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Comment by throwaway210222 | Hacker News Reader

Software engineers should not compare themselves to a basket that includes (presumably) labourers, tradesmen, etc.

SEs are educated, highly-skilled individuals and should thus be compared to the VALUE the NYC society places on other highly skilled, in-demand individuals.

Be assured that NYC lawyers, radiologists, and bankers don't compare their remuneration to an average that includes dustmen, baristas, and hot-dog salesmen.

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Software engineers did ten years ago. That you think the proper reference class for SEs is higher professionals, not the general population, or even engineers generally speaks volumes about how things have changed in the past decade or so. There are lots of actual engineers being outearned by boot camp grads with two years experience. That’s nuts, and it’s quite new.

How is SE today less complex than 10 years ago? It seems to me that even as tools today are more powerful and basic compute and storage are cheaper, non-functional requirements have only ballooned.

e.g. Lotus 1-2-3 was probably far easier to develop than Google Sheets presently.

I don’t think the complexities of SE, on the whole, have changed substantially in the last 10 years. If anything the tooling has gotten better.

Lotus 1-2-3 was 40 years ago, not 10, but still. The Lotus devs, of which there were only a handful, were writing in ASM, for an insanely memory constrained platform. I bet Google Sheets is insanely complicated too, and has all the multiuser requirements. But those devs have all the resources of Google backing them up. I’d call it a push.

>There are lots of actual engineers being outearned by boot camp grads with two years experience.

Hasn't that been the case for decades now?

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