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Comment by solidsnack9000 | Hacker News Reader

I'm just not sure these people are understanding the problem the right way round. Salaries and prestige are relatively low for developers in Japan, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and draw them away from technology. That will be true even if more women are interested in the field than formerly.

In fact, convincing many women to commit to the field early in their educations for reasons of representation, rather than because the economics are compelling to them, would only make the situation worse: relatively more workers competing for jobs with salaries that are already low.

Japanese enterprises do not value software engineering talent and there are probably some underlying fundamentals behind that -- in workplaces with relatively low independence, it's hard to leverage engineering talent for much -- which, left unchanged, will make initiatives like this into a game of musical chairs.

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I actually think we have the same problem, to a much lower degree, in the US. Clearly software engineers do get paid extremely well at top companies, and are paid reasonably at lower tiers. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, software engineers on average are only paid a little more than registered nurses and dental hygienists.

Software Engineers: ~145k Registered Nurses: ~140k

(note these are for SF and San Jose, not overall - the source for all this is at US News Best jobs which relies on labor dept data: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs).

I've left a version of this comment a bunch of times on HN over the years, but I'll add the usual provisos - I don't object to nurses making lots of money, or more than software engineers for that matter, but I will point out that SEs overall really aren't remarkably well paid compared to other educated professionals. And while SEs at the top make well above the median, so do many nurses in specialties that require a MS or higher.

I'm just not convinced that women would be well served by leaving nursing, law, finance, or medicine to go into tech. I don't mean this in a work-life balance "do you really want this" way. I mean, if women want to build substantial independent wealth, power, and influence, they may be well served by avoiding tech careers (or, if they work in tech, avoiding SE roles). Honestly, this is pretty much the same advice I'd give men. I'm hesitant to discourage anyone from tech or SE roles, since clearly people do have great careers in them, and it's the right choice for some people. What I resist is the notion that people should be choosing it more often than they do, when in fact, I think the low to medium level of interest in SE careers is probably the product outcome of smart people weighing the demands and rewards of a career relative to their personal professional and life interests.

I consider it very rational that US citizens with choice generally choose not to become developers in the valley in the numbers that Silicon Valley execs think they should. It's not a huge coincidence that the people who staff these positions disproportionately work on visas that limit their range of free choice in career path.

Is that Software Engineer salary accurate(despite being far lower than what all the household names pay), or is it excluding bonus and/or equity grants?

The number looks like base pay to me.

It's base pay, more or less.

> How are "wages" defined by the OEWS survey?

> The following are excluded from the collection of OEWS wage data:

> Non-production bonuses

> Stock bonuses

> Year-end bonuses

https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm

It looks like overtime pay and "weekend premium"(I'm guessing this might include third shift pay?) is also excluded from the number which would also paint a different picture for nurses if included.

Thanks for the link. This is an important part of this discussion, and something I don't understand well. If I'm going to compare compensation in different fields, it's important to know how variable compensation, like stock options or overtime, figures in. This is especially important in software vs nursing, since variable pay makes up a big part of software but overtime is rare, whereas overtime figures heavily into nursing but stock options are unusual.

Note that according to the BLS link you provided, overtime is also excluded. My company stock has never been worth a dime - I worked for Sun Microsystems before it crashed, and later for a startup that went kaput. This is all a combination of timing, luck, choices, the ability (or lack thereof) to pick a winner. Clearly variable pay is worth a lot at google, facebook, and many early startups, but my story is absolutely not unusual - and on the other side of the coin, I can assure you that nurses do get a tremendous amount of value out of overtime. Furthermore, overtime pay is predictable: you work more hours, you get 1.5-2x more money. But this pay is also excluded from the comparison I made above.

Without these considerations, the data is of limited value. FWIW, I have always been a little suspicious of how low the software engineer pay is on these surveys.

Overall, though, I think that in spite of the noise, the general principle does hold, that pay and benefits are good enough in other fields available that there's no reason to be puzzled about the low to medium interest level in being a developer in Silicon Valley, that this all explained as rational behavior in labor markets among hard working, academically inclined people.

I agree with the general premise of your comment.

In addition software engineering suffers from the worst ageism of any career which basically means that around mid to late 30s one starts to run into issues. Now contrast that with many other careers where one’s value invariably increases as one gains experience.

Given that, my general advice is even if you start with software engineering, transition out to other roles very quickly unless you’re in the top 1%, can be a founder or truly love software engineering.

I think you're onto something there. Starting out in software engineering can be a great way to enter the workforce, mainly because it allows you to join a team in a very high-value role. If you avoid jobs where you're a cog, and instead find a role where you help build a product with a team, you'll learn a lot - and again, because you can create the software, you'll have a pretty central role. There are plenty of good places to go from there.

