The Evolution of Developer Salaries: Looking Back 20 Years | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of Developer Salaries: Looking Back 20 Years

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102 pointsfagnerbrack173 comments

So from $62890 to $92610 in 18 years.

That is only a 4% increase per year.

I am surprised it is so little. I recently looked up some old receipts I paid in restaurants and cafes from 11 years ago. And then looked up the same items in the same cafes and restaurants now. The prices roughly doubled. So these increased by about 6% per year.

If developer salaries increased slower than inflation, why is it still so hard to find good freelance developers? Could the explanation be that the market has been flooded with people who call themselfes developers but hardly grasp what is going on under the hood? And just glue external code together until it kinda works?

> hardly grasp what is going on under the hood? And just glue external code together until it kinda works?

Wait, isn't this what all of us do? Do some folks really understand things?

I try to, but I guess it depends what you mean by “really understand” — I’m happy so long as I know about the product logic, but @pjc50 has said of themselves something along the lines of “full stack at every level from the transistor to the UI” or similar (I can’t find a link to the actual comment, they post too much for that).

Possibly this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191777

That certainly looks like the one I was thinking of, thank you.

I mean, I won't pretend I understand everything I do, but working in video games there's frequently no "external code" you can draw from, not even a Stack Overflow where you can ask questions. Over a year ago we got few prototype PS5 devkits dropped on our desks with some basic documentation available and were told to make it work - that's not something where you can ask for any help anywhere, because it's all NDA'ed and Sony engineers are extremely busy, so you just....have to figure stuff out by yourself.

Yes, I do.

Restaurant prices are not the only mark for inflation. Has inflation in the past 18 years been more than 4% per year on average?

It doesn't look impressive against the CPI.

According to the BLS calculator, $62,890 in 2003 is worth $90,538.76 in 2021.

So after adjusting for inflation, salaries have risen by all of 2%?

That's pretty depressing.

Depends on what you look at. Gold increased about 9% per year. The Nasdaq increased about 11% per year.

Neither of those represent inflation in consumer prices particularly well.

The price of a new washing machine (amortised maybe, I don't know), a litre of milk, a pair of jeans, a monthly phone/broadband bill or a tank of petrol would be more useful in tracking inflation.

Gold, copper, pork bellies, shipping, storage costs etc would be tracked in something like the Purchasing Managers Index.

Share prices are pretty much irrelevant since buying shares isn't really consumption.

> The price of a new washing machine (amortised maybe, I don't know), a litre of milk, a pair of jeans, a monthly phone/broadband bill or a tank of petrol would be more useful in tracking inflation.

That’s pocket change compared to the change in price for real estate, healthcare, education, childcare, taxes, and savings (assets for retirement and emergencies).

At least for where I want to live. If I made a budget 15 years ago of my purchases in the next 15 years, the total price for the total of those purchases increased at far more than US government CPI figures. I get more bang for buck for my TV, but that’s offset by the extra few hundred thousand dollars for land, healthcare, etc.

Of course. Depending on where you live, most of what you mentioned is probably included in the CPI calculation. Rent, health insurance, education and childcare are all included in Ireland's CPI in some form, for example.

I was trying to differentiate between increases in consumer prices (like the cost of a watch or running a car) and increases in cost/value of other stuff (like gold bullion or Tesla shares or whatever).

When I start eating gold and living in a Nasdaq, then that might matter as a measure of inflation.

This inflation calculator says the USA has had cumulative inflation of only 20%, not 100%, in the last 11 years; of 42% in the last 18 years; and of 48% in the last 20 years: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

I suspect your restaurant and café receipts are not representative of general price changes.

I suspect that website is not representative of general price changes. Maybe it looks at things that got easier to produce so they got cheaper via efficiency. They just don't sell cheaper because of inflation.

That's the elephant in the room with inflation measures (CPI CPIH RPI) the selection of the basket of goods can have a massive effect on the actual recorded rate - which may not be what the average person on the ground experiences.

Governments have incentives to use this to flatter the results or change inflation measures eg the UK and its switch to CPI from RPI for a lot of things.

Presumably there's a big difference in the level of inflation experienced based on income level as well: someone just scraping by is going to be much more exposed to food and rent inflation than a developer on $100k.

True, but the chosen measure is going to be the lowest inflation imaginable since it relates strongly the global price of goods instead of services cost.

Poor people actually can't escape service costs and pay for a lot more (seemingly) mandatory service costs that go away when you have enough money to stay away from them. I.e. the costs of not having a fridge at all vs being able to bulk shop at a warehouse are all massively higher.

In addition there's another complication - the BLS also makes (downward) adjustments for improvements in product quality over time to reflect that they have more value.

Things getting cheaper to produce via efficiency is (a negative) part of inflation. It's not a separate phenomenon.

They really aren't; I don't have concrete numbers, but most people agree that prices for restaurants and cafès have doubled since they introduced the Euro here. Even though officially it was illegal to do price hikes, many companies took the opportunity to do so, because while the new currency was worth 2x what the old one was, people still thought in the old currency's numbers. So 1.50 for a coffee or a beer stayed 1.50, after a little while people stopped trying to convert the value and just accepted the new normal.

I find that very difficult to believe. It flies in the face of everything I have been told about how the markets behave. If cafes double their prices and people's salaries don't double, people won't just get used to the new prices, they stop going to cafes. Such a price increase would capture the interest of economists and academics. I am sure papers and books will be written on it, as well as capturing the attention of the general public and the journalists and having lots of news segments and articles written about it. Could you please try to find some of these and share them with me. I do not know which country we are talking about and unless it is Ireland, I don't speak the language to search the internet on my own.

This is unfortunately another one of those cases where the “government” + sycophantic institutions are essentially and deliberately fudging the numbers to make people believe something other than what is really happening, in essence, essentially also committing fraud. In the case of inflation, one way the trick works is that the basket of goods and services that are used to calculate the inflation are not at all reflective of the lived experience of regular people, let alone of most people.

It’s not really all that different than the fraudulent way in which the intentionally deceptive unemployment rate is calculated that is pushed by all the governments’ sycophants. In the USA that process drops people from the calculation by simply assuming disinterest in employment if one has been unemployed for a certain time (yes, it’s intentionally deceptive and manipulative, largely to defraud and cheat the markets and countries that are honest about their unemployment rates).

ShadowStats has been tracking the real inflation rate for a few decades now since a major change was made to fudge the number. It should be pretty eye opening for some people.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

On a side note; it strikes me as a rather perplexing challenge that people seem to have a hard time adjusting their thinking to control for deceptive and manipulative practices, e.g., everyone who pays attention knows very well that the U.S. governments inflation numbers are literal fraud, yet they are the very number that drives so many aspects of everything. It’s like that meme scene in Idiocracy … “but fraudulent inflation rates are what the market craves” … “yes, but they’re causing illusion and deception to spread throughout the system that will cause collapse and ruin“ … * blank stare * “but fraudulent inflation rates is what the market craves”

Why don’t more people talk about this? The CPI is clearly broken. I’ve seen things stay the same price but get smaller in shrinkflation. Housing/rent prices go up 20% in a year but CPI barely budges. Do they just find 20% smaller houses every year? Just fixing the index would have a huge impact

Housing (and healthcare and education) will never be included in US inflation metrics because the inflation of those cost categories is a government priority. In particular the US gov wants homeowners to experience a consistent annual return on their investment, aka it wants housing to inflate. The CPI hides these issues and enables them to lie by omission, why would they change it?

