Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year.

Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more than the aforementioned lawyers. These pros can demand hourly rates of anywhere from $60-$80, but more often will make $250-$500/hr by quoting a job price and doing it quickly. And it's no problem for them to drive to all their appointments in their 1997 Ford E series wearing flannel and jeans.

I could also introduce you to janitors that make six figures a year because they know how to penetrate insurance bureaucracies and get black mold cleanup jobs.

If money is your aim, pick a job out of a hat and be excellent at it - and not just the actual execution, but the promotion, estimation, and pricing of your talent too. If you can get into the 25th percentile of solving problems in your expertise, you'll be well compensated for it no matter what it is.

Hogwash. For every skilled craftsman you can find, I can find ten other idiots making ten times as much money thanks to being born in the right family. Skilled developers recognize that rockstar developers can be ten times as productive as average ones. I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average.

Stock brokers are regularly getting beaten by monkeys when it comes to betting on the stock market, yet they are among the top earners in society. It's just insane to suggest that salaries are fair or that skill is in any way correlated to income.

Unless you believe that making lots of money proves that you are good at what you are doing, which makes the whole argument a tautology.

Edit: Also, the best work I've done is all open source. It isn't all very good stuff (far from it!), but it certainly is both more valuable and better than the corporate code I write for a living. Then there is http://www.ohloh.net/ that tries to estimate the labour costs of various open source projects. People have plowed thousands of hours of unpaid work into some of the highest regarded software projects on earth just for fun. They will never get properly compensated for their work. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work." is the famous slogan of Socialism, but it certainly isn't how the world currently operates.

To be fair, compensation in banking is very related to performance. Investment bankers get paid on the size of their deals, traders get paid based on how much they make, money managers get paid based on how much they bring in. The majority of people get pushed out within a few years if they aren't top performers.

The key thing to realize is that value to the customer isn't part of the performance equation. It doesn't matter if a hedge fund manager is beating the market. His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on.

Which brings me to your point--it's not that pay isn't correlated with skill. It's that the skill it's universally correlated with is salesmanship.

His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on.

Indeed, and if these people are his high school friends, then the task of bringing them in the door "just got a whole lot easier"...

So going back to a parent's point, it seems being born into wealth just happens to give certain valuable, uh, "skills"...

    compensation in banking is very related to performance

The last four or five are conclusive proof that this is not even remotely true.

Those bankers that helped caused the collapse were making money hand over first for their companies, and even with the reduced profitability during the recession the banks came out way ahead.

There's a quote I can't quite place right now (maybe from a TED talk?), but a metrics-oriented guy went to one of these top salesman companies and calculated the inter-year correlation of performance bonuses. Most of the salesmen figured it would be low - it turned out to be almost exactly 0.

He's not trying to make a point about the justification of society's wages in general, he's describing what an individual can do, which may or may be representative of general trends. Do you deny that it's possible for an individual to reach a point where they're well-compensated for being a skilled craftsman?

To be fair s/he did include marketing of your services among the set of things that were requisite that you be good at to pull it off.

Bjourne -

Notice the OP mentioned "promotion, estimation, and pricing" as part of being great.

Thomas Fuchs quotes clients at $800/hr ( http://script.aculo.us/thomas/ ). Thunderbolts labs is quoting $277/hr for their consulting rates ( http://thunderboltlabs.com/ ). And these are people that publicly advertise their rates. I know several other individuals at these levels that just don't publicly advertise.

Skills in this context includes (self)promotion; it's not enough to just code. No one (usually) comes knocking on your door after a great commit. But if you put yourself out there, stand by your work, talk to lots of people and show that you're a problem solver, by all means, you can triple even quadruple your income as a developer.

Honestly, it sounds like you're a good developer, so you're probably already half way there. Put up a site that outlines your major open source commits, your ability to cut through the BS and distill the problem to it's necessities. Tell the client that you ship on time.

Your world will open up with (financial) possibilities my friend.

It's pretty clear that top preformers don't look at averages. They look at what others have done and from there figure out how to get there in a reasonable time.

