Free food and misery: the life of a techie

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21688390-glamorous-tech-startups-can-be-brutal-places-workers-other-side-paradise?fsrc=rss

by pmuk • 11 years ago

120 94 11 years ago

economist.com

geebee2• 11 years ago

Wow. I'm a little surprised to read such a dim view of the lot of a software developer in the economist. I'm glad to see it in a mainstream publication, though.

I don't think that software development is necessarily a bad career, but I do think it has been vastly oversold relative to other paths available to well educated, hardworking people who can choose their own career path in the US. And I think that this overselling is a big part of a PR campaign to convince congress and the public that there is a shortage of software developers.

IN short, while this article presents an unusually pessimistic image of software development as a career, and I may not fully agree with it, I do welcome this rebalancing.

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

I don't think that software development is necessarily a bad career, but I do think it has been vastly oversold relative to other paths available to well educated, hardworking people who can choose their own career path in the US.

So what other paths are nicer, while requiring less up-front risk?

Law? Totally flooded with first-jobbers and fresh graduates.

Medicine? Salaries being suppressed and debts inflating unless you hit the right specialty.

Academia? Oh boy, basically just triple what I said about medicine.

At some point we just have to accept that the university-educated, white-collar professional class is being subjected to exactly the same wage repression and rentiering (on housing and education costs) as everyone else. We are all working-class now.

Apocryphon2• 11 years ago

Michael O. Church: "Software engineers aren't a privileged set. They're just less fucked than the rest of the U.S. Former Middle Class."

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...

geebee2• 11 years ago

It's tough across the board, certainly.

That said, can you think of another field that experiences a similar same drum beat about a "shortage"? Maybe nursing, though out here in SF, nurses actually do out-earn software developers at the median (US News "best jobs" has a roundup of BLS data), and because (again, this is in SF) they have powerful unions, they don't experience the Disney-stye situation where middle aged nurses are fired and forced to train their replacements as a condition of receiving severance or holding onto their jobs for a while longer. I always have to make sure I say this when I make this comparison: I am absolutely ok with nurses outearning software developers, it's a tough job, they deserve to be well paid. But according to the US News site, even dental hygienists make roughly as much at the median as software developers. Again, I have no problem with this, but it is at odds with the notion that software developers are a wildly well paid group that experiences wonderful perks, and that the big problem is that there's a "shortage" of them. The economic article makes it clear that the aversion to this field may be very rational.

Although burnout affects everyone, I do think that software developers face greater age related employment issues than most fields as well.

I can't really quantify this, but I don't think that the PR around a "shortage" of nurses reaches the same fever pitch for software developers.

Overall, I'd recommend you just go through the "US News Best Jobs" list and check out salaries in high cost regions, relative to software development. Think about job security, stress levels, age discrimination, and so forth. Nothing's perfect, but I think you can make a good case that all of the fields in the top 10 may be preferable to software development.

madengr6• 11 years ago

"Medicine? Salaries being suppressed"

How so?

FLUX-YOU• 11 years ago

So what other paths are nicer, while requiring less up-front risk?

It's pretty difficult to beat the upfront cost/risk of "Fire up a web browser and a compiler/interpreter and start reading a tutorial". That can lead to an entry level job in 6mo - year or less. Software is really an anomaly in this area especially with tuition costs these days.

You can learn math or engineering on your own to lessen the risk of flunking out of a major, but you're still required to spend the time.

zippergz5• 11 years ago

I make over $200k most years, with a liberal arts bachelor degree. I work in a comfortable office with reasonable hours, no one yells at me, I don't have to get dirty or put myself in physical danger. I take several weeks of vacation a year, I very rarely work a late night, and I have recruiters reaching out to me on a regular basis offering me new opportunities. While I don’t love all aspects of my work (who does?), I also can’t say with a straight face that I don’t have a drastically better situation than most people. If you ask me, software development is a pretty damned good field to be in.

madengr6• 11 years ago

What sort of software development, and what area of the country?

jaimebuelta• 11 years ago

I don't think that $200k is a common salary among tech people. Especially out of Silicon Valley, and, even more so, out of the US (The Economist is a British magazine, after all)

seivan• 11 years ago

You're assuming this is the norm. That's just pretty hilarious.

