Hacker News Reader

Comment by ditonal | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain to me what actual evidence there is that there's a shortage of good programmers? Good programmers still make less money than a good doctor or lawyer, indicating that those are even shorter in supply. Surely addressing that shortage would be a higher priority? Lots of people could use more legal services if the price was lower, and yet if someone wanted to hire a Harvard lawyer for $60k a year, we wouldn't even seriously consider it, but when someone wants an MIT programmer for $60k a year we consider it a job opening and thus a 'shortage.' Thus I find the 'job openings' a ridiculous metric of supply and demand, and I would use the metric people have always used - the market price. Using this more reasonable metric, there are careers with much more severe shortages of talent. As usual, nobody is surprised that those heavily invested in hiring programmers want a larger supply to drive down market wages.

View on HN

My identical-twin brother is a doctor, and I make far more than he does. The reason is that I don't call myself a programmer [1]. Instead, I've built-up enormous amounts of domain knowledge [2] in addition to my software engineering skills.

As for the career prospects of anyone fresh out of law school, the legal profession suffered a massive meltdown in 2008 and hasn't recovered.

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

[2] http://jacquesmattheij.com/domain-knowledge-or-a-lack-thereo...

Your two data points don't mean much because we're talking about macro trends and whether a 'shortage' actually exists. Specifically I'm asking someone to justify the assertion that there is a shortage of good programmers with some numbers, and I pointed out that job openings is essentially just market 'bids' and therefore not a very good metric since all markets have lots of 'bids' at well below market price. For some reason in the world of programming we take those low bids more seriously than in other fields which is inconsistent. The best metric that I know of, market price, does not indicate a shortage relative to legal and medical work, since both doctors and lawyers both have higher averages, and yet you rarely hear about shortages in those fields and how we need to more aggressively train more. So your point about how you individually make a lot of money is a bit of non-sequitur.

As for legal work, the median starting salary for the top 14 schools (remember, there is a shortage of 'good' programmers) is still 160K+. How many good programmers start there? Sure lower-grade lawyers don't make much, but neither do lower-grade programmers. Facebook and Microsoft both have reasonably high hiring standards and are complaining about a shortage of people over their threshold. As for 'the rest of us', the average lawyer salary is higher than the average software engineer salary. There are a lot of low paid software engineers too, it's absurd to compare only the highest paid software engineers to all lawyers which it seems you tried to do.

The fact that you can see the average lawyer salary being higher than the average software engineer salary, and still claim there a meltdown in the former industry while the second is struggling for people, just shows how deeply ingrained our cultural perspective of what job markets and compensation for a given career 'should be', and how it skews our perspective away from the simple econ 101 supply and demand curves that tell the real story. Markets are a lot more honest than PR releases from billionare tech executives.

But on a side note I did like your blog post, I just think it's irrelevant to this conversation.

It's important to keep in mind the role of the professional guilds in controlling supply for lawyers and particularly for doctors.

Speaking as one, MIT programmers go for a lot more than 60k.

That's why it's a job 'opening'. My point was that it doesn't get filled but people classify it as an opening, but if someone wanted a Harvard lawyer for $60k it wouldn't even get listed.

Do you have an example of a job opening where they're offering 60k for a MIT programmer? I can give you a bunch where they offer substantially more (all $100k+ with just an undergrad degree):

https://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/#t=sq&q=j&j...

http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/grad-software-job...

https://www.dropbox.com/jobs

You are totally missing my point. Yes, I realize MIT programmers make more and you need to pay them well to hire them. However, if you look at average software engineering salaries, you will realize most people do not pay as well as prestigious tech companies. Yet their job openings are used to indicate a shortage. Shortages are just low bids in a market, the fact that lots of people want to buy gold at $1 an ounce does not mean there is a shortage of gold. It's a bad metric if you understand anything about economics, and yet I've yet to see another metric used to argue for a 'shortage'.

I'm just asking for a few examples. Do you have any where they advertise an open job but the pay is low?

With exceptions, salaries aren't advertised in job openings. However you can look at average software engineering salaries to learn that most salaries are south of 100k, and it seems unlikely that on average higher salaries are getting turned down for much lower ones. Furthermore, specific examples are unnecessary. I originally asked for metric that proved there was a developer shortage, and explained why job openings are a bad indication of one. There have been none other proposed to my knowledge, so you're really just nitpicking details irrelevant to my original point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com