Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdgrech23 | Hacker News Reader

I majored in economics and it still boggles my mind what we make as software engineers versus the guy who unclogged my sewer drain allowing me to use the toilet.

View on HN

You will be surprised how much good plumbers make in the USA. You probably used a bad example.

Source: I know my trusted plumber makes well over six figures a year and he cannot take all calls. I asked him once if he has problems generating leads and he smiled saying "I have too much business that I turn people away". He is a "master plumber" which these days is not easy to get certified for in many states. He told me he cannot find enough skilled master plumbers to help him (state of NJ).

Yes I have family who make ~100k in chicago.

You will be surprised how much good software engineers make in the USA -- still many multiples of most successful plumbers, and without the long-term physical consequences of that type of labor. Yes, there's still going to be better examples to highlight the disparity.

There are no comparable "long-term physical consequences of that type of labor" software engineers do?

Maybe? Anecdotal I guess, but I've met more plumbers with chronic knee and back problems than software engineers. But being a plumber in the US isn't too physically demanding, and makes OK money, so it's probably the example of disparity the GP was trying to highlight.

A software programmer will be front of a computer screen, 8 hours, 5 days a week in a sedentary position - they are at risk for problems of eyes, back & neck problems, carpal tunnel, weight gain, anxiety, heart disease, insomnia, deep vein thrombosis just top of my head.

They technically have the option of a chording keyboard/mouse and a wearable computer. Or at the very least a standing desk (or even a treadmill desk). Along with special glasses or monitor filters.

How does a plumber avoid kneeling?

> How does a plumber avoid kneeling?

They technically have the option of reducing weight, exercise, proper shoes, knee braces and knee pads, kneeling pads, and such.

What I am suggesting is that both (all?) jobs have their own health related demons.

Yes in the way that someone with a multi-million dollar trust fund who wants to buy a nicer car or bigger house and someone working for minimum wage both have money problems.

Especially when working from home any health-related dangers around software development can be all but completely eliminated. This isn't even remotely comparable to any of the health or occupational risks in the trades.

Add hemorroids on top of that.

As a software engineer myself, I am not disputing that. All I am saying is that GP to whom I initially replied was using the comparison with plumbers that they make shit money and that is not the case necessarily in the United States. I am not delusional to think that plumbers can beat FAANG income unless they are running an entire business/company with employees.

This is always the same logic, where a plumber makes a ton of money. The reality is that your trusted plumber is actually a business owner. If you start out as a plumber, you need a ton of work to get to this spot by working for someone else for a bad wage. Meanwhile as a dev, I can comfortably work for someone else and don't have all the risk.

You might need to define a “bad” wage. According to BLS, the median wage for a plumber is slightly above the median wage in the US as a whole.

I do think some of the inflated values of some jobs is they are somewhat opaque, while the stuff of jobs like plumbing is easier to at least conceptualize, even if the work itself still requires skill and care. It’s easier for a BS job to inflate its importance if people don’t know exactly how it works.

The thing is that top-end software engineers in a FAANG company (the equivalent of a master-plumber / master-electriction / etc.) are either pushing towards 7 figures or have already got there - in total comp, not in wages, but still.

I'm an ICT5 at Apple (not the best-paying, but hey, less layoffs) and I reported ~$750k last year. There are ICT levels going up to 9...

Wow, I feel like you must have a pretty unique specialization because you are doing incredibly well for ICT5 (Congrats!) There are ICT levels above 6 but I feel like in practice those are very rare and you could easily spend decades working and not make it above ICT6 in many divisions.

Your job is incredibly tedious and boring dealing as it does with human-constructed Kafka-esque instructional systems. You're effectively psychiatrists for machines. Having taken a couple of introductory programming courses, and thrown together some VBScript and some R markdown, I'm fine with you making the big bucks.

Will GPT-6 replace a plumber? I think not.

Will GPT-6 replace some subset 10..80% of engineering, law, medical hours? absolutely

Wait, why 6?

Picked a higher number to not be scary. "supposedly" GPT-4 can pass the bar exam

Gotcha. I thought maybe they were planning to skip GPT-5 or something.

That's actually a pretty low bar, FWIW. (rimshot) Law students spend a few months in bar prep to memorize a bunch of crap that doesn't even apply to their real jobs. Maybe the AI will encourage bar associations to finally ditch it, a development that gained some steam during the pandemic.[1]

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/bar-exam-who-nee...

Bar exam has quite little to do with actual legal work. Or being effective in it.

I'm not actually surprised that a AI-model could pass it. The corpus is well known and well defined and test directly draws from that.

I'm not so sure. There is a Planet Money episode that talks about the effect the digital spreadsheet had on accounting employment:

> Thanks to spreadsheets, there are 400,000 fewer accounting clerks than in 1980, but 600,000 more regular accountants.

Might something like GPT-6 cause employment to shift to higher value job responsibilities?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/epis...

Developers are really dumb wanting to optimize code development.

This seems like a pretty limited viewpoint. We could all be coding in assembler still but generally we find value in using something higher level. Does that make us all dumb?

as a programmer, i would be happy to automate myself out of a job. Because it means that the work i do is infinitely valuable, and i would have been rewarded correctly for it, in a functioning employment market.

People raise arguments like this frequently, but in every other case throughout history people were made obsolete by tools that intelligences use. Never before has the intelligence part been made obsolete though.

Well you've changed the assertion a little bit there. I shared that one particular technical innovation shifted the mix of jobs towards more skilled jobs. That doesn't say anything about any individual person of course.

Your statement says that "people were made obsolete", which I take to mean that some people are individually unable to switch to the more skilled jobs.

I think the effect on current employees due to technical innovation is a reasonable issue to be concerned about but it's not the same phenomenon as the job "mix" changing towards more skilled jobs, even some that didn't exist before. The two phenomena aren't mutually exclusive either.

We don't have too many stagecoach drivers these days but we do have a lot more "drivers".

The fruits of your labour can be sold continuously at low marginal cost. His cannot.

I don't know. An unclogged pipe is used multiple times per day.

If plumbers can figure out how to sell flushing as a service, this whole disparity can be resolved. They might need to hire a software engineer though.

Your comment got a chuckle out loud. And then I saw your user name and can't stop.

Plumbers should get into the PaaS business (pipes as a service).

A point that used to be made a lot in copyright wars discussions a decade ago was that most "old fashioned" professions (like plumber, carpenter, architect, etc.) only get paid once, not every time someone uses their product, whereas creators of digital goods somehow are entitled to get money every time someone uses their creation. Super star musicians and software engineers making obscene amounts of money is a direct result of this.

The ignored corollary is that the market for these products will get saturated much more quickly, and thus the product needs to change to stay relevant. Plus there's a low(ish) bar to entry.

How long has a quality carpentry been sold now? Cost of entry is also relatively stable.

Music styles change every decade now and it is speeding up as marginal costs of entry fall. Likely similar with other entertainment, which is why every entertainment corporation is now looking for lock-in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com