ilovecheese

I said people who are middle aged and not paid what they are worth are pathetic.

So what you're saying is that you work for less than you are worth.

Can I ask you why you feel the desire to go work at a job where you are paid LESS than you are worth? There are plenty of programming jobs available for smart people in the 200k+/year category, which is what a real professional in any other industry makes.

You are either fundamentally misunderstanding my message, or are a complete and utter tool.

Help yourself out. If you were paid what you're really worth, you wouldn't have any desire to say that. I'm sure there are programmers out there reading HN who make over 200 grand (or are wealthy from other means) who are not trying to say "fuck you" to me, because they are in the class of professionals who are actually paid what they're worth.

Don't shoot the messenger, my friend.

http://www.acooke.org/

Is this you? Wonder why you're based in Chile.... something to do with the cost of living, perhaps? Wage arbitrage means you don't disagree with me at all, in fact you seem to be in vehement concurrence.

> Too lazy to subscribe

If you don't have an account to read the NY Times I don't know whether I should laugh at you or pity you. Maybe both.

I'm pretty sure that was deliberate on the part of the author. Sometimes they need a foil - makes for a more compelling story.

No, but just remember - when you're working for people younger than you, it's probably time to become an entrepreneur or director. Very rarely does "programming" offer a salary commensurate with the level of seniority older people actually have attained.

When you're middle aged and not paid what you're really worth, it borders on pathetic, not just merely sad.

It's entirely feasible that it didn't go above 70 in SF for a year. SF is not LA.

The historical data presented in the graph shows more variance.

I feel sorry for anyone in this industry who looks toward people like Joel Spolsky for guidance.

... and how many hoops do you have to jump through before you find out how much the job actually pays?

> She just needs a dead simple CRUD app, like rails on top of a simple sqlite scehma

No she doesn't. She needs Access because her needs are exactly what it's designed for.

Plenty of tenured professors and very well-paid research associates create these sorts of things...

UC, MIT, Bell Labs, Google, Microsoft, Sun, ... the list goes on and on.

> In Sweden...

New York has old, old, old, old infrastructure. It might surprise you to know that they still dump their trash onto the streets, where it rots in the summer heat and mixes with AC condensation that drips down (because their AC units hang out of windows) and creates giant rivers of foul smelling shit water that you must step over carefully to avoid.