You're attitude doesn't make sense when put into the context that housing inflation, as a whole, tracks inflation. It's only pockets of the country which experience high rates of housing inflation.

Even if you did include it, the numbers wouldn't change. For every Seattle or Denver experiencing heavy growth in the housing markets, there's a dozen Lafayettes experiencing slow/no growth.

Okay, so weight the costs by how many people experience them then. Oh! More people live in those big cities? Huh. And those cities are the only places with jobs that have experienced decent wage growth? Man.

I've found that most people in the economics space know how broken the CPI is, so it's boring. That's why no one talks about it. The reality is the CPI doesn't affect as much as people think, so there's little pressure to force its needed changes. And if you do ask people to change it, the factions that split in terms of what changes are desired leaves the "keep it the same" camp being the largest.

At a personal level, the CPI really isn't set up for cities. It is simply not considered in the CPI that housing would be such a big cost that would outweigh anything else. The "why" seems to be speculated by another poster, though I can't speak to that as I'm not deep enough into economics.

> Do they just find 20% smaller houses every year? Just fixing the index would have a huge impact

The opposite, people are in significantly larger and better equipped houses than they used to be.

I also think 20% is pretty steep outside of the most desirable areas in the US, which are akin to complaining about the pricing becoming unreasonable in your country club. The top end of the market shouldn't be used to track inflation, we should use the median.

Like most things, there are trade-offs involved.

Including X & Y may greatly skew the results higher or lower, but if the percentage of people purchasing X & Y are low, then they don't have much impact.

The CPI methodology isn't great, but it also isn't bad. Removing volatile sectors makes sense when trying to identify trends, but it doesn't make sense when those volatile sectors are a large component of consumer spend.

Since most of the data used by the CPI calculator is publicly available, it is possible for people to construct their own CPI metric and track it over time. This is helpful if you want to get an accurate indicator of the inflation you've experienced over time, or if you're wanting to push the narrative of higher/lower inflation over a period of time.

> The CPI methodology isn't great, but it also isn't bad.

It’s bad for any discussion involving wages since your earnings need to go up by more than CPI to tread water, in popular areas.

Wouldn't you expect roughly 50% of areas (population weighted I guess) to be "above average"?

Yes, but with widening income/wealth gaps, I would expect the popular areas to have a larger deviation from the mean.

The greater (lower) the degree of government involvement in the provision of a good or service the greater (lower) the price increases (decreases) over time, e.g., hospital and medical costs, college tuition, childcare with both large degrees of government funding/regulation and large price increases vs. software, electronics, toys, cars and clothing with both relatively less government funding/regulation and falling prices. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-5...

Let’s talk about housing. The median mortgage payment has been unchanged for decades, even though the median house is getting larger: https://images.app.goo.gl/5EpQSVaD12FvjK1XA. https://images.app.goo.gl/7ks5ssgZCWpu2Xf68

What’s happening with housing is the opposite of shrinkflation. There’s always been more or less desirable neighborhoods. When you see prices skyrocketing in a particular neighborhood, it’s because that neighborhood is moving up market. But house prices across the country as a whole aren’t going up. It’s just that Mountain View has become what Scarsdale used to be, and the current version of Mountain View—a boring nowhere suburb with housing prices to match—is somewhere in the Kansas City or Dallas suburbs.

Except for the fact that home prices in boring suburbs in Kansas City and Dallas have risen far more than the CPI indicates.

I take issue with this narrative of an "intentionally deceptive unemployment rate": the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes six different figured depending on who you want to count as 'unemployed': https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

> In the USA that process drops people from the calculation by simply assuming disinterest in employment if one has been unemployed for a certain time

No, it doesn't. You are dropped from unemployment benefits after a certain time, but from the headline unemployment rate [0] only when you stop actively searching for work.

[0] and even then, those “discouraged workers” remain in other unemployment measures published by BLS. (U-4 through U-6, just not the headline U-3 rate, or the even smaller U-1 and U-2 rates.)

I don't get why I should believe this one guy's numbers versus an experienced governments' bureau's calculations. Because it's all a conspiracy?

Anyone who was alive 20 years ago will tell you it's not a conspiracy. How much does health insurance cost now vs 20 years ago? Rent? A university degree? We can see the massive inflation with our own two eyes (and feel it in our wallets).

> How much does health insurance cost now vs 20 years ago? Rent? A university degree? We can see the massive inflation with our own two eyes (and feel it in our wallets).

People mention exactly these three things every single time they say "actually inflation is super super high". The fact that nothing else ever comes up is evidence that the bulk of things have not inflated at rates outpacing the government documentation.

These three things are getting very expensive very fast. That's bad. Policies can be put into place to limit this. This is not evidence that the government is full of liars and really inflation is at 20%.

Other things don't come up because these three are major expenses for most people, percentage-wise dwarfing the rest of their spending. I don't care that the price of steak is only up $5 /lb when I have to pay $3k more a month due to housing, insurance and education costs.

Well, that's your anecdote. My anecdote:

Health insurance went to zero. Back in 2001 there were copayments and my employer would deduct from my paycheck to purchase coverage.

Rent went to zero, or $266 if you count property tax. Back in 2001 my landlord made me pay $750 per month.

Education went to zero if you aren't fussy about your degree and aren't lazy. Dual-enrollment has become popular, letting students take college classes without paying. It's enough for a BA or BS degree. Suppose you insist on an engineering degree. Back in 2001 the cost was about $17,000 per year for me. Today it is about $16,000 per year for my son.

Meanwhile I'm paying about $48,000 per year for food, so I do care about that steak. Even the burger is $5 or $6 per pound, and the reasonable fish is $8 to $12 per pound.

You’re health insurance most definitely did not go to zero. It’s up thousands of percent. If your employers are eating that cost, they’re taking it out of your salary.

Your rent went to zero: complete BS or you’re in some kind of unique situation that applies to only you. Housing is one of the main drivers of inflation.

Your education claim is equally ridiculous. I also don’t believe you spend $4k a month on groceries (but zero for rent).

Well, those are my costs, as paid by me.

I suppose my employer could have given me a raise instead of deciding to fully pay for the health insurance. The line item on my paycheck is gone now, and I didn't take a pay cut to make that happen. Actually I got a big raise at the time. 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, getting health insurance required that I grant permission to deduct part of it from my paycheck. That's gone. Although in theory I have a high deductible now, my employer effectively cancels that by putting an equal amount into a health savings account.

My rent went to zero because I bought a house and fully paid for it. It is 3109 square feet on 0.39 acres. In other words, there is no mortgage anymore. I suppose repairs might be needed at some point.

The education is really what I paid. I attended Northeastern University and UMass Lowell long ago, which was about $17,000 per year. I have a kid in University of Central Florida now, paying $16,000 per year. I have multiple kids at Eastern Florida State College now, attending for almost nothing because tuition is paid under a dual-enrollment agreement by the local school district. Even books are covered. We just pay for a $40 parking permit and $10 per semester for wireless network access.

I spend $4k a month on groceries because I have a family of 14, I shop at Publix (a normal nice-quality supermarket), and I have a fondness for things like fish and less-typical fruit. That estimate is a couple years old, so it might be higher now.

