2013 Developer Salary Survey
drdobbs.com
drdobbs.com
As articulated in the synopsis at the bottom, 'This disgraceful disparity lays bare the false — but cherished — belief that our profession is at its core a meritocracy.'
It's well documented that women prefer other benefits, such as more time off and flexible work schedules (at the expense of base salary) more than men.
Probably a lot of interesting, complicated dynamics that effect the gap.
However I also remember reading a study that showed people reading a resume with a female name proposed a lower salary offer in the first place (academics in math, I believe). So, all of the above?
Here's a short list of factors that could contribute to the results the article in OP has:
-Lower number of years working in the field due to taking time off for maternity leave, or going back to work after raising a child. I suspect this is probably the biggest single contributor to the pseudo-gap in the article's charts.
-Concentration of male/female developers in different subfields. Ex: men may be more inclined to work in security penetration, which may pay higher than other disciplines
-Male/female college degree/other pedigree rates
I'm no statistician, but I think these factors are more than important enough would have to be taken into account when trying to figure out the size of the gender wage gap.
Don't forget to leave a comment telling me why I'm wrong when you downvote my comment for being unproductive.
It's a bit irresponsible after that slide not to put the rest of the results into the context of gender.
Are women represented proportionally by age? The last table in the article ("What Matters Most") would blow the lid off of many of the arguments. Do people who "could find seven attributes of their job more meaningful than base salary" in general make less than others? Do women and men respond differently to those questions? What is the disparity between men and women who value base pay most?
The only value I can extract from this survey is that a) it's BS that female compensation stagnated while male compensation rose (was there a mini-baby boom during which a lot of women took unpaid maternity leave?) and b) Dr Dobbs is getting less and less relevant, given that they consider "Company-paid smartphone/wireless email" to be a form of compensation.
One point you didn't make, though it is hinted at by your first point, is that if the proportion of women in the field is increasing over time, women's average age will be lower than men's (assuming people tend to enter the field from college and not from other fields, which seems reasonable), which would distort the salary numbers in a genuinely misleading way.
All we can say for sure is that this measures the average salaries of people who respond to drdobbs surveys. They are significantly less than the salaries we are seeing on our platform at Hired. ( see: https://hired.com/blog/late-stage-companies-winning-the-war-... )
However, most AZ companies needing devs seem to be Java shops with government ties hiring entry-level devs, which probably distorts the picture as most developers would then logically be graded up every year or whatnot and probably making above 80k after 3 years.
So maybe I'm not really saying the numbers are wrong, just that they seem wrong for entry level and sub 25-year-olds in the AZ/NM region. Or that there's a big disconnect between listed salaries in job openings and the actual average salaries among those with established positions in most markets.
So, in Australia at least, A Software Engineer is a "real" Engineer.
Am I wrong on that?
Some of it is just mental... "engineering" as opposed to "developing".
A software developer at a small startup is likely doing similar work to a software engineer at a large corporation, but the software engineer gets the BigCorp bonus.
Instead of startup vs bigcorp, I see it more like startup building some social phenomon that will be forgotten tomorrow as opposed to BigCorp coding airplanes systems.
My job title is "software engineer" and I don't have any accreditation to speak of. Such is the case with the vast majority of people with this title.
The reason I suspect this might be the case is the combination of the popularity of programming, along with the tools which are making programming easier.
Every year a new framework/library is introduced which makes the challenging and time consuming work easier and easier.
Are we reaching a point where we have a massive number of programmers doing a job which takes a fraction of the time it took years ago?
Not all of the young minds that are "learning to code" really have the potential to write programs at the same level as the average ValleyBoy RoR Jockey™ (or even the average casual Hacker News reading hobbyist coder). The number of students in my program that had massive interest in our numbers ( 100% placement with the highest average starting pay ) and almost zero interest in actually learning to code is frightening.
These students tend to slither through the technical classes with a lot of help from google and their friends, only to find themselves unable to compete for real developer positions and settling for the same 4x,xxx "business analyst" warm body jobs that seem to be the holy grail of the hoards of non-stem degree holders.
On the flip side, if you can actually get fizz buzz to compile and can stomach the idea of living in the midwest, prepare to be wined and dined by everyone under the sun.
In regards to the Midwest, I know. Who would possibly want to live in one of the most beautiful parts of the US, surrounded by lush forests, the Great Lakes, and friendly people who say hi when you walk by?
Nothing is wrong with the path these students are choosing, I just don't see business analysts creating specs or writing user stories in the same competition for career roles as myself. Even though I intend to stay in the midwest and generally detest the culture of excess in the valley I was replying to the parent saying the influx of people learning to write "hello world" in java and make visio diagrams or project workflows won't have a measurable impact on the people currently making money building productive software (regardless of weather that software is immaculately well structured or a snarling mess of perpetual spaghetti) .
While there does seem to be an increased popularity, there is still a number of people who exit the profession either due to burn-out or retirement.
Anecdotally, in the UK there has been concern for some-time about the number of people retiring from technology positions in the financial sector (people in there 50s due to very generous retirement provisions); industry crunches like this along with 'software eating the world' would suggest to me that the good times will continue for some time.
The word of warning I'd have is more around the economics of VC finance - money is cheap right now, if/when interest rates rise there might be an impact on the amount of money available to start-ups. But it's not like any other industry/profession is going to be unaffected by macro-economic issues.
I don't have any data, but nothing will continue "going up forever"...
Take a look at historical production per hour over the past few decades or centuries. It's been going up "forever".
What we have seen in the physical world is that the people who reap the wages of this productivity has been shifting to the holders of capital (physical capital, land, finance, etc). In software, there's very little need for physical capital (factories) and land - "holders of capital" really means "holders of human capital"; i.e. intellectual capital. I do believe productivity will continue to increase, and since programmers own their own minds (human capital), they will see the wages.
As for people actually learning to code, I don't actually think there's much risk of increased supply. The majority of people simply cannot think in the logical manner programming requires. They might learn a couple bits here and there, but they'll never be employed as engineers. (I've seen this myself with people who've taken months of classes—ask them to compute a program and they're still incapable.)
Put simply, CS is hard. That's why, despite the general awesomeness of our careers, so few people major in it. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/students-majoring-i...)
Anyway, the long and the short of it is it's the weirdos who are in short supply and I can't imagine why that would change anytime soon.
Everything you say could be right, I still struggle to understand how people who call themselves programmers can't do fizzbuzz, but one of the great things about being a programmer is that you don't have to go to University and get a degree (I didn't), so I don't think the linked article really provides much input. Interesting read though.
For a nationwide survey, I have to say these median salaries are actually pretty high. Very, very few careers requiring only a bachelor's degree can boast these numbers taken across the country.
PS: Where are these 200k salaries? I have 7 years of experience and would happily switch for <redacted> more money each year.
If I were to guess, they're most likely in the Wall Street-powered high-frequency trading firms. That, and/or big pharma, big oil.
I have a suspicion that this title can mean so many different things to different people/companies and therefore can offer an extremely wide range of salaries.
Anyone have any info they could share on the matter?