Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/do-you-really-want-to-be-making-this-much-money-when-youre-50.html

by tomstuart • 14 years ago

355 278 14 years ago

koide4• 14 years ago

If what's described is true:

a) Tons of money to be made b) Tons of unmet demand

Why the outsourcing market isn't growing as much as it should? There are plenty of places with more than capable programmers which are usually paid in peanuts not only when compared with SV, but when compared to people in the same country.

That smells like a niche waiting to be disrupted. He who solves the trust and quality perception and control issues, will become very rich.

mtrimpe• 14 years ago

The problem with outsourcing is not 'quality perception,' it's the actual quality.

The good programmers around the world command good salaries, whether out-sourced or not.

In the end it doesn't matter whether you're in India or the the US; there are just not that many great programmers around.

koide4• 14 years ago

That's why I said quality perception and control. This is, making sure you are producing what's needed.

As to the rest, I'm baffled. How can you even think it doesn't matter where you are?

Different cultures value differently different jobs. For example, I know of places where programmers are not valued much and it doesn't matter how good you are, you'll not earn more than a corporate salesman.

Maybe it doesn't matter for the top 0.5% who end up going to work for Google or Facebook anyway. But there are lots of jobs for merely above average programmers, which are very well compensated in the US, but not at all well elsewhere.

dasil0032• 14 years ago

There's a lot to be said for face time. Given an average contractor, if you bring him on site and meet with the team for 3 days a month, I bet the ROI easily doubles.

Getting value out of outsourced workers is a skill more rare than programming itself.

koide4• 14 years ago

And that's why it's a perfect niche for disruption: High barrier to entry, lots of money in the market. Yummy.

imechura• 14 years ago

My personal observation has been that the difficulty and set backs in the corporate adoption of outsourcing have not been due to the lack of capable programmers.

It has been associated with the lack of regular collaboration between the outsourcing resources and the customer. As a whole, this industry has not perfected the art of specification. An analysts with the ability to comprehensively specify software requirements is a scarcer resource than a programmer who can properly print a binary tree.

The lack of adherence to proper standards surrounding specification is generally compensated by ongoing collaboration between development teams and stake holders (hence the wide adoption of SCRUM). Separating the two entities with geographical, cultural and language barriers causes a break down in collaboration and that allows the deficiencies in specification to cause the project to fail.

I would argue that a bad team of coders with a water-tight set of requirements will have a greater chance of success than a team of rock stars with vague and incomplete requirements.

guard-of-terra9• 14 years ago

"more than capable programmers which are usually paid in peanuts" Where does that happen? I have troubles imagining this.

henrik_w2• 14 years ago

One of the biggest reason there aren't that many 50-year-old programmers is that a lot of programmers move to other roles in the same company, like line manager, project manager, product manager or various sales roles.

sturadnidge• 14 years ago

Agreed - the emergence of career progression (ie monetary progression) based on technical qualities rather than managerial ones is only a fairly recent phenomenon... at least, in all the companies I have worked for (large enterprise).

It's not surprising many former programmers of that vintage are in the managerial ranks now. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I'm not sure.

henrik_w2• 14 years ago

I think it's mostly a good thing. Having worked yourself as a programmer makes you a better manager of programmers in my experience.

bjansn3• 14 years ago

I've seen all kind of different programmers. The ones that are not in it for the money and the ones that hate their job but won't switch because it has a good pay. It reminded me of this animated movie about 'what motivates us' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc The essence: don't underpay and don't overpay.

More and more programmers are looking for good company cultures with a good (but not highest pay). Money will make your life easier but won't make you happy.

TeeWEE3• 14 years ago

Hooray. That is exactly what drives me too. The culture, the people, the actual work is more important.

Working for a huge amount of money in a corporate machinery is a brain killer.

bjansn3• 14 years ago

Yes! But make enough money so you don't have to worry leaving the lifestyle you'd want.

j_jochem• 14 years ago

This is a nice response to the other blog post. It is amazing how privileged your life gets when you can do black magic with code that most people don't even dream of ever being able to understand.

However, I disagree with this statement: "So I'm not planning to quit programming, not because it's such a great source of joy by itself, but because it looks so good compared to just about anything else."

Well, I wouldn't want to miss the high I get from being in the zone for four hours straight either. I wonder if the author implies that programming is no longer fun to him or if its just not the deciding factor. To me, the fun in coding is really a big part of my overall happiness and so contributes a large part of the decision to stay in the field.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

It's a lot of fun, but not the deciding factor. I have a great gig now, but it won't necessarily last, and I won't necessarily be able to get a similar job (it's in hardware architecture and software tools and there are likely to be less jobs in these things over time, though not necessarily). I'm not sure the typical programming job is that much fun for me, but it's decent enough and the question always is what you'd do if you decided to leave the field.

xaxzaz• 14 years ago

I've often times felt guilty that this is almost exactly the reason why I program. I like programming but I also like the salary and benefits. I can then use my 5-9 time to do all the other things I like: cooking, working-out, hiking.

That said, I recently founded a startup, where the work is more stressful and the pay is less and I'm hoping for it all to be worth it financially in a few years. This is often not the traditional "Why I founded a company" story you read about hear on HN, but I wonder how common (or misguided) it is.

aiurtourist• 14 years ago

If financial independence is your only goal, you've stared a startup for the wrong reason.

TeeWEE3• 14 years ago

If you're into programmer and not in it for the passion there is a high chance that you're a mediocre programmer.

But indeed that doesnt matter. Because the demand is high.

But for me, this is what drives me: working with an excellent team on a product/service that is heavily used and comes with technical challenges.

If managers, business and bad programmers interfere with this, i'd rather stop and get a decent job.

The money is not the main driver.

dasil0032• 14 years ago

The tricky part is defining passion. I think the key element is that insatiable curiosity that pulls you in when you're doing it. The desire and drive to understand every nuance of a system is what makes it possible to be a good programmer.

In other words, a clock-punching mentality is not enough, but neither is making it your life's mission necessary.

prodigal_erik3• 14 years ago

Hm, it's obviously true that the computer doesn't care what your life's mission is, but I don't know how someone would avoid having that insatiable curiosity dominate their life. I never could, and I only tried briefly because I felt like a freak (and to be fair, compared to the mainstream we are).

readme• 14 years ago

Judging by OP's blog, I'd say he's passionate. Look at his other articles.

He says he's "in it for the money" because he's honest. No one working to earn a living is not in it for the money, and if they tell you otherwise they're delusional. I think the measure should be "Would you still program if this wasn't your job?" and if the answer is yes, then the passion is there.

I really hate it when people decry the importance of money, because money is basically our unit of human sustenance. It is what we trade for food, shelter, and clothing.

chaosmonkey• 14 years ago

I guess if you are into something with a passion (programming), more often than not you are going to be good at it and the money follows.

TeeWEE3• 14 years ago

Off course everybody needs money to survive. But when choosing a profession, some people choose to be an attorney because they can get a big salery.

However I choose computer science because of the passion. I also had a passion for making music. But the passion and the money are the drivers. But the main driver is not the money.

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

>"The fact is that your material well-being is rarely in jeopardy because of a missed deadline, so your reaction is fully up to you."

Much of what the author says is true, currently. This is a fantastic market for programmers, and anyone being born into this era is lucky.

But the forces of supply and demand will sort this market out in the future, to which the author seems ignorant. Name another profession that requires "Little or no education", and "no physical effort" (not to mention the ease of globalizing coding) that has sustained the kind of market pressure where agents are required to fend off recruiters, or kids right out of school can demand six figure salaries and four weeks of holidays right off the bat.