So really I'm not feeling any inflation. Power is cheap (thanks FPL), water is cheap, I no longer have to pay a long-distance provider per-minute phone charges, and fuel is still cheap. I went from having a car loan at 7% to just buying my cars in cash. For less money, I get a car with more seats and more power. Capitalism does a really nice job of making life affordable.

Maybe I'm the inflation. I cost more, but you won't find me in the consumer price index.

Well you’re in a highly unusual situation. How much is your employer paying for health ins for you? How about your car and house insurance? Your property taxes?

It's my anecdote, which is every bit as valid as your anecdote.

I don't know or really care how much my employer pays for the health insurance. My pay went up, not down, when they started paying 100% of health insurance.

I skip most car and house insurance, getting it only for liability. I'll take a risk on the cars or house needing to be replaced. I pay $266 per month for property taxes.

The house is a nice upgrade too. Over the years I have gradually upgraded from living near a heroin dealer and hearing gunshots at night, to a really peaceful street near the beach.

I'm just not seeing the inflation.

Even if I look around town at the cheap apartments, those are affordable. They go for $800 to $1200 per month here, which is not much more than I was paying 20 years ago. They can go for half that in many locations, such as near Dayton, OH.

Compared to ten years ago:

My electric bill is 10x. My water bill is 6x-8x. I live in the same house and have the same consumption then and now.

My supermarket costs are 5x-7x.

So yes, real inflation has been pretty scary the last 10 years. On a silicon valley techie salary I can absorb these costs but it's still a huge increase.

Talking with some friends the other day about this topic, I projected the numbers for the next ten years if things were to continue on this path and the result would be that in ten years I won't be able to pay utilities + food on my salary. So presumably something will change or break, because that's not sustainable.

I can’t see how your electric rate (in terms of per unit usage) could have 10x’d in 10 years:

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/General.aspx?id=12057

If you weren’t mining BTC in 2011 and are now, well sure your bill could, which I admit is all you claimed.

> My supermarket costs are 5x-7x.

If the cost of your groceries doubles every ~2 years, you've got yourself a local problem. If this was caused by inflation, it would be the common experience of all Americans. And yet, the price of my groceries today is not noticably different than the price was two years ago.

Your supermarket costs are 5x? Mine are up like 10% over the last six years.

Around $200/mo a decade ago, now always over $1000/mo.

Also, in 1990 it was ~$140/mo. Inflation was quite gradual from 1990 to 2010, the last 10 years have been brutal.

You shouldn't. Shadowstats is a crank website, praying on people are already convinced that everything is more expensive than according to official numbers. They're the economics equivalent of homeopathy, anti-vaxers, 5G radiation truthers and sellers of homebew crypto-algos. I.e., they have a nice business and a good susceptible audience, but they're not providing you the Secret Information that the Authorities don't want you to know.

I don't know anything about Shadowstats, no opinion on that.

But the fact that prices have risen far faster than the official inflation numbers suggest is a trivially confirmable fact. Just look at what you paid for things years ago and now, compute percentage increase.

The fact that specific prices, or that prices in some spending categories have risen faster than the standard CPI is trivially conformable and trivially true. The contention that the general price level has increased faster than CPI is quite difficult to confirm or dispute.

Even on an individual level, it's not easy at all to built an accurate price index. Not many people have complete and accurate records of all their expenditures even from just the current month. Close to zero have them for several years, let alone decades. So they usually go by memory and cherry picking.

What is 'general price level', is there a formal definition for this?

> increased faster than CPI is quite difficult to confirm or dispute

There's nothing difficult about that. Take the cost of all necessites like utilities, food, clothing, transportation. Graph cost over time. Compute percentage change year to year. Observe that the increase is higher than officially reported inflation rate. None of these steps is difficult.

> Close to zero have them for several years, let alone decades. So they usually go by memory and cherry picking.

I have all my finances categorized in GNUCash back to the late 90s. Most of my friends seem to also have similar data, whether in quicken or elsewhere, so I doubt it's close to zero.

You don't save your credit card & bank statements for 7 years back like you're supposed to?

Even if you never spent any cash for 7 years, the full bank/cc records are insufficient to built a complete personal price index, because they don't list exactly what and how much you bought (unless you have some extraordinary bank/cc).

Can reconstruct from your bank records how many kWh electricity, gallons of gas, pounds of potatoes, cups of coffee, Gb of data or hours of video you consumed in 2015?

The value of my house has barely changed in the four years since I bought it. Grocery costs haven’t gone up noticeably either. Or gas. Or car payments. I live an hour outside DC, but there’s not a tech or finance job for miles.

Shadowstats is a crank website, and "eye opening" in the same way as anti-vaxers and 5G radiation truther websites are "eye opening" to a significant number of people without much expertise in the field.

Shadowstats are not "tracking the real inflation for a few decades", they're just adding about 3 to 4 %-points to the BLS inflation and peddling those numbers as a paid subscription. If you want to want to know the *shocking truth about the Real Inflation* accoding to shadowstats, save yourself the money and brain damage of reading conspiracy sites: just download the official inflation from BLS or FRED and add 3-4%-point every month.

The implication of these shadowstats "true inflation numbers" is that the US economy has been in constant depression since the 1980s or so. I'll leave the credibility of that up to the reader.

I am reading the graphs incorrectly or does ShadowStats claim inflation rate has been 10% per year for the past 24 years? That would mean prices are 1.1^20=10 times higher now that they were in 1996.

The CPI that the government tracks is as good as their unemployment rate. It's indicative (it should raise if inflation raises) but has nothing to do with reality. These numbers were twisted so that they do not look very bad. If you read that unemployment is at 30%, you'll be protesting.

The reality is, life got a lot better in the last decade. If you are measuring by that, prices are actually down (or did not increase that much). Today's iPhone would have been prohibitively expensive (if possible) and many houses did not have the amenities they have today (washing machine, cable, tech gadgets, etc...).

For another reference point, the "cost of life index"[0] in Germany went from 79,9 (in 2000) to 105,8 (in 2020), a 32% increase.

DESTATIS provide all the details of the calculations of this index and also how it changes over the years to adapt to the real cost of life (like everybody having a smartphone now but not in 1991).

[0]: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=pre...

Question: Should I be struggling to afford a 1000 sq ft house and maintain it? I want to get a bigger house but it feels like I’m getting priced out of the market right now. Fortunately I already have this small home which I used a loan from my retirement to put the 5% down payment on, paid off the loan and refinanced a couple of times, so I’m not struggling to pay for that, but it’s nowhere near big enough for my partner and I to both work remotely. It’s not in a super trendy area or new, actually near a bunch of seedy motels and pawn shops. I’m taking off work and crawling under my house to fix the furnace so I don’t blow through my savings. I don’t go out to eat often or much more than the occasional fast food or take extravagant vacations, usually just road trips to visit family or national parks. I have spent some money on replacing appliances and remodeling, but nowhere near a down payment on another house. I only bought this place because I was living in someone’s attic and it was getting old. I’ve been dev for 8 years, have always gotten stellar performance reviews, manage people, and get bonuses. Just feels off to me. Everyone else I know doing well has some kind of side hustle like managing properties. I myself was freelancing the past year in my free time trying to make some extra cash. True I’m doing better than many people and I am saving for my retirement, but it seems like a dev salary in this day and age should at least buy you a decent house. Everyone I know got a down payment from their parents. Is this normal? Where’s the money at?

>I want to get a bigger house but it feels like I’m getting priced out of the market right now.

LOL, come to Germany where you're by default priced out of buying any house period unless you get some sizable assistance from the bank of mom and dad.

