Why great programmers don’t make as much money as soccer stars? | Hacker News Reader

Why great programmers don’t make as much money as soccer stars?

coliveira.net

11 pointscoliveira20 comments

Because, thanks to our society's investment in stadium, television, and sports-bar infrastructure, the work of a soccer star scales really well? The best of them have an audience in the billions.

Meanwhile, the game of soccer -- like all major spectator sports -- has been deliberately designed for... spectators. It is designed to give the scant handful of brilliant outlier talents a stage on which to shine. If soccer became too boring to watch, eventually they would tinker with the rules until it became exciting again -- that is how soccer itself was invented, after all. Hence, soccer makes money because it was designed to be popular. Programming, on the other hand, was designed for various other purposes, ranging from personal pleasure to scientific exploration to actually getting things done.

High school soccer players don't make money, because high-school soccer doesn't consistently produce the highest caliber of play. The world's best fencers, or chess players, don't make much money because their talent is difficult for the average spectator to appreciate. And the world's best dancers and acrobats only make money if they are good at self-promotion, or if they plug themselves into a system that was built to create stars, work really hard, and then get some lucky breaks. (See: Jackie Chan. For whom the term "lucky breaks" is well chosen.)

It might be possible to design a programming sport that showcased the talent of the best programmers at the highest level. (In a sense, that's what YC is trying to do, although a startup is a test of more than just raw programming skill. But, then, team sports are a test of more than just hand-eye coordination...) But it's probably pretty hard to make programming as exciting as soccer. So what? Programming is a different game.

I'd watch that. Like an Iron Chef show, but with programmers. Iron Programmer. Today's secret ingredient is... REGULAR EXPRESSIONS! Go!

The work of programmers scales really well, too. There are a number of pieces of software used by more than a billion people: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Firefox, Google, Apache, PHP, and the operating system they run on: Linux. And that's exactly why the best-paid programmers make a lot more money than the best-paid soccer stars.

And that's exactly why the best-paid programmers make a lot more money than the best-paid soccer stars.

Upmodded, of course.

The irony is that this was the thesis that I set out to write about when I started composing my post. And yet I somehow completely lost my train of thought! I guess I had more fun thinking about why, when a soccer star makes $49M a year (which, of course, happens only at the peak of his career), people notice:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/best-paid-soccer-biz-soccer...

... but when a programmer makes an average of $12M a day over 24 years people can manage to forget about him.

(That's Bill Gates, assigning him $0 when Microsoft was founded in 1975 and $101 billion in 1999 when his wealth peaked, and assuming linear growth -- which is obviously wrong, of course; I was just too lazy to do the exponential assumption. He was obviously making money at a much lower rate at first... and a much higher rate later.)

I'd guess that, as percentiles go, programmers make much more money than soccer players. Sure, there are stars like Ronaldo that make more than almost anyone here, but he's up against Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

I would imagine soccer salary levels fall dramatically once you drop below the very top of the sport. Unlike programmers which can be far from the top (Gates? bad example) but still make a reasonable living.

Does anyone know a low level soccer player who makes a decent middle class living? Is there a working 'minor-leagues' for the soccer world?

You can look at Major League Soccer in the US. David Beckham makes $6.5 million/year and the median salary for all players is $53,000. Lowest salary for developmental players is $13,000.

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=427678&...

$53k a year is probably not too bad unless you live in expensive areas, but it's really not a lot considering that the length of your career is probably less than ten years.

The top programmers (in terms of profitability anyway) have made infinitely more than the top soccer stars. Bill Gates could buy every soccer star with the money under his mattress.

The Bill Gates and Larry/Sergeys of the world are rich because they are business owners, not because they are programmers. The sports equivalent would be if Michael Jordan started his own basketball league, grew it to many teams/cities, got TV and merchandising contracts, etc.

Sports stars are some of the highest payed employees in the world because they, like musicians and movie stars, can use the infrastructure that mechanical_fish mentioned. But they are nowhere near as wealthy as the team owners, just like great programmers that aren't also business owners aren't nearly as wealthy as the companies that employ them.

Michael Jordan is part-owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, actually, and I think there are a number of Google and Microsoft employees who are richer than Michael Jordan (who apparently has about US$400M and recently had to pay US$168M in a divorce settlement). It's true that it's because they're part-owners of Google and Microsoft, but that ownership was granted because of work they did, not (for the most part) because of dollars they contributed.

So I think the premise of the article is wrong; some programmers do earn as much as sports stars and star musicians. I don't have a good sense for how the numbers shake out in the aggregate.

Why great programmers don’t make as much money as soccer stars?

because most of us think abs is a numerical function not a muscle group.

I get nervous every time I use Math.sin().

At least it's not Math.sin!(), which seems more unrepentant.

"Programmers have to work in a team if they really want to do anything of moderately large scale"

I would disagree with that statement.

Yes, programming history has a few star programmers that implemented operating systems, editors, web sites, etc. The problem is that, in the end, they all had to work with a team to take that creation to the next level.

L. Peter Deutsch, who is by anyone's measure one of history's greatest programmers, spent many years working on basically just GhostScript, basically by himself (code contributions he received were not up to his standards). He made a good living at it and has a substantial amount of savings as a result. I don't really have any idea whether that means US$2M or US$2B, though. Maybe he'll donate some of his savings to some charity and we'll get an idea of their scale.

So I think GhostScript might demonstrate, or at least approximate, the limit of what one person working by himself can do.

("Greatest": he wrote approximately the second Lisp interpreter when he was 15; with Butler Lampson he wrote the QED editor, on which ed and thus vi are based; he invented JIT compilation; he did a bunch of stuff at PARC in the 1970s that I don't even know about; and he successfully competed with Adobe in the PostScript RIP market for decades.)

Have you ever just stood back and watched a programmer work? You can't sell tickets or ads for that! Therefore programmers don't make as much as soccer stars...

The highest paid soccer stars are usually celebrities too. That is, people will go to the game to just watch that person play.

Although there are software franchises that people will follow (think games), people in general don't care who programmed the software.

The average pay of all soccer players is probably less than the average pay of all programmers. I can tell you that the median soccer pay is zero.

Because of Supply and Demand.

One word: Sexiness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com