Wow. I'm a little surprised to read such a dim view of the lot of a software developer in the economist. I'm glad to see it in a mainstream publication, though.
I don't think that software development is necessarily a bad career, but I do think it has been vastly oversold relative to other paths available to well educated, hardworking people who can choose their own career path in the US. And I think that this overselling is a big part of a PR campaign to convince congress and the public that there is a shortage of software developers.
IN short, while this article presents an unusually pessimistic image of software development as a career, and I may not fully agree with it, I do welcome this rebalancing.
>I don't think that software development is necessarily a bad career, but I do think it has been vastly oversold relative to other paths available to well educated, hardworking people who can choose their own career path in the US.
So what other paths are nicer, while requiring less up-front risk?
Law? Totally flooded with first-jobbers and fresh graduates.
Medicine? Salaries being suppressed and debts inflating unless you hit the right specialty.
Academia? Oh boy, basically just triple what I said about medicine.
At some point we just have to accept that the university-educated, white-collar professional class is being subjected to exactly the same wage repression and rentiering (on housing and education costs) as everyone else. We are all working-class now.
That said, can you think of another field that experiences a similar same drum beat about a "shortage"? Maybe nursing, though out here in SF, nurses actually do out-earn software developers at the median (US News "best jobs" has a roundup of BLS data), and because (again, this is in SF) they have powerful unions, they don't experience the Disney-stye situation where middle aged nurses are fired and forced to train their replacements as a condition of receiving severance or holding onto their jobs for a while longer. I always have to make sure I say this when I make this comparison: I am absolutely ok with nurses outearning software developers, it's a tough job, they deserve to be well paid. But according to the US News site, even dental hygienists make roughly as much at the median as software developers. Again, I have no problem with this, but it is at odds with the notion that software developers are a wildly well paid group that experiences wonderful perks, and that the big problem is that there's a "shortage" of them. The economic article makes it clear that the aversion to this field may be very rational.
Although burnout affects everyone, I do think that software developers face greater age related employment issues than most fields as well.
I can't really quantify this, but I don't think that the PR around a "shortage" of nurses reaches the same fever pitch for software developers.
Overall, I'd recommend you just go through the "US News Best Jobs" list and check out salaries in high cost regions, relative to software development. Think about job security, stress levels, age discrimination, and so forth. Nothing's perfect, but I think you can make a good case that all of the fields in the top 10 may be preferable to software development.
It's evidence that people in these fields are much more attuned with their worth and work conditions.
Meanwhile, as this thread will surely very soon demonstrate, software developers have taken the old US notion of hating on unions, peppered in a lack of overtime pay, clauses that claim ownership to things developed in their free time, a culture of big company pretend startups (you know, 60h week little pay all the micro management none of the freedom and ownership) and an attitude towards their own field that equals that of pirates.
I been wondering why devs/hackers, with the passionate for disrupting things and tinkering with systems, don't attempt to disrupt labor. Or rather, disrupt capital/management in favor of labor. Unions are too bureaucratic, corrupt, or at least disreputable in the U.S.? No problem. Create a 21st century equivalent.
2. Because it would require cooperation and coordination with large groups of people, and the grand mythos of the hacker is one of individualism. This applies to both personalities and projects
3. Disrupting US law isn't like disrupting taxis
4. There are powerful forces preventing labor organisation by hackers
5. Unions are viewed negatively by hackers (you actually covered this one)
Those nurse salaries are median though, right? It's a terrible comparison. How many nurses get 120k plus shares? My wife is in health care (Physical Therapy) and makes 80k+ which is a bit higher than my own salary, but that's it. No benefits (such as stock, etc), and no chance of higher pay. 80k is about it (she's a clinic director with a large company). I can get half again her salary by commuting 1+ hour a day instead of my 20 minute commute, but she doesn't have that option. The pay in Seattle is pretty much the pay in Tacoma. In fact, she works outside of Tacoma in a small town, so her pay is actually higher than in Seattle, where in web development, that's not the case. Tacoma hires "ninja javascript developers" as low as 35k (according to listings in craigslist that I've seen, and in fact, my first job out of college in the immediate Tacoma area - Gig Harbor - started at 15/hr with a "promise" of 20/hr after 90 days; which turned into 17/hr)
So, I don't disagree with your points, but nurses and PTs have a lower ceiling than software engineers. By far.