America (and the world) will churn out programmers until being a programmer is a marginal decision, equal among many occupations. It will lose its luster; it has already happened to lawyers. So planning on having a blase attitude towards deadlines and stress-free work in this field at 50 (assuming you're ~30 now) is a tad naive. I believe this will be an extremely competitive field in 20 years.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

Why isn't the field extremely competitive now? The demand has been strong for a decade and a half; it seems like a lot of time.

(I'm not sure I have an explanation myself, really; perhaps it's something innate in people and perhaps it's something about education, but the fact remains that the world still hasn't churned out enough programmers even though the incentives have been there for a long time. One possible explanation is that much of the software implements bureaucratic processes and there's always more demand for this sort of processes - so demand will outstrip supply no matter what happens at the supply side.)

plinkplonk2• 14 years ago

"Why isn't the field extremely competitive now? "

Visas.

Most programming work (of the type talked about in the OP) originates in the USA, and most companies, even startups, need employees to come in the door everyday. (not taking on the question of whether this is ideal or not, that is the just the way it is, right now) .

Imagine (as a thought experiment) a scenario where a smart kid who lives in India or Ukraine or Africa is just able to get on a plane and land in SF for an interview or a job irrespective of whether he has the right degree, paperwork etc and without jumping through hoops at the consulate and rolling the dice.

The (edit: thanks @daladd for correction) supply would go way up and hence average salary would go down (which is why large companies are trying for more H1 Bs - they like easier availability of devs and lower salaries)

Or imagine the border with Mexico being completely officially open. See what happens to the dishwasher/fruit picker payment structure.

rsaarelm• 14 years ago

There's definitely more you could do with education. A lot of professional programmers are people who started doing programming as a hobby as kids. Attempting to teach programming to 20-year-olds entering an university seems to not work terribly well, while the basics can be picked by a 10-year old.

If you waited until people are 20 to start teaching them to read and write, you would probably also get poor results, while the weird kids who learned to read for fun when they were 12 would end up outperforming the regular students when they grew up.

guard-of-terra9• 14 years ago

Programmer is like the modern villager. Villagers grew food and made stuff and that's what you ever needed. The programmer writes code and everything in our civilization is already code or it will be.

Therefore, programmer is a much broader occupation than almost any other. It's still a seller's marker because of that. Look at everything around you, and while there is at least one item that doesn't execute code inside, we haven't hit peak coder yet.

speleding• 14 years ago

People smart enough to be programmers have more options than being a programmer. Most of the people in my CS class ended up as managers, 15 years after graduation.

bjansn3• 14 years ago

But I envision in a few years we will talk more explicitly about 'coders' and 'programmers'. It's just a very different ballgame.

Swizec• 14 years ago

Yes and no.

Look at what happened to "making websites". It used to be a super lucrative field, now agencies who can afford to slash prices because they hire cheap developers can churn those out by the hundreds a month. It's become a very silly market to compete in because all the competition that still happens is based on price.

But while this was happening, the web evolved and opened up new jobs and opportunities. Now you can make a lot of money by making web apps, interactive things and so on and so on. That's still not a market where everyone can compete.

Even moreso, mobile has opened up.

So I think that programming has a very lucrative future for a while yet, because new fields where it is applicable open up faster than old ones become commoditized.

scotty79• 14 years ago

The programmers write programs that enable new activities that require more programs. Even if we consciously attempted to turn every person on the planet into a programmer I don't think supply overcomes the demand. Ever. Until the strong AI is developed.

LnxPrgr32• 14 years ago

I went to school with people who went into CS because they thought they were pretty good with computers and they saw money in programming. Some of them made it; others dropped out or changed majors.

"Despite the enormous changes which have taken place since electronic computing was invented in the 1950s, some things remain stubbornly the same. In particular, most people can’t learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department’s intake fail the ﬁrst programming course." (Source: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf)

Many others learn how to string glue code together, but can't really solve problems that go deeper than finding the right library to import. I've heard working programmers worrying they'd fail a FizzBuzz test in an interview.

If anything, I suspect the bar for talent will go up—increasingly, programmers barely getting by now will become a commodity. But real aptitude is still rare, and I think the right combinations of talents will hold their value for a good while.

suby2• 14 years ago

I don't understand how anyone can be a working programmer and fail the FizzBuzz test. What are these individuals working on that allows them to contribute enough to the company to not get fired?

UK-AL2• 14 years ago

Basic Economics states that with a low barrier to entry and large salary means it won't be for very long. Wish we would professionalise. In the UK now there are software dev jobs being advertised for minimum wage.

ericb• 14 years ago

I think the barrier to entry to be "good" is fairly high, it just isn't artificial, like most barriers. There is no certification, money, or time barrier artificially constraining supply.

You need persistence, logical (not magical) thinking, willingness to learn a tremendous amount of material, and the ability to envision abstraction in order to become a programmer. These skills co-occur in only a limited portion of the population and of that, only a subset would be willing to live the programmer lifestyle (indoor, bad for extroverts, sedentary, not so high-status as being a Dr.)

hyko• 14 years ago

>"No health (...) risks"

I'd like to see some research to back up this claim, but I'm not aware of any studies into occupational health for programmers. Does anyone know of any?

usaar333• 14 years ago

Can't think of any offhand, but I anecdotally, tendonitis is a huge risk for programmers.

While you can't claim "no health risks", they are pretty low as far as jobs are concerned.

will_work4tears• 14 years ago

Actually sitting too much has lately been touted as a health concern: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sitting/AN02082

I should probably get a standing desk. I try to stand up, move about and go to the restroom or look out a window every hour, so maybe that helps.

pchivers• 14 years ago

I'm sure sitting on your ass 8-10 hours a day is a health risk. Maybe not as bad as working in a factory breathing in nasty chemicals all day, or dodging falling trees as a lumberjack, but a health risk nonetheless.

CWIZO• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure there aren't any. And as any RSI sufferer will tell you, programming has health risks, which can even prevent you from continuing to program.

drpgq• 14 years ago

I had some pretty bad RSI where I had to take a couple of months off so I don't think the risk is nothing.

dmethvin2• 14 years ago

I'm one of those guys programming in my 50s. Technically my jobs involve project management and consulting as well but I still love programming the most.

Saying that programming "requires little or no education" is from the perspective of either a naturally smart person or the Dunning–Kruger effect. Like any profession, there are some self-motivated people who can do the job effectively without formal education. Yet it saves time to have everyone on the same page with knowledge of basic algorithms, terminology, and problem-solving methods.

If money is your motivator for programming in your 20s, the odds are that you will find some other way to make more money and not last until you're 50. At least I hope so.

donpark• 14 years ago

Yup. While formal education is not necessary, one has to keep learning to stay in the forefront of this profession. If you stop, your 'shelf-life' is 10 yrs at most.

stevewilhelm• 14 years ago

I disagree, if you did any application programming in the mid to late eighties in C/C++, TCP/Sockets, CORBA, Sybase, and X11, about 90% of your experience directly translates to today's Web based application development.

Hell, if you use a Linux development environment you will feel right at home.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

I said "little or no education" compared to other fields. I'm a grad school dropout, so my bet is that my CS education is above average for a working programmer. A hiring process considered "demanding" (such as Google's) is basically testing if you know the stuff they learn in the first year and a half of an undergraduate program. Contrast that to the amount of training and test-taking that a doctor must go through and it'll put what I said in proper context.

dmethvin2• 14 years ago

In that case I think "little or no certification" would be more appropriate. It does seem kind of strange that doctors, lawyers, electricians, plumbers, and barbers all have to take tests to get into (and sometimes remain in) their professions, but a programmer can write the software for a missle system, voting machine, or power plant with no certification whatsoever.

cynicalkane• 14 years ago

One piece of the puzzle is that programming education is not very effective. Most computer science programs teach you almost nothing about software engineering, partially because many CS profs know almost nothing about it.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

I think CS education is extremely effective, if one does the exercises himself, and as to software engineering, they don't teach about snake oil, either.