At one point I was given a Macbook Pro as a perk (iOS dev) which was slower than my personal Air because of the lack of SSD.

jondubois• 11 years ago

I make that too as a contractor. This is a standard rate for doing contracting in Australia and UK. Now that the economy is crumbling I don't see why anyone would want to work for a startup.

ryandrake3• 11 years ago

Congratulations, but you have to admit you are a pretty extreme outlier, even in the Bay Area. I'd guess the vast majority of tech workers in Silicon Valley are in the $80-$140K range, and the vast majority outside the valley are in the $50-90K range. $200K is eye popping and probably two or more standard deviations from the mean.

vosper• 11 years ago

I don't believe the Instagram billion was about acquiring 13 software engineers. It was about controlling an application that was a huge (and growing) competitor for attention on mobile, was it's own social network, and was better (or at least, more flexible and fun) than Facebook at one of Facebook's core functionalities: sharing photos.

danieltillett3• 11 years ago

It was about preventing any social application that might conceivably threaten facebook. Personally I think it was a bit of an over reaction on Facebook’s side, but they do seem very paranoid about this.

I have to say I am a true old fuddy-duddy when it comes to Instagram as I can’t think of a single use for it that appeals to me.

tedks2• 11 years ago

That's exactly the intention of instagram. It took my parents a very long time to get on instagram and they only eventually did so to try to police my teenage sister (who promptly made a new account, added her friends to it, and dribbled a few worksafe photos a month onto the account our parents knew about).

Now everyone is on snapchat, which fortunately, nobody's parents will EVER be aware of.

pconner2• 11 years ago

I have to say I am a true old fuddy-duddy when it comes to Instagram as I can’t think of a single use for it that appeals to me.

On Facebook, people present a polished version of their lives as if it's reflective of everything in their lives.

On Instagram, the purpose is to show polished (and "filtered") versions of what you're doing. I like that Instagram is a bit more honest about what it really is.

mkehrt• 11 years ago

I wasn't a user for a long time, but now that I am, I have to say that Instagram is really pleasant to use. It's just photographs, which gives it a pleasant simplicity other social networks lack. It's nice to occasionally check to see what pictures friends and others have taken.

exceptione• 11 years ago

working link: https://ixquick-proxy.com/do/spg/proxy2?ep=5679746e445249575...

mberning• 11 years ago

Fabulously paid? Yeah right. Salaries are decent compared to the average working stiff. You still top out early in your career with little chance for significant increase.

In regards to the perks, having access to all of them mentioned is the exception rather than the rule.

It is a sad indictment of work culture that the freedom to make your own hours or rest when tired is seen as an extravagant benefit.

jusben1369• 11 years ago

"You still top out". Actually that's pretty unique to sw development vs other white collar roles and is not discussed enough when it comes to understanding higher levels of disillusion. SW developers are basically having their mod life crisis at 28 or 32 when they realize they've mostly flatlined unless they go into management.

umanwizard• 11 years ago

Saying "unless they go into management" is an artificial distinction.

In most white-collar roles, "advancement" is synonymous with "going into management", and software development is no different.

mkozlows2• 11 years ago

1. I know many people who've had significant salary increases into their 40s, at least.

2. Management is not automatically higher-paying than development, until you get into the higher reaches of management, which not everyone will.

3. To the extent people are flatlining, it might just be a case of starting high; if you're hitting a wall with a number that's in the top 5% of individual income nationally, well, you're doing better than 95% of people out there, so consider that it might not be so bad after all.

serge2k2• 11 years ago

Is that really a big problem?

Growth slows down as you get older and more experienced, not everyone can grow beyond some level. A company isn't going to keep giving big raises to someone who isn't growing that much anymore. That seems fair.

Worst case for most people is that they hit a reasonably high wage quickly and can stay there for a long time, even if the increases become modest at best. That's a good thing.

If you are willing to develop the skillset you can still move into management and continue to increase your earning power. That's good too.