Granted geebee referenced the Valley specifically, but how many software engineers get significant bonuses? I have been various kinds of engineer for almost 14 years and have yet to be in a position to get much more than 5%. My current company is 100% owned by a single person and gives absolutely no bonuses.
Good point, I don't know about outside of the Seattle area, but I've had many job interview requests in Seattle where the recruiter offers such perks so it's not that uncommon (I don't get any where I am, but my pay isn't SV or Seattle levels either).
>So what other paths are nicer, while requiring less up-front risk?
It's pretty difficult to beat the upfront cost/risk of "Fire up a web browser and a compiler/interpreter and start reading a tutorial". That can lead to an entry level job in 6mo - year or less. Software is really an anomaly in this area especially with tuition costs these days.
You can learn math or engineering on your own to lessen the risk of flunking out of a major, but you're still required to spend the time.
I make over $200k most years, with a liberal arts bachelor degree. I work in a comfortable office with reasonable hours, no one yells at me, I don't have to get dirty or put myself in physical danger. I take several weeks of vacation a year, I very rarely work a late night, and I have recruiters reaching out to me on a regular basis offering me new opportunities. While I don’t love all aspects of my work (who does?), I also can’t say with a straight face that I don’t have a drastically better situation than most people. If you ask me, software development is a pretty damned good field to be in.
Los Angeles, huh? I would love to work down in LA, but I've been staying in the Bay because I assumed this was the only place I could earn ~200k. Mind listing some of the companies that pay in that range in LA?
I don't think that $200k is a common salary among tech people. Especially out of Silicon Valley, and, even more so, out of the US (The Economist is a British magazine, after all)
I didn't say it's salary. That's salary+bonus+stock vesting. This is in line with the total cash comp I've seen and received from most of the major tech companies in the US.
I make that too as a contractor. This is a standard rate for doing contracting in Australia and UK. Now that the economy is crumbling I don't see why anyone would want to work for a startup.
Congratulations, but you have to admit you are a pretty extreme outlier, even in the Bay Area. I'd guess the vast majority of tech workers in Silicon Valley are in the $80-$140K range, and the vast majority outside the valley are in the $50-90K range. $200K is eye popping and probably two or more standard deviations from the mean.
You're looking only at base salary. Bonus and stock vesting (I'm talking generally about large, public tech companies you've all heard of - not startups) raise the total cash significantly.
I'm considering all parts of the package. You really think a significant chunk of Valley tech workers make $200K including bonus and _sellable_ equity? Not a chance. Sure, everyone knows someone who knows someone who works at Google and makes that much. But for each of them, I'll show you 10 people who make a normal amount.
And by the way, even if you're making $120k, that's REALLY REALLY GOOD and way more than the vast majority of the people in this country make. Let's have some perspective here.
I don't believe the Instagram billion was about acquiring 13 software engineers. It was about controlling an application that was a huge (and growing) competitor for attention on mobile, was it's own social network, and was better (or at least, more flexible and fun) than Facebook at one of Facebook's core functionalities: sharing photos.
It was about preventing any social application that might conceivably threaten facebook. Personally I think it was a bit of an over reaction on Facebook’s side, but they do seem very paranoid about this.
I have to say I am a true old fuddy-duddy when it comes to Instagram as I can’t think of a single use for it that appeals to me.
That's exactly the intention of instagram. It took my parents a very long time to get on instagram and they only eventually did so to try to police my teenage sister (who promptly made a new account, added her friends to it, and dribbled a few worksafe photos a month onto the account our parents knew about).
