Programmer pay is so bizarre, it makes me cynical about our entire economy.
If I’m a blue-collar worker maintaining the wires between banks, I get paid little. If I’m a programmer maintaining the banking software that controls everyone’s money and is essential to the entire nation, I’m paid a little more, but not as much as some programmers.
If I’m a young man who creates a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions of dollars into my hands.
You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.
COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.
not sure what you’re talking about with lisp lol, the military may have some dialect they wrote but lisp started as an academic language and there’s plenty of still supported and used dialects outside of that
It’s pretty simple isn’t it? If you want to be paid a lot of money, learn how to do what other people can’t or won’t. In the software industry those opportunities are all over the place. You just need to find it and take it.
I think it makes perfect sense. Those people are building something from scratch. That’s a lot more responsibility and skill needed than to maintain a tiny part of a huge well established system. The people capable of doing an A+ job at building something totally new are very few and far between and the competition to hire them is fierce. The best way to move up in this industry is to build up your skill and jump ship to a new job as soon as your skill has outpaced your salary.
I think it really just comes down to scale. Relative to other professions there aren’t that many software engineers, but the work produced by each one has the potential to reach an extremely wide user base. Someone working at Google could write code that gets deployed on a billion devices. This is pretty clear when comparing between different software engineering roles as well. Companies that serve a global market pay significantly better than local companies.
On top of that, there’s no supplies or logistics required for software engineering. It just takes one person and a computer, so expenses are minimal compared to other engineering disciplines.
A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.
Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.
Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.
Programmer pay is so bizarre, it makes me cynical about our entire economy.
If I’m a blue-collar worker maintaining the wires between banks, I get paid little. If I’m a programmer maintaining the banking software that controls everyone’s money and is essential to the entire nation, I’m paid a little more, but not as much as some programmers.
If I’m a young man who creates a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions of dollars into my hands.
You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.
COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.
Dude, should I learn COBOL?
not sure what you’re talking about with lisp lol, the military may have some dialect they wrote but lisp started as an academic language and there’s plenty of still supported and used dialects outside of that
There may be, but as far as I can tell, they won’t pay what the people that still need COBOL are willing to pay
It’s pretty simple isn’t it? If you want to be paid a lot of money, learn how to do what other people can’t or won’t. In the software industry those opportunities are all over the place. You just need to find it and take it.
I think it makes perfect sense. Those people are building something from scratch. That’s a lot more responsibility and skill needed than to maintain a tiny part of a huge well established system. The people capable of doing an A+ job at building something totally new are very few and far between and the competition to hire them is fierce. The best way to move up in this industry is to build up your skill and jump ship to a new job as soon as your skill has outpaced your salary.
I think it really just comes down to scale. Relative to other professions there aren’t that many software engineers, but the work produced by each one has the potential to reach an extremely wide user base. Someone working at Google could write code that gets deployed on a billion devices. This is pretty clear when comparing between different software engineering roles as well. Companies that serve a global market pay significantly better than local companies.
On top of that, there’s no supplies or logistics required for software engineering. It just takes one person and a computer, so expenses are minimal compared to other engineering disciplines.
A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.
Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.
Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.