On the other hand, saying that the majority of the population is grinding in tough physical labour is just not true. Most other jobs are generic office jobs that don't need to be done (just like 80%+ of software engineering jobs don't need to be done).
Most of us are just doing things for money. Are most people working hard? Not usually, because it mostly doesn't matter. Spreadsheets idle in inboxes, meetings lead nowhere and achieve nothing, brown-nosers and family members get promoted into jobs they're incompetent at. And the world continues to spin regardless.
In the last two years I've worked with hundreds of bootcamp students who have reached the end of their rope with 20th century career paths that no longer make any f-ing sense. From teachers to construction workers to bartenders to graphic designers. Not all of them have a deep love for writing software, but all of them recognize that its one of the only viable paths available if you don't want to have roommates into your 40s.
As my best friend told me in an abandoned bay area parking lot before I switched careers to swe, there just doesn't seem to be any other reliable way for people in our generation to make a living. Maybe it only applies to california, maybe it only applies to millennials, but having been on both sides of that fence now I 100% agree.
There were people from Tourism, Law, (non-software) Engineering, Biologists, Chemists, Philosophy, among others.
Most of the people in those areas were burned out of REALLY being overworked, underpaid and being treated like trash (you should see how Law firms treat their interns).
I suspect this may be exaggerated, in that there is still demand in other career paths, they just aren't as appealing for various reasons, e.g. manual/technical trades with reasonable pay but some physical labor involved or a long apprenticeship period
I do worry we might be flooding the field and siphoning talent from sectors that matter, even as the proportion of software jobs that don't really need to exist balloons
this seems like a recipe for a lot of disappointed people in need of retraining once we realize code can't eat the entire world, and in the meantime it feeds the bubble cycle, pointless or abusive "innovation", and speculative nonsense software is plagued by
* Time spent on finding a job
* Time spent on studying in order to attain a job
* Actual amount of hours worked (hard to get accurate data on it)
* Actual amount of effort per hour (hard to operationalize)
It's a very tough discussion to have, but I have a gut feeling that you're simplifying too much and are partially wrong. But I can't even give evidence that you might be wrong because I don't have data. So at best I feel we're both blind and we don't have a one-eyed king that can see! ;-)
Compare that to physics, chemistry, bio or mechanical engineering.
When I see SWE saying they know 10 different languages I see someone who is bragging that they know how to sum 1+1 1+2 1+3 (...) 1+10
No wonder people with no degree can learn how to code in a few months and get a nice paying job. Try that with any of the others I mentioned and you get nothing. Not with 1 year. Not with 2 years. Maybe with 3 years of studying.
Doctors require lots of qualifications which is a barrier to entry into the career. This significantly drives up compensation.
Are most doctors really more than human frontends to webmd? Probably not.
Source: my doctor told me this (really).
Extending this to SWE. A degree may not be necessary to enter the field anymore, but I don't see how it should be less of a requirement than for a regular consulting GP. Both are expected to understand fundamentals well, and both can cause harm if they do their job badly - I'd argue the SWE can cause a lot more harm to be honest.
If it seems like I'm suggesting qualifications should be mandatory for SWEs, I'm not. I'm saying other professions are revered in a way that we aren't - and I don't see the evidence it's especially warranted.
> On the other hand, saying that the majority of the population is grinding in tough physical labour is just not true.
10.3% of US jobs are classified as "physically demanding". [1] (I didn't see parent said "labour" until after my research, but I expect figures in the UK are similar). Assertion is TRUE, the majority is not doing "grinding" labor.
> Most other jobs are generic office jobs that don't need to be done (just like 80%+ of software engineering jobs don't need to be done).
Hard to say about the parenthetical, and it is impossible to say if the jobs don't need to be done without running an experiment, but some research has been done on whether people think their job needs to be done. A study of the European Work Commission Survey [2] showed that in 2005 only 7.8% of people responded that they were not doing useful work. In 2015 even fewer, 4.8% felt they where not doing useful work. (The UK reported slightly higher at 5.6%). A "recent poll" from an article dated 2017 which links to a 404 for the poll claims that poll said that 37% of Brits felt their jobs were useless. [3] Even the originator of the "bullshit jobs" book thought that 20 - 50%--maybe as high as 60%--were useless. Assertion is probably FALSE, most jobs have some utility.
