Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

It's not obvious why it should be bimodal.

For law, it's pretty obvious. There's the partners at white shoe law firms and then there's everyone else--many of whom are doing personal injury law or scraping by doing routine wills, real estate, etc. Sure you have in-house corporate counsel and the like who are somewhere in the middle, but it's not hard to imagine why it's generally bimodal.

With programming/software engineering OTOH, yes you have outsized salaries at some big firms mostly in some high CoL areas, but it's a generally pretty well-paid field even if it does tail down for developers at non-tech companies in low CoL areas.

View on HN

Agreed - in law you can essentially get away with a single predictor for much money you make (given your level of experience): whether you work at a big law firm. This creates a natural bimodal distribution.

In tech there are far more factors:

  1. What industry you work in
  2. How big your company is
  3. Geography (this plays a much bigger role than in Law in my experience)
  4. How good you are at negotiating
  5. Equity luck
  6. What type of tech you do (front end vs backend vs ML etc)

Given this complexity, I'd be shocked if there is a bimodal distribution for devs.

> It's not obvious why it should be bimodal.

Software scales massively. Other industries do not.

You are simply paying for the cost of innovation. Whole categories of products created overnight. If you can afford it, it's best to get the best possible engineers onboard. Else your competitor will.

Anyone remembers BlackBerry?

That's not really an argument for being bimodal though. A bimodal distribution suggests that you either win the tournament with a FAANG or the startup lottery or you'll be scraping by with a generally low-paying job. And that doesn't really describe programming that I've seen.

> or you'll be scraping by with a generally low-paying job.

That's not what bimodal means, it just means there are two modes (i.e. peaks). It could equally well mean that the general case is pretty well paid, but there is a distinct peak of high earners (e.g. FAANG etc.)

The question we have to answer though is why there's no middle ground. It seems like we have a ton of middle grounds between 'ML engineer at Netflix in SV' and 'Frontend developer for H&R Block in KC.' I see three possible gradients in those descriptions alone: specialization, company and location.

With permanent remote at a bunch of companies becoming the norm, location will increasingly become less important.

I can foresee a talent grab happening in the next years where the best devs in KC all start working remotely at 2x what they are currently making.

> The question we have to answer though is why there's no middle ground.

Again, this isn't what bimodal (or multimodal in general) means. There can be lots of middle ground, it just doesn't end up with a single mode.

To turn this around the other way, is there a reason that we would imagine a unimodal or even normal distribution for salaries here? If so, why?

So, my understanding is that law firms have the structure they do in part because there are legal restrictions that say that law firms must be owned by lawyers, not just by any old group of shareholders. Ostensibly this is supposed to be about professional ethics. But so structurally, ownership is reserved for people who are at least in principle involved with doing the actual work of the firm.

I wonder how engineers would do with the same sort of structure? If tech firms had to be owned by people who actually participate in creating tech, how would that change us? And how would it change what we build?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com