>Everyone I know got a down payment from their parents. Is this normal?

It's normal if you've won the lottery of birth. If not, then, as someone else here said it, "get richer parents".

If there’s any Daddy Warbucks out there that wants to adopt a 30 year old son, please let me know.

This is depressing. For the last 15 years or so, when housing prices started accelerating rapidly in most of Anglosphere and much of the developed world, Germany was always touted as a country with sane and stable prices (with the exception of Munich, I remember). Then after the housing crash, things began to recover, and I'd heard Germany was still affordable, with the exception now of Berlin and Frankfurt, which were rising quickly.

But now I imagine all areas, even cities without a lot of tech and finance to push up prices, are becoming unaffordable to 80% of the millennial generation looking to buy their first home. Even in once low cost areas in former East Germany

Same thing is happening to once affordable 2nd and even 3rd tier cities in the US. Homes in my very low cost origin city in the Midwest are up almost 50% in just 7 years or so, and half that increase in the last year. And unlike cities where land is tight, there are farm fields in every direction, so unlimited room to grow. But something (lack of supply, money printing, immigration, low interest rates, massive price collusion, who knows?) is putting insane pressure on prices.

I feel the same way. I've been a dev for a few years now, make 150% of the median household income in my area by myself.

Even once I finish my student loan payments I will be in the same position as you. I live in a Medium cost of living area of a LCOL state.

All of my friends are doing okay even with way less personal income than myself, because of their parents money. I happened to come from a single parent home with no resources.

It's pretty damn clear to me that people of our generation can not expect "The American Dream" unless their parents give them a bunch of money or they become a very high income earner themselves.

In the US, in the states where we can make decent money, yes, it is normal. If middle class is defined as being able to afford a modest house/condo and retire at 65, yeah, this country is fucked.

My experience parallels yours for 20-40 house owning friends in the Pacific Northwest. People got help from parents, or got lucky with IPOs (a minority of us for sure), or have trust funds, or bought in when houses were less than $500k.

So much of the market is a combination of real estate investors, private equity and foreign investors. I know a bunch of boomers who basically own several properties, and just keep buying them up. One guy in LA owns several hundred now in his later years.

EDIT: Also obviously massive asset inflation due to QE Infinity, which has more or less fucked everybody who has cash or a low net worth.

Same observation here. Things are bifurcating into 1. a (mostly younger) underclass whose savings will never catch up with prices to the point where they can own real estate / stocks without help from parents, and 2. a (mostly older) capital class who own multiple, sometimes dozens of properties, robust 401(k)s and pensions, and use those assets as leverage to buy more and more assets. The middle class "family without help owning a single home they live comfortably in" is vanishing.

Same place right here.

I've been living WAY WAY below my means. I drive a 15 year old car, I live in a 1br apt (wife and I, 650 sqft). I've also been pushing forward in my career with as much zeal as I can muster. I'm also putting my wife through grad school (though she'll never make much, English degree - I'm just glad I can enable her to chase her passions) I don't have high other bills, currently have an iPhone 7 and don't plan to upgrade, my PC is 8 years old, etc.

I've managed to just this year save up the down payment for houses in my area... but it's kinda dumb, because I really can't afford a house (mortgage/higher utilities/repairs/etc). So I'm in limbo: I have a LOT of cash saved, that should be invested (especially now), but I might buy a house in 5 years so I keep it liquid.

I also want to say that I tied home ownership (or at least living in a house) to having children - I don't want the stress of bothering my neighbors on top of child stress. So I haven't started a family, and I don't see a path to starting one. I think I have been priced out of having a family and it makes me so so sad.

At least I'm a dev, my non-dev friends may as well not even bother getting up in the morning. They will never, ever, ever gain enough capital to be a owner. If their parents are broke, they'll die having only lived in apartments. This also makes me very sad.

I don't see prices going down. I guess I could move, and I am kind of planning a remote/low cost play after COVID is over and I can get an understanding of how stable remote work is. I'd hate to be stuck in the boonies of South Dakota looking for a dev job because things "went back to normal". Holding pattern forever.

> I also want to say that I tied home ownership (or at least living in a house) to having children - I don't want the stress of bothering my neighbors on top of child stress. So I haven't started a family, and I don't see a path to starting one. I think I have been priced out of having a family and it makes me so so sad.

I see this a lot. Generally I see it from people who were raised outside urban areas, with a very white-picket-fence lifestyle. It turns into a great deal of stress in people's lives and relationships, as they often literally cannot imagine having children without a detached single family house and a yard and so on. I've seen some of them take major financial risks to try and work up what feels like enough money, with depression resulting if doesn't work.

The people I know who grew up in urban apartments often have none of these hangups. They regard occasionally hearing your neighbor's children as a fact of life.

That's interesting! I actually grew up in single-parent household, have never lived in a house, and certainly have heard my neighbors children. Not urban, but suburban apartments. I guess I buck the trend (or maybe I'm reaching too high :-P )

I've even thought that, after infancy, apartment living is potentially BETTER for kids. Reasoning that there are more nearby friends and usually a playground or field to play in. I certainly had lots of fun with the neighborhood kids in the pool/large field/playground on the apartment grounds when I was young.

But, kids are noisy during quiet hours (before you can reasonably control them). I remember it being hard on my mom when my brother was young. Always 1/2 a step from eviction for noise complaints. I felt the stress as a child, I cannot imagine how hard it was on her. I don't want to do that...

I feel like human noises within your apartment should not be cause for eviction. If other people can listen to you, then the apartment is substandard and your privacy is at risk. Those walls are supposed to protect you from having neighbors casually spy on you.

Now, it'd be different if you were experimenting with a pulse detonation wave engine. That would be worthy of eviction.

> I've even thought that, after infancy, apartment living is potentially BETTER for kids. Reasoning that there are more nearby friends and usually a playground or field to play in.

IME, nearby and safe playgrounds and fields are more common in suburban developments with single family homes than apartment complexes, either in urban areas or even in the same suburbs.

Only comment is that keeping your money in cash instead of invested for a 5 year horizon isn't wise. Put them in something on the safer side - I'm not saying buy Bitcoin or something - but that's a long time to have your money not be working for you at all. Interest rates at way below inflation.

Please see a good financial professional (not a bank employee). You don't need to struggle through this alone.

Any FP worth their salt should be able to make you significantly more than you pay them. And they will help you set your financial goals and reach them.

My mom is an FP and she would sort you right out. That stress and uncertainty would be gone.

Answer: Yes, but it depends.

I have basically double the size of your house as living house, a guest house that is about 800sq ft and a big ass barn. I could afford it pretty easily but it needs a bit of renovations.

Also, I live about 45 min drive from the nearest city with a population of about 12k. I basically live in the middle of nowhere but with a big house.

I work remotely so I can live here, which a lot of people today struggle with. The trick is to live where no one else lives. In my country there is a massive urbanization going on and living in our capital where I am from is very expensive. A 3 bedroom apartment would cost more than my farm.

I don't know if you should be struggling, but I guess everyone kinda is. Everywhere I look there is people that seemingly have huge amounts of cash but what you need to know is that basically everyone sucks at money. Most of the western lifestyle is provided thanks to loans.

This talk changed my life for the better when it comes to economics and I recommend it to everyone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Li_sFNc4Q

I sold my new car, bought an old volvo from -97 and I save about 60% of my income. That is helping a lot so I can afford to renovate the house. What you need to do is simply to live for much less than you earn, that way you will for sure end up financially secured.

