What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

http://ramiro.org/notebook/income-software-engineers-countries/

by gkst • 10 years ago

149 158 10 years ago

TrickedOut4• 10 years ago

I really detest when software engineer salaries are compared to the salaries of the general population (often to cite how our sector is "overpaid"). Usually lacking from such simple comparisons: 1. Discussion of how software engineers have to go to college for 4 to 6+ years, but the general population is weighted towards those far fewer years of schooling 2. Discussion of downtime -- the amount of time software engneers spend unemployed (due to economic cycle, startup bankruptcy, downsizing, etc.) compared to the general population (e.g., government workers for example have superb job security, often 100% lifetime job security.)

glogla• 10 years ago

Software engineers are like doctors or lawyers - long period of study on difficult (and in places where people pay for colleges expensive) schools, long hours, but good pay. So it makes sense to compare them with doctors and lawyers.

Unlike doctors and lawyers, software engineers don't have any respect and are pretty much working class, but that's another story.

nibs2• 10 years ago

Disagree. Status is attributed based on "How useful are you or can you be to me?". A doctor and lawyer could be very useful to me personally, selfishly. A software engineer tends to be very useful to capital (institutions, etc.) but not as useful to an individual personally. Facebook engineers have a lot of status - because people use Facebook personally all the time. A great engineer who programs stop lights, manufacturing PLCs, business application, etc. not so much. No selfish benefit = No love.

rubidium• 10 years ago

Not really. SW engineers are more like the better paid regular engineer.

Hired for a specific, technical purpose. Expected to (usually) have gone to college.

No offense, but equating a comp sci degree (even with years of work experience) to a medical doctor is a little laughable. Doctors (as a field) are a step up from software engineers in terms of professionalism and work expectations.

GFK_of_xmaspast5• 10 years ago

Unlike doctors and lawyers, software engineers don't have any respect and are pretty much working class, but that's another story

I see this kind of Rodney Dangerfield sentiment a lot on HN but it has never made a lick of sense to me (especially the "pretty much working class" variety).

And also if software engineers want to get into the "doctors and lawyers" category we need to start doing doctory and lawyery things like "professional societies with teeth" and "board/bar certifications" and "codes of ethics" (good luck on that last one).

emodendroket12• 10 years ago

Software engineers are not "working class." Where did you get that idea?

fecak4• 10 years ago

Doctors and lawyers require outside certification and extensive post-graduate education just to enter the industry. Comparing them to software engineers is not a useful comparison.

gkst• 10 years ago

Does it make any sense to you to compare a particular group to the general population then? I think it does, the insights you may draw from such a comparisons are obviously different than comparing two sub-groups, e.g. programmers vs. doctors for example.

Also the article doesn't judge the differences of incomes, the "overpaid" is your interpretation.

distances• 10 years ago

Did you check the article, though? In quite many European countries the median software engineer earns less than the average salary.

I wonder if they meant "median salary" instead, as median vs. median would seem a better comparison than median vs. average.

V-23• 10 years ago

A lot of software engineers are autodidacts and never graduated in IT. I didn't (I have an MA in politics, obviously irrelevant to my profession). In general unemployment in IT is very low, and there's always a shortage of programmers, so job security is clearly above average. (And government administrations have IT departments, too).

It's supply vs. demand, that's all there is to it. I'm not buying any of the above as a justification for big salaries.

ghaff2• 10 years ago

It's supply vs. demand, that's all there is to it.

Yup. There may be good demand because of force multiplier or return to capital or whatever. (Which are just ways of saying that the work translates into something people are willing to pay for.) And there may be (somewhat) limited supply because it's not something everyone wants to or can do, whether through formal education or otherwise.

But, take either supply or demand away and the salaries commanded adjust accordingly.

That I could spend 10 years becoming an expert on medieval German literature doesn't necessarily mean that I could command a high salary however rare that expertise.

berntb• 10 years ago

> there's always a shortage of programmers

Wow, people really have forgotten the IT-death. :-)

There are cycles and bubbles here too. They just might not be in phase with the general economy.