It's just that there's not that much to learn that is universally applicable, comparatively. The field is young, and then computers are easier to make sense of than most things, because we made them that way. Doctors need to deal with human bodies which aren't designed for human understanding and tinkering. Lawyers need to deal with documents which aren't designed for easy understanding, either - they're designed to prevent hostile, malicious parties from screwing each other. We simply have it easier than most skilled professionals.

colinb2• 14 years ago

I think one of the problems with software engineering is that [almost] no one knows anything about it.

I've been a working programmer [or software engineer if I've just met you at a party and I think you're cute] for long enough to work on >5 multi-billion dollar projects. Of these, one was delivered on time and according to spec. That company went down the toilet within four years.

I've read fairly widely in the software engineering literature starting with Weinberg and Brooks in university, and chasing my share of papers, 'blogs and web pages since then. One of the most positive things that has happened to the field is the recent discovery that the only thing at the end of the methodology rainbow would appear to be consultants [wearing suits with slits for the dorsal fins [h.t. Mr Stross]] and stacks of unread Learn Florble-Oriented Development in 21 days.

I know I can build complex systems. I know I can sometimes build simple systems [much much harder.] I don't know how to reliably schedule a project to build a new thing. I think anyone who thinks they do know this is delusional or lying.

And in the end, I think it probably doesn't matter. The truth of the software engineering crisis, is that it never existed. And it's possible that software engineering never existed either. We program. We do it because we like it and it pays. The folks who do it only because it pays usually end up in management fucking things up by assuming they can motivate people always and only with money.

[oh, on a tangent I've also been a manager. I wasn't all that good at it. The team I managed delivered good stuff, some of it on schedule, but the company still went belly-up. And I learned that I don't enjoy management, and would rather have less money and more fun - take from that what you will]

jarek2• 14 years ago

> One piece of the puzzle is that programming education is not very effective. Most computer science programs teach you almost nothing about software engineering, partially because many CS profs know almost nothing about it.

And mostly because computer science is not software engineering. If you want to learn software engineering, find a degree or diploma program in software engineering.

Being frustrated that your computer science degree did not teach you about software engineering is like being frustrated that your civil engineering degree did not instruct you how to physically build a bridge, or that your mathematics degree did not teach you how to corporate accounting.

gnaritas• 14 years ago

I think he means little or no formal education required; i.e. something the self taught can get into based on merit alone. You can't do that with a lot of high paying professions as they absolutely require formal education.

krapp2• 14 years ago

I'm 35 and I just recently started trying to turn what had been a hobby into something that pays. I harbor no illusions about ever making decent money at it though.

eru11• 14 years ago

Just concentrate on doing hard stuff.

krzyk• 14 years ago

"Little or no required education" really? Sitting at the cashier requires little or no education, but doing programming requires much more education (either on your own or someone has to teach you). From my perspective a lot people I know aren't capable of programming just as they are unable to solve mathematical problems (and a lot of people can't even do basic math when buying at grocery store).

Not to mention that here where I work you are tested for your knowledge and problem solving skills - so although there is a high demand there are still very few that are hired.

BTW. About 15 years ago I heard that it's not a good choice to go and study computer science because there are a lot of others that do it and the market will be saturated. And we know how it is saturated right now (it isn't). There are more and more "places" where software wasn't needed before (e.g. cars, TVs) and now it is required - demand for programmers increases.

VexXtreme• 14 years ago

I agree with many of the things written in the original post. But I definitely disagree with the notion that the barrier to entry in this profession is low and that any Joe Sixpack can start programming for a living because it's supposedly easy.

I can vividly remember my days in back in college where a lot of fellow students in my CS classes had substantial problems writing even the simplest of programs and understanding basic statements and data structures. A lot of them couldn't even write simple programs which would take user input, do something with it and give some output, let alone come up with more complicated solutions and architectures for real world problems.

This field is not for everyone and I believe that is often not obvious to many of us because we take our ability to turn mental constructs into code for granted. A lot of people just don't have the mental facilities to do it. I'm not saying this to sound elitist, but it's the way it is.

akurilin3• 14 years ago

I think it's getting progressively easier. I think that back in the day before the Internet, perhaps in the mainframe days, you had to be a true wizard and know your domain extremely well to make anything happen. Think K&R kind of attitude and skill level.

Nowadays anybody with sufficiently good Googling skills can put something together by stitching pieces of Stack Overflow code. You don't need a specialist to make it happen, just about anybody will do. Perhaps you shouldn't leave mission-critical aspects of development to those people, but you can get away with most of the other work.

Was it Mark Suster who said that most companies out there do not fail because of bad technology?

MaggieL• 14 years ago

If this fellow truly has no passion for his craft, I hope he can find the energy to constantly update his skills when he's 50.

I started in FORTRAN in 1968. Today I'm working in Java and MongoDB and studying Scala and Go.

eugenejen• 14 years ago

If you have followed his blog posts for a long time. He is very crafty in all low level programming that most of us are incapable of. And he also wrote his reflection on C++ programming language in C++ Frequently Questioned Answers.

Also I like this post from him a lot. He just likes to say things more frankly.

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/work-on-unimportant-problems.html

winter_blue• 14 years ago

I have a suspicion (albeit a light one), that programming in itself will become a commodity skill, like "good writing" (something you _have_ to know to score well on the SAT/GRE).

It would become a necessary skill that simply everyone in a wide variety of fields (doctors, accountants, etc) where programming is the slightest bit helpful would have.

In such an age and era, will programmers get paid anything close to what they get paid today?

pacala2• 14 years ago

Programming is about fast thinking, good organization, good prioritization, continuous learning, continuous automatization, sharing and yes, good writing. The actual coding is a side-show.

geon• 14 years ago

You seem to have "good writing". Could you write a novel, with a captivating, nonobvious plot, interesting characters and a twist ending?

You probably can score ok in a math SAT. Can you visualize the mathematics of a quaternion, or formulate the equation for an n-sided betzier patch?

The work a linguistic/novelist/journalist or a mathematican is not on the highscool level. Neither is the work of a programmer.

I do believe basic programming should be taught, just like basic math and writing skills. But that has absolutely nothing to do with proffessional programming.

dpark4• 14 years ago

Most people don't write well, even most educated people. It's not the commodity you seem to believe. The GRE/SAT test for the ability to write essays on a specified topic in the format that the GRE/SAT want. This doesn't really reflect useful writing in the real world.

Plus most people don't have great GRE/SAT scores anyway. You don't have to have outstanding scores to get into most programs. You just need decent scores.

gardarh• 14 years ago

It's posts like these that get me as a programmer worried. Arrogance tends to lead to bad things and the world can change at a pace greater than one can imagine (a good way for me to understand how swiftly things change is to ask myself: Could I have foreseen x years ago what I am be doing today? for me, using the relatively low value of x=5 the answer is a definitive no. And I think that's a good thing).

Be humble if people are willing to pay you more money than others for what you do - it might change incredibly fast. The more generic assumption of the post is that people are willing to pay good money for skills that are relatively rare... well, make sure to keep your skill set up to date.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

Don't get me wrong - I'm rather paranoid, and I'm not sure at all that this will last. All I'm saying is, the alternatives I know about aren't necessarily better, and if one talks about quitting the field because it's not enjoyable (without mentioning money), then my question - from an angle not unlike yours, I think - my question is, so what's your alternative way to make money.

kayoone• 14 years ago

You dont necessarily need FORMAL education, but you have to learn alot to be a good programmer. Its alot about training, experience and talent...

