The situation in the US does impact salaries all over the world though. A lot of software engineers over seas work for companies that are either US based, or who primarily do business in the US.
Why should a software developer get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, while those who weren't lucky enough to be born with the required intelligence (despite what coding bootcamps say, not everyone is cut out to write code) are doomed to work a low-wage job for their entire life? It's the height of privilege. And if you subscribe to the theory that intelligence is a product of a child's developmental environment (nature over nature), it serves to increase social stratification and decrease class mobility.
Builders and electricians are just as much key employees as software developers. In Australia, a skilled electrician can earn the same salary as a software developer, and that's the way it should be. My job is easy, I sit at a desk all day. I don't have to wake up at 5 AM every day and spend 8 hours a day (more like 6 in Australia, thanks to the unions) running cables in a construction site.
I'd love to see most software developers try their hands at a trade, it's backbreaking work.
Investment bankers and programmers earn more than your typical American because the supply of bankers and top-level programmers is much tighter. Goldman Sachs and KKR hire from Wharton or HBS, and Google hires grads from CMU or Stanford. Whether they should or shouldn’t restrict their hiring practices is another matter, but their insistence on hiring only the “elite” causes salaries in those fields to skyrocket.
Welders and electricians make more money than say a landscaper because you need more training, certifications, exams, and experience to do the job, greatly reducing the pool of available labor.
If you want programmers to get paid less, make it easier to become a programmer and get Google to hire more broadly.
That’s perhaps why bootcamps and code camps are looked down upon by existing programmers — not just the belief in the superiority of a traditional 4 year computer science education (whether founded or not), but also a realization that if these things catch on they might be paying us all less in the future.
And bootcamps are not going to help you with that.
No, this is incorrect -- Google has a list of “favored” academic institutions. It’s not used to filter out candidates, so they’ll still hire people from other backgrounds, but studying at a top university is considered to be a positive signal.
(Possibly this has changed recently, but it was true through at least 2012 or so.)
You wouldn’t understand American standards because you don’t understand the difference in work intensity and performance. There’s a reason all of the good workers still head to California.
* authors * artists * judges * motivational speakers
The difference is that I think leverage is more diffuse for software engineers, and it doesn't require fame.
>In Australia, a skilled electrician can earn the same salary as a software developer
What about the unskilled electrician? Are they paid the same as the skilled one?
There are very few professions with profit/cost ratio this high. Writers and media creator come to mind. Definitely not electricians or builders.
(Of course not every software engineer is like this. But there are plenty of $60K software jobs in US too, nit everyone gets six digits)
The issue here is that the work of a skilled electrician doesn't scale, unlike a software engineer. The classic example is process automation.
I would argue software, and engineering in general, is one of the few disciplines where that's possible.
There's non-compete in most places that makes it hard for employees to switch jobs. Since there's none in California, the strategy to retain employees is to tie their income to equity in the company. That creates a moat around hiring engineers from a competitor (you'll have to match the equity if you want to hire!). There's also labor laws that makes it hard to fire someone; these incentivize the business owner to pay less so that a bad hire has less of an effect. There's also, in a lot of EU countries, so much taxes that it's helpful early one to hire specialized accountants just to claim all the possible subsidies for the business. It can be worth it for businesses with 5 employees. Adding that extra salary will leave less for the early employees.
There's also the fact that some companies simply don't see the value of software, at all. They have a software division but don't treat it as the core of their business. In their mind, it's simply a tool for the business (despite the whole business depending on it sometimes!). So they treat software as a cost center and that drives engineers to tech-focused companies that are clustered in the US. Prime example of that is banking, where no matter how much revenue is directly tied to software, it's still considered a cost center.
Finally, in some market there's simply a talent gap. Ontario, and Canada, strikes me as one since I've met a few Canadians who jumped the border to Silicon Valley but never actually met a Silicon Valley engineer moving up north.
Even in my limited experience, I have seen big, well-funded software teams in companies doing retail, manufacturing, transportation, shipping, food service, etc. Those developers do not typically make SV wages (and generally have better work-life balance), but they do frequently earn comparably to lawyers in their cities.
An example in the insurance industry from Dallas, a city not known for being a tech hub: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/417604/mid-senior-level-net-d...
Or telecom in Atlanta: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/392595/senior-software-engine...
It might be fair to say these industries have more leverage in the US because they can serve a bigger market. But it's not all about the types of products they make, there are definitely bigger issues that drive the comp differential. I would love to learn more.