(And get off my lawn. :-) )

mr_luc• 10 years ago

Yeah -- "force multiplier," and talk of how programmers can obsolete other jobs, is at least partly an argument that programmers 'deserve' their salaries, because they make society permanently more efficient.

That discussion feels imprecise, though. Are those really the reasons that programmer salaries are what they are? If there were 20x more programmers, would that change things?

Worse, it makes me want to avoid that whole side of the discussion, because it also sounds like justifying an economic fact on moral grounds.

Yes, supply and demand and perverse economic incentives sometimes result in high demand for things that aren't that beneficial to society as a whole. Personally, I happen to think that what programmers do is more beneficial to society than what Hedge Fund managers do. But I don't care to have a conversation about whether or not we 'deserve our rates.'

It's what supply and demand dictates; that much is definitely true.

Gratsby2• 10 years ago

While there is a segment of autodidacts, it's not like people can become expert software developers overnight.

Software developers work longer hours. I've never been in an environment where developers hang their coats up at 5:00 and go on with their carefree lives.

And while unemployment may be low in IT, developers do not enjoy job security.

michaelmrose• 10 years ago

Why do such salaries need justification other than people are willing to pay them

lordCarbonFiber• 10 years ago

I think the problem is further compounded by the fact that "software engineer" is woefully vague. Are we talking a highly educated Machine Learning specialist working at at top tier institution, or are we talking about the CRUD dev working for the local bank; or perhaps we're comparing generic IT that barely codes at all? The former might be underpaid, the latter maybe over paid, but they're all going to reported as "software engineer" and it really muddies the waters..

altotrees• 10 years ago

Exactly... a "Software Engineer" in my experience can run the gamut from someone with a CS PhD to someone with an Associate Degree to someone who is self-taught. Sometimes pay is correlated with education, sometimes with experience, sometimes both and I have seen cases where neither is really a factor as a company is just looking for a warm body to fill a dev role.

Add to this the glut of contract positions in industry along with the wide range of pay there, and it becomes much harder to make an accurate assumption (at least for me in my head) of what software engineers should be making.

Googling "Software Engineer Payscale: brings up pages listing, 73, 78, 83, and 92 thousand per year. And I am leaving those roles with sub-titles like senior and principal off the list. That said, this is a cool idea and undertaking, especially the country comparisons.

yread• 10 years ago

downtime -- the amount of time software engneers spend unemployed (due to economic cycle, startup bankruptcy, downsizing, etc.)

funny but from my circle of friends I never heard of anyone being unemployed and looking for job for more than a month. I myself had exactly 0 time of looking for a job in 12 years of working. I'm in Europe, though, we're ridiculously underpaid compared to the US I think. Very few people earn more than 100K.

bryanlarsen2• 10 years ago

12 years of working means you just missed the dot-com crash of 2000-2002.

jazzyk7• 10 years ago

Off topic, but I must: comparing salaries alone makes no sense. In Europe, you don't have to pay $250K/child for college education, you don't have to pay $20K/year/family in health insurance, etc.

jazzyk7• 10 years ago

Exactly. Software salaries should be compared to doctors', lawyers' and other professions', as software engineering is a profession.

I bet you the comparisons would not look so good then.

criddell4• 10 years ago

I'll accept that software engineering is a profession when software engineers accept the same level of responsibility for their work that doctors and lawyers do.

When that happens, brace yourself for a never ending stream of malpractice suits.

DominikR• 10 years ago

It's about supply and demand. (not exclusively but still)

How could it be enforced that software developers can only earn the median income of the general population?

Passing new laws that set a limit? That would be completely crazy, you might as well just go and live in North Korea if you like that.

Why shouldn't private companies have the right and the freedom to pay more out of their own pocket (not from government funds) for certain employees?

