Comment by 3c6bYDXLMj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3c6bYDXLMj | Hacker News Reader

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This reeks of personal taste and bias. “Django jobs pay less”? Yes, I suppose in comparison to C#/.NET jobs in corporates. To not send your daughter to Django Girls because of your personal language bias is completely lost on me. Django Girls isn’t even about learning Django. The benefit your kid is getting from that, the skills they’re really learning, are transferable. C#/.NET is just about inarguably a less approachable platform for a beginner looking to develop rapidly and have fun doing it. Python by itself just has a much lower barrier to entry. Again…it sounds like you’re not taking your personal tastes and familiarity into consideration nearly as much as you should be.

You’ve also entirely missed the point of Django admin. It is not your app. It is not your project. It’s intended as a crutch. The fact that it integrates with your ‘front-end’ code, in a way that a no-code platform popped in front of your database does not, is literally its main selling point.

> “Django jobs pay less”? Yes, I suppose in comparison to C#/.NET jobs in corporates.

Broadly speaking, corporate jobs offer a higher salary relative to startup jobs.

This is by design. Being engineer #0 at a startup is far less stable (i.e. riskier) than being engineer #65535 at BigCorp. The salary is somewhat lower because the company simply doesn't have the cashflow to pay more. Startups have one thing to offer employees to offset that lack of stability and lower salary: equity.

The vast majority of the time, that equity ends up being worthless. Every once in a while, it becomes worth a life-changing amount of money. It's not fair to say that Django jobs pay less. Those types of jobs are an opportunity to trade a portion of your earning potential for a few years for a chance at a much larger prize.

I don't have numbers in front of me to be able to prove it, but I'm of the opinion that when you include this in your calculations, the expected value of your labor is higher working for startups than at large, established companies. While the chance of any given startup succeeding is relatively low, it's not unreasonable to think you'll be able to join up to a dozen or so over the course of your career. The chance of _one_ of those having a successful exit is high enough that I've staked a big part of my financial future on it happening.

No I haven't missed the point at all.

I've worked in the industry for over 20 years now, skills are transferable only to a degree. If you are applying to a corporate job, the person with c#/.net has the edge over someone with the equivalent experience in python/django.

Developers hate admitting this, but tech stacks matter to your hiring potential. My daughter can learn teamwork and other skills from the billion other kid oriented groups, for programming skills I'm going to help her get the easiest best paying job.

> for programming skills I'm going to help her get the easiest best paying job.

Why would anyone want that? This sounds bland and boring.

> If you are applying to a corporate job, the person with c#/.net has the edge over someone with the equivalent experience in python/django.

If.

I spent seven years working a corporate job. My pay is higher today working for startups than it would have been if I'd climbed the corporate ladder. I've had a couple of windfalls in that time: a ~$50k payout when an investment round occurred prior to an IPO, and a ~$125k payout when that IPO happened after I left. If I had joined that company earlier, more aggressively exercised my RSOs when I had them, or had stayed until the IPO occurred, I would have seen a ~$1.5m profit. I learned from that, and now choose my employer based on my estimation of their chances at a successful exit in the time period I want to commit to the company. For me, that means choosing earlier-stage companies where I can accumulate more equity. A happy side effect of that is that I have a much larger relative impact on the company's direction, which keeps me interested and engaged in their success.

In other words... I have no interest in a corporate job. I know I'm far from alone in that.

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