Now everyone is on snapchat, which fortunately, nobody's parents will EVER be aware of.
Lol. When do you think millenials will have kids? When they have houses? Stable jobs?
Nope, you Gen-Xers have fscked yourselvs as far as that goes. Nobody in my generation in the West will ever be able to have children. Hope you like immigrants.
> I have to say I am a true old fuddy-duddy when it comes to Instagram as I can’t think of a single use for it that appeals to me.
On Facebook, people present a polished version of their lives as if it's reflective of everything in their lives.
On Instagram, the purpose is to show polished (and "filtered") versions of what you're doing. I like that Instagram is a bit more honest about what it really is.
Yes this seems to be the purpose, but as a 40 something married man I don’t have too much interest in presenting a polished photographic image of myself to the world :)
I wasn't a user for a long time, but now that I am, I have to say that Instagram is really pleasant to use. It's just photographs, which gives it a pleasant simplicity other social networks lack. It's nice to occasionally check to see what pictures friends and others have taken.
Fabulously paid? Yeah right. Salaries are decent compared to the average working stiff. You still top out early in your career with little chance for significant increase.
In regards to the perks, having access to all of them mentioned is the exception rather than the rule.
It is a sad indictment of work culture that the freedom to make your own hours or rest when tired is seen as an extravagant benefit.
"You still top out". Actually that's pretty unique to sw development vs other white collar roles and is not discussed enough when it comes to understanding higher levels of disillusion. SW developers are basically having their mod life crisis at 28 or 32 when they realize they've mostly flatlined unless they go into management.
1. I know many people who've had significant salary increases into their 40s, at least.
2. Management is not automatically higher-paying than development, until you get into the higher reaches of management, which not everyone will.
3. To the extent people are flatlining, it might just be a case of starting high; if you're hitting a wall with a number that's in the top 5% of individual income nationally, well, you're doing better than 95% of people out there, so consider that it might not be so bad after all.
Growth slows down as you get older and more experienced, not everyone can grow beyond some level. A company isn't going to keep giving big raises to someone who isn't growing that much anymore. That seems fair.
Worst case for most people is that they hit a reasonably high wage quickly and can stay there for a long time, even if the increases become modest at best. That's a good thing.
If you are willing to develop the skillset you can still move into management and continue to increase your earning power. That's good too.
It does suck to think that as a mid level engineer I'll most likely get to a senior level in a few years and rise no further, but it's just something you have to get over.
I had just such a crisis at around that age. After 3 or 4 companies, I realized that I hit the ceiling at around 28 or so had only 1-1.5% cost of living adjustments to look forward to for the rest of my life. So I tried to do a major career change, ended up doing a minor one (I have "manager" in my title now but that's about it), and really I'm not making that much more than I was. There's definitely a ceiling, and you hit it real early in tech.
A key paragraph in the article kindly submitted here is this paragraph about promised shares of stock in a company: "Moreover, tech startups typically attract talent by offering shares. Employees work like dogs in return for supposedly making a fortune when the firm goes public. However, such firms often use multiple classes of shares that preserve the biggest gains for insiders, leaving the employees with common stock that can easily lose value. In particular, startups have taken to offering later-stage investors guarantees that they will get their money back, if either a subsequent funding round or an eventual initial public offering (IPO) values their shares at a lower price than they are paying. When firms have to pay out on such guarantees, they generally do so by issuing extra shares, which dilute other common shareholders such as their staff." That's what makes the venture-capital-funded tech industry different: it looks like it offers opportunities to make serious money through appreciation of shares in the company, but all too often that doesn't work out.
It was interesting to see, in another part of the article, the suggestion that knowing what a company's goals are in relation to one's work can make one's work more satisfying. That makes sense.
