And then people rhetorically ask themselves why students coming from economically disadvantaged households are under-represented in this industry (one of the best paying industries in this time and age). Stuff like that has got to change.
Medicine is still better paid and better paid universally. Silicon valley is really the outlier here, most of Europe and the world programmers don't get paid that much in comparison.
But it requires you to refresh your knowledge constantly so from this point of view it's similar
A few things though:
1. A psychiatrist has to commute 1 to 2 hours per day. So that salary is not for 8 hours per day, but 9 hours at minimum. Adjusting their salary to an 8 hour basis, it needs to be multiplied by 8/9 or higher like 8/10.
2. The psychiatrist has to be on location. The cost associated with that is hard to quantify, but it is there. For example, I always sleep during the afternoon for 20 minutes, a psychiatrist can't do that. Also, I can take a break whenever I want, a psychiatrist can be on call for 24 hours straight in severe cases. Let's suppose this gives a cost of 1/16 as a multiplier (half an hour of extra work per day).
So the minimum overhead a psychiatrist has is 16/19, their salary is then 4200 EUR. This can be amazing or not so much, considering your own personal preference. My personal multiplier is 0.8 on top of all of this, so for me a 5000 EUR salary is worth 3360 EUR if it's working as a psychiatrist.
As a developer I experience something different, which is:
1. I do not have to commute, I can if I want to, but don't have to.
2. I do not have to be on location, nor do I have a strict schedule for going client after client. I can take random breaks during the day if it helps me be more productive.
So a developer's salary for 2600 EUR is much more like an actual 2600 EUR in that sense. Moreover, my personal multiplier for being a developer is a 1. There are some things I dislike and some things I absolutely love about being a dev (e.g. being a true netizen in the sense that you can randomly act with APIs if you want to).
To conclude: the absolute values are far apart, but the relative values might not. It differs on a person by person basis, and I haven't discussed the whole picture of course (e.g. needing to stay sharp as a dev, I don't know how that works for psychiatrists).
[1] https://www.monsterboard.nl/vacatures/zoeken/?q=Psychiater&w...
[2] https://www.glassdoor.nl/Salarissen/junior-web-developer-sal...
When people on HN discuses salaries, or I see a job posting from a Silicon Valley company I can't help think that we don't even pay our CTO that much. Frequently you could get two developers for the same price here in Denmark.
Think about what your CTO could do in that setting and realize that he's probably worth more to FAANG shareholders than to you hence the salary differential.
For the record, I do not work at a FAANG.
Interesting. I'm in South Africa, right now. The largest offer for a senior C# dev *right now* on www.pnet.co.za is R960k/a.
Twelve years ago, the GP that I was dating, who worked in a *state hospital* (i.e. not making as much as she could have in private practice) was making more than that.
I don't believe that doctors' salaries over the last 12 years have effectively been lowered. OTOH, if you know of places where they are offering more than R1.8m/a for senior developers, then by all means give me their contact details.
In the end, it was mostly those that didn't get discouraged and socialized with the other students that would remain in the end.
I myself did not have any programming experience before going through that ordeal.
But I agree there is a risk of academic instructors going way overboard in practice, e.g. by flagging actually useful minor standard conformance violations (like zero length arrays or properly #ifdef'd code assuming bitfield order).
* As a potentially amusing aside, a different course in a different degree program had a professor rage-quit after his first semester because he didn't want to deal with children -- he had a policy of giving 0s on papers with no name or class info on them, and enough students ("children") failed to do that correctly but complained hard enough to overturn the policy and get a resubmit.
Those who have been subjected to such programs can also probably agree that the filtering of the first semester (and there is a filter, but again we think it's a fair one not dependent on prior programming experience or other such privilege) ends up normalizing everyone, for the benefit of everyone. For the people who started at 0, they're now Somewhere nearby everyone else, ready for the next (harder) material, and for people who started with some "advantages" they've discovered they... are also now Somewhere, not Somewhere Else ahead of everyone like they might have been at the very start. In these sorts of programs, people with prior experience find that they couldn't sleep through their classes and get A's like they might have pulled off in high school, their advantages were not actually that significant after all, and indeed some from-nothings can and do perform better than they.
For anyone who just wants access to the software industry's wealth, I'd encourage them to ignore college entirely. There may be a case-by-case basis to consider college, especially if you need economic relief now in the form of scholarships/grants/loans only accessible through the traditional college protocol, but in general, avoid.
(If you want something besides just access to the wealth, you have more considerations to make.)
I think the filter is more effective for finding those who can quickly adapt, learn, and grok a methodical mindset. Not necessary characteristics to be a programmer, but necessary characteristics to excel at programming.
I've mentored quite a few first semester students (in my spare time, to help. Not as a job) and there is no way some of them would've passed without serious help.
At some point I used to think privately that CS should have a programming test as an admission exam, because these students did drag everyone down. If medicine and law have admission restrictions, why not CS too?
But I have changed my opinion because I think everyone deserves a real opportunity, and our school system does not provide a level playing field sadly. (Also the medicine & law admission criteria are GPA based and that is the last thing I'd want for CS.)