> Most of us are just doing things for money.
Yes, and so what? Does that make it not worthwhile?
According to a Pew study from 2016, 49% of Americans are "very satisfied" with their job (59% of people whose family incomes were over $75k), and about half said they viewed their job as a career. 51% said their job gave them some sense of identity (higher percent as with more education), while 47% percent say the job is just what they do for a living. However, those working in non-profits, government, or self-employed were about 62% likely to say their job gives them a sense of identity, while only 44% of those working at a company said the same) Assertion is PROBABLY FALSE, depending on the definition of "most" and the intent of the claim, but the statistics certainly do not make it a definition-true assertion.
[1] https://dc.citybizlist.com/article/639055/dc-has-the-2nd-sma... (scroll to the bottom for the US figures)
[2] https://phys.org/news/2021-06-workers-useless-jobs-previousl...
[3] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/why-its-time-to-rethi...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-a...
My guess (and it would only be a guess, as I don’t see how it would be possible to really know either way) is that for many of the respondents they could well be kidding themselves about how necessary their job actually is.
As an example, Bob might feel his job really matters, and it might within his company, but his whole company could be an also-ran or a quango that the world wouldn’t miss if it didn’t exist.
All of the above aside, how would you feel about coming to my house while I watch the news and subtly letting me know when I’m being fed alternative facts?
I’ll provide unlimited tea and biscuits. Don’t keep your gifts to yourself!
Qualitative evidence is just fine. We might want to stop exclusively fetishizing numbers, and instead of complaining how hard it is to find data, do something to fix the problems right in front of our face.
Well, that's all dandy. But when someone actually shares something it's "cry me a river". Their contribution is summarily dismissed because it's not the Right Evidence from the Right People.
I really don't think this is true. Maybe in the US, but worldwide I would charecterize most job environments as closer to sweatshop than office.
I do understand the issue. Humans are prone to complain about any slight whether real or imagined. Millionaires will complain about not having enough money, A-list celebrities will complain about not having enough visibility, sports stars will complain about every foul play.
Money just does not lead to life satisfaction, only craving. I just have to accept that this is the human condition.
The compensation can be high if you work in Silicon Valley (even though the cost of living is high there). The standard corporate programming job is already paid much worse. Also in a lot of countries that are not the USA, software development is not such a well-paying job.
I looked for software development jobs in Spain, and they pay even less than in my native Uruguay.
And forget about six figures unless you're in the US, England, Switzerland or Australia or a top company in Europe.
Most of the people I once worked with in the service industry had degrees though. Sure, not compsci, but something.
Also most construction workers I've know made way more than that average, often close to 6 figures if not above it. Of course I'm in a big city, may skew things.
Data for this? Does not match my experience whatsoever.
Office politics, skills evaporating, high work pressure, ageism, boredom, physical inactivity, an indoor life, over-consumption of information...all of these factors have their effect on one's mental state as well as body.
Pay does not fix that.
This. People don't feel sorry for people who are in the top 20% in terms of salaries, when they complain about not being in the top 5%.
About a decade ago, or a bit more, I noticed that the the crowd over at slashdot started complaining in similar ways, either that some MBA was compensated better, or that H1B holders were suppressing salaries.
Maybe I'm prejudiced, but it seems to me that this kind of thinking is common in mediocre developers who are disappointed that they are stuck in an average-or-below paying programming job from around the age of 35-40 on. Maybe their salary even went down a bit, in real terms, after the latest downturn.
I simply have trouble empathizing with people who have it better than most other poeple, but still complain like that. If they were industrial workers that started out low (at least for the country), but still lost their job to outsourcing to Asia, and were unable to get another, I would empathize a bit more.
I don't think it's the job of governments to protect top 20% earners from competition from abroad, and get fed up when entitled people demand such protectionism.
I stopped following slashdot because the discussions often turned into something I would expect in a labor union forum, instead focusing on fresh perspectives in tech an science.
But if it is a generational sort of thing, I suppose that is why it is becoming more common on HN about now.
We take ourselves so seriously we cannot afford the time for someone to be polite!
> Do still be polite, and feel free to have social conversations!
Given that, I don't really see what's impolite about it, especially in an async conversations, where the other person is not expected to be on their feet, waiting for incoming messages.
