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Comment by clipradiowallet | Hacker News Reader

I empathize with your sentiment.. I checked out of IT-related work in my 20's, and the moment I checked back in was sitting on the floor of a production welding shop, impact drilling holes through plate steel. I had this moment of clarity when I realized that however "unhappy" IT made me, it wasn't nearly as miserable as the alternative I had stumbled into.

Or as my dad put it: better to work with your head than your hands, isn't it son?

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This all still skirts the main issue. Why does the janitor get paid so much less for a shitty job almost no one wants to do? Why do we have damn near minimum wage construction jobs? Many jobs are important, all should be paid accordingly. Failing that, shouldn't the most labor intensive jobs therefore pay the best? The incentives are so skewed in society now. And I say that as someone who has done all kinds of crazy jobs from cushy to hell.

Skills.

What % of software engineers could competently perform a janitorial job, preferences aside? What % of janitors could competently perform a software engineering job?

6 week coding bootcamps would beg to differ with 'skills'.

just to reiterate here- I'd bet you most janitors could code if given the same classes. Or maybe they can't code maybe they'd be better as a manager or HR or PM, or fuck even CEO.

I'm tired of this bullshit rhetoric that SEs are somehow smarter than everyone else. I know some absolutely fucktarded people working for some pretty big companies in some pretty big roles. One is a doctor I wouldn't trust with my cat.

Your job does not speak to your intelligence.

Janitors can be smart too. Maybe this is all because movies like Good Will Hunting aren't made anymore.

Nobody said anything about intelligence. The person you originally replied to said skills. Just because I could spend a year learning something if I so choose, doesn't mean that I currently have those skills. They're called low skill jobs, not low intelligence jobs.

His point was he has the skills. I made the point about bootcamps, skills are easily obtained. Implying the janitor could not gain the skills is insane. Thinking a SE could begin a janitorial job tomorrow and do it as well as the janitor is laughable. SE skills are just a bit harder to come by, they aren't special. If your skills can be learned in a 6 week course you are not an astrophysicist nor a brain surgeon.

SEs are paid well and so have an overinflated self-value. Again, now that this is crashing with WFH. We have code chop shops in India, yet we still try and pretend coding is some modern-day magic language.

ninja edit- hit reply b4 finished

2nd edit- reminded me of this [1] infamous That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch =)

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

I used to believe that a good bootcamp can make a developer out of anyone. I changed my mind after trying to teach programming to a couple of people. In all failed cases people was not trained to thing algorithmically, that is being able to pick a piece apart and build a thing out of small parts, all in mind. Like looking at what a single iteration of a loop does and imagining what will be the end result. A person either has this skill and then she can learn on her own even without a teacher. Or she does not have it and then no matter how hard you try to explain Java/Python/JS/etc she does not get it at a very basic level.

I do agree that learning how to code is not that hard given that you have certain skills already. But said skills are rare. This might explain why programmers think it is easy to learn programming but we don’t see an influx of skilled developers despite boot camps and online courses available for free.

Maybe changing something at an elementary school level would fix the problem. I have no idea how to do it but I know for sure that we need to teach people a certain way of thinking and this is a prerequisite to being a successful programmer. As soon as you have that way of thinking learning Python or Java is a piece of cake. And I absolutely sure that anyone can learn it, we are simply super bad at teaching the right skills to people.

I agree about boot camps. I didn't say it would make them good coders, just able to code. I've worked with code monkeys who did nothing but C/P from SO, who had no idea how their code worked. I've worked with 'hardware repair specialists' who didn't know the how/why of hardware, they could only parrot what they saw on YouTube.

Some (read- rich) schools are teaching programming early, but I agree 100% if we had all public schools teach it early it would remove much of the mysticism.

Anyways sorry if I come across as heated on this issue, just some of the best people I've ever met made the least and had the most menial of jobs.

edit to add- my mother (a horrible, evil person), was head of Sandia Labs IT(weapons defense contractors for the govt), she had a masters in accounting and knew nothing about computers and servers. This woman- who was on call 24/7 and still had beepers in 2010 as they are more reliable than cellphones, couldn't use a desktop computer and had Win98 as her OS when the rest of the world was on Win 7. I don't understand this world.

Rate of pay is empirically determined by the intersection of supply and demand for that job, not by how important a particular person or group thinks a job ought to be considered a priori.

Where supply is much larger than demand -- that is, where many people can easily replace the person doing the job and perform similar work -- wages are low. When not many people can do a demanded job, wages are high.

Note that I am not making any moral claims about this fact being good or bad; just pointing out that it is indeed an objective fact.

This dynamic notably holds true even in non-capitalist economic systems, such as in Communist countries where the rate of pay is legally fixed at the same level for all jobs: people simply barter out of band with non-monetary forms of value transfer (блат) instead, to compensate for the inability to use money to find the supply/demand intersection.

Supply vs demand works until WFH begins to even the payscale. SEs everywhere started screaming about pay reductions. There is no lack of SWEs, that is now more than apparent.

It's simply the flavor of the decade, just like last bubble it was website/graphics design. Bubble is bursting IMO.

I think the bubble is shearing perhaps. The top wages for SWEs in many markets seem to be going up and substantially so, while the wages for the broad middle of the market in globally high-cost locations aren’t going up and, as you observe, are at risk of falling as/if WFH-driven globalization accelerates.

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