Hacker News Reader

> Salaries will never be as comparatively high as they were in the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to sabotage

In the 80s and 90s programming salaries were not very high, it was a decent middle-class job. Sure, there were outliers if you hit a big IPO as always (e.g. Sun in the 80s, Netscape in the 90s, among others). But salaries? No, they were generally in line with other white-collar middle-class jobs like accounting or such.

It's only in the later 00s and particularly the 2010s that mean programmer salaries exploded to the point that now entry level jobs in SV can be 180K+. It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce.

> It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce.

The last 10 years of ballooning salaries are a mirage perpetuated by the FED's irresponsible quantitative easing. Who cares if you're making $180k when an entry-level house in your area costs $2 million. Not to mention that the people making that much in the first job is a fraction of a fraction of the workforce.

Do you have any evidence that tech salaries were high in the 80s and 90s? I thought Apple, Sun et al conspired to keep salaries down. As the son of an electrical engineer with a 45 year career in software we never lived, and he doesn't have the pension, that a junior engineer at Meta or Google would be able to provide today.

There's plenty of evidence[1]; but more importantly, when putting stagnating salaries in the context of housing prices, CPI, and inflation, it becomes even more jarring. Today, as an engineer making 125-175k in LA, for example, you will literally never be able to purchase a home near to where you work.

[1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional

There are plenty of nice cities in the developed world where people making a third of that have no trouble buying homes. California is expensive, because people oppose building new housing in sufficient quantities. They may support it in principle, but they oppose what it means in practice.

Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by car and too sparsely populated to support good public transport. Building new housing is difficult due to the traffic it generates.

Where? Can they buy homes without entering into lifelong debt?

At least in Finland, home ownership seems to be common among the people in their 30s and 40s I know, regardless of what they studied or didn't. The most common reasons for renting appear to be being single and relocating often for work. Typical mortgage duration is 20-25 years, which means that if you are in your 30s or 40s, you are probably about halfway through. At least if you didn't switch to a bigger home recently.

> At least in Finland, home ownership seems to be common among the people in their 30s and 40s I know, regardless of what they studied or didn't.

You cannot call it home ownership, when these people are in decades of debt for their houses. 20-25 years is what I'd consider lifelong debt, if you enter it in your 20s. And for many it makes financial sense to go into that lifelong debt. When the parents croak about when they're halfway through paying, they have the option to sell the inheritance and can get free from the debt. To finally take back control of their life - but in reality to refinance and get a car and continue to feed the banks.

That's just the choices people make.

I saw an interesting factoid some time ago. In the early 20th century, it was considered enough to have 7 m2 of living space for an adult and half of that for a child. If people still considered that enough, they could buy homes and be debt free before 30. But because people can reasonably expect to afford more, they take loans against future earnings to buy bigger and better homes. Meanwhile, students live alone in apartments that once housed families.

I thought this might be the trick that would get pulled. House price inflation is a completely inappropriate measure. House prices are not kept stupidly high by the 1% or capital class but by the 50.1% that vote against allowing any kind of building anywhere near an existing house, not near an existing house or that, heav'n forfend, might endanger the habitat of the lesser spotted newt.

> House prices are not kept stupidly high by the 1% or capital class but by the 50.1% that vote against allowing any kind of building anywhere near an existing house,

The discussion is not about a specific area or your specific area. There are large parts of the US where there is no such NIMBY voting allowed, much less enacted to prohibit construction. Prices have more or less ballooned everywhere in the US.

Random home in Southern CA: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1414-N-Center-St-Orange-C...

Random home in Boulder CO: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/175-Gold-Run-Rd-Boulder-C...

Random home in Edmond OK: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/7105-Robey-Dr-Edmond-OK-7...

There were 0 votes on housing in Fargo, ND over the last few years and new homes are consistently over 400k because the land is cheap. The issue is not some uniform voting block artificially inflating housing prices. Random home in Jacksonville FL: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1414-N-Center-St-Orange-C...

> There are large parts of the US where there is no such NIMBY voting allowed

It's called zoning. Do you know of any notable residential areas without zoning?

As I understand it in most of the United States zoning is controlled by City governments which are under democratic control. If enough of the people didn't want the zoning, the zoning wouldn't be happening.