The crazy thing is job satisfaction. People do things they dislike because you pay them more. I've been a carpenter and a heavy machinery opperator before my current job in tech. Come March, I'm going to look out the window at the first sunny day and wish I was crushing a house. But in April 15, I'm going to smile as I realize how much money I save this year and look at my investments yoy.
I mean, I don't feel as apriciated or have as much fun, but I put money in the bank, I'll have healthcare for my family, retirement for my self and better job security.
Everyone is feeling pressure from inflation and stagnating wages, but let's not pretend an SDE with a six figure income is some how part of the working class now. The working class was relieved of health care and security a decade or more ago.
It is so much fun that many years, I schedule summer vacation to coincide with a house crushing from my old boss. I go out and give home 2 free days of labor cleaning up after the crushing in exchange for getting to drive into someones kitchen with a dozer. It's harder than you would think, you kinda try to scrape the inside out through the windows or a hole you made in the walls, then push it in on itself. It's really easy to get a pile of garbage that is too weak to drive on and too tall to pull the top off of. That's when you have to start driving dump truck and realized there are people who do this for a living and you're just playing around.
For the record though, cleaning up involves driving a dump truck, bobcat or excavator. It's not like I have a shovel in hand for more than an hour in the week.
That would be pretty cool but the vast majority of the job would be drilling in concrete which is pretty tough work. The pay off would be pretty cool though.
Pay to crush a house no. Pay to dig a hole yes. The thing is digging a foundation for a house is a lot like digging a ditch with a shovel. After the first cup of coffee it's mind numbing, just taking the scoop from the in front of the last scoop and putting it in the truck. I've laid utilities in a strate line for a mile and a half in the country. Every scoop just like the last. Put it in the dump truck, is the truck full? Do I need to back up? Am I still on the line? Take another scoop. Repeat 6 times then honk. One truck leaves, another takes its spot, honk when the truck is under the bucket, take a scoop.
You don't want to divide you shift into 30 second increments then do the same cycle 1000 times a day.
It needs a security clearance, so not yet, but I'm sure they would if they could figure out how to do so.
Funny thing is, if they would offer free lunch, they would get some more work out of me. They don't even offer free coffee; yes that's how fucking pathetic it is. Not even cheap black coffee. They'd improve employee health if they offered free fruit, but nope, that bag of apples from Costco is too fucking expensive. Instead they just fine us $2000 for not participating in biometrics.
I, and my spouse, must participate in the yearly biometrics screening (i.e. blood test and BMI) or else we are fined $1500 each. By fine I mean a paycheck deduction.
The biggest card this article palms is by starting out talking about tech companies, and then switching into a survey that's not primarily about tech companies: "A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms... found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated."
Because, sure, if you're the person who does Crystal Reports at Bob's House of Widgets, or the VB person at Gary's Lawncare, or even (to some extent) one of the J2EE horde at MegaBankCorp, you're in a place where you're not core to the business, you're viewed as a cost center, you have a limited career path, and the main people at the company probably have you lumped in with HR and Accounting.
But I really, really, really doubt you're going to find that same sense of alienation, underappreciation, etc. at a tech company.
In my experience, having worked at many "tech companies" as well as "square-job companies", there is no great difference in how software engineering types are treated.
I work in tech in the silicon valley. That's just untrue.
There is a sense of alienation in being a small cog in a huge company shipping millions of devices, churning through code to get data from one point to another hoping that it'll make a difference to customers and that that feature isn't just another PR gizmo.
The most insulting things companies do is offer 'vanity' perks while slashing real perks. My last gig had fancy parties, free dinner (no lunch interestingly), got itself ranked as a "best place to work" etc. It could market its employees as entitled, spoiled developers for sure.
However, there was no 401k matching. No tuition reimbursement. There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real. Basically, if you couldn't market the perk to 20-somethings, they slashed it.
Meanwhile I'm told that my very existence screws over the poor working class police officers and firefighters, who make 80% of what I make but have job security and lifetime pensions awaiting for them. And they get paid for overtime.
