s Tokyo bureau chief Robin Harding wrote in the article, the city had 142,417 housing starts in 2014, which was “more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).” Compare this, also, with the roughly 20,000 new residential units approved annually in New York City, the 23,500 units started in Los Angeles County, and the measly 5,000 homes constructed in 2015 throughout the entire Bay Area. > This has stabilized Tokyo’s housing prices, wrote Harding, and has kept them far lower than in many U.S. cities.

I am confused on why you don't consider that 2nd paragraph as an answer to the 1st. "Did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally?" It "grows by ~74%, and all other occupations by ~57%". So yes, SWE expeirenced more growth. By measuring the percentage change you are scaling the salaries to each other.

That's an outcome that I was only able to derive after giving the graph the benefit of the doubt, eyeballing some of the numeric data, and doing some calculations in IPython. But it isn't a result that I feel one can accurately derive from the visualization presented by the graph. (If both had increased by 50%, the shape of the graph would be very similar.)

It is not a contradiction to say the presentation doesn't help show the conclusion, and that the conclusion is (nonetheless) correct.

Fair enough, I guess I just think about things a little differently. I didn't feel the need to do any calculations. You can just eyeball it and see one went from roughly $600 to $900 and that is obviously a 50% increase and one went from a little above $1000 to a little above $1800 and that is obviously around a 80% increase. Those are all nice and easy to process numbers even if they aren't exact. There is a big enough gap in the results to be confident that whatever margin of error existed in my estimates it is clear that the developer salaries grew at a faster rate.

Within some constraints, the decision on how to distribute these excess productivity benefits is basically arbitrary. There is some minimum you need to pay people in order to get them to work. Once that’s done, you have some excess. You could distribute that to front-line workers. You could distribute it to the software teams, but you sure don’t have to. In practice, human nature being what it is, what will most likely happen - in the absence of specific government policies incentivizing other choices - is that management will distribute it to themselves and their shareholders.

We in the US once had a number of tax policies that were designed to disincentivize this kind of payout, and encourage companies to maintain full-time workforces with decent benefits, invest in R&D and facilities improvements etc. Other countries still have those policies. But we here in the US got rid of a lot of them. The result is that excess productivity benefits have been distributed in exactly the way you’d expect - with frankly alarming effects on our political stability.

SWE's don't have a union, so of course they're getting relatively hosed, too.

Though the disparity is somewhat justified in that the efficiency of software (neither in its running nor production) haw kept up with Moore's Law. In any case, owners and executives are funneling up the excess value created. It's there, you're just not getting it.

> they're getting relatively hosed

If by "hosed" you mean getting $120K salary right out of school, then I guess that's true. I'm just not sure I'd call that "getting hosed" though.

If you want to see what "getting hosed" means, go work as an SWE in Europe.

High US tech salaries are an ephemeral business problem that owners have not yet eliminated. Eventually they will.

If they haven't been able to do so in 20 years, I don't think this is a problem they particularly care about "solving".

Yeah, it always baffles me when people say things like that.

Yes, SWE's only get a piece of the pie but it's a pretty nice piece (Especially compared to everyone else). If you want more, go and bake your own pie.

Relatively. It's not based on what you can buy with it, it's based on what your company pulls in with your turning your cog.

My experience as a long-time SWE is that companies are willing to pay us upper-middle class (or better) salaries to do things that many of us would happily do for free in our spare time. The only “catch” is that we have to work on their problems instead of ones we pick.

If that’s “getting hosed”, I hope they never run out of water!!

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