Anyway the real filter was always maths.
Or imagine math was taught by giving kids all the axioms and requiring them to derive the other rules needed to solve tasks as needed :)
Kids from well off families would be ok - it would just be considered another random thing you have to teach your kids to help them make it.
But other kids would suffer and think "English and math is not for me".
By that same argument, schools should not teach anything that is not widely known by 100% of the parents of each kid. Otherwise, it would be discrimination to those kids whose parents cannot help. I disagree very strongly with this principle.
I have two kids, and the best things that they learn in school are precisely those that I'm unable to teach them. For a start: mastery of the language, since I'm not a native speaker of the place where we live. I would be frankly enraged if the school lowered the level of language exigence to accommodate for the needs of my kids who do not speak it at home!
Not at all what I mean. I mean schools (at least primary schools) should be designed for top 80% or 90% not for top 10% or 20%. You can never get to 100% but resigning from the start and going for 20% makes no sense.
You should expect people taking math at university to be able to solve linear equations and explaining it is a waste of time but you shouldn't expect kids in primary school to be able to do the same and it is your responsibility to prepare them in case they want to pursue academic career.
If public schools teach linear equations it's ok to assume that knowledge at university.
If they don't - it's not.
It should be the same with teaching programming and anything else is just funding rich people kids education by everybody's taxes.
The whole point of common public low-level education is to maximize the number of people participating in the economy. It's much better if everybody can read and write. Whole industries are impossible without this. And so is democracy.
It's the same with basic programming and math literacy. It benefits the whole society if vast majority of people have it.
If you "weed out" 60% or 80% of population just because they happen to be born in the wrong environment or went to the wrong school - you lose massive amounts of money and economic/scientific potential. Then you have to import these people from countries which don't fuck their own citizens in such a way.
BTW "no child left behind" isn't practical, there are people who can't learn basic stuff no matter how hard you try. But "less than X% kids left behind" is for some low value of X.
He fears while a professor might imagine they're weeding out people who lack 'dedication' or 'aptitude' they're actually weeding out people who didn't grow up with a PC at home.
If that sounds evil, imagine the grief, wasted money, time, frustration, and stress of letting people get 3-4 years into computer science and then dropping out because it's fucking hard.
So my second hardest classes were freshman year. 3rd year (micro-architecture and assembler)finally bested them.
Their parents can't afford a laptop? They can't afford an Internet connection? The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house? They don't have time?
Is programming affected more than other subjects like math, English/grammar, science, etc?
All of the above, and it's surprising this isn't obvious. It may be hard to notice or internalize if you've never seen it and only know privilege, but possession of all or even some of those things is not a guarantee for everyone. Believe it or not, there are some who don't come home to a computer, caring (or even existent!) parents, stable meals, or free time.
Maybe I didn't use the right words to formulate my question.
Yes! There are millions of kids in the US whose parents can't afford a cheap $300 laptop. The federal government pays for school lunches because there are so many kids who otherwise wouldn't even be getting decent food otherwise.
> They can't afford an Internet connection?
See above. Also, there are many places in the US where getting broadband service is very difficult. Including places just an hour outside of Washington, DC. My parents were only able to get conventional broadband service a few years ago. Prior to that they paid exorbitant fees for satellite internet service with a 500mb per month cap.
> The kids don't have a good place to learn in their house?
Imagine being a kid with 3 siblings and your parent(s) living in a studio apartment. Or a kid that doesn't have a stable "home" at all.
> They don't have time?
That can be an issue too, depending on age. A teenager may be working outside of school hours to help take care of the family's financial needs.
Probably a bit more, as it is common to learn other subjects by a book, but learning programming without a computer ... sounds hard.
> Their parents can't afford a laptop?
Holy crap, the amount of privilege shown off in just two sentences is absolutely astounding.
This may come as a shock to you, but a very significant number of people don't have a couple hundred dollars to buy a low-end used laptop. 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an emergency expense [0], let alone save $400 for a laptop.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
It actually doesn't say that, it says they don't have $400 in cash equivalents but may be able to produce it by selling "assets". So a person who keeps all their savings in CDs or investments also counts, although only for expenses you can't put on credit cards.
They often take payday loans, mortgaging their next minimum-wage paycheck; since the next paycheck minus payment no longer covers their regular living expenses, they take another predatory loan or pawn another heirloom. 80% of people who take a payday loan have to renew it because they can't repay it. I have a deep personal dislike for Dave Ramsey, but he does a good job of explaining how even minor emergency expenses can lead to a cycle of debt and further despair. (https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/get-out-payday-loan-trap)
There is so much more instability and precarity in this country than most PMC people can imagine.
Figure 12 on page 21 of the underlying report - https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-repor... .
Conversely, programming was not available in my fairly middle-class school. In terms of money, we only have to look to the laptops schools are providing to students (or not depending on government funding) to see how many children don't have access to a laptop. A good place to learn can also be hard to find for large families in small houses which is sadly all too common for low income households.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/756054/united-states-adu...