It does suck to think that as a mid level engineer I'll most likely get to a senior level in a few years and rise no further, but it's just something you have to get over.

ryandrake3• 11 years ago

I had just such a crisis at around that age. After 3 or 4 companies, I realized that I hit the ceiling at around 28 or so had only 1-1.5% cost of living adjustments to look forward to for the rest of my life. So I tried to do a major career change, ended up doing a minor one (I have "manager" in my title now but that's about it), and really I'm not making that much more than I was. There's definitely a ceiling, and you hit it real early in tech.

tokenadult• 11 years ago

A key paragraph in the article kindly submitted here is this paragraph about promised shares of stock in a company: "Moreover, tech startups typically attract talent by offering shares. Employees work like dogs in return for supposedly making a fortune when the firm goes public. However, such firms often use multiple classes of shares that preserve the biggest gains for insiders, leaving the employees with common stock that can easily lose value. In particular, startups have taken to offering later-stage investors guarantees that they will get their money back, if either a subsequent funding round or an eventual initial public offering (IPO) values their shares at a lower price than they are paying. When firms have to pay out on such guarantees, they generally do so by issuing extra shares, which dilute other common shareholders such as their staff." That's what makes the venture-capital-funded tech industry different: it looks like it offers opportunities to make serious money through appreciation of shares in the company, but all too often that doesn't work out.

It was interesting to see, in another part of the article, the suggestion that knowing what a company's goals are in relation to one's work can make one's work more satisfying. That makes sense.

jethro_tell4• 11 years ago

The crazy thing is job satisfaction. People do things they dislike because you pay them more. I've been a carpenter and a heavy machinery opperator before my current job in tech. Come March, I'm going to look out the window at the first sunny day and wish I was crushing a house. But in April 15, I'm going to smile as I realize how much money I save this year and look at my investments yoy.

I mean, I don't feel as apriciated or have as much fun, but I put money in the bank, I'll have healthcare for my family, retirement for my self and better job security.

Everyone is feeling pressure from inflation and stagnating wages, but let's not pretend an SDE with a six figure income is some how part of the working class now. The working class was relieved of health care and security a decade or more ago.

civilian• 11 years ago

Off topic, but is crushing houses fun? It sounds like it'd be a lot of fun.

jethro_tell4• 11 years ago

It is so much fun that many years, I schedule summer vacation to coincide with a house crushing from my old boss. I go out and give home 2 free days of labor cleaning up after the crushing in exchange for getting to drive into someones kitchen with a dozer. It's harder than you would think, you kinda try to scrape the inside out through the windows or a hole you made in the walls, then push it in on itself. It's really easy to get a pile of garbage that is too weak to drive on and too tall to pull the top off of. That's when you have to start driving dump truck and realized there are people who do this for a living and you're just playing around.

For the record though, cleaning up involves driving a dump truck, bobcat or excavator. It's not like I have a shovel in hand for more than an hour in the week.

kaybe• 11 years ago

There is probably a place where you can pay for doing it, like the excavator parks where you can shovel gravel from one corner to the next.

madengr6• 11 years ago

For me, as an EE, all those perks are a fantasy. All I can expect is my company to consistently screw us every year on our benefits.

linuxlizard2• 11 years ago

And move your job to China.

madengr6• 11 years ago

It needs a security clearance, so not yet, but I'm sure they would if they could figure out how to do so.

Funny thing is, if they would offer free lunch, they would get some more work out of me. They don't even offer free coffee; yes that's how fucking pathetic it is. Not even cheap black coffee. They'd improve employee health if they offered free fruit, but nope, that bag of apples from Costco is too fucking expensive. Instead they just fine us $2000 for not participating in biometrics.

mkozlows2• 11 years ago

The biggest card this article palms is by starting out talking about tech companies, and then switching into a survey that's not primarily about tech companies: "A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms... found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated."

Because, sure, if you're the person who does Crystal Reports at Bob's House of Widgets, or the VB person at Gary's Lawncare, or even (to some extent) one of the J2EE horde at MegaBankCorp, you're in a place where you're not core to the business, you're viewed as a cost center, you have a limited career path, and the main people at the company probably have you lumped in with HR and Accounting.

But I really, really, really doubt you're going to find that same sense of alienation, underappreciation, etc. at a tech company.

jfb2• 11 years ago

But I really, really, really doubt you're going to find that same sense of alienation, underappreciation, etc. at a tech company.

