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Comment by Bukhmanizer | Hacker News Reader

It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs. IMO there’s probably a good reason for it, namely some institutional memory of when engineers would just defect en-masse and literally destroy your company if you pissed then off enough. But it also makes me a little sad that other white collar jobs don’t have the same benefits.

There are probably a ton of jobs where people work just as hard as engineers but are treated as little interchangeable boxes by the money people.

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> It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs.

Other office jobs are treated better. They don’t get pinged at random times outside of business hours. They don’t have to attend late night meetings because of foreign time zone

I know a bunch of AWS people and have heard worse things from them

Frankly, I love programming but would rather have a regular office job. This industry is predatory

I think you're glossing over how much people in other office jobs get gaslighted (gaslit?) into showing up at odd times too. To finish a report. To coordinate with an offshore accounting team in a foreign time zone (not unique to Engineering). To be always reading their email. Not for nothing are some states and countries writing rules against being "always on" into their laws, recently. So, sure, a small contingent of Engineering folks might be on-call, but you should be able to make good working agreements about that, put boundaries around it, and keep your sanity. If not, you're maybe being gaslighted like any other old regular office worker.

I replied to your other similar post too, but why not look into working for smaller companies or contract/freelance work? Not all tech jobs are big tech type work. You’ll make less money perhaps but it sounds like you might be happier based on what’s important to you.

Smaller companies are less stressful but they often give you no autonomy or purpose.

It can be a good economic / stress tradeoff but it will suck your soul.

Left job with a unicorn because of stress, I make more than double that by contracting with smaller businesses and working less - but I'm way more depressed about the job.

I think a happy medium might be to run your small product company. I do that on the side as well, but it brings 1/10th of what I can make contracting.

I know tons of office jobs that have to attend late night meetings because of foreign time zones.

Just like I know lots of developers that don't.

What a weird generalisation to make.

Not a miracle. Things fuck up extremely quickly when you the systems are not maintained and it takes competence. A lot of businesses value (most perhaps?) goes to zero in a flash sans - IT. There is a developer behind all of that.

That combination of needing talent which is in short supply and being essential.

Even comparing traditional sysadmin work — where operations are even more crucial — to software engineering, it’s easy to see that engineers tend to get paid more, get treated better and have more freedom.

Obviously there are reasons for this, but it seems to boil down to broad generalizations in how the C-Suite sees your role, and very little in the particularities of the org or employee.

The reason is growth. A sysadmin will make sure the lights stay on and the place doesn’t burn down, but they aren’t creating a new revenue stream. And when all these companies need to grow forever, they need to be creating new things, which developers do and sysadmins don’t.

And that is why platform/devops is safer than the sysadmin. Not only do they help developers create new things, but make it complicated enough that you can't disband their team ... {tongue in cheek, sort of...}

It's not a miracle.

You're treated well because you have the potential to deliver multiples of what you're making in revenue.

Other office jobs rarely can do so.

That means that sensible places will happily pay you a lot and make money on you, and that will prop the entire market up, which means even crap places will have to pay more just to get some developers.

Supply and demand and the fact that their multi-billion dollar business depends on this small handful of people?

Name another white collar job that’s simultaneously as complex and as creative as being a programmer.

Architects build houses.

Software engineers build whole cities, and they exist only in their minds! (i.e they can’t even see them, they’re just abstract concepts of enormous complexity)

I'm very thankful to my high school self for choosing computer science. I feel lucky I happened to be interested in computers. If I was born 5 years earlier, I may have made a different choice.

> institutional memory of when engineers would just defect en-masse and literally destroy your company if you pissed then off enough.

Got some good examples?

Probably a reference to the "Traitorous Eight". You can Google more about them.

One of the realities of capitalism is that people are not paid proportionally to how hard they work.

Or in proportion to how much value they create.

They're paid in proportion to how much unique value they gatekeep.

Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession. They dream of making us more of a commodity, so that as the chief gatekeepers of the tech economic engine, they get to keep a larger slice of the pie we create.

>Hence why Silicon Valley's masters were so keen on everybody learning to code in primary school and getting more women into the profession.

Why is it bad that more people learn to code? I see this as a net benefit to humanity. Why do you want to gate-keep it?

Put another way, wouldn't it have made more sense, social-benefit-wise, to encourage everyone to be nurses, doctors, teachers, or members of another profession that provides direct benefits to humanity? Or flautist or waitstaff or any thing else that benefits people too?

It really was to put the prices down and benefit themselves, not to benefit humanity overall. They would never encourage people to learn mental health providing, physical therapy, exercises for their own health, they don't actually care about those.

A glut of coders only is good for the coders if there is enough overall business to keep them actually employed somehow. Otherwise you have a lot of people who don't spend time coding.

I was just explaining why the tech oligarchy is so obsessed with it. It's a long term pragmatic and selfish effort to drive down our wages that is couched in progressive terms about inclusion, equality, education, etc. They also want to appear to be the hero while they try to push down dev wages.

It was a positive statement. You're free to make whatever normative judgements about that that you please. I'm not here to stop you praising it.

'Tech oligarchy', whatever that means, can't forcefully turn everyone expert SW devs even if they wanted to.

