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A comment on As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw. Parent comment

Re:As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw by besogno on Friday April 14, 2017 @11:22AM (#14114967)
The average income of a programmer is as relevant as the average income of a musician. It will not tell you anything about how much Lady Gaga makes, or the fact that the richest man in the world is a programmer. This kind of averages could possibly be relevant for bricklayers, but even in that case I doubt it.
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Re:As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw by ryandrake on Friday April 14, 2017 @12:03PM (#14115228)
Lady Gaga's wealth/success is about as relevant to a musician as Bill Gates's is to a software engineer. The averages are very relevant.
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Re:As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw by pilom on Friday April 14, 2017 @12:28PM (#14115370)
The GP's point is that Median Income would be valuable but "average" i.e. Mean Income, is much less valuable.
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Re:As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw by mywittyname on Friday April 14, 2017 @01:00PM (#14115572)
The according to the BLS, the median wage nationally is $100,080 and the average is $104,300. I'm not convinced a 4% difference takes away a whole lot of value, especially when salaries are close to a normal distribution.

I'm willing to bet that as you limit you data set to a smaller region, salaries normalize even further.

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Re:As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw by user5994461 on Friday April 14, 2017 @02:41PM (#14116242)
Salaries are not a normal distributions. They are a multimodal distribution (usually 2 waves).
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Re:As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw by dasil003 on Friday April 14, 2017 @12:07PM (#14115250)
The richest man in the world is better described as a founder than a programmer if you want to correlate his occupation to his income.
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Re:As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw by hkmurakami on Friday April 14, 2017 @09:50PM (#14118880)
Even the medium isn't truly informative in terms of purchasing power within a geographic region.

It really boils down to your relative earning power vs your professional peers (including non engineers) in the direct geographic vicinity of you, in a supply constrained bidding war situation like desirable real estate.

Let's say the average primary care physician's salary has been matching inflation for 20 years while that of the software engineer has outpaced it. Well even if a physician is doing just fine vs his physician peers, the rapid rise of sw eng salaries and the dramatically increased number of such people will have reduced his or her relative earning power and the standard of living he or she can afford, over said 20 years.

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