Tech, like law, is a bimodal market. If you think of it as a single bell curve your intuitions will be all wrong.
The good news is that unlike law it’s possible to jump into the better paying market even if you didn’t go to the “right” school.
The good news is that unlike law it’s possible to jump into the better paying market even if you didn’t go to the “right” school.
The issue right now is that many companies are having hiring slowdowns and the VC market is cold so there's less jobs in the second two categories.
If you're a key component (welder) in a high priced product (ship), the builder can compensate you $$$$ and still win. So they do.
You can temporarily have unreasonably high pay (higher than value added), but eventually the market will figure it out. The only way to make outsized returns your entire career is to find a supply-limited, high-value-add niche.
My understanding is that it's dangerous and few want to do it.
Yeah this is the part everyone is ignoring in the conversation. Many highly compensated physical labor jobs are highly compensated because of the associated risk. While being a developer (with exceptions) doesn't expose you to any physical risk.
but I don't think tech compensation is high because of risk of this type of injury.
vs underwater welding, where the types of possible injuries have greater impact on overall health.
DevOps Engineer
City of London, London, £600 - £700/day
EDIT: Sorry, you did say Software Developer. How about this? https://www.cv-library.co.uk/job/217407072/Senior-Front-End-...
£650 - £750/day Remote
EDIT: (clarified a timeframe)
A decade later I sold a company and spent 3 months in Portland at https://bikeschool.com/. I took pretty much all of their classes. (Their wheel building seminar was fantastic, btw). Sadly they no longer teach welding, but the classes were fantastic. In each class you sized, laid out, machined and welded a bike. Started with lugged chromoly brazing, then chromoly fillet brazing, then chromoly tig, aluminum tin and finally titanium tig.
Unfortunately there are no bike schools in the world which have as comprehensive as a program as bikeschool did. I think they lost most of their teachers during Covid. Hoping they recover.
I ended up bringing 5 frames with me on the train home from PDX to Oakland. Over the next year I built another 15 frames for friends, then started a business building and selling custom, very durable bikes to overweight techies. It was great fun, we used to host weekend 25, 50 and 100 mile rides, nobody under 200lbs allowed. I lost $300 on every bike I made, but it was worth it.
Check out Paul Brodie's videos on YouTube, I am hoping to do a master class with him next year. https://www.youtube.com/c/paulbrodie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2CnJ9lmlQo really shows the beauty of fillet welding.
Also, I'm going to take a carbon fiber class here: https://www.framebuildingschool.com
Long story short: Go buy a couple of the cheapest throw-away bicycle frames you can. Get a brazing setup, then spend a few weeks cutting them up and learning how to join tubes solidly. Everything else is easy after that.
Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.
Ironically, I've given at least 5 people their start in this industry who are all now worth 8 figures. There are haves and there are have nots.
Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year?
Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.
Being a bitter old man is not the attitude problem mentioned here, being someone that refuses to see that their unsatisfactory situation is 100% due to their own actions (or rather, lack of action) is your attitude problem.
Also your resume is absolute garbage and your company's website is offline. Read https://www.careercup.com/resume
People like you are why San Franciscan locals like myself hate techies.
BUT you have the technical skills to leverage yourself into a favored position, and I'm confident you can do so if you reset your outlook and your approach. Nobody's going to pay you $300k because you deserve $300k, they're going to pay it because they're making $1M in revenue.
Anyway, good luck out there
I have no degree and am no influencer or genius. I just never stop learning so I can be the one bringing new ideas to the meeting.
Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped.
I am no workaholic, averaging 35h weeks, but I try to learn a new skillset every month or so. If there is a gap I identify at an employer or client that will make me learn a new programming language, infra stack, or new vulnerability discovery technique, my hand always goes up first.
People are willing to pay more to those willing to run ahead into the dark and document a path for everyone else once they figure it out.
I know others who are more do-what-they-are-asked personalities, who work a lot more hours, but being simply experienced and reliable has earned them 50k+/year bumps every time they change jobs with good referrals and open source projects people can reference.
You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.
You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.
I do not need to be an expert at something new every month. I just have to learn enough to unblock high-value efforts no one else wants to take on. The problems that come up more often I get better at solving faster over time.
Not all skills are even work related, but just challenging myself. Last month I learned to solve a Rubiks cube in spare time. I will not break any records and am not an expert, but I can solve it in a minute which is good enough. I move on to the next skill.
I am not an expert at anything, but I have spent months doing a bit of everything at one point or another. I tend to identify risks most others miss from having breadth-first experience in how entire stacks fit together from kernel system calls to network packets to end user frontend javascript.
I ended up pivoting to full time security engineering several years ago as a result.
Security is in a lot more demand than devops/sysadmin these days but all sysadmins have experience in security. Something to consider.
I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.
Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.
We often open source security-first ansible and terraform infra patterns in our community, #!, which may be of interest to you. https://hashbang.sh https://github.com/hashbang
A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk.
Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now.
Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)
Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.
Get good enough to be proficient and become a broad generalist. This is a much better route imo.
People can't just make as much as they want. There's always competition and other constraining factors. It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.
If one's primary objective is to maximize income/money/wealth, then you should be prepared to be more flexible with the kind of work you do. There are many careers that pay more than my chosen career, but I am not interested in that work. Hell, it even applies within an industry. There are some companies in tech that have to pay a lot more to attract talent than other companies, because of their reputation, their culture, etc. You can choose to work there to make more money but it does not mean that other companies with better working conditions and more appealing products etc. should automatically match comp. Put differently, there can be many reasons why people choose one job, or career, over another.