Nope this is an outdated opinion. You can do just as well or better in trades (source: my electrician buddy). If you’re referring to the FAANG salaries (sub 1%) you’re comparing to doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs in terms of opportunity cost. Your average joe programmer isn’t killing it like you seem to think, and they’d do just as well in trades or middle management.
The cynic in me thinks this is an opinion promoted by employers, just like the BS “labour shortage” headline.
[1] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...
[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...
I have no idea how that comparison would shake out, or if the rise of WFH for tech people would/will change it, though.
I'm absolutely sure that lawyers and doctors only work 20 hours a week.
I technically work 12 hours as well as a developer, but actual work might be 6 hours or less, and it's way less stressful than a doctor.
Also sitting in a chair in an office all day has a lot of health issues And they’re insidious in that your body doesn’t immediately tell you how badly your damaging it.
They all have some combination of: odd posture, odd gait, a dry cough, or bad skin. You can talk about ageism in the Tech world, but I've worked as a tradesman for a bit of time when I was young, and there were not many past 50 much less 50 and healthy. Over lunch they each all recounted their health issues, which made me quit that summer and get an office job.
The trades can be a good life, especially since you have much more freedom in where you can be located, but to pretend they average as high as FAANG is silly.
Who said this anywhere in this thread?
Easiest is also highly subjective, if your job is making wordpress templates/sites then sure. If you're working on complexer systems then this statement is horseshit. I've done physical and service jobs that were both easier than the software development I do, only difference was that the physical job was also physically exhausting.
IMHO it's the culture and the VC environment. There's simply not that much money around to throw at moonshot projects, therefore you don't have many unicorns that lose a few billion euros a year paying extravagant salaries for talent. Obviously EU is a very rich place but people with money invest their money in stuff that are profitable right away, likely to be profitable in short term because a giant company is behind it or invest in the US companies if they are more adventurous.
You are not getting that much in net salary above certain amount.
Europe is a hellhole if you are a young ambitious individual.
How does one identify a well paying non-union employer? Noname companies in almost all cases pay much less than union employers.
All I know is a lot of great engineers at my company are internationally refusing more pay to non union jobs. I.have no idea if it applies to other companies, or what the benifits are
Anecdotally, I've observed (over a 30-year career) that less than half of the people who have the qualifications can actually produce halfway decent code (as in code that doesn't crash the first time it's used or introduce new problems).
It’s probably the most privileged position possible.
And especially not true after 2020, when so many more companies are willing to hire people remotely, often for close-to-US-levels of pay.
In short: I'm privileged AF
This race to the bottom is how software devs will become the new "teacher shortage", and how wealth will continue to funnel to the upper classes with those on the lower end unable to climb up.
"The pay isn't great", "treated far too shabbily", "dealing with bugs and bad decisions", "inadequate processes" and so on, sucks when development is the only thing you've dealt with, but you have no idea how it is to actually have a blue collar job if you're actually complaining about those things.
I think cs137 and others like them should try to have a part-time job at McDonalds (or whatever that is not in front of a screen), because it will make you love your software engineering job again.
There's stress, but it ends at the end of the breakfast/lunch/dinner rush, not a constant low-grade stress over the whole day and often lingering into the night from unfinished JIRA tickets.
Then there's mostly chatting and hanging out with interesting people, either kids with dreams or adults with off-the-beaten-path lives (not an endless stream of white collar adults who only have stories about how they went to a bbq or just had another kid) while cleaning or prepping food, helping a customer here and there. Some customers were assholes but they'd be gone a few minutes later and you'd go back to other things. And because it's a public facility sometimes my friends would stop by just to say hi and shoot the shit for a few minutes.
And I was much healthier then too, despite working fast food. Mainly because I spent my day moving instead of being stuck in a chair.
I also worked a retail, a warehouse, and a factory job. The retail job was even better because you didn't have to deal with the grease or cleaning bathrooms, and the customers were somewhat nicer. If it paid remotely near what I make now I'd probably switch to that tomorrow.
Factory job was probably the toughest. More isolating, no A/C in the summer, more constant stress, more physically demanding, mandatory 10 hour days for weeks sometimes, and there was an incident where a drunk forklift driver almost knocked a tower of heavy steel racks on top of me. I quit the next week.
I could say McDonalds workers don’t know how easy they have it. They should try picking fruit as a seasonal immigrant, because it will make them love working at McDonalds.
