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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Offices are a really great example of the push to keep programmers from thinking of themselves as professionals, either by treating them like IT or tech support, or like college kids. Google or Facebook's revenue per engineer is probably 3x that of a law firm or consulting firm, but the overwhelming practice in the latter sorts of places is for each professional to have an office with a door.

When you're a growing startup, having private offices costs you flexibility as well as cash because open plan is easier to reconfigure as you grow. If you're at the point where you're commissioning a Ghery, you're well past that excuse.

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From my time at consulting firms and experience with law firms, this isn't true any more.

I was at the offices of a large law firm in the City of London yesterday and only very senior partners had offices. They had a lot of very nice meeting rooms on separate client facing floors and 'working floors' with open plan offices where lawyers and paralegals did their work.

US law firms anywhere but Manhattan give attorneys their own office, even typically legal interns and those who haven't passed the bar yet. And it is almost always external offices with a window.

Even in Manhattan they typically just share with one other associate for 2-4 years.

This definitely isn't the norm in my experience. I have friends in many of the magic and silver circle law firms in London. All of them have shared private offices for their junior staff and individual offices for the senior staff.

> the push to keep programmers from thinking of themselves as professionals

Hah. If only we had someone else to blame for that. We do that to ourselves. Programmers act like spoiled little kids when choosing which jobs to apply to or how to conduct their career, (look at all those juice bars! Never seen an accountant use that as a selection criteria.) are often completely unreasonable, (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.) and consistently refuse to move to management. (you must pay me more and more money to drift further and further away from company priorities)

Programmers refusing to move to management is not unreasonable. I like being a developer. It's what I studied in school and it's the job I applied for.

It is if you expect career advancement. If you want to stay in the same role making the same salary, plus a minor bump every year for 30 years, by all means don't push yourself to try to figure out how to manage more parts of the organization you work for.

But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company. They want to be like doctors without taking their work half as seriously.

"But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company."

What lofty career ambitions? My productivity at work goes up at least 40-50% every year. I'm not expecting to capture even half of that.

To expand on this a bit: I was on ~$80k/year in 2002. If I had even had 10% raises each year I would be on ~$250k/year.

Instead I'm just under $200k. Not bad by any means but I wouldn't call sub-10% annual raises as lofty career ambitions.

Out of interest, what do you do? And where?

It is interesting the thought about moving to management - I often see that developers have to become project managers or managers of some sort as they get older.

You really think that your productivity has risen more than 10% every year? Do you have any numbers to back that up? I know you use a ticket tracking system. You can add up all your completed story points, by year, pretty easily. If you're really getting 10% better every year, consistently, it should be easy to ask for a bigger raise.

My experience is that developers don't increase their value as fast as they increase their pay.

yep barristers don't have to stop being lawyers the more senior they get - unless of course the want to switch to being a judge

Yup. The guys with their names on the door still write briefs for a living. So to with doctors. Head of Surgery at a hospital still cuts people open for a living.

Do any of the employees get excited about juice bars, or is it just the management trying to use juice bars as a decoy.

> (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.)

Professionals get high pay. Software engineers get pay in this range, and it's bizarre to scoff at pay concerns when you are arguing that employees are unprofessional.

Professional software engineers with years of experience get pay in that range. Guys just starting out want that kind of money. I see it all the time.

The employees might not give a damn about the juice bars once they get hired, but you better believe they're all sharing picture of Google's workplace and just glossing over their environment and culture and recruiting practices.

> Professional software engineers with years of experience get pay in that range. Guys just starting out want that kind of money. I see it all the time.

At Google, new grads get 120+k with their bonus, not including the ~62*$500 in stocks every year for 4 years or the ~$25k in signing/reloc bonuses. If a new grad gets offered that amount, why would they not want the same elsewhere?

I just went through the process of getting my post graduation job (Computer Engineer btw). Before I went to any interviews I asked my peers what sort of offers they got and it was all between $75-90K. I went to job interviews and when they asked what I expected for salary I told them what I had heard and was scoffed at from several companies. I received 3 offers, $65k, $70k and $95k. I got the $70k offer to go up to $83k with a two month signing bonus which I took mostly because of the better location.

Companies will constantly tell you that you are worth less because it isn't in their interests. Don't buy it.

Very informative, thanks. It is often too easy to undervalue yourself with software development.

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