It is unreasonable to lament that your chosen work does not pay as much as another job, and more unreasonable to expect all jobs to pay similarly.
Yea, I'll take the occasional phone call at 1 AM for a production down over that.
“All we’re asking is folks to be able to go to routine doctor’s visits without pay, but they have refused to accept our proposals,” Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) said before the deal was struck. “The average American would not know that we get fired for going to the doctor. This one thing has our members most enraged. We have guys who were punished for taking time off for a heart attack and covid. It’s inhumane.”"
Yes go be that instead of a SWE.
Sign me up! A friend of a friend was a diesel electric mechanic making $85k starting 14 years ago, and no college cost. It took me 8 or more years and a masters to hit that comp as a dev. My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.
Ahh yes the famous friend that "makes all this money". Go ahead, sign up. No one is stopping you. "I know a guy who made billions in crypto!" Yea, we all do.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/...
People lie like crazy about wages. The numbers don't.
> My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.
Sure. Overtime pay is a great. Being away from family all the time, working odd hours, yea, if you can handle it, go for it, it can be rewarding for a certain type of person. But remember - OT goes by seniority in the union.
For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc. But if you don't want that, go ahead. Some people do better in those jobs.
"For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc."
Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.
I grew up in a blue collar household. My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.) He worked his life away to provide a better life for me. It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis.
The work is hard, the pay isn't as good. It takes way more hours for equivalent wages. You're location locked. And it taxes your body. It's not about being better. But for most, the numbers don't lie. The facts are the facts.
> Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.
Haha if you think there aren't bad bosses in the trades...well, honestly, just shows me where you're at in your life.
Good luck! It may be the best move you can make. Lots of people have found success there, you can too. I remember when I was less mature, I always thought grass was greener. Turns out, it isn't always. Go figure it out for you.
I never said that.
"My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.)"
Yeah, you can get diseases working in an office, or higher risk of cardiovascular events and cancers from being sedentary.
"He worked his life away to provide a better life for me."
Sounds emotional and possibly a source of bias being that you don't want cognitive dissonance if the life really isn't any better.
"It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis."
Yet I see none of that here.
"I remember when I was less mature,"
Thanks, really love all the backhanded insults and belittling. I bet I'm older than you (neither of us is mature based on this exchange). It's pretty shitty of you to assume my current salary is over $90k. Plenty of trades can earn that or more and not be sedentary.
You need to focus on what makes you happy. I don't want to dissuade you. But think long and hard about the change. Grass isn't always greener. But it can be. It may work out, it may not. The point is, it isn't a slam dunk.
Best of luck!
But yeah they’re also on call sometimes.
Then you tell them the realities of working in a trade. They have no seniority and get night turn. Then you tell them to make that money you need atleast 20+ hours of overtime a week. Oh, and if there's a union, you aren't getting that OT because someone with more seniority is getting it first. Then you tell them they'll be lifting and moving objects and their knees will be in significant pain by the time their 40. They'll be working in un-air conditioned facilities. That alone will eliminate most of them.
The fact is too these outliers always pop up on here. "I know a plumber that makes xxx,xxx!!!" but those are few and far between, many are business owners. The numbers don't lie. The median annual wage is 62,240 for crane operators. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537021.htm
edit: The comp is also not counting stock appreciation which historically was a lot. If you joined Apple in 2019 with a $200k in annual RSUs over 4 years then this year you'd be making $800k from those RSUs. So likely over a million in total tax reportable income.
In a post-covid world you can normally move anywhere you want and keep your pay after you build a good network and reputation.
Even the surgeon would have gone through hell during their 20s and maybe even lower 30s (their best years as a human) to command the $500k+ per year.
There -are- ceilings within a given company though, which is why job changes every 1-2 years are pretty normal. Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them.
When you do finally max out what any one company will pay but have broad experience, you can pivot to independent consulting where $300-1000/hr is normal, and work the number of hours you want.
Startup stocks are ephemeral lottery tickets unlikely to ever make as much as 30% base pay bumps every 2ish years.
Now as an independent consultant I have no stock at all and still make more than the total comp of any FAANG friends.
This may be mitigated at FAANG because they vet heavily on leetcode grind.
Would love to hear your experiences doing this. I took a break from FAANG to do this, and I was making the same (which is great!) but doing utterly boring work (control over my hours was the point). And now I'm back at FAANG making almost double the equivalent since salaries there accelerate after 15+ years exp. You make 150-250 in the lower bands, but like 350-1M after that.
"Always another company willing to pay 30% more to gain niche experience you have that is stalling progress for them."
I feel like you're living in another reality. I have not had significant increases every year, and I feel that's the experience for the majority of devs. A 30% jump every two years is unimaginable (at least prior to the last 3 years). Maybe you're just a top tier dev and me and everyone I know is just shitty.
They are skilled too, mechanics, electricians, welders.
The old dudes running the business make bank, for sure. But the people turning the wrenches are still getting the shaft.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to treat each curve as one sub-category of the industry? It would at least make things more intuitive. My salaries tend to be in the bottom-most curve (55k was my top yearly income) and any changes in salaries in the top curve would probably have little to no effect on prospects at the bottom.