And those seasonal immigrant fruit pickers don't know how easy the have it. They should try being kidnapping victims chained in a basement, waiting to be tortured to death by an axe-wielding maniac.
That's the problem with "you can't complain, somebody else has it worse" - I can always think of somebody who has it worse.
I've had a colleague who was paid worse as a software engineer than his previous job as a McDonald's burger flipper. I also have software engineer friends who were paid minimum wage as software engineers.
I learned from that that having a high-value skill means nothing if you're not willing to take action to extract that value.
I joked with a girl yesterday when she asked me what I did. I told her: "I'm a dude that's paid way to much to sit in his living room and make websites and apps".
Not everyone will make $300k per year, but you'll probably still make way more than most other professions. Teachers make like $70k in good places, often times much less. Here we are sitting in our pajamas at home changing the background color of a button and making twice as much.
You don't need to do this forever. Usually you can just focus on a stack and related technologies and do well. Once you have experience and a clearly defined need, ad-hoc research is good enough.
The thesis of the linked article is that you do. For the most part, it matches my experience. I'm 30 years in and already wondering how useful the Hadoop/Spark/Scala stuff I spent the last few years mastering is going to be in the next 5 years.
* Scala introduced us old Java hands to a whole different world of modern languages. If you know it you get Kotlin or the latest Java changes for free (probably TypeScript-like other ecosystems too).
* Spark introduced a generation of backend developers to distributed query engine technology (my generation is unlikely to delve into postgress codebase in comparison) and made ETL trivial in real life systems
Hadoop clearly died in the last few years or so (outside of EMR where it's mostly invisible anyway). But it's a perfect example of a complete technology lifecycle - it had a good run for a decade starting around 2010 which in our line of business is incredibly long time. Not to mention how many things about distributed systems people like me learned from that stack over time.
In my opinion comparing SWE to blue collar work like construction is apples to oranges. Ofc the blue collar work is harder and more demanding physically.
It’s better to think about whether software engineers are being compensated fairly relative to other professions like lawyers.
I think they are given that wages seem to be governed with supply and demand. On one hand I don’t make as much as my sister, who is a doctor. On the other hand, I make enough/comfortable money and don’t have to deal with the liability/responsibilities/obligations of being a doctor or lawyer, and I can work from bed naked should I choose to do so.
So, yes, you might not have to do the full specialty training and residency but it can still be quite competitive and expensive.
You’re only earning surgeon money when you’ve made staff level at FAANG. Which usually means you’re near the same age as surgeons and there was a lot of risk and grind getting there. If anyone thinks getting to staff at FAANG is trivial - I’d suggest they’ve been very lucky in life and aren’t a representative person of how hard it is.
People who could do either often go into software because of the nearly unlimited earnings cap. Theoretically you could start your own company and be ultra rich. That’s what I see often as the source. Less common with doctors afaict.
FAANG hires way too many people to hire exclusively (or even primarily) from Ivy League schools. Jointly they employ probably 5% of the software engineers in the country! Master's degrees are likewise totally unnecessary; I almost never see anyone who isn't here on a visa getting a Master's. (PhDs are a different story, but I know people without even undergrad degrees working at FAANG too.)
Surgeon money is generally $500-700k/yr (this might be my sampling bias - looking at stats online, it varies a lot - this is like tech incomes, there's a wide distribution). The nice thing about surgeon money is that you can make that in a lot of places - not just in SV. The same cannot be said of FAANG. You're gonna have a hard time getting remotely hired in BFE making $400k+/yr. Yet, the local hospital always needs a surgeon and most surgeons don't want to live in BFE... So, you're gonna be fine.
Even then if you assume you're making $450k/yr at 27 - you're not gonna have $5m by 40 unless you somehow are beating the market or save every penny and live like scrooge. (Which - again - why bother saving $5m if you're gonna live like a peasant?)
If you assume you're gonna live like you would on a safe withdrawal rate (let's say the more optimistic 4% - $200k/yr at $5m) then you're gonna only have $250k/yr gross income to save - which turns out to be ~$150k/yr net. (You can play with the numbers however you see fit but the point will come around) If you decide to save $12.5k every month for 13 years at 6% return rate (just a simple return - we assume same value dollars) then after those 13 years you have $2.9m. It would take 19 years until you crossed $5m. So, you'd be 45-46 assuming you saved every penny, never went above a $200k/yr income lifestyle (LOL at that in the bay area - you're a renter for life!), and you somehow made $450k/yr starting at 27. Which - is again - uncommon. It has happened due to wild stock appreciation but it isn't the norm offer people receive for senior level - levels backs this up.
