Wow. I make less than $45/hr (salary with extra hours dragging it down further, but with benefits).
Edit for background: I have 9 years experience, an MSIS working at a financial company.
Edit for background: I have 9 years experience, an MSIS working at a financial company.
A recurring issue I've found is, "Jack the EE picked up programming in a week, why are you worth as much or more than him when you aren't even a 'real' engineer?" Substitute another field for EE based on industry. Software is simultaneously too easy for them to take seriously, and too hard for them to fathom its depths.
The company should definitely be paying more out of their pocket to employ good tech talent, but I'm not so certain whether it's good for society for all that created value to be given to the developer who happened to create it. I think there is a big value gap in how much developers can produce with relatively little labour compared to, say, a car mechanic - but I think that it might be best for everyone if a really big proportion of that value gap was sliced up and distributed more evenly across society in the form of social programs to benefit us all.
And since management teams in large companies tend to grow out of whichever departments are the primary domains, if software is always seen as tertiary then managers with software background are consistently absent or too few to clear up this confusion.
Just because an arbitrary person can learn how to do X, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a huge shortage of people who can competently X. The price paid for software development is a product of supply and demand, not how “special” software developers are.
Sometimes I think about becoming a mechanic. They make good money.
I definitely would not work at a dealer or chain. Being part of a small company or your own would be great. Not moving up wouldn't be a big deal in that kind of role.
On a side note, I'm confused why everyone is obsessed with moving up. Can't people just be happy where they are? I really don't see much difference in my company between the various levels, nor is it a very big promotion at 7%.
Software engineering and development field is extremely difficult. There are many opportunities in this field, because there are so few candidates that can do the work. HN is self selected group of people with experience in the field. But they are actually very few in number.
The average worker does not have in demand skills in tech sector.
Its not so much that the skills themselves are in demand, its the enormous experience that someone who can command that kind of fee has. The skill set you're talking about can be learned probably in a year or two of 8-5, M-F self-guided learning from Udemy / Coursera / YouTube, but its the experience of using those skills to build something of value that is driving that hourly rate, not so much the skills themselves.
If you feel I'm missing something here, please go into more depth, because I find this all quite fascinating. :)
$200/hr in the UK would put you in the top 1% of earners.
That roughly equates to $400,000 a year. Which may seem like a lot, until people actually see what the market rates are in west coast tech hubs.
Also, Mark Zuckerberg is worth $100 Billion, for creating basically a CRUD app in php.
In west coast tech hubs, that's about half of median salary alone. If you factor in bonus, stock options, etc. That's about 1/3 or 1/4 of total comp.
He may still be underpaid, but it's not apples/apples.