DennisP• 14 years ago

Also, in what other job can you build your own little slaves to do some of your work for you? You don't even have to tell anyone.

willholloway• 14 years ago

I like to think of myself as master of the intelligent networked machines :)

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Farming :-)

randomdata6• 14 years ago

Farming is undergoing a similar talent crunch right now. If you are in the right parts of the world and have a little skill behind your name, you can easily make $50/hr as a farmhand.

Food and tech is where investors are piling all their money right now. As both a software developer and farmer, I do fear what will happen when investments start going elsewhere.

calinet62• 14 years ago

"Programmers who can program at all - as in, print out a binary tree correctly"

Strikingly succinct and useful benchmark, just sort of thrown in there like it was jam on toast.

There are some tidbits of wisdom in this article, but overall it boils down to a life that has lost all meaning and passion and has succumbed to the lowest common denominator: money. True, maybe, but sad, really.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

I found much "meaning and passion" in programming after getting into it for the money. Conversely, I know a few people who started programming as kids, and who spent some time fighting depression, unable to feel the same passion as in their early years while doing real-world, bill-paying stuff. Typically, they try a few other things, and then get over it, realizing how lucky they are, sitting on the gold mine that is programming ability.

A life full of "meaning and passion" is typically sustained through money. It's much easier to find meaning and passion given money than it is to find money given meaning and passion. If nobody is willing to pay for your program, maybe it's not worth the passion; if they pay, maybe it is.

dpark4• 14 years ago

Many people spend years or decades moving from job to job and from career to career looking for happiness. Most of them don't find it until they learn that your job just isn't what makes you happy. "Do something you love" is a myth.

Jobs are jobs because they involve a lot of crap people don't want to do. No one's going to find personal meaning by writing specs, or by cutting a beautiful design down to an ugly minimum to fit into time constraints, or by maintaining some poorly-written internal tool. But these are all things programmers will do, at some of the best jobs in the industry. Every job has a large chunk of "this sucks" work. If it's kept to a minimum, you're doing far better than most people.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

>"Do something you love" is a myth.

As someone who is currently working his dream job, this statement couldn't be further from the truth.

jamesaguilar• 14 years ago

TIL your life is wasted if your treat your job as a job.

prodigal_erik3• 14 years ago

If you spend 40 of your 112 waking hours per week doing something other than what you're passionate about, you're wasting at least a third of your life. Unfortunately we've created an economy that compels most people to do this.

unsigner• 14 years ago

To the pedant brigade: ease up. It's "little to now education" compared to medicine or law, where you have to toil in years in a very rigid pipeline of exams, internships and certifications. There's plenty of learning in programming, but you can do with little education.

hakaaak• 14 years ago

Good post. I've been doing this for many years now though and I've been burnt out after maybe the first 4-5 on coding, but that is still what I do. It really is about the money though. Early on I had the idea that I would become an architect get all of the certifications (back when that meant something), work my way up management and have a house at the beach, at the lake, and in the mountains. Ha. Yeah, I should have known. Right now I'm hoping that telecommuting becomes the norm. I love working from home, but I don't think I could make what I'm making now as a contractor doing Rails development, which is now primarily what I do. As long as I continue to be employed, I guess that is the main thing. And I guess that is the point of the post.

adelevie• 14 years ago

> I haven't met programmers who became lawyers.

For what it's worth, I'm a programmer in the middle of law school.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Many do, such as Google's Dan Berlin and huge chunks of the IP law field.

drags• 14 years ago

And in constitutional law, Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (http://www.volokh.com/).

opminion• 14 years ago

passion burns out, whereas greed is sustainable

This blog entry seems to have been written so that it can end up with this sentence and not read cynical.

kennethologist• 14 years ago

Best quote I've read/heard all month "...but passion burns out, whereas greed is sustainable." I identified with the author and it's one of the major reasons I didn't pursue other career paths even though I could have (Lawyer, Doctor etc.) Thanks for this article.

raganwald• 14 years ago

I came here to say that this is the most misleading quote I've read recently. If you're avaricious, of course you think that passion burns out, because your passion is for money. All of your other interests have been fleeting fancies, but you mistook them for "passions."

At the risk of introducing a Scotsman to the discussion, I suggest that passion is the only sustainable thing. If you sustain an interest in money for your whole life but not an interest in programming, or art, or writing, or Ultimate Frisbee, those other things aren't passions, they're interests or hobbies.

Greed is pretty much the definition of a passion for money. If you identify with this quote, I suggest that you modify it slightly to read, "For the greedy, a passion for making money is the only sustainable thing, all other interests burn out."

Tycho• 14 years ago

Pretty much.

There's also tremendous scope for working from home, or from wherever you want. I can imagine it getting to the stage where job ads for developers will advertise perks like 'work from the beach!'

I'm not a full-time developer (though my work involves programming), but I know what I want to be doing in my 30s, 40s... Not just because I like it but because it gives you so much freedom in terms of lifestyle.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

I've done programming, functional management and product management. Today, I'm back to programming for exactly this reason. I work remotely, can take 20 minutes to run my kids somewhere or just to sit and listen to the latest problem at school that day. Given how little time I have left with my kids as kids (and how much I wasted chasing a "career"), this alone is worth as much as my salary.

anovikov• 14 years ago

I know a programmer who became a lawyer (in Netherlands). It lifted his hourly rate 10x (50->500 EUR/hour), and while not all time is paid, and he isn't working full time having a lot of time to spare, he's getting like 2x than before.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

That's rather nice indeed; I think the mean earnings for lawyers aren't that high and there's quite a lot of variance, not?

(Unfortunately, this is a theoretical discussion for me, since I'd make a lousy lawyer.)

pfedor2• 14 years ago

The starting salary distribution for a lawyer is an interesting graph: http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib

Basically, after graduating from a law school you either get hired by a good law firm or not. In the former case, which happens to some 20% of graduates, your starting salary will be $160k. In the latter case your salary will be dictated by an unexciting distribution with the peak around $50k.

lutusp4• 14 years ago

Just a few comments on a well-written article that makes some good points:

> No health or legal risks

On the contrary -- the health risk arises primarily because of the sedentary lifestyle. It's hard to imagine anything so hard on one's health and longevity prospects as sitting and typing all day.

As to legal risks, they're certainly on the upswing, as people who can't program try to steal the work of those who can, and as people try to take generic methods, known to all, and turn them into private property.

Apart from those quibbles, a nice article.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

I think programming and exercising is healthier than, say, moving.

As to legal risks - it's not the programmer who's facing them, it's his employer (which is the same thing for the self-employed programmers, but they're few). A programmer will not be personally sued for any sort of "IP infringement".

lutusp4• 14 years ago

> As to legal risks - it's not the programmer who's facing them, it's his employer

I didn't consider this angle, because I've always been my own boss. I've never written programs for anyone else, which means I took home the money, not the grief.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus

But as time passes, I see more and more cases where someone tries to patent something that should never be patented, which might eventually prevent people from writing programs at all.

guard-of-terra9• 14 years ago

Quite a few professionsnow require you tositall day looking at the screen, but they differ in compensation while sharing health risks. And I don't see many occupations where the risk is much milder.

lutusp4• 14 years ago

> And I don't see many occupations where the risk is much milder.

Yes, I agree completely. To me the problem is that programming is so lucrative and fun that it might make us too sedentary to be healthy.

eru11• 14 years ago

> On the contrary -- the health risk arises primarily because of the sedentary lifestyle. It's hard to imagine anything so hard on one's health and longevity prospects as sitting and typing all day.