SilasX2• 10 years ago

Also, software engineers are concentrated in high-CoL areas, which skews things.

z92• 10 years ago

Comparing software engineer's salary with other graduate's salary would have been more meaningful. Instead of with general population.

emodendroket12• 10 years ago

There is no requirement that you have a degree to be a software engineer.

paulmd2• 10 years ago

It's meaningless to directly compare software engineer salaries with the rest of the general population because our work is a 'force multiplier'. A single software engineer can displace the labor of 10 staff - often permanently. While we're compensated more highly than 1 lower-skilled staff member it's still actually not commensurate with the amount of value we actually deliver. My (unscientific) belief is that we actually capture less of the value we generate than most other staff, out of the sense of "fairness" espoused in this article.

This applies at all levels of the spectrum, from a junior developer working at a contracting firm to high-end staff working for Google or whatnot. We wouldn't be paid those salaries if we didn't bring in 5x more than our pay.

Apart from that, supply and demand/etc also apply. We're highly-trained staff who often deal with mathematics that the general population can't or won't deal with.

andreineculau2• 10 years ago

Value and worthiness are two different things. If a CEO is valued at 12m/y and another one at 6m/y that does not mean one is worth twice as much, nor does he bring in twice more revenue. I hope one day you'll realize that one way or another everyone is worth more or less the same (eg societies need both good software devs, farmers, doctors, teachers, cleaners, carpenters etc) and we are only valued in very extreme ways.

_yosefk2• 10 years ago

Erm... How many people are fed by a combine harvester driver? How many babies and mothers are saved by the staff of a modern hospital, who drastically lower child mortality? If 10 future programmers are delivered by a single nurse, should she be paid 10x what a programmer makes?

(Supply and demand I get, "force multiplier" I don't get.)

andreineculau2• 10 years ago

Hilarious but effective argument:) I'll start using it. Thanks!

turnip19793• 10 years ago

I think SW engineers have to go through a lot of of specialized training that is short term in nature. Friends in the med field studied a lot to get the job but they hardly have to spend as much time as I do to keep up. I'm only in my mid 30s and a majority of the tech I use was invented after I graduated.

paulmd2• 10 years ago

If a combine harvester allows a farmer to feed as many people as 100 farmers working by hand then they have a force multiplier of 100x. If you can train one nurse to deliver as many babies as 10 normal nurses then they have a force-multiplier of 10x. This doesn't necessarily translate into 10x or 100x the salary - farming is still an extremely capital-intensive business, probably moreso than it was pre-Green Revolution. Tractors and fuel and fertilizer don't buy themselves. There really hasn't been a single improvement that produced a 10x improvement in the number of babies a nurse can deliver. Maybe if someone goes out and invents the robo-midwife, but I can't see that being real popular...

The other way you can go is a qualitative improvement, which is where the child mortality example comes in. If one engineer can remove 75% of the fuck-ups caused by manually performing a task, then that is also worth money, but it's not valued in quite the same way. You'd value lower child-mortality in person-years of economic output (accrued to society), quality-adjusted-life-years (accrued to the individual) and diminished malpractice suits/insurance (accrued to the hospital or the insurance company).

Perhaps a better term would be "productivity multiplier". Productivity is a pretty standard economic measure (average economic output per individual), and engineers both have much higher economic output per individual, and can greatly increase that output for other individuals as well (often with a one-time investment).

bryanlarsen2• 10 years ago

I know your question is rhetorical, but a single combine harvester driver can 'feed' about 10,000 people in a couple of weeks. If the driver is the owner/operator of a farm, that's all they do, but there are some who do the circuit, starting in Texas in May and finishing in Northern Alberta in October.

pcurve• 10 years ago

I don't think anyone is going to agree with you here on this board, but there are plenty of average or substandard software engineers that also along for the ride that do not pull their weight.