While I absolutely feel like I'm privileged in many ways to work in tech, the industry has many incentives to make tech workers look more 'spoiled' than they are, and so they work their PR engines to do exactly that.
I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.
recently learned that a lot of places give employees incentives to leave positive reviews on glassdoor.. hopefully glassdoor doesn't go the same way as yelp
> There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real.
I am a 20-something who was woken up every day at 1am for weeks to "handle emergencies" that didn't exist -- are you telling me the standard is compensating people for this? I did get the sense that if it cost the company meaningful amounts of money they would have let me change the alerting system so that only real emergencies woke me up, instead of "not your department"ing me.
If you work as an engineer in the US you're probably an "exempt" employee by status, meaning that your employer doesn't have to compensate you for extra time. If you're sufficiently underpaid as an engineer that you're non-exempt, then you should be paid 1.5x for any time beyond 9-5/40 hours, or you should get to trade in those unscheduled hours to work less on following days.
EDIT:
Realized I didn't address the question of whether it is "standard". I've heard that DevOps engineers have a bit of a compensation consideration (maybe $10-20k/year in the Bay Area where I live) for the on-call nature of their jobs, but I am sure that they are mostly paid enough to be exempt employees. This is totally anecdotal/second-hand and it would not surprise me if their pay is at parity or even worse than other software engineers.
Suffice it to say I was making $1X0k/year in a second tier American market (Chicago/Seattle/LA you know the deal), so I didn't feel underpaid per se -- more that, for those weeks when I was missing a lot of sleep, I got the sense it was a pretty raw deal.
Unfortunately the rather depressing trend seems to be towards shoving it all on devs and not paying them more then justifying the reasoning as "if you are the one being paged then you are incentivized to fix things.
Unfortunately, and this is what you are seeing, too often they don't give you the resources to fix things and you just end up in ops hell.
They get away with this because we (devs) have allowed ourselves to get screwed over because we chug the koolaid. We don't get overtime because for some reason we're exempt, this lets companies get away (financially) with crunch time caused by incompetent management. Oncall rotations which don't pay extra are just another offshoot of this.
Additionally, any vanity perk that isn't in your contract is at the whim of the company. More than half the perks listed on the jobs page of the company I used to work at were completely untrue - some of them were out of date, and some were never offered to begin with.
>I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.
Yes. Also assuming that everyone who works in tech is a ".com millionaire", because either you worked at a startup and made millions in your stock options or you work at google and of course make at least $500k.
> There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year
Call me crazy, but when I see there's an on call rotation, I figure that's part of the work I have to do as a salaried and not hourly employee, and I calculate the extra work into my total compensations vs. time worked estimate.
I totally agree with everything else you're saying, though.
Plenty of people get paid overtime without having to put their life on the line. Sadly, if you have a college degree and use it, the odds of getting OT are next to zero.
I come from a family of police officers, so I'm keenly aware of the risks police officers take, and I'm very appreciative of their service.
But.
I am tired of the automatic assumption that police officers and fire fighters are to be lionized because they "risk their lives". It's true that there are police officers and firefighters and EMTs who work tough beats and have extremely dangerous lives. But by and large, these jobs are significantly less dangerous than many other jobs that pay less and don't come with the public respect of being a firefighter/PO/etc.
In NYC, for example, sanitation workers have higher rates of injury and death than police officers do by 2x[1]. Convenience store clerks and commercial fishermen also have much higher death and injury rates.
None of that means that we shouldn't respect and appreciate those who work hard to keep us safe. But it's also reasonable to recognize that these positions pay well and have excellent benefits relative to jobs with much higher risk and much lower social respect.
"I am tired of the automatic assumption that police officers and fire fighters are to be lionized because they "risk their lives"."
Just answering the original poster. Farming and construction are also dangerous and the risks, aside from random bad luck can be managed, while pay and conditions may vary. But that's not what was being discussed.