How many tech companies have you worked at?

ionforce• 11 years ago

What are you trying to imply?

Tuxer• 11 years ago

I work in tech in the silicon valley. That's just untrue.

There is a sense of alienation in being a small cog in a huge company shipping millions of devices, churning through code to get data from one point to another hoping that it'll make a difference to customers and that that feature isn't just another PR gizmo.

randycupertino• 11 years ago

lol... you don't think engineers are viewed as a cost center? Because they are.

ditonal• 11 years ago

The most insulting things companies do is offer 'vanity' perks while slashing real perks. My last gig had fancy parties, free dinner (no lunch interestingly), got itself ranked as a "best place to work" etc. It could market its employees as entitled, spoiled developers for sure.

However, there was no 401k matching. No tuition reimbursement. There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real. Basically, if you couldn't market the perk to 20-somethings, they slashed it.

Meanwhile I'm told that my very existence screws over the poor working class police officers and firefighters, who make 80% of what I make but have job security and lifetime pensions awaiting for them. And they get paid for overtime.

While I absolutely feel like I'm privileged in many ways to work in tech, the industry has many incentives to make tech workers look more 'spoiled' than they are, and so they work their PR engines to do exactly that.

I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.

ljk• 11 years ago

got itself ranked as a "best place to work"

recently learned that a lot of places give employees incentives to leave positive reviews on glassdoor.. hopefully glassdoor doesn't go the same way as yelp

ceejayoz• 11 years ago

free dinner (no lunch interestingly)

Free lunch doesn't get them anything - you already expect to be at work before and after the lunch hour.

Free dinner gets you to stay until it arrives (6:30, I'd bet) and probably afterwards.

hawkice2• 11 years ago

There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real.

I am a 20-something who was woken up every day at 1am for weeks to "handle emergencies" that didn't exist -- are you telling me the standard is compensating people for this? I did get the sense that if it cost the company meaningful amounts of money they would have let me change the alerting system so that only real emergencies woke me up, instead of "not your department"ing me.

onewland• 11 years ago

If you work as an engineer in the US you're probably an "exempt" employee by status, meaning that your employer doesn't have to compensate you for extra time. If you're sufficiently underpaid as an engineer that you're non-exempt, then you should be paid 1.5x for any time beyond 9-5/40 hours, or you should get to trade in those unscheduled hours to work less on following days.

EDIT: Realized I didn't address the question of whether it is "standard". I've heard that DevOps engineers have a bit of a compensation consideration (maybe $10-20k/year in the Bay Area where I live) for the on-call nature of their jobs, but I am sure that they are mostly paid enough to be exempt employees. This is totally anecdotal/second-hand and it would not surprise me if their pay is at parity or even worse than other software engineers.

serge2k2• 11 years ago

It depends on the company and the system.

Unfortunately the rather depressing trend seems to be towards shoving it all on devs and not paying them more then justifying the reasoning as "if you are the one being paged then you are incentivized to fix things.

Unfortunately, and this is what you are seeing, too often they don't give you the resources to fix things and you just end up in ops hell.

They get away with this because we (devs) have allowed ourselves to get screwed over because we chug the koolaid. We don't get overtime because for some reason we're exempt, this lets companies get away (financially) with crunch time caused by incompetent management. Oncall rotations which don't pay extra are just another offshoot of this.

ebiester• 11 years ago

Many companies give an extra x00/week that you're on call. I won't say most, though.

I can't contain my ire at being woken up for phantom emergencies, though. That would be a cause for a new job, personally.

skdfhksdf• 11 years ago

Additionally, any vanity perk that isn't in your contract is at the whim of the company. More than half the perks listed on the jobs page of the company I used to work at were completely untrue - some of them were out of date, and some were never offered to begin with.

newjersey• 11 years ago

I am still amazed that BaRT employees got away with striking. Many of them make $90k a year base!

Oh and this pathetic low-life still has a badge and a gun. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/19/...

JimboOmega• 11 years ago

I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.

Yes. Also assuming that everyone who works in tech is a ".com millionaire", because either you worked at a startup and made millions in your stock options or you work at google and of course make at least $500k.

ghrifter2• 11 years ago

And having friends and family that know you are tech savvy so they always come to you with their tech woes.