We studies fairly advanced CS at school, without the 'tech oligarchy' making us (in Europe where this is non-existent anyway) and yet very few of us turned it into a career later in life because not everyone likes to do programing for a living and there's other lucrative jobs out there. Same at university, less than half of those who entered, managed to graduate in CS because it was tougher than people initially thought.

Cook, Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos can't turn you into an productive CS if you don't have what it takes, they can't download CS theory into your brain like in 'The Matrix'. In fact, many of them are responsible for dumbing down the population when it comes to computers, so I guess we can actually "thank" them.

Only the last ~6-10 years saw an insanely large number of people get into the industry without CS background because of the super high demand driven by the mobile revolution, negative interest rates, crypto hype cycles and stuck-at-home pandemic, and not by the 'tech oligarchy'.

But that was potentially an once in a lifetime event which might never come back. The mobile market is now saturated, crypto is done, people are not stuck at home anymore and the negative rates are also over, plus a trade war and an actual war, meaning an industry slow down, but again, not dictated by the 'tech oligarchs' and more people choosing CS careers, but by market, geopolitics and financial circumstances.

It is so disingenuous to snip out the reason they gave and then pose a sanctimonious question as if it wasn't clear. They said it's to increase supply and lower labour costs.

You can argue with that or not but don't pretend you do not understand the capitalist ideal of an excess supply of labour so that salaries and benefits can be driven to legal minimums with desperate people still waiting to be hired no matter the indignity. Creating Labour surpluses to reduce Labour power and enable exploitation is not a "net benefit to humanity", it only benefits capital.

In our shitty world, you are only valued if you are in a position of more demand than the supply. You might get that by being lucky but most only get it by gatekeeping whether it's doctors or delivery drivers or companies buying up their competitors. If you stand idly by, the world will punish you.

>It is so disingenuous to snip out the reason they gave and then pose a sanctimonious question as if it wasn't clear. They said it's to increase supply and lower labour costs.

Oh please, don't act so 'righteous-than-thou'. With this logic, aren't we all here who got into SW development responsible for increasing the labor supply and decreasing wages?

What's disingenuous, is people in traffic complaining there's traffic. It's sounds like you got "yours" and then you wanna kick down the ladder behind you.

Where does the buck stop? Who gets to decide who's deserving of getting into SW development without also being responsible for diluting wages, and who not?

Those are valid questions, you are describing the problem. It is a tension. It applies to immigration and any number of other social issues. What was wrong was to frame the flooding the market with new software developers as an entirely noble intent. It's like saying the abuse of h1b visas has also been noble and not about labour costs / control over staff.

The problem is that it is a fundamentally unfair game which requires some people to lose. If you want a solution then it's to remove desperation from the labour market. Remove the implicit threat of destitution and ruin if you don't take the work that is offered to you at the minimum cost an employer can get away with. This is what takes people to ideas of basic income and basic services.

>Oh please, don't act so 'righteous-than-thou'.

Theres an interesting pattern here of us making positive statements and you inferring normative judgements which then make you upset.

That's good, in fact. People should be compensated for the value they generate. Why should a fast food worker be compensated equivalently to a doctor or engineer? I do not want to live in a world where that could exist.

CEO compensation vs returns:

> We find evidence that industry and size adjusted CEO pay is negatively related to future shareholder wealth changes for periods up to five years after sorting on pay. For example, firms that pay their CEOs in the top ten percent of pay earn negative abnormal returns over the next five years of approximately -13%. The effect is stronger for CEOs who receive higher incentive pay relative to their peers. Our results are consistent with high-pay induced CEO overconfidence and investor overreaction towards firms with high paid CEOs.

https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/CEOperformanc...

Employee compensation vs Output:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-...

They're not paid for the value they generate either. They're paid proportional to the leverage they have to extract money from the business.

In other words, can you run the business into the ground? If yes => $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, if no => $.

The CEO can tank a company (in fact they frequently do)

An engineer certainly has more power than average to sink a company (isn't half the star wars story pretty much this?)

Cleaning personnel does not

A manager at an In-N-Out burger restaurant makes more than most developers outside of Silicon Valley ($160000) - and tbh I don’t complain about that because I’ve seen the speed those guys put out burgers in Mountain View on a busy day!

You are in a world where that can exist if you make international comparisons. There are some fast food workers earning more than some developers.

Bartending at the right bar is a six figure, semi-untaxed salary which is competitive with a jr swe salary.

Not competitive because you still have to account for quality of life, working on site with no remote option, working evenings, nights, and weekends, general riskiness of being around drunk/high people, etc.

Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either.

Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?

> Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?

That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lowly software engineers’ too. With that sort of attitude you can rarely win.

Using a broad range of parents’ recommendations for what their kids could aim for does not having anything to do with parents being proud or disappointed.

It is a rough rubric to gauge an average quality of life for a person who does a certain thing for a living, not that parents or even entire generations of parents are always right about the continued resilience of a given occupations’ quality of life.

Okay tiger mom. Bartenders don't get fired because they got a cheaper office in Estonia or India to write code. They don't have 9am meetings. Git is an insult you call somebody; What's a JIRA‽ You don't want to work in the nightlife/entertainment industry, which is fine, but it's a $36 billion dollar industry and some people want to do that instead of sitting in front of a screen all day long.

At the end of the day, take home pay is one metric we can actually compare, because different people want different things.

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