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I'm not sure I'd agree. By and large employers exist in language silos and will only hire devs with experience in their specific language, this means that there are distinct markets for different languages. That effect is amplified that entire sectors focus on specific languages.

So for example Java in London tends to be pretty well paid because all the investment banks hire for it heavily, this has also pushed up Java salaries in non-banking role.

The best PHP dev with great negotiating skill probably still makes less than an average Java dev at a bank.

Language is a primary differentiator in hire-ability.

In case you don't remember, we had a discussion about the job market last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4214543

You were claiming the hiring market was on fire and that being fizzbuzz capable was about enough to get meetings with hiring directors and that your clients were begging you to find them an engineer.

During that time I was spending a great deal of time applying to jobs, going to tech meetups and interviewing and had very little success despite a track record of successfully taking on challenges in the business world and demonstrable junior-level programming skills. I asked you to your back up your claims and put me in touch with any of these clients dying for an engineer, as you might remember.

Now—about a year later—I've achieved the goals I had at that time. I'm working in a purely technical role building a large site that many, many people use. My compensation is at least in the top decile of both programmers in the US and residents of the city where I live. And one thing that was key to me getting a flood of offers from both large companies and start-ups a few months ago was developing domain-expertise in JavaScript and becoming proficient in several frameworks. Putting up projects on github and contributing to others played a role, too.

There is a high rate of unemployment in the US right now. As a result, many, many people are trying to break into the software world. For new graduates, there's a bit of an open door via internships but it's not at all easy in the general case. I've seen many talented people struggle for months to break in and then suddenly get a flood of offers. There's clearly a good degree of herd behavior involved.

Without the specific framework skills that I had, companies would have had a very long list of applicants to consider before getting to me. And both understanding the frameworks and doing well in the technical interviews required some fairly deep understanding of the language. Yes, the company you work for and the team you're working on have a great deal to do with your compensation. But both of those things are heavily influenced by how skilled you are in what technologies, especially for typical engineering roles. Knowing the right stack can open doors for networking around the front-door, too!

>They're getting compensated for non-Ruby things which happen to be expressed in Ruby programs." I call that winning rather than cheating but to each their own.

I wouldn't call that cheating but I would call it a poor anecdote to generalize from. Some people with a legal background translate contracts and earn a great deal of money for it, but that fact doesn't speak much to the market for translators as a whole or show there's no appreciable difference in career trajectories for translators of various languages.

I am very very impressed by your posts over a year ago, and by your recent achievements - as someone who hustled his way from redundant to twice my original salary in a similar time I sympathise with the effort.

I would say that perhaps both of you are missing one important component - specialisation. giving off the right signals for a particular niche enables you to credibly sell yourself in that niche (be it email-life cycle products or Angularjs coding)

I read your post from a year ago - you mentioned three interviews, Ruby, ObjC and JS. I would guess that today you would not dream of going to the first two - simply because your strengths lie in JS.

You have specialised - and as such become more valuable. But you could have specialised in many things other than language and still gotten good jobs. A specialist commands more money, due to scarcity and percieved increase in the probability of success.

However I still think patio11 is also right - of two equally qualified specialists, one that is better at marketing and promotion and negotiation is going to do drastically better.

But no matter how good Ramit Sethi is on negotiation, if he goes for a C++ job he is not going to beat out a specialist even if the specialist just says yes to the first offer.

(Little assumption there about Ramit's C++ skillz)

If your argument here is that knowing Javascript earns you more money than knowing no programming language in depth at all, I don't think anyone disagrees with you.

You could however have picked Ruby, PHP, Python, Haskell, Java, C(++), Objective-C (holy crap, Objective-C), Scala, Clojure etc to deep-dive on and would have been just as employable.

To convince me otherwise, you'd have to make the case that all of my professional connections are conspiring to deceive me or that I'm experiencing hallucinations on a near-daily basis and need professional help.

Yes and no. The particular job offers I got all relied on JavaScript, but of course there are a lot of great positions that require other languages. I do think that JavaScript was the optimal choice. There is such a small number of people who have experience with the MEAN stack compared to LAMP / Java / RoR that it makes it a quite a bit easier for an outsider to break in through unconventional means.

Objective C would have been very strong as well. Many companies of all sizes, including my current one use it. It would probably have taken a successful app on the app store or a stronger resume in order to get the kind of interest I did from top tier companies. Ruby would have lead to openings, but probably wouldn't have done much for me my interviews with Google. Java is used all over the place but from what I've seen, few junior devs without a degree break into the better work. Haskell would have been absolutely horrible--I'd have been competing with freakishly smart people for a small number of low-paying jobs!

The beauty of JavaScript is:

1) It's in the front end of every web stack, so nearly everyone needs it.

2) The MEAN stack (which includes Node and Angular) is a fast rising platform with few people competent in it. Even knowing "old" frameworks like Backbone can lead to a lot of opportunities.

3) In general, there is a bit less conservative of a culture among JavaScript programmers. Java/C/Python shops are more likely to care about pedigree and formal credentials.

veering offtopic, but how the hell do you remember a conversation you have with a guy two years ago on a website? Can you give me some tips on getting my mind to that steel-trap state?

Exercise! It does wonders and can protect you from a lot of the fallout from stress, obesity, aging and all kinds of other things. http://bit.ly/12aKL6p

And salad. I don't have a link for it but I think salad is huge.

