What’s a mid-career software engineer actually worth? Try $779,000 per year

michaelochurch.wordpress.com

13 points·dkasper··2 comments

"Thirty years ago, programming was an R&D job. Programmers had a lot of autonomy: the kind of autonomy that it takes if one is going to invent C or Unix or the Internet or a new neural network architecture. Programmers controlled how they worked and what they worked on, and either answered to other programmers or to well-read scientists, rather than anti-intellectual businessmen who regard them as cost centers."

Thirty years ago (1984), most programmers were employed by big corporations doing whatever IT was called back then ("data processing"? "MIS"?). They were very much a cost center. The average programmer had to program in whatever language was installed on the company's mainframe or minicomputer (PCs were just beginning to enter the business world), coding primarily database transactions and reports for executives.

R&D? Autonomy? Working for scientists? Inventing C or the internet? That was for a small minority of programmers, as it still is today. The only difference is that CRUD web apps have replaced CRUD batch jobs as the average programmer's work.

(By the way, working for scientists can be just as crappy as working for businessmen, since they both consider mere programmers to be lower life-forms.)

I wish...

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