Leave the Bay Area, you'll afford a large house and car just fine.

Quote: "In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely. Take for example the role of Web Developers when it comes to building websites. With popular CMS tools like WordPress and Squarespace, almost anyone can build a website for their business, reducing the need for people who know “just a little bit of front end web development”. "

Yeah, not gonna happen. Low level code, if anything, is going to become even more popular with the current explosion of IoT. You have this 4th generation becoming in full swing (1st was mainframes in 50's/60's, 2nd was PC in 70's/80', 3rd was web/mobile in 90's to 10's, and now Arduino/Raspberry/MicroBIT for IoT) and I swear is the same stuff under new hood. Plenty of people want fully integrated stuff and blings around them, which means in next decade IoT is going to be what smartphones started from 2008 to 2015.

Second - Sure mom and pop can do basic stuff in Wordpress, but once they want something unique guess what? PHP developer to the rescue to adjust their Wordpress site. So no, if anything, it's going the opposite direction, more code, more software. So the <need for people who know “just a little bit of front end web development”> is going to be shifted to mom and pop and that's all...at best.

I think "low level" here means "low skill level", not the programming definition [0]

0 - low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture

I would like to see some concrete examples of what is meant by low skill level "programmer" work. In my opinion, programmer, developer and engineer mean the same thing. Is there a market for "Hello, world" that I am not aware of?

Simple CRUD websites maybe, adding simple things to e.g. wordpress deployments.

I think of “an Excel workbook” as being an actual workable example of the pattern.

I think that gives a lot of solace that it’s not going to collapse the market for devs.

IoT is dead in the water right now because of the same reasons smartphones did not take off until iPhone. The dataplans suck. Steve Jobs insisted on unlimited data for a flat fee. If you go look at the M2M offerings for most data providers you will see they do not list prices. That is for a reason. I personally saw many of the actual prices. The ranged from 'not bad' to 'you got them to agree to that?!'

You can piggy back on customers networks to a point on 'home automation'. Everyone is trying to be the next modbus/zigbee on that one but charge a monthly fee for the privilege of using their protocol, or even better their service. The integration between services is kinda crap and the ecosystem is very shaky with no clear winners.

Bespoke systems are doing 'ok' but again no clear winners yet. Most seem to be setting themselves up to be bought out by some bigger player instead of shipping good product.

What we found with IoT was it was not the software or hardware. We had that 15+ years ago. The problem is integration and maintenance and connectivity. The integration phase you can see sales cycles of 2-3 years. Maintenance ongoing cost no one really wants to pay for. Connectivity is at the mercy of someone elses price plans.

I think the issue is that IoT is not really broadly useful for normal people.

IoT devices have been a big thing in the manufacturing/industrial sector for a while now, because collecting telemetry on equipment is extremely valuable. The growth in ML has been a huge value-add in the sector.

I can't really see the value in IoT devices for the consumer market. There are niche applications which may appeal to a small group, for example security systems or climate control. But, for the most part, there's really no obvious "killer app" for consumer IoT devices. The few ideas with potential are already getting integrated into the iOS ecosystem (health monitors).

Agreed. I'm working on an IoT platform and there is a lot of interest from big industrial players (energy sector, manufacturing, fleet managers of all sorts). IoT can help companies save money either through analytics or reduced need for labour, but I don't see too much value added to regular people.

The data plan certainly doesn't help but the fact most IoT devices actively put time and money into providing anti-features like demanding an unnecessary connection for basic functionality, an unpredictable sunset period of 'whenever we go out of business, get bought up, or just feel like it', needless privacy issues, and needless vulnerability to hacking and viruses and expect people to pay more for it including recurring charges? Using ubiquitous computing to turn their devices into dumb terminals which must defer the home server?

It is downright stupid runaway greed run amok while viewing themselves as entitled to customers - they couldn't make their contempt for their customers clearer if they had put photos of themselves flipping the bird twice to the customers on every box and giving making every product name a combination of three to five randomly chosen swears and insults.

If they actually started with an appliance and asked "what features would a customer find useful" instead of "what can we charge them for and put behind a pay-gate" then we would have something worth considering. Washer/dryer unit which can text or email you when your load is done and can be programmed in sequence? Great. Smart locks for changing entry codes remotely and phone communication with an app? It is actually made for its niche.

Instead their strategy is like including a remote triggered bomb in every product and then wondering why people rarely buy their stuff.

Most IoT devices do not need Internet for the home automation features that actually provide value to users. They need a LAN connection at most. They say they need Internet but it's typically just used for exfiltrating user's personal data and analytics, and as you say for implementing needless payment gates and remote-triggered bombs.

You hit my sentiment on that perfectly.

I am currently going through something similar on some open source software. Basically the people who run the project are 'done'. But it depends on other services and those people are 'done' too. They got tired of the endless support requests with little recompense. So they bailed out. Yet from my 'customer' point of view now something I used no longer works correctly and no amount of money will fix that. So now I have to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out something that works for me for something that 'worked'. This is the situation many of these companies leave other people and companies in.

Fail usable is what IoT should be. Instead it seems to be just 'fail and you are out of luck'.

CMS replaced the guy who turned your .doc into HTML (this used to be a job). Many of these people became LAMP CMF specialists. That transition was at least a decade ago. Sysadmin roles have been under the most pressure since.

> So no, if anything, it's going the opposite direction, more code, more software.

That's the paradox, the more we automate, the more work we have to do. All because of scope creep.

This is good to hear, and I've felt that a lot of people are underestimating the IoT explosion that is to come. The automotive industry is just finally on the cusp of it. Buy a new high end appliance, and you can probably connect it to a network. Everyone loves "smart home" accessories. I think demand is going to sky rocket.

Why would I want to buy a fridge in 2021 with 2018-era tablet embedded and expect to use that fridge in 2035 with who knows what WiFi standard changes in between?

I’d pay extra to not have a tablet embedded in an appliance.

Yeah, I'm not saying I personally want that either. I prefer dumb appliances with less to go wrong, but the industry seems to be going that way?

At least the freelance rates of today are about the same value as in the early 2000's, for the typical enterprise job.

I used to work as a freelance around 5 years ago, and I still receive some recruiter emails with occasional mention of the going rates.

It's the same as 5 years ago or less, which is the same since I remember in the early 2000's.

The rates took a hit with the 2008 crisis and stagnated since then. I think the golden age was somewhere in the mid-90s, where developers got paid really well.

I stopped contracting in 2001 (in the UK) and the rates I was charging then don't look much different to what is on offer today. It doesn't help that the UK tax authorities have been waging war against contractors, their latest wheeze is to force them into being employees.

The rates are heavily dependent on the skillset. I.e. for people well-versed in the latest and "greatest" tech, it's typically 500-600 pounds per day, for everyone else it's 300-500.

That's what it's been for at least the last 8 years (when I started contracting). For sure you can earn more if niche down, but for a generic 'mid-senior level dev turned contractor' those are the going rates.

That isn't much different from what I remember in 2001. SAP was in demand and people were billing £750 per day for that, even ordinary stuff was at least £300 per day.

As a dev based in EU, in any year I was at around 50% of the expected American level. The healthcare and social systems are so underfunded and overloaded in most of the EU countries that in case of any health or life problems I expect to receive "American-style" support (ie. ending up on the street, with bills and debt collection hounding me). Why even bother being employed?