It sounds nice until you do the math and realize $200k/yr is shit to live on here. God forbid you marry someone who isn't in tech/law/finance/$400k+ income.
- 450k is not, actually, top-of-band for senior engineers right now. There are some companies where that's approximately true (i.e. Google) and some where the number is much higher (Netflix goes without saying, Amazon routinely breaks 500k, Uber is hitting 480-500k, Cruise breaks 500k, Snapchat hits 550-600k at L5, etc).
- Well, since I'm looking at annualized compensation, I am considering stacked refreshers. I don't think job-hopping ~3 times is an enormous ask.
- I certainly wasn't assuming market-beating returns, or living on ramen. But I certainly wasn't running the numbers such that one would be spending the equivalent of one's safe withdrawal rate pre-FIRE. I live unconstrained by budget concerns and don't even come close to spending half that. At 450k pre-tax I was assuming one would be saving ~200k/year, with 7% returns.
- I was also not assuming that one was starting from 0 at 27, since it's not like pre-senior one would be making barely enough to live on. Having something in the neighborhood of 500-600k saved up by then is something like the default outcome, given a typical single person's lifestyle (absent extravagantly expensive hobbies).
- Ok, sure, this gets you to 4m, adjusted for inflation (oops). Guess you gotta hit that third decade (barely).
- You aren't limited to SV; many companies in that tier support remote work and those that don't have a bunch of hubs across the US.
I'm genuinely not sure why you think that 450k is an outlier level of compensation for senior FAANG/adjacent engineers. One possible source of confusion - if you're just looking at the "Average Total Compensation" levels lists for those companies, those numbers are very low. Filter by "New Offers Only", and then remember that those offers don't include refreshers (which, over the course of the first 4 years at a company, will add something like 360k = 90k/year, assuming totally average performance and no multipliers). It might be in the top 50th percentile, though even that may be pessimistic.
As for 200k/year being shit to live on... I assume you're talking about living in Silicon Valley, which, shrug? I don't live in Silicon Valley and before I decided to substantially change my career direction, I was on-track (and that despite not even hitting 6-figure comp until a few years into my career).
Can confirm. Just did an onboarding in my underwear. (Although mostly because I forgot time conversion when on business travel was a thing, because COVID)
Any engineer who has enough EQ and people skills to give some demos on Zoom is going to find that Sales Engineering/Solutions Engineering is an easier job with more earning potential, all with no on-call rotation.
On top of that, the company treats you like you're valuable rather than a cost center (especially relevant to people doing infrastructure and IT engineering). Sales teams go on vacation to team-build, engineers are shoved in a conference room with some lukewarm sandwiches.
In US for sure. But there are many other places where you get a better balance between learning/working/salary in other jobs.
Not to mention the notoriously higher rate of burnout in the industry, even in the US.
The people in this threads making huge overgeneralizations might be indeed overpaid.
I agree that being a SWE is certainly not the worst thing in the world but it has also a lot of bad properties that often are overlooked and the most positions do not have moon salaries, that we see on HN regularly.
Also to do whatever lower income job you don't need to study for 5+ years (master). You need to compare with jobs that have similar requirements to your education.
You also have the ability to get a standing desk and take breaks to walk around.
A standing desk is better than no standing desk but won't correct everything by itself. Taking a break and walking around is fine but I still need to get back to staring into the computer screen to do my work.
I don't know your age but for me it started with about ~35 that I realized that this has negative effects on my body.
One of the things I’m glad of is the flex time and working from home so I can crank out workouts whenever it suits me.
I'm not denying the field is changing fast, it is. But there's other reasons why 50 year olds are pushed away besides some imagined inability to keep up.
If you think unreasonable deadlines are a big issue, then you're in for a rough awakening if you spend any time with the rest of the workforce that doesn't sit in front of a computer all day.
Most of the world lives in severe poverty, therefor software developers should accept any amount that the owner class feel like paying them and be thankful.