Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

This is silly.

First, very few people become millionaire CEOs. If thats your standard for success, then every path likely leads to failure because no path reliably leads to that kind of success. Some paths are more likely than others, but none are very likely for the average person.

Part of the reason for flat-ish career trajectory is that programmers earn more at the start than most. Some professions have more of a premium on seniority and experience than others. Senior doctors and lawyers for a combination of the above 2 reasons probably have steeper salary growth than programmers. That said, good 10+ yrs programmers do earn pretty damn well. 10 years as a doctor or lawyer and you're still considered a youngin.

Anyway, if you're the CEO, you aren't a programmer. If he's claiming that being a programmer is not a good starting point for becoming a CEO, I think he's wrong. Look at all the over 40s who were coders at some point, many transitioned into management or something else. Programming actually offers a lot more of that kind of opportunity than anything else.

Totally agreed. In the Bay Area, there are many companies where the most junior engineering tier earns more than $100k a year, only including cash compensation. To expect to grow by 20% per year on average for a decade given this starting condition is just not realistic.

Honestly, to be in the top 95% of incomes at the entry level and then to complain that you're in a dead-end job . . . it just smacks of a lack of awareness about what a real dead end is like.

>> "In the Bay Area, there are many companies where the most junior engineering tier earns more than $100k a year"

It's important not to forget cost of living in that area is abnormally high.

How could we forget, every time someone mentions a salary in the bay area people leap to mention how expensive it is there.

Watch out, you might lose all your karma for interrupting the Bay Area self flagellation. Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here.

The high dev salaries there make the Bay Area even more of a dead end than it would otherwise be for the people who are stuck in service jobs for life, such as making food when the devs eat out.

Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here.

Programmer salaries are not "insane". A half-decent programmer is worth $500,000 to the business and costs about $100,000. A good one is worth over $3 million, and only costs about $150,000.

Programmers are actually incredibly fucking cheap right now, if you know what to do with the talent.

If that were true, why wouldn't some startup pay the best programmers it could find $2,000,000 a year and put everyone else out of business?

... google.

If you look at it funny, YC itself is doing this. Funding isn't salary, but if you look at it in terms of expected value they're pretty much handing gobs of money to those they think can do the right kind things with computers.

Because nobody yet has figured out how to turn programmers into simple machines where you shove money from one end and get even more money from the other end. You need to actually give those programmers something to do and sell the results and make profit on it. Programmers don't do that, that's a different profession. One that can be extremely lucrative if done right, but so far has not submitted to any automation.

Assessing the talent is hard. People who have the ability to assess that talent (which is different from the talent itself, also uncommon) are rare, people who have the money or organizational position necessary to pay significant numbers of programmer salaries are rare, and the intersection of those two sets, even in a world with almost 7 billion people, is vanishingly small.

The talent is rarer than the capital, and the capital often isn't owned by the decision-makers (VC) but the people who control the capital are the ones who get more arrogant. Why? Because capital is easy to demonstrate, and talent is hard to prove. It's especially hard to prove talent without breaking social protocol, which is the real advantage of pedigree. Everyone knows that there are plenty of sharp people without pedigree, but proving you're one of them requires being extremely assertive. Professionally, it's often better to be presumed intelligent and thereby be able to optimize for social polish alone.

Startups tend not to have that kind of money. Big companies do, but how can they be sure who's the best?

One answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring

Acqui-hiring: buying mediocre talent at a panic price because your middle management filter is so broken that you can't spot talent at the bottom. (Granted, after a long enough spell of dysfunction, you won't have much talent at the bottom either.)

This is basically the startup business model - get a bunch of guys together, split equity, write something cool, get aquihired for a few million apiece.

The reason it has to be done with equity instead of salary is because there's a principal-agent problem with salary. People collect their salary regardless of whether their contributions actually are worth a few million. And so they have every incentive to sit on their butt - or at least, not take any risks and just do what got them the initial salary grant - in the meantime.