I don't know where in the EU you are but I live in Germany and had to have cancer treatment a few years ago & got outstanding care for no cost. Also having two children the amount of support we (and everyone who has kids) get from the state here is excellent.

This will last at most only 5-10 years more [1]. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Greece are brain-drained to the bone already. There is noone to come over.

[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/

I've worked at tech companies since we moved here in 2013 and at least for developers most of the "imported talent" were from non-EU former Soviet countries (Russia, Ukraine, etc), India or Latin America.

This might be a fair assumption from a birth statistics viewpoint, but completely misses immigration.

I met a lot of brilliant people from all over the world during my undergrad at TU Munich; many of them stayed. Google, Apple, Microsoft have expanded rather aggressively over the past years, and the startup scene is growing. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt seem to follow suit.

Granted, it's much less likely (and also less politically incentivized) to become a "millionaire employee", but I guess ultimately, the correlation between wealth and wellbeing is simply weaker in (northern) European economies? As long as immigration policies don't change (and why would they? the current model aligns well with lobby incentives), I don't see much reason for this to change.

Also, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, and Greece have a different political and economic history than Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, etc.

Holy shit, I knew from anecdotal evidences that young people from Spain and Italy were "fleeing" their country but the demographics are frankly scary !

I don't know how what the retirement scheme is implemented over there, but if it is generational (young gens pays for older gens) they willy have a BIG problem in 15/20 years ...

The population pyramids of Germany, Spain, Italy are interestingly similar while the economies of the latter two are in deep problems. Retirement age in Germany is 67, wait for it. Putting aside the tabloid hysteria I dare to presume that this was one of the main reasons of Brexit. The entire Europe will hiccup.

This is huge exaggeration and generalization. Some parts of EU are doing very well economically and have very quality of life. Cherry-picking specific countries does not represent the totality.

I live in the Netherlands and I pay nearly 150 / month in health insurance, my employer pays another heap, and on top of that I have a mandatory minimal deductible, medication that isn't on a list gets billed extra, and a lot of things are not covered by default (like glasses, physical therapy) or have a max coverage (like dental work).

The total spending on health care in the Netherlands in 2019 was €510 per person per month[1]. That need to be paid in somehow.

[1] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/24/zorguitgaven-stegen-...

I pay a lot more than you, but I'm ok with it cause it's a % of my wage and it means people much poorer than me get free/cheap healthcare. I'm not familiar with what is covered in the Netherland but here the normal public insurance really does cover a lot.

Not just poor people. Kids are insured by the ZVW premie which the employers pay for everyone. They are subscribed on one of the parents insurance but for the basic insurance this is free. Additional insurance can cost money for kids.

That's true! And when my wife was home when they were babies all 4 of us were insured on my contribution alone.

> nearly 150 / month in health insurance, my employer pays another heap

This contribution is in line with public health insurance in Poland, which in practice doesn't cover any services and is completely disfunctional. German one which actually delivers is twice as much.

> I pay nearly 150 / month in health insurance, my employer pays another heap

Not to digress too much, but it’s worth pointing out that it is you who is paying for both parts, even if only half of it gets listed on your salary slip.

Yes! this cannot be highlighted enough. It is scandalous that this is not listed on salary slips, this is an invisible tax and it makes people think insurance and health care have little cost.

The same thing is done with Social Security and Medicare in the US. I hate it when governments try to obfuscate things like this.

in the US, the employer also pays a share of the employment tax (split in 2 between employer and employee) and doesn't always show you the true cost of benefits... all of these should appear and employee should be able negotiate the complete package (wishful thinking...).

I'm sure many countries do the same. See https://entreprise.pole-emploi.fr/cout-salarie/ for the true costs in France...

Yup. My first time being in a leadership position I pushed to get better health insurance and to have my company pay for more of it. The CEO said something to the effect of, "This will be a 2% raise for our employees" which was true but not how I or probably any of the employees would have looked at it.

No, it's wrong: the employer is paying. The same goes for personal VS corporate taxes.

They apply financial pressures on different spots. Unsurprisingly, they have different effects on increasing o decreasing inequality.

No matter where you decide to draw the line that delineates which part of health insurance is paid by you vs. by employer - the amount of money that employer parted with, the amount of money in your pocket and the amount of money in healthcare budget remain the same.

There are two "sliders" - net salary, gross salary, then the total cost of the salary to the employer on top of the gross salary. One starting a job negotiates the gross salary. In EU positioning of these two "sliders" varies widely from country to country and one could rarely have mistaken impression that the contributions and deductions are low.

...but various balances of power change greatly.

I can't tell if you're bragging or complaining.

But compare to the US: I pay over $2200/month in health insurance (and company pays more on top of that). And of course there's a lot of stuff the insurance won't cover so it's typically an additional 4K-8K out of pocket on an average year.

Yeah, people really underestimate how good a deal they get from government programs.

When I was studying in Austria there were still tuitions for universities (it was later made free) but they were just 350€ per semester and people were complaining about having to pay for their education - I had to laugh/facepalm because that was such an insignificant amount of money compared to what students pay in places where the government doesn't automatically pay the lionshare of their tuition for them.

I'm sorry but you're exaggerating quite a lot. Were are you based? In France this is definitely not the case. Public care works and is efficient enough.

Poland.

I wouldn't say france works and is efficient enough. You can see the covid crisis as a revelatory of what doctors and hospital are going trough in france. underfunded, directed by people from business schools looking at profitability (less beds, merging services between hospitals, promoting their buddies/network, hiring people to recreate company-like hierarchy where you undermine anyone that is not in your team) the goal of the current government is to cut everything that they can and obviously they would love to have less public hospitals.

Not even talking about the building renovations that are near impossible, the medical devices that will never be next-gen and the idea of counting beds rather than patients.

Yes it works. it is not efficient. And it is putting immense pressure on doctors that are underpaid, underappreciated by management.

I can see where it is going and I think we will be very sad. They want all the bad sides of the american model + the bad sides of the french model. None of the good ones. And then on their business model and powerpoint the picture will look amazing. Just like any BS company tweaking their financials to look great.

Where the hell do you live in the EU. I had to go to the hospital several times in the last 2 years and the level of care I received in public hospitals(for absolutely free) was great, wouldn't say a bad word for it. My father has been treated for cancer for over 8 years, medicines, operations, hospital stays - all provided without any delay.

I'm sorry if you have been wronged by public healthcare at some point, but you're just talking nonsense for the sake of it I feel.

The experience is nothing like this in Poland. One still pays the contributions.

I am talking of Poland, I'm Polish myself. My father has been treated at oncological hospitals in few different places and the experience has been very good.

We must be living in two different Polands. Me and many acquaintances of mine don't even have GP doctor assigned from public health insurance, that's how hopeless is dealing with them. Nowadays the waiting times are as hopeless as always plus there are exclusively phone consultations. The doctor calls whenever they please and the appointment is void if noone answers.

Perhaps your father is a politician, or high ranking person in public administration or public services? I cannot imagine how otherwise one could be satisfied from the healthcare services.

>>Perhaps your father is a politician, or high ranking person in public administration or public services?

Lol, what? I mean, I guess you're trying to imply he got some special treatment, but I assure you he didn't, and neither did I when I needed help. He was a truck driver and then ran a car workshop, then when he got cancer he was under constant care of the oncological hospital in Warsaw. Not only his level of care was very good, the drugs he was getting from NFZ for free are incredibly expensive(look up the cost of Glivec treatment), he was even getting reimbursed for travel to the hospital every time he needed to go - that's all standard NFZ procedure, no VIP treatment.

