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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

If you are reading this comment on HN, you are not normal, average, or a reasonable datum to extrapolate from. You are more likely to have a career in which you are rarely seen as a replaceable part. Your employers will negotiate with you rather than fire you. You will build up enough reserves that an unexpected layoff is painful rather than crippling, and you will consider many factors besides money when taking a new job.

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.

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I like your comment. We often forget that we're living in an echo chamber of our own peers.

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.

That's the whole point in unit testing, agile methodologies and all the other processes - to make programmers like parts of a machine and easily replaceable. Having worked for one large investment bank, the work was really boring, and in my team hardly anyone lasted much more than a year. But they had the money to keep hiring and essentially throw more money at the problem.

Totally agree on your comment on agile. It is a blight on our profession. I was having beers with an old friend from undergrad yesterday - our career paths have taken us very different places. What's common is that both of our employers have been instituting agile in very dysfunctional forms. My friend and I are both in our 30s and we were jokingly thinking how long we can take this crap before we have to either move to management or change careers completely (unlikely since we love tech so much).

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.

It looks like a lot of people in this thread are reading the headline and not the article. The article states:

>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%

Not that many people understand what probabilities and statistics mean.

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