If you know what to do is key. Unfortunately, most businesses cannot properly utilize a decent programmer, never mind a good one.

The average mid-size company is a monument to bureaucracy, ruled by mediocrity and incompetence.

If you don't want to be in commuting hell, then it costs about $4k+/month for a house to raise a family in. To buy a house close to your work will also cost over $1.3 million.

If you willing to go over the bridge, then your paying $2k/month

It depends on where you live in the Bay Area. If you avoid San Francisco and the peninsula then housing I'd about the same as the rest of California.

High finance (banking, PE, hedge funds) are basically the only career I know of where you begin at a relatively high salary, and have potentially unlimited career growth (in terms of salary and earning power), where at the highest end, you aren't doing substantially different work than you did at the beginning (this is simplistic, obviously. You work at a higher level, and begin to employ people to do the work you did previously. My point is that the career progression doesn't require a change to realize the highest earnings).

Am I wrong? To become a "millionaire" (using it as a synonym for wildly financially successful) doctor or lawyer, you generally make the majority of your money through either an invention or marketing skills. What career isn't a "dead end" applying this logic? Real estate, maybe?

To be a doctor you need to study for like 10 years as well.

I'm pretty much just addressing career progression after you enter the profession, not barriers to entry (since the author seems to be addressing those who have cleared whatever entry barrier there is).

When you asked "Am I wrong?", I nodded in agreement, until I read the next sentence. Successful doctors and lawyer are usually people that proved a better track record, usually both in their relation to their client (so important for those jobs) and their factual successes and special skills. Additionally, they usually also succeed at leading teams of talented younger people that help them succeed at a bigger scale.

You can become a millionaire CEO if you are intelligent with at least a 10-20% success rate. Get 5 years work experience, ace the GMAT, go to a top 5 MBA, do consulting at 250-500k/year for 10 years for a company like Bain or McKinsey, then get hired as CFO of one of the companies you work for, 5 years later get promoted to CEO.

Even if you don't make CEO, you can get to several multiples of an engineer's salary with a 100% success rate with this plan. Let's face it, a software engineer is far from a top tier occupation, and for good reason. You can hire very high quality people with 10 years of experience in eastern Europe for $30/hour.

This is a pretty distant perspective. It's like saying 'you can become a millionaire startup founder if you are intelligent. Go to MIT, Get a job at a young tech company. Get Funded by YC. Sell the company to your former employer.'

Obviously, it's not impossible to become a millionaire CEO. People do it. There The requisite work, skill, risk, talent and luck just isn't comparable to 'become a programmer.'

Becoming a programmer requires one to learn to program, at university or some other way and get a job programming which isn't to hard if you can program. At neither step are you competing to get through gatekeepers and bottlenecks in a most-will-fail situation.

You easy steps to becoming a CEO require you to go through several of these competitive bottlenecks. In any case my point was just to point out how silly it is to say 'most programmers don't become millionaire CEOs, it's a dead end job.'

Too bad the work is the polar opposite of a programmer so it's kind of a pointless thing to say in the article that programmers rarely become CEOs. Most people don't want to become CEO's, they're programmers because they love what they do.

As one of those people - you can live like a king on that kind of money in eastern Europe. As a freelance programmer I can afford to pay rent for a flat in Ljubljana that puts most SF apartments to shame both in size, comfort, and location.

What's better, I can do that _while_ actually living in the Bay Area. Just because I can and I like moving back and forth between here and home.

Kings tend to buy houses not rent flats. Ljubljana seems nice though.

Eh, I'd much rather live in a nice flat than a house. And I guess it might be nice to actually own one eventually, I actually prefer renting. Much less of a hassle.

Wait till you get a family, your ideas on merits of moving around may change drastically.

Are you a us citizen or on a work visa? Genuinely curious?

Programming wasn't very well paid even when there was no competition from abroad.

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