A developer who makes 10x a regular developer happens often, but what they are doing is taking on a lot of the risk that companies take on and knock your salary for. Your project is 2x over budget and 4x behind schedule? Oh, that's just Software projects in corporate IT. This has nothing to do with the developer actually being better of course, but the developer willing to assume the risk that results in 10x payouts.

Instead of complaining about Stock Brokers, it might be more effective to look at what they do (transactional work) and try to figure out how to place your self in a position so that you can take advantage of transactional work.

And a minor correction, it should read: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

The only way you can claim that a developer can make 10x the regular salary, is to have that developer do something other more profitable than development and claim that that makes him or her more excellent. It's a circular argument: "you are doing something that makes lots of money, therefore what you are doing is more excellent than someone making less money." No, making money is about being good at making money. Not to perform outstanding work.

The quote is right, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is for Communism, which has a different slogan than Socialism.

You've never heard of a developer who made a mil in a liquidity event? This is Hacker News dude.

"I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average."

Programmers who are making that kind of money know enough to keep it quiet.

I have never met a programmer making 10x the average salary ($500k - $1mm depending) excluding liquidity events.

That says more about who you know than the real distribution of programmer salaries. It's not common, but those kinds of compensation scales definitely exist?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828538

Here's your model programmer who makes a lot more, although you'll probably call it an unfair comparison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson

Never did I suggest the world was fair or that trust fund babies don't have a better chance at a high income than someone born into a iron-workers family.

I was suggesting that there's good money to be made in every discipline - you may need some creativity and personality to get to that money, but no one should ever look at the field they're in and say "Oh, ho hum, I'll never be rich because of my field."

And your socialist quote was misquoted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abil...

Finally, if your open source code is good in that it is solving problems for people, then you should have a very fertile network of possible consulting clients. Those who use their open source work to feed their consultancies can make very very good money.

As a biologist, I'm going to have to object. No matter what level of talent and competence you have, there are very few opportunities in this field to make a nice living. You're pretty much relegated to becoming a tenured professor (good luck) or working your way up in an established biotech firm doing work many would consider mind-numbing. At best, you're looking at the low-end of six figures for someone with decades of experience and an amazing track record, and there are very few of those positions. You can go the entrepreneurial biotech route, this is HN after all, but considering the small number of successful firms we can safely leave that option out for the purposes of salary estimation.

I think this is a factor of latency in added value. It seems to me that higher salaries are often given to those who can provide immediate usable value in the short term (lawyers, stock traders, some programmers). Long-term value-add professions, such as biology and many other R&D fields, tend to get the short end of the stick salary wise. Perhaps this is tied into the immediate gratification complex of western culture; professions with a significant value-add prospect >~5 years in the future have a difficult time arguing their own worth.

The point of tenure is that it's well tenure. There is actual value attached to a sinecure. What would it cost right now to buy an investment that would pay you a six figure salary for the rest of your life, no strings attached? That's what tenure is worth. Now tell me profs aren't well rewarded.

By no means was I trying to say that professors aren't well rewarded, if that's how I came across, I didn't communicate very effectively.

My point was mainly that there aren't very many of those high paying positions relative to the number of graduates in the field. The ratio of graduates : professors is not too different than the ratio of CS grads : CS professors, but unlike CS, biology doesn't have nearly as many high paying positions outside of the professorial field. Even within education, many very good life scientists have a hard time obtaining tenure.

Most jobs outside of education pay somewhere around 60k, and there isn't a whole lot of room for growth unless you move up into management at a biotech firm. This is in contrast to CS, where a non-manager software engineer has a pretty decent opportunity to make 6 figures if he works hard enough and has a decent level of talent.

It's a bit of a reach to say that a tenure position amounts to a sinecure.

Do you seriously claim that janitors in the 25th percentile make about the same as programmers in said percentile, on average - that the average is the same for all occupations? I rather doubt it.

I mean, it makes sense that return on all sorts of investment should be about the same once the respective markets stabilize, but some things aren't investment, they're luck. Being good at something that is in demand is more like sitting on a gold mine than buying stock.

Money is about the market rate. If your good at something, but there lots of people similar to you then you're gonna have a bad time.

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