I mean, perhaps you were just unlucky? I have no other explanation.

If it's anything like the UK, the hospital experience, and life expectancy, will vary a lot between regions.

I do t think you’ve ever experienced the brutal reality of living in the US: barely any employment insurance compared to the EU, two weeks notice before you lose your job only, just an ambulance ride and seeing an MD in the ER is a few thousand dollars before they even start treating you, getting cancer also means hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills (good luck without insurance), 0 days a year vacation prescribed by law, to only pick a few. Oh and free or nearly free education all the way to a masters degree at least. Not to mention other public services like mass transit. Or life expectancy. You’re better off in Europe.

Pretty much none of this comment is true besides maybe the mass transit thing, which again depends where you live, if you're a dev in the US (as the OP you responded to said is their profession). This almost strikes me as a Reddit-comment-style parody, so maybe I was whooshed.

I get all of what the parent comments describes for Europe and more here in Berlin:

* hard to get fired and you get generous unemployment benefits if you do.

* ambulance rides and medical treatment is free, medication is heavily subsidized.

* cancer treatment and twice yearly MRIs afterwards are free (I know this from personal experience unfortunately)

* 25 days vacation per year (I think legal minimum is a bit less but never had a job that offered below that)

* never owned a car or even a driver's license, been living in Europe since 2005 and have 2 little kids.

Not to mention:

* 14 months parental leave

* >200€ per month per kid, up to age 26(!) unless they start working & earning earlier than that

* free education

* free childcare from 1 year of age

* loads of tenant's protections - from rent control to almost unbreakable rental contracts with no expiry date by default (landlords need a very good reason to throw you out & can't increase rent beyond the rate of inflation)

Furthermore we got more or less the same benefits when we lived in Vienna as well & I'm pretty sure this is not unusual for continental western europe. It's true though that in the eastern states you get a lot less. So instead of Europe maybe we should say "wealthy continental western european countries" - if you live in e.g. Bulgaria or Ukraine you don't get many of these benefits and these countries are still in Europe (and Bulgaria is in the EU).

I get what you're saying, and I'm not denying this all exists in Europe. And I don't mean that America is perfect, it's actually in a shameful state for many people. But what I mean is that the "brutal reality" of the US doesn't exist for many software devs. I don't mean this as a humblebrag, but my wife and I are both software engineers in the NYC area, both in non-FAANG companies.

* My wife was laid off in 2019, pre-COVID. She got almost 9 months worth of full US salary paid. Likely equivalent to 2-3 years salary in Europe. She found a new job within 3 months and pocketed the rest. Obviously, stronger employment protection is nice, but the generous cash payout is a nice consolation prize.

* Health insurance for both of us is excellent. The cost compared to salary is negligible (fortunately, the worst we've had to deal with is serious dental surgery, which was handled very professionally and cost effectively).

* Unlimited vacation for both of us. We have spent the past month in Florida.

* We live in NYC, public transit is excellent for US standards (though it's garbage compared to Asia). We do have a car entirely voluntarily, it's not necessary. My wife doesn't drive at all.

* Parental leave ~6 months for each of us.

Like I said, we're at non-FAANG no name companies that you've probably never heard of. FAANG would be much more generous. On top of all this, we're paid extremely generously, likely 2-3x what you would expect in Berlin/Amsterdam plus generous equity compensation. If you're responsible with saving your money, there's basically no place better to be a software engineer on the planet.

Yeah I don't think the argument was ever that if you're in the top 10% (or whatever) of society economically you'll get more in the US than in Europe (or anywhere else). In Europe everyone is squeezed more towards the middle - less risk and less reward.

The point is that I want to live in a more egalitarian society even if that means I personally have to pay higher taxes (relative to what I get back in social services).

But also I think you may overestimate how secure your position is - people get sick in a way that means they can't work for a while (or at all), or are limited in how much they can work. I also never thought it would happen to me but when I was in my mid 30s with no history of serious illness or any health issues I was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. I had to get operated to remove it pretty much instantly and was not able to work for months afterwards. For as long as 6 months after the operation I was only working very part time, and this is for a more or less best case scenario with cancer - it was caught early & I didn't need chemotherapy or radiation therapy. If I was less fortunate I may have been unable to work for a year+ afterwards and may have never 100% fully recovered.

And this is not the only way your fortunes can change, you can get hit by a bus, get injured in a burglary, get drunk one night and slip and fall. All of these can more or less random events can result in you continuing to live but without the ability to command as high a wage afterwards. I personally know people (software engineers even) that experienced stuff like that, or even seemingly less severe issues (burn out, depression) that still meant they were no longer at the top of society economically like they were used to.

I want to reiterate that I'm not trying to convince you you are "wrong" - maybe your personal risk/reward tolerance is such that where you are makes more sense for you. I'm an immigrant here and could have immigrated to the US instead of to Europe if I wanted to (I'm Israeli so had no particular advantage that would have made it easier to go to Europe than to America).

You’re right, and again I’m not saying America is perfect. This was specifically in the context of being a developer, of which very little of the parent comment is true. Risk/reward and all that, yes, that’s likely a cultural or personal issue where we might weigh the pros and cons differently, which is fine. I’m not saying my way is the only way.

But I do also feel on a personal level that for an American born in America, running off to Europe in search of a more perfect society is basically no different just running off to a gated community somewhere in a rich state where I don’t have to see the poor people anymore. They’re still there though, just out of sight. Since I do see problems and do have the resources to help, I’m obligated to do what I can. But again that’s a personal decision, and I would never truly knock on someone who was genuinely trying to improve their lot in life.

Surely the poor people you are not seeing in Europe are mostly in developing countries in Africa and Asia, not in the US, right?

But yes, I can imagine a big part of the puzzle of why Americans put up with the way things are is that above a certain level of wealth (top ~30%?) you don't have to suffer for lack of stuff you'd otherwise get from public services in Europe (or in Canada, Australia, etc).

What I mean is that if we’ve (meaning the privileged Americans) already got it pretty good, then why should we leave? If the reason is that life would be better elsewhere, then that’s a valid reason to go. If the reason is that we feel our fellow citizens are treated unfairly, then shouldn’t we stay and try to fix it (as voting Americans with potential influence). I’m not saying to take responsibility for the world’s poor, I’m saying that if you’re already in a privileged spot, it’s the ultimate privilege to just up and leave.

Two weeks notice? Only if the company cares about reputation, there’s zero legal requirement for notice or severance.

It is also pitifully easy to be denied unemployment. 8 years ago I was laid off from a failing startup with the option of 1 week’s severance or 2 weeks if we signed non-disparage / non-entice.

Everyone who choose 1 week was “fired for cause” and had their unemployment contested. Mine was contested after 4 months and I was forced to pay it back with a 50% “fraud” fee.

In America money talks and bullshit walks.

The irony is that this is why we hop startups every year or two. The only reliable way to get a significant income increase is to level up on popular new technologies at employer A and get employernB ton pay more.

I think you are generalizing way too much. While there are underfunded healtcare systems in the EU I dont think its realistic to say in most.

His conclusion :

> In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely.

Me wondering how much of it shall we see.

