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.
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.