Who says you have to do that? At the very least you can demand a standing desk.

lutusp4• 14 years ago

I don't know about you, but when I solve programming problems, I'm not exercising. And when I'm exercising, I'm not thinking abut programming except perhaps in the most general sense.

I'm just saying that it's pretty much accepted that sitting around a lot is bad for you.

grecy• 14 years ago

Why are all these posts talking about 50?

Retirement in Canada just got pushed to 67, and I think most people expect it will go out to 69 before we actually get to retire (I'm 30 now).

All these titles should say "Do you really want to be doing this at 66"

randomdata6• 14 years ago

Given the article, the additional income over of a programmer over the average income earner should be, if saved carefully, enough money to cover the years between 50 and 69 to retire, if you so desire.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I think this is a bit cynical (and dangerous) but agree with the premise that currently the number of programming opportunities continues to exceed the number of programmers. However there are signs that this is changing.

I do know a programmer who became an IP attorney (doing well at it too) and a couple of programmers who have gone off to do entirely different things (one is a guide in Africa, another drives a tugboat around Puget Sound for fun and profit). I also know some who are not working at their first choice of job, rather they are working at jobs they would not have taken if they had a choice.

It is this last bit that suggests we are at the beginning of the end for the programming shortage.

NB: I think it is hilarious that the first comment is from a user named Bogdan but I suspect that is just me.

pfedor2• 14 years ago

However there are signs that this is changing.

I've been hearing this for fifteen years now, which is about as long as I've been paying attention. For the first five years I was maybe even a little concerned. (In the nineties programmers were going to become obsolete because OOP worked and all code was about to become highly reusable so there wouldn't be any need to write new code. Yes, people were saying this in earnest.)

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I hear you, I don't think the change is being wrought by any magic bullet where programs write themselves, what I'm seeing is that more folks are going into programming than durable programming jobs are being created. (I use the word durable because there are lots of short term requirements.)

So this is how I look at the health of the market:

1) Does any programmer have their choice of jobs? (which is to say bargaining power when changing jobs)

2) What is the median unemployment time for programmers?

3) How are the first two mediated by contract vs full time work?

4) What are the median salaries?

What I've been seeing since the more recent depression is that unemployment median is staying fairly low but that is being achieved by an increase in the number of folks doing contracting work. Full time work (and that includes health benefits which become significantly more expensive for the 'over 50' programmer as a contractor) is getting harder to find.

As with most markets it is more clear on the 'mediocre' programmers (where mediocre is a function of code productivity) Another thing I'm seeing is salary erosion, which is to say that engineers taking lower salaries at large companies to stay employed. That also indicates a switch in the 'bargaining power' of companies looking for programmers vs the available programmers.

The sequence I've seen a number of times now with acquaintances are flat to negative salary growth when leaving one job and moving to the next. Some folks spent a year or two consulting looking for that position that would be a net gain on their salary growth.

From an economist's point of view if prices are flat to trending down it signals a shift in power from the seller to the buyer.

Those are the signs I'm seeing, would love to hear other's experiences on whether or not they think the market is saturating or not.

guard-of-terra9• 14 years ago

OP is a Russian-speaking israeli and Bogdan is a fine slavic name (rooted as God Given, I guess)

jackpirate• 14 years ago

another drives a tugboat around Puget Sound for fun and profit

This is one of the most underrated jobs around. Good pilots will make >200k working 4 days a week doing this.

ww5202• 14 years ago

Tugboat pilots make way more money than programmers, but the responsibility is much greater. You don't want to lead a tanker crashed into shore.

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

Is anyone concerned that over the next 10+ years after many people realize how lucrative the work is that supply will catch up with demand?

nostrademons3• 14 years ago

It's happening already - a lot of my liberal-arts friends are retraining as programmers - but the thing is that it takes 10 years to develop expertise in a skill. So the market for good programmers will remain untouched for the foreseeable future, and that should give the alert ones plenty of time to skate to a different point in the value chain if market conditions start changing.

padobson2• 14 years ago

Money is about being good at something. I know of lawyers that barely scrape by on insurance law suits because all they know how to do is prey on the fear and pain of injured people. Such lawyers have to buy $500 suits and drive BMWs and belong to country clubs to stay presentable, and thus have to scrape by on 80-100k a year.

Similarly, I know carpenters and plumbers who will get the job done - and make a lot more than the aforementioned lawyers. These pros can demand hourly rates of anywhere from $60-$80, but more often will make $250-$500/hr by quoting a job price and doing it quickly. And it's no problem for them to drive to all their appointments in their 1997 Ford E series wearing flannel and jeans.

I could also introduce you to janitors that make six figures a year because they know how to penetrate insurance bureaucracies and get black mold cleanup jobs.

If money is your aim, pick a job out of a hat and be excellent at it - and not just the actual execution, but the promotion, estimation, and pricing of your talent too. If you can get into the 25th percentile of solving problems in your expertise, you'll be well compensated for it no matter what it is.

bjourne2• 14 years ago

Hogwash. For every skilled craftsman you can find, I can find ten other idiots making ten times as much money thanks to being born in the right family. Skilled developers recognize that rockstar developers can be ten times as productive as average ones. I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average.

Stock brokers are regularly getting beaten by monkeys when it comes to betting on the stock market, yet they are among the top earners in society. It's just insane to suggest that salaries are fair or that skill is in any way correlated to income.

Unless you believe that making lots of money proves that you are good at what you are doing, which makes the whole argument a tautology.

Edit: Also, the best work I've done is all open source. It isn't all very good stuff (far from it!), but it certainly is both more valuable and better than the corporate code I write for a living. Then there is http://www.ohloh.net/ that tries to estimate the labour costs of various open source projects. People have plowed thousands of hours of unpaid work into some of the highest regarded software projects on earth just for fun. They will never get properly compensated for their work. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work." is the famous slogan of Socialism, but it certainly isn't how the world currently operates.

rayiner5• 14 years ago

To be fair, compensation in banking is very related to performance. Investment bankers get paid on the size of their deals, traders get paid based on how much they make, money managers get paid based on how much they bring in. The majority of people get pushed out within a few years if they aren't top performers.

The key thing to realize is that value to the customer isn't part of the performance equation. It doesn't matter if a hedge fund manager is beating the market. His performance involves how many people he brings in the door willing to pay the fund's management fees. That's the metric he's judged on.

Which brings me to your point--it's not that pay isn't correlated with skill. It's that the skill it's universally correlated with is salesmanship.

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

He's not trying to make a point about the justification of society's wages in general, he's describing what an individual can do, which may or may be representative of general trends. Do you deny that it's possible for an individual to reach a point where they're well-compensated for being a skilled craftsman?

dpatrick86• 14 years ago

To be fair s/he did include marketing of your services among the set of things that were requisite that you be good at to pull it off.

aantix• 14 years ago

Bjourne -

Notice the OP mentioned "promotion, estimation, and pricing" as part of being great.

Thomas Fuchs quotes clients at $800/hr ( http://script.aculo.us/thomas/ ). Thunderbolts labs is quoting $277/hr for their consulting rates ( http://thunderboltlabs.com/ ). And these are people that publicly advertise their rates. I know several other individuals at these levels that just don't publicly advertise.

Skills in this context includes (self)promotion; it's not enough to just code. No one (usually) comes knocking on your door after a great commit. But if you put yourself out there, stand by your work, talk to lots of people and show that you're a problem solver, by all means, you can triple even quadruple your income as a developer.

Honestly, it sounds like you're a good developer, so you're probably already half way there. Put up a site that outlines your major open source commits, your ability to cut through the BS and distill the problem to it's necessities. Tell the client that you ship on time.