The downside to this attrition is that software engineering (or development if you'd prefer to avoid a charged term) really does need experienced people who understand the long term impact of design, technical debt, what to pursue and what to abandon, mentor and develop new talent, and so forth.

To be honest, considering currency exchange rates, 140k for a nurse is a GINORMOUS salary in atleast 80% of countries other than the USA. I have tremendous respect for medical professionals , but surely , a nursing degree is easier to obtain than one in IT ?

Hmmm. I wouldn’t say surely, but I don’t really know. IT can range from immensely difficult math heavy curricula to watered down technical training. And my understanding is that rigorous nursing does require a lot of science (though I Don’t think it generally requires calculus, let alone advanced math or engineering). As a job it’s pretty tough. Anyway it’s always important to me when making this argument to point out that I consider nursing to be a job worthy of good salaries. I bring it up only to refute the notion that Software developers clearly outearn comparable educated professionals.

I suspect the standard deviation is more interesting than the mean or median.

I suspect "software engineer" encompasses people getting 400k at a FAANG and people earning 60k at an outsourcing consultancy or small product shop in a low cost-of-living area.

I'd be surprised if the spread for a RN is as broad.

No... not the salary range for nursing isn't quite that broad, but it is very broad. Consider the salary for a nurse anesthetist in a high cost urban center, vs a registered nurse or nurse orderly in a low income rural area.

The median salary for a nurse anesthetist in San Francisco is around $250k a year (and $285k a year in Akron OH)[1] - keep in mind, that's the median, not the top 10th or 25th percentile. Meanwhile, The median salary for a registered nurse nationally is $73k a year, and the 25%ile is $63k a year[2]

[1] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/nurse-anesthetist...

[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/...

Also - remember (per the discussion above) that the 400k software engineer pay you mentioned almost certainly includes stock (which is not included in these numbers), but the pay for nurses doesn't include overtime. Try using the Transparent California calculator to see some of the higher end total compensation for nurses.

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=nurse&y...

> software engineers on average are only paid a little more than registered nurses and dental hygienists. Software Engineers: ~145k Registered Nurses: ~140k

Don’t recall if they were in the Bay Area or not, but I know someone out in California who is a nurse and wants out because the shear amount of hours they make you work. I suppose many Bay Area engineers may work a lot of extra hours as well, but my understanding was that nursing pay looks much less appealing when you’re working double the standard work week.

You sure about that? I came across two different surveys of Japanese workers that suggest women in tech are paid relatively well compared to women in other industries.

[1] https://kimi.wiki/work/income ("IT, Communications")

[2] https://www.tsunagulocal.com/en/42243/ ("Informations services")

You are looking at this differently than the parent post. You are looking at cross-industry inside Japan. Parent is talking about inside Japan vs outside Japan within the same industry/job.

If you look at public data on somewhere like levels.fyi, there's a big gap in pay even within the same company, at the same level. I'm most familiar with Seattle comp, and same tier of SDE role is a 30+% paycut from Seattle to Tokyo at FAANG companies.

I also know someone who left a FAANG company here to go work in Japan for awhile. They had to move from SDE to Data Scientist + got a senior role at the new company, and even then they struggled to get anywhere close to their previous comp.

I don't see that. I believe parent comment is also talking about "cross-industry inside Japan".

> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for *developers in Japan*, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and *draw them away from technology*.

I agree that difficulty attracting foreign talent is a problem for the Japanese tech industry, but I don't think it's the focus of the article or the focus of the parent comment.

The last source actually presents a table which shows "Education" is the best paying field for women, whereas "Finance/Insurance" is the best paying field for men; and "Information services" is not the best paying field for either sex, although it is near the top. In the USA, in contrast, "Education" is definitely not competitive with tech as far as salaries.

These are not the kind of sources I would use to study these things, by the way, because they break things down by industry or profession rather than role and these sources use incredibly broad "industry" and "profession" categories.

If you know of better sources, I'd love to take a look. I can read Japanese, but I'm way better at searching stuff up in English.

> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for developers in Japan, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and draw them away from technology.

Another aspect to this is that IT is one of the few fields where there is a low tradition lock. Getting into the more prestigious and high paying areas can require either a better diploma, stronger adhesion to stereotypical profiles, or working way longer inside to climb the ranks.

In comparison IT companies will be more focused on competence, accept lower social status in exchange for performance. I think this is true in other countries as well, but Japan looks to me like a poster child for this bias.

>Salaries and prestige are relatively low for developers in Japan

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to hear that a Senior Engineering Manager at Rakuten, the "Japanese Amazon" and one of their top software companies, only has the TC of somewhere around $100k USD. And the position was in Tokyo, not exactly a cheap place.

Many senior engineers at "top tier" domestic software companies get paid somewhere around $70-$90k, which is pathetic for even LCOL areas in the U.S.

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