I'm taking this study at its face value, and it is quite interesting.

dudul• 10 years ago

Am I the only who thinks that the "average income" in a country is a meaningless metric? Depending on the area (e.g. big city, desirable area, etc) average salaries and cost of living may be very different. It is easy to see in the US for example.

turnip19793• 10 years ago

You are quite right. I never had an idea how immobile I would be as a tech worker. The best tech jobs are concentrated in a few, high cost of living cities. While we can work remote, the quality of the career opportunities are not the same.

frogpelt2• 10 years ago

Is it meaningful to compare the median annual income of software engineers to the average annual income of the general population?

I'm legitimately curious, what is the statistical significance of an average versus a median?

goldbrick• 10 years ago

It's a mistake to compare the two -- statistics 101.

frogpelt2• 10 years ago

So, I guess the point of the notebook was probably not the statistics but the scraping and plotting of the data.

And furthermore, the author just used the data that Bloomberg used here: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/highest-...

eterm• 10 years ago

"average income" as reported is usually the median.

Edit: I'm not sure why I'm getting downvotes.

Anywhere you read about average incomes from a serious source it'll be the median, no one uses "mean income" for average when dealing with incomes, since the distribution is so skewed.

If you even just google "average income" it'll report you the median. Median is so completely standard when reporting on income data that it gets short-handed to "average".

dionidium• 10 years ago

Anywhere you read about average incomes from a serious source it'll be the median, no one uses "mean income" for average when dealing with incomes

This is demonstrably untrue. A search for "average income" returns articles referencing both median and mean incomes (and usually clearly distinguishing between the two).

pessimizer2• 10 years ago

We're on the internet, you can link to examples if it is true.

ghaff2• 10 years ago

I didn't downvote you but people probably did because, if all someone says is "average," most people will assume they're talking about the mean absent any other context. Yes, it's a bad measure to use for certain things but lots of bad measures are used in lots of places.

(Now, if a piece talks exclusively and explicitly about medians and then uses a term such as "this average" that's probably OK because they've already stated that median is the only average they're discussing.)

All Google is doing BTW is basically "deciding" that although you asked for average income, what you really wanted is median income because that's what people are looking for. So it basically reworded your query for you.

kevinpet• 10 years ago

Average in this article is GDP per capita, which is the mean, not the median.

cortesoft• 10 years ago

I think you are probably getting downvoted because the article explicitly says that they are using the mean for the general population:

"Moreover, we compare median annual values for software engineers with mean annual values for the general population. Considering how large the income share of top earners is in several countries, annual median values for the general population might well show a different picture."

dvirsky• 10 years ago

It certainly distorts results where the median and average in the general population differ by a lot. Where I live the average is almost 50% higher than the median.

belorn• 10 years ago

To understand the significance, lets start by considering that the top 1% earn about 20% of the total income, and 60% of the lowest earners only have about 4.2% of the total income.

If you remove both those extremes, then average and median becomes somewhat closer to each other.

retbull• 10 years ago

If you removee the bottom 60% of people you aren't representing what is happening very well.

coherentpony• 10 years ago

You can compare them because they have the same units. Whether or not it makes sense to make statistical conclusions from the comparison is open for debate.

imtringued2• 10 years ago

It's not very meaningful but in general thanks to outliers at the upper income level the average is higher than the median income which means you are underestimating the ratio of median software engineer pay to average income which means that the multiplier could be much higher than the data tells you. If you're a software engineer this is good news for you but bad news if you are an average worker.

liviu-2• 10 years ago

Both arithmetic mean and median are averages, so unless they specify what average they used for the annual income, you may only assume what the author meant.

EDIT: Never mind, the author also says:

Moreover, we compare median annual values for software engineers with mean annual values for the general population

pessimizer2• 10 years ago

I'd appreciate a link to anyone, anywhere, at any time, using the word average to refer to the median. The median is the middle, not the average, and often nowhere near the average.