Your world will open up with (financial) possibilities my friend.

noahc• 14 years ago

It's pretty clear that top preformers don't look at averages. They look at what others have done and from there figure out how to get there in a reasonable time.

A developer who makes 10x a regular developer happens often, but what they are doing is taking on a lot of the risk that companies take on and knock your salary for. Your project is 2x over budget and 4x behind schedule? Oh, that's just Software projects in corporate IT. This has nothing to do with the developer actually being better of course, but the developer willing to assume the risk that results in 10x payouts.

Instead of complaining about Stock Brokers, it might be more effective to look at what they do (transactional work) and try to figure out how to place your self in a position so that you can take advantage of transactional work.

And a minor correction, it should read: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

gaius2• 14 years ago

You've never heard of a developer who made a mil in a liquidity event? This is Hacker News dude.

nostrademons3• 14 years ago

"I haven't ever heard of any developers making ten times the average salary or even double the average."

Programmers who are making that kind of money know enough to keep it quiet.

padobson2• 14 years ago

Never did I suggest the world was fair or that trust fund babies don't have a better chance at a high income than someone born into a iron-workers family.

I was suggesting that there's good money to be made in every discipline - you may need some creativity and personality to get to that money, but no one should ever look at the field they're in and say "Oh, ho hum, I'll never be rich because of my field."

And your socialist quote was misquoted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abil...

Finally, if your open source code is good in that it is solving problems for people, then you should have a very fertile network of possible consulting clients. Those who use their open source work to feed their consultancies can make very very good money.

UK-AL2• 14 years ago

Money is about the market rate. If your good at something, but there lots of people similar to you then you're gonna have a bad time.

jkimmel2• 14 years ago

As a biologist, I'm going to have to object. No matter what level of talent and competence you have, there are very few opportunities in this field to make a nice living. You're pretty much relegated to becoming a tenured professor (good luck) or working your way up in an established biotech firm doing work many would consider mind-numbing. At best, you're looking at the low-end of six figures for someone with decades of experience and an amazing track record, and there are very few of those positions. You can go the entrepreneurial biotech route, this is HN after all, but considering the small number of successful firms we can safely leave that option out for the purposes of salary estimation.

I think this is a factor of latency in added value. It seems to me that higher salaries are often given to those who can provide immediate usable value in the short term (lawyers, stock traders, some programmers). Long-term value-add professions, such as biology and many other R&D fields, tend to get the short end of the stick salary wise. Perhaps this is tied into the immediate gratification complex of western culture; professions with a significant value-add prospect >~5 years in the future have a difficult time arguing their own worth.

gaius2• 14 years ago

The point of tenure is that it's well tenure. There is actual value attached to a sinecure. What would it cost right now to buy an investment that would pay you a six figure salary for the rest of your life, no strings attached? That's what tenure is worth. Now tell me profs aren't well rewarded.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

Do you seriously claim that janitors in the 25th percentile make about the same as programmers in said percentile, on average - that the average is the same for all occupations? I rather doubt it.

I mean, it makes sense that return on all sorts of investment should be about the same once the respective markets stabilize, but some things aren't investment, they're luck. Being good at something that is in demand is more like sitting on a gold mine than buying stock.

mcantor• 14 years ago

Passion only burns out if you consistently fail to pace yourself, or if it wasn't really innate passion in the first place.

kfcm6• 14 years ago

The author is a bit naive in his cheerleading, extrapolating his situation in his location to a nation-wide situation. That is just simply not the case.

As a business-owner in my mid-40's, I travel around quite a bit. There are locations where the employment picture is similar to what the author describes. But what he describes is far from the norm in the places I travel to, or from what I hear from friends and old coworkers during lunches. Ageism, low-salaries, "sweatshop"-like/highly-political work environments, lack of diversity in companies/economic sectors, lack of interesting problems to solve. All are observations of mine, as well as old friends' concerns voiced softly after looking over their shoulder during lunches over the past year or two.

Very good IT people (programmers/developers, DBAs, infrastructure, the whole gamut) wanting to leave their current job, but wondering where to go, because their friends in other "just as bad" companies are looking too. Discovering they can still get interviews--but maybe not the job--after age 35; and discovering the difficulty in even getting interviews after age 40. Watching their companies hire either H-1Bs for 40-50% of what they're paid, or college interns (or even recent grads for intern salaries) for even less.

Yeah, people would like to be making this much money in technology when their 50. But in most places, it's a pipe-dream.

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

This is depressing but a realistic depiction of "how the other half programs".

What are your thoughts on what puts people into that programming underclass (which definitely exists)?

larrys• 14 years ago

"thoughts on what puts people into that programming underclass"

An example is the developer that just quoted me on setting up a server. He is charging me essentially his cost for the equipment and 3 hours at $50 per hour to set it up. I've seen this time and time again. Not able to price to what the market will bear. (He's in the midwest by the way and has a stunning resume and full time job working for a known company).

nandemo• 14 years ago

I don't know exactly what you mean by underclass (though I think I've seen a similar comment of yours), but one answer is what plinkplonk said in this thread: immigration restrictions, combined with the concentration of "elite" software companies in the US.

foohbarbaz• 14 years ago

Oh come on! I am in mid-forties and not just did not have any problems getting interviews, but also did not have any problems switching jobs a few months ago. Where I work we can't find enough decent devs for any money. H1-B is just a memory at that point. Mind you, this is not Silicon Valley, the market is quite a bit smaller (north Denver metro).

Someone is either feeding you bad information or you are extrapolating and imagining things.

Where I work, we have a very good team of developers and being mid 40-ies I am right in the middle of the pack.

BTW, having been on H1-B 10 years ago, I can tell you that "40-50%" is not true either.

So, what the heck are you talking about?

kfcm6• 14 years ago

Apparently you didn't read my comment all that well. Re-read, and catch the "there are locations" where the article would be correct.

You are falling into the same trap as the author of the original article. Just because Denver metro (or the Valley, DC, Minneapolis or a couple of other tech/government centers) are doing well, you're extrapolating that the rest of the nation is the same. I know there are places where the beer flows like wine. I'm here to tell you in many--if not most--places where I roam (primarily in the midwest), that is not the case.

Ageism is a serious concern, along with companies doing what they can to lower "human capital" costs while still extracting as much work as possible. Infrastructure is somewhat immune to this, as well as smaller towns (25-50K and smaller, some distance away from larger metros) where they can't retain or recruit younger workers as easily.

As for being fed bad information, you haven't seen the look on friends' faces who've remained in tech when they talk about their concerns and experiences. 10-20% paycuts 3-4 years ago which have not bounced back. Two different companies recently resetting position titles from "Senior Position" to "Position II" for those with 15-20 years experience. Watching any open positions be filled with H-1Bs, college interns or recent grads at intern salaries. Hearing about apparent tech Nirvanas in other metros, and being unable to leave because they'd uproot their family.

The look on their faces may not be fear for their future, but it is a deep concern/worry.

rorrr• 14 years ago

> we can't find enough decent devs for any money

I don't believe that for a second. For $500K/year you will have top 3% developers moving to your office tomorrow (unless you're in Iraq or some other messed up place).

What that means is that your budgets suck.

_yosefk11• 14 years ago

I think ageism is "the" problem that you point out, because this is why people can't even get an interview after age 40, right?

There are employers biased against older candidates, I guess - though not near me, not to the point where I'm able to get all the good candidates aged 40 and up for peanuts, and it's not like I'm not searching, goodness knows.