"But you love doing it! You love this tech stuff!" Sorry. Not if I have a solution of the top of my head. 30$ of help please.

g8gggu89• 11 years ago

There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year

Call me crazy, but when I see there's an on call rotation, I figure that's part of the work I have to do as a salaried and not hourly employee, and I calculate the extra work into my total compensations vs. time worked estimate.

I totally agree with everything else you're saying, though.

bootload2• 11 years ago

"And they get paid for overtime."

And put their life on the line, every call out. Never forget this.

pinot• 11 years ago

Plenty of people get paid overtime without having to put their life on the line. Sadly, if you have a college degree and use it, the odds of getting OT are next to zero.

mattzito2• 11 years ago

I come from a family of police officers, so I'm keenly aware of the risks police officers take, and I'm very appreciative of their service.

But.

I am tired of the automatic assumption that police officers and fire fighters are to be lionized because they "risk their lives". It's true that there are police officers and firefighters and EMTs who work tough beats and have extremely dangerous lives. But by and large, these jobs are significantly less dangerous than many other jobs that pay less and don't come with the public respect of being a firefighter/PO/etc.

In NYC, for example, sanitation workers have higher rates of injury and death than police officers do by 2x[1]. Convenience store clerks and commercial fishermen also have much higher death and injury rates.

None of that means that we shouldn't respect and appreciate those who work hard to keep us safe. But it's also reasonable to recognize that these positions pay well and have excellent benefits relative to jobs with much higher risk and much lower social respect.

1. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-secr...

linuxlizard2• 11 years ago

Does this article apply at all outside Silicon Valley?

pconner2• 11 years ago

If anything, I think it would be worse outside. Crazy perk culture is mostly associated with bay area companies. Other areas have cheaper costs of living, which may help reduce stress, but bay area companies have better base salaries to compensate, and they tend to provide better stock options/grants than companies based in other areas.

mooseburger• 11 years ago

Well, I'm a software developer with three years of experience in Puerto Rico. It hasn't been too bad so far. There isn't an expectation that one will regularly work 12 hour days or something, though of course there is crunch time.

staunch• 11 years ago

Why haven't salaries at tech companies gone up much despite huge increases in demand, profits, and housing costs?

Most programmers make about what they've always made, maybe less (adjusted for inflation). $120k/yr in 2001 is $160k/yr in 2015.

beachstartup2• 11 years ago

because smart kids are always willing to work for less and there's no credentialing guild like there is with medicine or law or real engineering.

noam87• 11 years ago

Have we arrived at the conclusion that the people who convinced the middle class that unions are evil did not have our best interests in mind yet, or are we gonna keep shooting ourselves in the foot?

Keep shooting ourselves in the foot it is then. K. Carry on.

jarjoura• 11 years ago

I'm sorry, but software engineering was never glamorous. When I went into college, over a decade ago now, the first year courses were always the most packed, largely filled with hopeful souls. Then by year 2 and 3 they dropped back to only the most dedicated fans. That's right, I said the word fans. I graduated with 20 other computer science majors, out of what was probably thousands at the beginning.

I wouldn't want to be doing anything else in my career and the tech press and media did little to influence or change it.

Netscape, then Google, then Digg, on to Facebook and Twitter, these were all early companies that got the press raving about how cool, how easy, how glamorous it was to work in startups and in tech. Yet at the end of the day, it's still solving mundane and sometimes really hard problems with you butt glued to the seat and writing a lot of code in a text editor.

I should also add that the biggest reward for me every day is solving a problem and finally getting that ah hah moment. It's not the foosball table or free lunch.

vonnik• 11 years ago

However, a career as a software developer or engineer comes with no guarantee of job satisfaction.

No career comes with a guarantee of job satisfaction, and very few come with much security. Less so in the tech industry, because tech itself is evolving quickly.

I'm a little disappointed that this reporter feels such a statement is newsworthy. To read this article, I would almost believe that its author doesn't believe in meritocracy or neo-liberalism, which is kind of bad faith, coming from The Economist.

gansai• 11 years ago

liked one metaphor in the article: golden handcuffs

Free food and misery: the life of a techie

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