There are tons of other things to do but I don't generally do them. I eat about 4000kcal a day, often go out drinking with my friends, don't sleep enough, and I'm often a workaholic. But I exercise and I eat vegetables.

ability to use computer code as leverage to accomplish things that capitalism cares about

For the people that ultimately pay the bills, this is the only thing that matters. They don't give a shit what technology you know or what a nice guy you are. They just want it done. To them, the ability to understand their domain, communicate effectively, and get things done is far more important that how you do it. I regularly hear from people who say, "I need x fixed/working/solved. We use y. If you don't know y, then figure it out."

Languages and technologies are only important to CTOs and recruiters. The point when you get beyond them and start talking to their bosses is when your career will really take off, not when you learn a "better language".

If that was the only thing that mattered, how do some consultants make 3x others, with exactly the same performance or worse?

While the people who pay the bills think that's the only thing that matters, your ability to confidently market yourself as providing perceived value plays a big part in your payment or salary negotiations, regardless of the actual value you provide.

Unfortunately I, like many others in our field, suck at this. Strangely, I've always found it easier to to market the work I do than to learn to market my own value. I can't even write a short bio without feeling like I'm stepping out of line.

In my talks with programmers, a lot of the disconnect is the perception that there's "legitimate work" on one hand and "marketing" on the other. While one may understand the importance of marketing at an intellectual level, the technical mind may still have an aversion to actually doing it.

My suggestion: replace the word "market" with "communicate" in your thinking. So:

"your ability to confidently communicate your value plays a big part in your payment or salary negotiations"

So it's not marketing, it's kind of like writing docs for end users. Still not coding, but a little further from "marketing". A small change, but it may give some mileage.

Exactly.

I feel like the term "marketing" is often used by not-so-great communicators to fill a gap of understanding of how value is communicated by those who are doing good business as a result.

I think the same goes for companies. E.g. a user friendly phone, tablet, computer or maybe just a very usable website, is not more expensive because of 'marketing', but because it does a better job communicating with the end user and thus creating a better perception of value to the customer.

What you are talking about?

> I can't even write a short bio without feeling like I'm stepping out of line.

150% agree. I had to write a bio when I judged a hackathon last month. It took 2 hours two write, what ultimately became one sentence.

The biggest personal shift for me came when I realised that marketing is not about me, my experience and the marketing copy on my website. It's about giving things of value to other people. Maximise the value you give to others and the number of people you give it to, and the "marketing" takes care of itself.

Languages and technologies are only important to CTOs and recruiters.

Even at the CTO level, languages and technologies more of a strategic business decision than a raw technical decision. Questions like:

* can we hire enough programmers of quality in this language?

* is there sufficient support available for these technologies?

* is the technology sufficiently mature?

Selection of a core technology can't be purely a "wow, cool" decision at that level, although it may factor in to what kind of programmers you are likely to get (e.g. see pg's old article "The Python Paradox" http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html)

The author of Real World Haskell has a startup that uses Haskell. I don't remember the exact quote, but it is in part to weed out crappy developers. http://functionaltalks.org/2013/06/10/brian-osullivan-runnin...

Jane St. Capital also does this to some extent by using OCaml, but I don't think that was the primary motivation.

PG has made similar comments about the use of Lisp. It doesn't really scale to the IBMs and Googles of the world, though.

This is key. If you think you'll want to or have to hire an 800 person staff then you're going to lose developer quality and will be served by picking languages which are already common on the market.

[...] people that ultimately pay the bills [...] don't give a shit what technology you know

Of course they do. Imagine trying to convince a CTO of a 20-strong company to switch to another, better suited for the business task at hand, programming language for a project with 1+ MLoC written over a course of couple of years.

There are two factors that determine how much money you can make in a job such as programming:

- How much money are you making for your employer - What are the costs your employer needs to make to allow you to make that money for him

If there's a large and growing gap between the two, you can expect a raise, event if the company as a whole isn't doing too well. If there's a small or shrinking gap, you'll be looking for another job soon. If the gap is negative, you're probably the owner.

The only thing I'd add to this is that there exist organisations in the world that can afford to hire a team of developers (or, as it were, execute long-term contracts with a consultancy at an aggregated $10k+ day rate) indefinitely with little or no function that couldn't be achieved with Wordpress 1.0, including the security vulnerabilities.

In the worst case, I... I mean my made-up friend Bob... has worked on teams that seemed to have no other purpose than to execute the new idea that week, with little or no connection to any actual business value.

Bob has seen this happen too many times for it to be a random occurrence. According to Bob, such engagements/teams are typically funded by the taxpayer or upper management at companies that have more cash than God. Then I told Bob to shut up, because he's in breach of all the NDAs and sometimes people read things on Hacker News.

Nice work... Bob :)

Very good point. It's not the language, it's how you market what you're doing with it.

What would be interesting in this survey is slicing it by industry and years of experience. Do Python programmers in Financial Services make more or less than C++ if they both have 3 years of experience? Which languages show tapering of salary after a certain amount of experience?

This is definitely an interesting read, though I wouldn't be using this as someone just getting started with regard to programming.

So how do the people at the high end get there if not exclusively by becoming better Rubyists?