Your lifetime earnings are probably determined in your 20s
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
In short, if your comment on this can be summarized as "that isn't what happened to me", that's because you are an outlier.
We often get into debates with my group of friends about how bad we have it, how we're not charging enough, and basically decrying our very existence and how bad we've got it. Then somebody has a moment of clarity and is like "Guys, guys! We're complaining that we only make 2x minimum monthly wage of our environment PER WEEK."
That's usually followed by a moment of silence. Then it's right back to squabbling.
I would not put unit testing in the same camp - frankly, my employer doesn't care about unit testing at all - to my chagrin. Senior developers sneak in unit tests on the minutes of breathing room we get. I actually got a lecture on "company cares about customer visible features". Well .. you know what? Software that doesn't crash is a pretty darned customer visible feature.
What makes me very uncomfortable is that my current situation reminds me of what I saw on the news about the BP oil spill incident. Management asks very pointed and specific questions - engineers answer truthfully. Mgmt makes wild decisions based on half information. I fear this kind of crap is rampant in organizations not run by technical people. Is it any better at places run by technical people?
The fundamental problem plaguing our industry is perhaps not agile - that is a mere symptom of it. The core problem IMHO are treating people like cogs and the need to continuously move faster.
Rant over. I needed that. Off to sneak in some unit tests.
>Workers in the 95th percentile can expect a 230 percent increase over the same period. Those in the 99th percentile -- the doctors and lawyers and engineers -- will see earnings grow a whopping 1,450 percent.
The "that isn't what happened to me", the outlier thing, that's the 95th to 99th percentile which includes engineers. And because that's for the 95%+, that's why the WaPo article says "probably" in the title.
We're mostly not in the top 1% (I'm looking at you Calacanis) but we are the upper-ish 1% or at the very least, a very weird 1%
I switched jobs to software development at 30 to go from $34k to 45k (note that I made a bigger jump at 30 than in all of my twenties.
I'm in the process of switching to a job that pays $115k, two years later.
Do I wish I'd done this a decade ago? Certainly. But if you're sitting there thinking "my twenties are over, I'm done," think again and go learn something new.
This article is just fear mongering. If you belong to the group of people reading comments on HN, you are able to drop in and out of the work force as you wish and do whatever you want with your life. If you want to maximize income in your 20's and reap the rewards of early investment, fine. If you want to travel the world now and jump in the game later, that's also fine.
More seriously, I laugh when former colleagues think of me as successful. It's correct that I've launched a successful product, but money is so random that I rather consider myself as "having fun and learning to launch a product" than "being successful".
What are you doing in your new job, out of interest?
Wish they dug into deeper analysis instead of having fluffy explanation and conclusion. Interesting things to look into would be what makes average increase so low? What are the top 5% doing to get 230% growth, how about those 1% that get 1500% growth?
If you're interested in this topic, there's a good subreddit [0] with much information on how to start.
That's why it's also so important to start saving early and invest it regularly.
That mortgage your financial advisor wants you to keep? Get rid of it. Over pay principle as much as permitted.
Consumers refer to such things as 'debts' or 'payments', but financial institutions call these 'liabilities'. Financial institutions use the correct word, and don't like to hold them for good reason.
Financial institutions 'caring' about one's credit rating == confidence that one can handle the liabilities they want one to hold. :-)
But seriously, this is about as insightful as saying career choice affects lifetime earnings. Most people have settled their career by their early 30s. Throw kids into the mix and its no big surprise.
In my experience kids can have quite the opposite effect - I got a lot more ambitious when the first one arrived, and I've almost doubled my salary since then (a bit more than four years).
In The Netherlands it's pretty normal to bring kids to daycare from 3 or 6 months.
In the end, there is often a salary hit though. My wife started working less. Also, there is no extra time anymore - on working days, we always go home at 17:00 sharp.
That's still not that huge a portion of a typical ~40 years career (unless you have a lot of children - I think the average for western Europe is somewhere between 1 and 2 kids) and you'd get parental leave payments during that time.
So sure it probably hurts your combined income but I think it's very rarely a 50% reduction as suggested by OP saying he needs to double his salary to stay at the same level.
Sources: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm and http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R
Where I come from this is extremely uncommon.
Secondly, you can say that career selection in your 20's impact your later earnings, even if the actual growth of earnings happens later. An indicative example is of course two persons, citizens A and B. Citizen A goes to work in manual labor after primary education. Citizen B goes to high school and then gets a university education. Citizen A may well be earning much more in his early 20's than citizen B.
Depending on how long the studies take, citizen B has earned little money by the time he/she is 25, while citizen A who went straight to work, say in construction, has been accumulating earnings for many years. Still, the future potential of earnings for citizen B has been built with the education, even if it is not visible in his/her annual earnings yet, and the only monetary thing to his name is some debt taken for studies.
(Nonetheless, it would be nice to have a break-up per sector.)
Today I'm 34 (still in Hungary), and my net salary has gone up 5.3x.
Another 2-3x is doable by handpicking a high-paying job here in Hungary (eg. an investment bank), another 2-3x if I were to go abroad.
For 10x and higher further multiplies I will have to try a startup again (my first one failed), although that's not a salary, it's equity.
I consider this high rate of increase a lucky thing: basically I chose to become a programmer at the right time when the industry is hot. I often remind myself that maybe in 30 years this will not be so, and maybe programmers then will be like chemical engineers today.
Could you elaborate what you mean by "chemical engineers today"?
Of the guys in my class, and wildly guessing, I would say that less than 50% work with something chemical related, mostly either in pulp, oil or fuel cells. A bit more than 50% work with something related to programming or computer modeling, and outside that a variety of odd jobs.