But I think this is going to get better over time, as the masses of young programmers who entered the profession during and after the .com bubble age. In particular, you'll have more people in higher age brackets recommending each other.

kfcm6• 14 years ago

I'm the only employee of my business, but I do contract 1099s when needed. When I do, I try to get older professionals, simply because I get a more efficient bang for my buck. Far too many younger techs within a few years of entering the workforce, are too prone to the "not-invented-here" syndrome and re-invent too many wheels. Like we all were, right?

Maybe I shouldn't have been an absolutist about not being able to get an interview after 40, but the difficulty of getting one is an order of magnitude or two higher. 45-50? Even more difficult in many locations.

But my original comment's point still stands: things are not a bed of roses everywhere. Ageism exists in the field, and is probably more the norm than not. Will things get better in time? Maybe.

rayiner5• 14 years ago

The ageism I saw is why I decided I didn't want to be in software development for the long term and left the field.

I personally think the mentality is stupid and probably quite inefficient. In my field, law, they don't even let you into the courtroom until you're 5+ years in. Practicing law is an art and people with 20 years of experience are just better at it than people starting out. I never understood why so many people think software development is any different. Companies don't lay off their lawyers and hire fresh graduates when some new major new law goes into effect, so why do people lay off their software developers and hire fresh graduates when some major new technology becomes popular?

nathan_long• 14 years ago

I wouldn't argue for ageism, but I would say programming is different from law because technology changes much faster than law. There aren't giant paradigm shifts in law every 10 years.

A new technology may in fact be much more productive to work with than an old one. Does someone with COBOL experience have an advantage or a disadvantage in learning Python vs someone who is just starting? Which is larger, the amount of useful knowledge they bring along, or the amount they have to discard?

There are sage old programmers that I look up to. But there are also a lot who just burned out and quit, tired of the new technology treadmill. I'm not sure which I'll become.

tlogan• 14 years ago

You have to understand that practicing law is not influenced by VC money as much as it is software development. Since VCs (and all these new incubators) have clear preference toward younger entrepreneurs, it is logical to expect that these kind of preference will be replicated in other segments of the market.

I think that VCs and incubators have very good reason to invest in mainly younger entrepreneurs, and they probably suggest to hire "the best, regardless of age" but ....

fatbird2• 14 years ago

It's all about the money. New graduates are cheaper. It's that simple. Technology and business are both over-populated with Randian/Libertarian douchebags for whom the quarterly bottom line is more important than good engineering or business as a sustainable entity in the larger social setting. Everything else is handwaving to hide this fact.

OldSchool• 14 years ago

Nice to hear such an optimistic viewpoint. I find some comfortable truths in this essay, but he kind of glosses over some major things.

The moving targets that are the latest fads in languages (every six years a new "generation" does the same old thing their way) and shifts in market demand certainly create an environment requiring constant learning. Unless you're in business for yourself and taking on more risk and stress, your earnings will top out in the low six-figures so you have to value daily comfort and health insurance over any grand ambition or ability to disappear for months at a time. Outsourcing and immigrants willing to work longer hours for less money are a constant macro threat to this comfort zone too.

To say that it requires almost no education isn't true. An engineering or computer science degree surely makes it easier to get a job. Whether that training makes a difference at work if you started coding at age 9 anyway is debatable but a degree gets you recognition as a professional and shows that you have deep cross-training in math and physics.

I do agree coding non-mission critical applications is pretty low stress and for the most part you have a chance at a decent quality of life.

niels• 14 years ago

I'm a software developer (MS Comp. Sci.) in my late thirties. I've always had the impression that software development was really well paid. But lately many of my friends (doctors, lawyers, MBAs) has started to make way more than I can get as a regular employee. And for the doctors it's all part of their standard salaries. They don't need to demonstrate any particular high level of competence. And from here on their salary will increase until retirement, while I expect mine to flatten or decrease. I love programming and didn't choose it for the money, but my view on software as a high paying job has changed. Of course everything is relative.

hga2• 14 years ago

Just wait until you hit 40 and getting a full time salaried job becomes asymptotically more difficult (unless you're in a special field like embedded or one that requires clearances).

creamyhorror• 14 years ago

This is interesting. I've heard mentions of very large numbers for bankers, lawyers, doctors as they move up the career ladder, but normally involving starting their own businesses or being made partner. Do they really outearn developers significantly, even as employees? Maybe I should've stuck to trying to get into finance...although once the entrepreneurship bug bites, it isn't quite so easy.

I'm in a country where the wage difference between the protected professions and the rest is pretty large, and programmers are pretty much commodity employees with little advancement opportunities. The only way to break out seems to be entrepreneurship, but the local market isn't big enough to support big or even medium exits. I guess that's why so many people try to get into medical and law school or into i-banks.

ww5202• 14 years ago

Doctors and lawyers are often small business owners when they have their own practices. Their incomes are more on par with small business owners.

cpeterso3• 14 years ago

How much do typical doctors and lawyers make mid-career?

blackhole• 14 years ago

If money is your primary motivation for any long term choices, you are doing something wrong.

gogetter• 14 years ago

I did not even get past the first 100 lines before I want to give this blog post a score off the charts. We need more people programming, lots more, with the honesty and humility of the author. Thank you for saying what you said.

yosefk.com +10000

pirateking• 14 years ago

I am grateful that I am able to make a lot of money doing something that is fun for me anyways, programming computers. However, a fool and his gold are soon parted. There are some programs best left unwritten, for any amount of money. And some programs worth no money, yet most valuable.

The freedom from work as we know it, is the dream that technology is meant to bring... to everyone. When I am 50, I hope that how much money I am making will be largely irrelevant due to advances in technology and society.

clueless1233• 14 years ago

You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Being good at the job or the market demand or the right size of a company are small variables against your ability to negotiate the rate you want.

ivany• 14 years ago

One reason I'm not confident that the supply problem will be solved anytime soon:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/col...

Given that college has been incredibly (over)promoted over the past 20 years and that CS jobs have become more lucrative if anything, the conclusion I drew from this is that there just aren't very many engineers on the margin.

ixacto• 14 years ago

Either the system is broken, or some people are just gasp not motivated as much by money. There are quite a few internships in programming (just check out glassdoor) that pay about as much as a tenure-track professor, and these days with all the shenanigans in academia I would be hesitant to make a judgement on which will provide better job security...

So the economy rewards someone building facebook or groupon more than someone with a PHD and multiple post-docs doing basic research, and while the developers for said companies do add a tremendous amount of value, which is reflected in their sallary -- IMO it is more likely that DARPA or a similar government body is more likely to develop the next step in innovation. Siri was originally a government project, that was then commercialized from CALO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO Same goes for the internet.

ghostoffuture2• 14 years ago

Perhaps I can add my experience in this. I was very good at programming in college. I was one of those guys that left the labs under the hatefull gaze of the entire lab section having finished his assignment early. And boy I loved it too. I was so happy having finished a large programming project or a large engineering design assignment. After getting an interesting assignment I would literally skip on the way back home daydreaming about how I will write it. I was not at the best university, mostly because I was an immigrant so I was not able to get good grades/sat scores, but it was a very decent state school.

But while in college I saw that most powerful people in america were lawyers of some kind. These were the days of the Clintons, btw. Then I got into my stupid head that perhaps I should go to law school. You know in order to join the power elite and make a difference and all that.

By that time my english was very good, and being naturally intelligent (I will not bore you with false modesty), I got into some of the very best law schools in America. I chose one and did very well there and got jobs at some very prestigous top law firms. Basically, for a while I had the promise of a career that most lawyers would dream of.

But now this is all in shambles and I am thinking of getting back into engineering or something more closely related to technology.