AdamSC12• 10 years ago

It's statistics 101 to not compare median to average, simply because an average is more impacted by outlier values and so a member of the general population making $15m a year would lift the "average" income far more than it would lift the "median" income. The numbers set "1, 2, 3, 4, 1000" has an average of 202 but a median of 3, and 3 is clearly a better representation of those numbers as a group.

Also we've got multiple data sets at play and so we shouldn't be using a "ratio" but rather a z-score.

A z-score is a measure to normalize all the different distributions and see how many standard deviations away from the average each value is. It's the accepted practice for comparing across two different data sets.

Udacity covers it in their data science course: https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-st095/l-81689336/m...

whorleater• 10 years ago

It's not necessarily wrong to compare the median to the average once a sufficiently large dataset is reached given LLN, but I'd argue that a z-score is still far too basic to capture the nuances of such a varying dataset with so many points. Some type of hierarchical model would probably be best for this dataset.

option_greek• 10 years ago

While this is interesting, its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt as the average median income of general population in India tends to be aggressively underestimated. This is because less than 5% of the populace pays/declares tax. The ones in private/government employment happens to be the ones paying tax while any one having "business" income tend to lets say "downplay" their income to get various subsidies or to just hoard money.

emodendroket12• 10 years ago

They're relying on voluntarily self-reported data, often collected by essential coercion ("please enter your salary to see the averages") so I doubt it's extremely accurate in any country

agentgt• 10 years ago

I didn't find the data to be very compelling but the real world example with Pandas and D3 very helpful.

Probably irrelevant but I feel the article should probably be titled differently like "Using Pandas and D3 to get a rough....." as I'm not sure many good conclusions can be drawn from that dataset (I could be vastly wrong though?).

carlob• 10 years ago

Yay for Italy! Where not only software developers are paid less than the general population, but also where the real wages of everyone are very low compared to the cost of living of other European countries!

joesmo• 10 years ago

The data for Romania is completely incorrect or the OP just fucked up his analysis royally. You're talking about a country where the average national wage is just shy of $500 a month (https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-salary-european-union-...) and software engineers are making well over a thousand and sometimes thousands a month. See: http://www.developer.com/daily_news/romanian-developers-earn...

I don't care what numbers or technique he used, it's impossible to come to the conclusion that software engineers in Romania actually make less than the average salary. It's also just plain wrong.

donquichotte• 10 years ago

Peculiarly, in Romania, the median income of a software dev is 0.7 times the average income whereas in neighbouring Bulgaria, the factor is 3.2. Does anybody have an idea why?

bluetomcat• 10 years ago

The dataset probably has a huge error margin. In my observations, the factor in Bulgaria is almost 4 and in Romania it is something like 3-3.2.

nowey• 10 years ago

I'm in the 90th percentile in household salary in my country. I'm single so double my salary to accomodate the 2.5 people living on average, and I jump to to the 93rd percentile.

foobarrio• 10 years ago

I clicked around the PayScale and IMF pages and could not find how they define "Software Engineer". Is this the same as "Programmer" or "Software Developer"? These titles are quite broad in some places. For example where I sit now, we are all "programmers". However one of our programmers is a CPA + some other certs and spends as much time talking to accountants, lawyers, reading IRS notices as she does spec'ing out and developing software. Is she a "Software Engineer"? I spend most of my time fixing bugs and operating our software systems does that make me a "Software Engineer"? I program a lot sometimes but I'd hardly call what I do engineering. I'm in the U.S. and we don't have formal engineering accreditation for software.

ThomaszKrueger• 10 years ago

The use of the term Engineer is very unfortunate. In many places (Texas and Florida come to mind) one cannot claim to be or perform the functions of Engineering without being properly licensed and member of a board of professional engineers.

khedoros• 10 years ago

If I engineer software, then I can be described as a software engineer. I couldn't be described as a licensed PE (because I'm not and don't claim to be). The fact remains that "software engineer" is a common industry term. What is unfortunate is FUD from various Boards of Professional Engineers trying to appropriate the term for their sole use.

What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population

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