Without context, I could guess that quote could have been written at any time in the past couple decades. It's the "nuclear fusion" of our industry: one day someone will make it happen, but not as soon as you think.

It's like instant on demand video and voice calls. Science ficiton had been dreaming of it since the end of 19th century. Then suddenly... Skype. It will happen in the most obscure place.

It's been discussed ad nauseam here, but companies love "no-code" tools until they find their limitations (which is often sooner rather than later) and then they desperately get out their wads of cash to have the problems they caused sorted.

This creates an entire ecosystem of "low-code-real-developers" who have the skill, commercial foresight (and possibly patience) of working inside the guts of low-code tools, doing Java, JS or what-have-you, but inside an ugly, sparsely-documented propietary API instead of an open-source framework with literal gigabytes of documentation and knowledge accumulated in Stack Overflow over the course of fifteen years...

So now instead of two in-house analyst-developers building business applications, you have Mark from Marketing & Sales building apps in low-code, and four "low-code-high-code" contractors on expensive contracts cleaning up behind Mark.

And so it goes...

Being able to do something by oneself is such a huge advantage over telling someone else to do something that it can compensate for lots and lots of disadvantages. HyperCard was a great success, and I have high hope we will have great low-code tools like HyperCard in the future.

I was being facetious.

I agree there can be massive advantages to tools in the "lower-to-no-code" spectrum; even software developers benefit from the abstraction that frameworks and tooling provide. At a business level, many organizations that offer products and service in said spectrum have been successful at a massive scale: Wordpress, Salesforce, Tableau, Shopify, just off the top of my mind.

However my point about these applications creating a cascade of new jobs still stands. And I don't think more hand-crafted "high code" solutions are going anywhere either; for starters I don't think anyone making this sort of prediction understands the literal oceans handcrafted of code we swim in. Who's going to take care of that, and how long would it take to replace with "no-code"? Well over a century, would be my guess. Software hasn't eaten the world - it has devoured it.

Then there's the natural limitations of these tools. I had to look up HyperCard as I didn't know about it, and it was indeed an initial hit, but it seems like (a) it was limited (for example, Wikipedia mentions people were making "choose-your-own-adventure" games with it, but I know as a fact that some games made by solo devs in the late 80s where infinitely more intricate and deep) and (b) it didn't have that much lasting power. I wonder if the latter is yet another limitation of these tools - that they tend to quick obsolescence as tech trends move at breakneck speed.

I will say, as much as I agree with you, even software organizations have problems that are well suited toward these low code platforms. After working through some of the quirks of retool, we have developers just adding things in the fraction of the time as they took with our first solution. I also saw another developer create an "excel++" solution with Airtable that allowed us to solve some problems that would have taken twice as long with twice as many people otherwise.

Now, this isn't every problem, but it's a very useful tool that will reduce the number of developers for some tasks. I think there is a world where a business has six or seven licenses for no-code solutions that reduce the head count by 10-15 FTEs (or redirects them)

> it didn't have that much lasting power. I wonder if the latter is yet another limitation of these tools - that they tend to quick obsolescence as tech trends move at breakneck speed.

Hypercard dying on the vine has much more to do with Apple's changing priorities than it does with Hypercard itself or what its users thought.

Haha this is the business model for every project I've ever worked on in Tech is.

Hire low paid developers to 'save money' at the start.

Low paid developers present working prototypes that aren't scalable or maintainable but the biz people don't know that ,they just see working demos.

Years later the app is a nightmare and the low paid devs have moved on and now they have to pay out the nose to get people to actually work on their stuff.

And so it goes.

> Years later the app is a nightmare and the low paid devs have moved on and now they have to pay out the nose to get people to actually work on their stuff.

You forgot the part where they keep trying to lowball competent developers, struggle to find someone willing to duct tape their system together for "competitive" pay, and throw their hands up declaring there's a Shortage Of Developers™.

I think that sort of claim has been made for decades already, repeated by each generation of programming language, 4GL tools, AI and graphical tools.

An example from forty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

As the developer tooling improves and parts of my job get easier, I sometimes think I may be out of a job someday. But then I talk to some users or other non-devs about technical issues and realize I will always have a job.

The delta in technical expertise between the average dev and the average user is so large that there will always be economically viable ways for the dev to spend their time.

The thing is, high-level languages like Python are already a really efficient way to communicate requirements to a computer, and we've already seen a massive shift from low-level languages to high-level languages in applications that don't need low-level control.

Developer tools and user interface components will likely continue to get easier to work with, but chunks of functionality that we compose with arbitrary code in between will always be a better model than a "no-code" monolith we configure.

Personally I see lawyers as "proof" that taking the highest level won't be sufficient to do away with devs. That and many of the non-technical specifications emphasize that there must always be someone to specify the details and make sure they are consistent and handle the nasty corner cases.

Yes, I think the doom-and-gloom predictions are dramatically over-hyped.

I'm pretty sure that software development has had by far the most effort put into automating it of any job that has ever existed, simply because every person capable of doing the job has the same skills necessary to automate it.

That has done nothing to decrease salaries for developers. If anything, it has raised them, simply because developers can now produce more useful things in less time and at lower overall cost.

The way I see it, at the end of the day we still live in the real world with real, imperfect business/social/etc processes. Unless the entire world is 100% standardized and run by robots, any technological no-code solution would still need to be Turing Complete. At that point, basic computer science principles need to be learned to use it, so all you've done is create another programming language, which again...we already have plenty of those.

> Me wondering how much of it shall we see.

Have you heard of RPA? It's a low-code/no-code way to automate mouse and keyboard actions on top of desktop and web applications.

this is subject to the same issues all salary surveys have - they dont take into account stock based comp, which is responsible both for the huge amount of variance in comp by years of experience and for the increase in total comp over time. the conclusions you can draw from this are really not that meaningful in total.

That is definitely a big miss. Looking only at cash, my rate of compensation increase was about 7.5% per year (in reality, it was typically a couple years at 1-2% with some big jumps). When stock is factored into the equation, the average jumps to about 12.5%!

I feel that these numbers hide a lot:

(1) There is a small percentage that are being paid what I consider to be a fair income. They are being paid in very competitive markets. They are getting valued in a HCOL market where demand for engineering talent is higher.

(2) There is a large percentage that are being paid something like a "developer status quo". A salary that:

- doesn't acknowledge that software developers are _capable_ of generating inordinately large amounts of value (and considered in aggregate, mostly do)

- treats all work done by college-educated individual contributors as of roughly equivalent value

- cannot be too high because "we can't pay you 2x what $other_person_of_value makes"

- cannot be too high because "we can't pay you more than what $your_manager makes"

(3) Developer skill levels vary greatly. This means that the average developer is just that: average. Average developers simply do not generate the kind of value that top-end developers do.

The article needs to compare against salaries in general to distinguish changes in developer salaries from other trends.

"low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete" What is low-level coding: Verilog or HTML?

Both charts purportedly show stats for 2001-2011.

Is it the case the first shows 2001-2011, and the second 2011-2021?

> Both charts...

There are four charts. Are you referring to the just the top pair labeled median 2001-2011 and mean 2001-2011 which are in the “From 2001-2011” section? Those are 2001-2011.

If you want later ones you’ll have to scroll down to the section titled “From 2013-2019.” There’s a pair labeled median 2013-2019 and mean 2013-2019. Those are the 2013-2019 ones.

Ha! Missed the tiny "mean" vs "median" difference between the first two. Thanks!

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