I was referring more to the additional processes that have been weaponized like CEQA.

In most of the US, additional zoning is welcomed. Zoning for smaller locales is controlled by financial limitations, rather than entrenched interests. Who doesn't want utilities to be brought to their area? For example, Puyallup WA is ~40 mi away from Seattle and there are still residences in Industrial zoned areas waiting for residential zoning to bring them sewer access. It's about the cost, not grassroots opposition.

Most towns can grow in every direction as fast as they can build. The issue is cost of land development and regulation, moreso than NIMBY influence.

Zoning controls the type of housing that is developed, and thus far typically represents the interests of NIMBYs without explicitly saying as much.

Sure, changing zoning from "light industrial" or "commercial" to include some level of residential is often welcome, and is generally a good idea. But such changes are not the crux of the battle over housing. We don't actually want towns to grow in every direction without bounds, as a general rule: we want them to have sufficient housing that the people who need to live there can afford to do so. That typically requires dealing with the zoning laws that prevent increases in residential density ... i.e. NIMBY-ism.

I don't think you can separate the behavior of the voting public from the conditions imposed on them by the capital class and the propaganda they feed us through their media properties.

> railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic reality in the early 20th century.

Yes, they did. Being a locomotive engineer was a high-status job around 1900 or so. It was a union job. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was the first major union in the US.

The same thing happened to electricians (heyday around 1920), radio engineers (peaked a bit later), and television engineers (peaked around 1970).

Being a printer was once a good unionized job. I've seen homeless printers talking about the good old days at the Burger King near the Civic Center cable car turntable in SF.

Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler?

> Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler?

There are plenty of unhoused tech workers, already.

See! They pre optimised.

Eagerly the awaiting the age of the homeless current googler. I would let them stay on my couch.

> It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber.

People keep saying this, and people who own software companies REALLY seem to want it to be true, but as far as I can tell, it's the opposite. I occasionally work with kids fresh out of college and they find themselves completely lost in the maze of modern software stacks that abstract distributed file systems and dependency management and security that fail for what seem like incredibly arcane reasons ("what the heck is a trusted certificate authority and why doesn't it like mine?"). Developing software today requires fairly deep knowledge (or access to somebody with deep knowledge) of nearly the entire history of software development.

Offshoring and H1-Bs have definitely kept programmer wages lower than they would have been otherwise.

I make better than 3x times my wife’s teacher salary. If I really pushed hard career wise I could probably get to 6x.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to the market distortion caused by offshoring and H1-B. Could you explain further?

Sure, but the point is that you have to fight now. Personally, I think a union would be a GREAT move, and I'm surprised he didn't stress that more.

> class warfare nonsense

Its only nonsense in the mind of plebs. For the class that's waging that war, its quite real. They are aware of what they are doing.

So if we disagree with you, we're a "pleb". Nice.

Personal attacks are against the site rules, by the way.

You absolutely have not understood the comment that you replied to.

You know, if you actually think that, instead of are just using it as a cheap rhetorical trick, you might supply some explanation of the comment I was replying to...

They would want it to be like a plumber but it turned out 95% of people just cant hold a wrench and no amount of boot camps can change that.

> Programming, as a profession, has simply become more commoditized. It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber.

Did it start that way though? I feel like from the 50s-70s, outside of a narrow slice of academia, companies were mass hiring (and training!) people to program.

Yes. Companies used to send people to "IBM School", to learn COBOL or Job Control Language.

If you have to pay to train people, the technology tends to be kept simple and understandable.

If I parsed that correctly, you're using JCL as an example of a technology that was kept simple and understandable. That, um, is not the way I think about JCL...

Good point.

I used UNIVAC mainframes, not IBM. They had a different control language which wasn't too bad.

> It used to be kind of like being a brain surgeon, and it's becoming more like being a plumber.

That's quite a dramatic change. Maybe it is inevitable because most jobs not involve computers.

> In the capitalist game, being an employee is never going to be a way to garner any real amount of wealth

In the capitalist game, being an employee is the only avaliable starting position to 95% of the population. It it does not allow a way to garner any real amount of wealth, then we cannot have social mobility and best people getting to the top. Then we are all poorer.