Hacker News Reader

Comment by brational | Hacker News Reader

So tangentially related but what does it take to increase wages in the US? We've been hearing the rhetoric for a while now that over the past 10/20/30 years productivity improvements simply go to the top and real wages decline with the hand-waving recourse that it's just the way capitalism works. But how do you actually prevent this?

Unions are obviously one solution but can be wrought with other issues. Besides that, it seems there really is no solution to wage stagnation outside of major failures or security breaches which hit the business' pockets directly.

I don't just mean in IT but it does seem to be an area where salary growth doesn't match up _at all_ with the amount of value it adds to a business, especially in the case of IT within a non-IT company.

View on HN

Wage stagnation doesn't tell the whole picture. Workers are compensated through other means as well (benefits). Also, purchasing power for many goods has increased.[1]

[1]http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230402680...

Note, of course, that benefits have also stagnated, if not been cut. Defined benefit pension plans disappear, part time workers (with no benefits) replace full time workers, and health insurance increasingly is paid for by the worker, with increasing copayments.

That's not what the data says. Did you read the article?

I think the issue is not so much wages as it is respect, at least in IT.

Wages are a kind of respect. One that is very important.

By that standard, though, finance companies respect their IT staff more than Google respects their engineers, even though the cultural perception is the opposite.

In my view, salaries for programmers should be going down, not up.

For instance, I think house construction is overpriced because I think "what's so hard about putting up walls around some ground?". The answer is everything is hard about it. But that it is hard is incidental. By that I mean, it was harder before, and now it is easier, and it should get even easier (there are 3D printers printing houses now) and therefore cheaper.

A non-programmer thinks the same way about software as I do about houses: "what's so hard about telling the computer to do grab this data and transform it?". Well, all of it is hard, but again, it's incidental. It would have been more expensive in the past because it was harder, and it will be easier in the future (Docker, NixOS, mathematically proven programs that do not require maintenance, etc).

It's nice being a programmer today but we won't ride this forever. As we automate ourselves out of the market, it will be a net benefit to everyone (as no one will have to program as hard or as much as today).

That just means we will be tackling harder problems. The problems we were solving in the 70s were much simpler than the ones today. Today, we're handling things that we would have never considered possible before.

On the other hand, something that hasn't changed in 40 years is that end users are not able to precisely explain what they want. That is why we will always have jobs. There will always be some sort of exceptional rule.

> it will be easier in the future

Complexity expands so as to fill our current mental capacity.

Each level of abstraction divides the cost per feature and so multiplies the sum of total complexity.

I suppose you're one of those people who think that drag and drop programming, or programming in english will be a reality?

"mathematically proven programs that do not require maintenance" - very funny.

You don't want to increase wages really. Improve quality of life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com