Oscar Wilde said something very wise (paraphrasing): "I used to have the life of my dreams and I was happy; now I have the life of everybody else's dreams and it is incredibly tiresome"

So my advice is if you are one of those natural programmers by all means do it, and do not ever think about what other people say about "what would you be doing when you are 50." Yosef (the author of this article) is one of those people, and to him the answer is very simple and very happy: "programming".

You see this question of "can you see yourself as a programmer when you are 50" does not have much to do with ageism or the labor market but about people's inner feelings and desires. Some people are horrified to see themselves as programmers when they are 50, not because of the market but because they secretly loathe it. And to see themselves doing it when they are 50 seems like a life sentence. For others, it is the most natural thing in the world.

I remember when I was a lawyer I once had an especially good stretch. Some of our top clients complimented my work. This is a big deal because those clients spent crazy money on fees and it is very rare for anyone to complement a lawyer's work. I thought to myself "wow keep going and you will be a partner in no time". Then I thought about life as a lawyer, doing the same thing over and over again, for the rest of my life and it was the most depressing thing ever. It was horrifying and the thought about multi-million dollar salaries did not help (although now in my much more perilous situation those salaries sure seem nice). I got into a serious depression and that badly affected my work thereafter.

So my advice is, if you are good at programming, if you are one of those few for whom this stuff just clicks, go for it and do not listen what anyone says about markets, or ageism etc. Note that those that are really good at programming are very few. Even among programmers, I would say that those to whom programming is annoying and a little scary greatly outnumber the ones that have real talent for it.

So people will generally give you many reasons to move away from it, but those are their reasons, not yours. If you are part of this select group just count your blessings. And here are some of these blessings:

1. You know how rare it is to have a passion and talent for something, and at the same time have that something be valuable and useful. Think of all the brilliant and passionate people that are into disciplines where only a few thousand people in the world get a decent income. Think of all dancers, screenwrights, directors, painters, poets, chess players, etc.

2. You have a wonderful differentiator of skill and ability: things either work or not. When I was a lawyer I had to compete with so many hacks. When I would stay up nights writing complex documents, trying to phrase every single word just the right way, when I would stress out for hours about a particular phrasing or argument, they would slap something together quickly and with no second thought. And their work would look like mine to the client. The consequences of bad legal work are uncertain and tend to be much delayed.

3. Your craft requires very little investment. Again, you have no idea how lucky that is. Even startups that require capital, get it mostly for salaries. There is no expensive equipment to purchase, etc. Marx thought so much about how to connect workers to their means of production, and in the end came up with a theory that turned out into a complete disaster and caused untold tradegy. If he only knew that some day there would be a sub $500 means of production that can create wealth worth millions he would not go into silly plans about dictatorship of the proletariat.

There is more but I have rambled enough. Heed my advice. If you are one of the lucky ones, ignore what the less lucky ones are saying and do not squander your good fortune.

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

The consequences of bad legal work are uncertain and tend to be much delayed.

That's a really good point. Well over 50% of the "lines of code" in a typical complex business contract cover contingencies that ideally will not happen. That means they will likely never be "executed." That, in turn, allows the legal profession to be held to very different quality standards than an engineer or programmer.

As a freelance developer I often find myself reviewing contracts and consulting agreements prior to signing them, and I'm rarely impressed with either the original language of the documents I'm given by clients, or with the reviewing skills of the attorneys I engage to look them over. Yet it's inevitable that the attorneys who wrote (i.e., cut-and-pasted together) these agreements, and who review them on my behalf, will make more on an hourly basis than I will when I perform the work.

gruseom• 14 years ago

This sort of intelligent reflection on personal experience makes for valuable comments.

Particularly good: "You see this question of 'can you see yourself as a programmer when you are 50' does not have much to do with ageism or the labor market but about people's inner feelings and desires. Some people are horrified to see themselves as programmers when they are 50, not because of the market but because they secretly loathe it."

I hope you do get back into engineering, and write about it.

ghostoffuture2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the encouragement.

blaenk• 14 years ago

Thanks for this. As a first generation US citizen, there are times when I feel like maybe I fell short and should've aimed "higher", because I consider how easily programming comes to me that I figure it's easy for anyone, child's play compared to "hard" engineering and science like Physics, Electrical Engineering, or medical studies, law, etc. But it's true, like you said: the simple fact is that I love programming, so I figure that I'm fortunate enough to have found something I love doing so much, and will also (hopefully) allow me to live comfortably while doing it.

astral303• 14 years ago

++++1. Exactly my sentiments (also 1st gen US citizen here).

ghostoffuture, thank you for a most insightful comment.

fanbango• 14 years ago

You won't have to worry about that. They'll be hiring 23 year old Stanford kids who don't have a family and who can pull all nighters. They won't be hiring you.

shmerl• 14 years ago

> Give me a profession remotely close to programming in the following ways: Little or no required education...

> Programming is money for nothing.

This is not called programming. It's called monkey job. Programming requires education (i.e. being a knowledgeable professional in computing, software engineering and so on) and it's not money for nothing by any means.

akurilin3• 14 years ago

Agreed. You can do a lot in programming without much knowledge, but a lot of the really good opportunities and interesting work are reserved to those who have superior domain expertise.

akadien• 14 years ago

Honestly, I don't want to read articles about "doing x when you're 50" when I'm 50.

lkrubner• 14 years ago

Computer programming jobs in the USA have been in decline since 1990.

Stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (USA):

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c...

2010 Median Pay $71,380 per year $34.32 per hour

Number of Jobs, 2010 363,100

Job Outlook, 2010-20 12% (About as fast as average)

Especially worth a look:

http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/programming-jobs-fall/

"Over and over, Americans are told that education is the key to their job future. The more education you have, the better your shot at getting a job that pays middle-income wages to take care of your family. If we as a nation are better educated, the theory goes, we’ll be able to compete more effectively in the global economy, which in turn will generate more good jobs for everyone.

But some major flaws in this theory are playing out today in a field that was once thought to have the brightest future — information technology...

...In its 1990 Occupational Outlook Handbook, the U.S. Department of Labor was especially bullish: “The need for programmers will increase as businesses, government, schools and scientific organizations seek new applications for computers and improvements to the software already in use [and] further automation . . . will drive the growth of programmer employment.” The report predicted that the greatest demand would be for programmers with four years of college who would earn above-average salaries.

In 2000, the Labor Department predicted America would have 839,000 computer programming jobs by 2008. The department warned of competition from "programming businesses overseas where much routine work can be outsourced at a lower cost," but was nonetheless confident that "jobs for both systems and applications programmers should be plentiful." Things didn't quite work out that way. The number of programming jobs has fallen steadily, in part because of outsourcing.

When Labor made these projections in 1990, there were 565,000 computer programmers. With computer usage expanding, the department predicted that “employment of programmers is expected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations through the year 2005 . . .”

It didn’t. Employment fluctuated in the years following the report, then settled into a slow downward pattern after 2000. By 2002, the number of programmers had slipped to 499,000. That was down 12 percent–not up–from 1990. Nonetheless, the Labor Department was still optimistic that the field would create jobs–not at the robust rate the agency had predicted, but at least at the same rate as the economy as a whole.

Wrong again. By 2006, with the actual number of programming jobs continuing to decline, even that illusion couldn’t be maintained. With the number of jobs falling to 435,000, or 130,000 fewer than in 1990, Labor finally acknowledged that jobs in computer programming were “expected to decline slowly.” "

solarmist• 14 years ago

Programmer is a distinct job from software developer.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...

2010 Median Pay $90,530 per year $43.52 per hour

Number of Jobs, 2010 913,100

Job Outlook, 2010-20 30% (Much faster than average)

Employment Change, 2010-20 270,900

Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

Related Stories