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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

> Damn, she deserves that $240k more than a lot of us software developers. This is a hard job.

Wow, this is such a nonsense view. Software development may seem easy to you, because you know how to do it and probably have been doing it for a long time. But I can assure you, software development is a hard job. If it was easy, everyone and their dog could do it. Have some respect to your profession!

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Yes SW development is a hard job but she is doing a lot more than one job and the skill set required (not just knowledge but also behavior) to cover so many roles is a lot broader than most developers and also many managers in the software industry require to do their job.

On the other hand, there are a lot of Walmarts and similar stores, and a lot of people who have managed these in the past. There are many people who she can turn to for reliable advice. I'm assuming one Walmart is not fundamentally different from another. It's hard work, but it's essentially predictable.

Software developers are often called to do work that's not predictable. At the top of the pay grade we're generally asked to design something novel, because it's obviously not worth paying $240k / year for a developer whose work could be replaced by off-the-shelf software. (Sure, there are many exceptions and cushy jobs where people are raking in the cash with few risks. I'm thinking there are probably less of these around than a few years ago, though.)

The SW development is not just knowing the programming language, you also have to cover many roles, you need to understand and have the domain knowledge of the thing you are developing, you need to have communication skills to coordinate with other developers and stakeholders and many more (like developing intuition to know when to stop manager from making a mistake - e.g. you know this and that idea won't actually work in practice or it will have problems down the line adding to technical debt and so on).

If both options paid you 240k a year, would you rather be a software engineer or do the exact job the Walmart manager does? I'm guessing you'd rather do SWE

and plenty of people would rather do the job where you walk around and talk to people all day, folks are different

I would imagine most people would rather do the Walmart job. It would probably be like 90/10 or something.

Depends. Walmart manager could be one of the highest salaried roles in a LCOL area enabling an early retirement or better quality of life than a SWE stuck in a HCOL.

I think you misunderstood my point. I actually had a conversation about it with my friend who was a manager of a private health clinic. She had a moment of massive burnout and was looking to switch profession to something else. She was particularly tired of abuse she was getting from employees she had to manage and patients, unrealistic targets, overtime and relatively poor pay. The prospect of sitting in a cubicle, with noise cancelling headphones, minding own work and having similar pay while being surrounded by like-minded professionals was really enticing. Her understanding of programming was very much that you type in commands so the computer does things you want, easy. When she was this motivated, I asked her to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOjov-2OZ0E She managed to watch about 20 minutes and from there she couldn't focus. Then she asked to stop and asked me: "Do you know all of this? Do you have to know this?" I said that this is just the basics. That was very much the end of it. She changed her career later and she is managing construction projects. Something I wouldn't like to do. It would be a hard job, because that's not something I am interested in.

I think you underestimate how many people hate interacting with computers.

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