The OP was complaining about first responder over-time and pensions, while the most risk involved in well funded companies and startups is probably getting a paper cut. The distinction I draw is between the types of risk and reward being experienced.
Your point was about their risking their lives in exchange for overtime and pensions. My point is that there are many jobs that have more risk and no overtime or pensions and maybe those are the jobs we should be talking more about.
If anything, I think it would be worse outside. Crazy perk culture is mostly associated with bay area companies. Other areas have cheaper costs of living, which may help reduce stress, but bay area companies have better base salaries to compensate, and they tend to provide better stock options/grants than companies based in other areas.
Well, I'm a software developer with three years of experience in Puerto Rico. It hasn't been too bad so far. There isn't an expectation that one will regularly work 12 hour days or something, though of course there is crunch time.
Have we arrived at the conclusion that the people who convinced the middle class that unions are evil did not have our best interests in mind yet, or are we gonna keep shooting ourselves in the foot?
Keep shooting ourselves in the foot it is then. K. Carry on.
I'm sorry, but software engineering was never glamorous. When I went into college, over a decade ago now, the first year courses were always the most packed, largely filled with hopeful souls. Then by year 2 and 3 they dropped back to only the most dedicated fans. That's right, I said the word fans. I graduated with 20 other computer science majors, out of what was probably thousands at the beginning.
I wouldn't want to be doing anything else in my career and the tech press and media did little to influence or change it.
Netscape, then Google, then Digg, on to Facebook and Twitter, these were all early companies that got the press raving about how cool, how easy, how glamorous it was to work in startups and in tech. Yet at the end of the day, it's still solving mundane and sometimes really hard problems with you butt glued to the seat and writing a lot of code in a text editor.
I should also add that the biggest reward for me every day is solving a problem and finally getting that ah hah moment. It's not the foosball table or free lunch.
> However, a career as a software developer or engineer comes with no guarantee of job satisfaction.
No career comes with a guarantee of job satisfaction, and very few come with much security. Less so in the tech industry, because tech itself is evolving quickly.
I'm a little disappointed that this reporter feels such a statement is newsworthy. To read this article, I would almost believe that its author doesn't believe in meritocracy or neo-liberalism, which is kind of bad faith, coming from The Economist.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadI don't think that software development is necessarily a bad career, but I do think it has been vastly oversold relative to other paths available to well educated, hardworking people who can choose their own career path in the US. And I think that this overselling is a big part of a PR campaign to convince congress and the public that there is a shortage of software developers.
IN short, while this article presents an unusually pessimistic image of software development as a career, and I may not fully agree with it, I do welcome this rebalancing.
So what other paths are nicer, while requiring less up-front risk?
Law? Totally flooded with first-jobbers and fresh graduates.
Medicine? Salaries being suppressed and debts inflating unless you hit the right specialty.
Academia? Oh boy, basically just triple what I said about medicine.
At some point we just have to accept that the university-educated, white-collar professional class is being subjected to exactly the same wage repression and rentiering (on housing and education costs) as everyone else. We are all working-class now.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...
That said, can you think of another field that experiences a similar same drum beat about a "shortage"? Maybe nursing, though out here in SF, nurses actually do out-earn software developers at the median (US News "best jobs" has a roundup of BLS data), and because (again, this is in SF) they have powerful unions, they don't experience the Disney-stye situation where middle aged nurses are fired and forced to train their replacements as a condition of receiving severance or holding onto their jobs for a while longer. I always have to make sure I say this when I make this comparison: I am absolutely ok with nurses outearning software developers, it's a tough job, they deserve to be well paid. But according to the US News site, even dental hygienists make roughly as much at the median as software developers. Again, I have no problem with this, but it is at odds with the notion that software developers are a wildly well paid group that experiences wonderful perks, and that the big problem is that there's a "shortage" of them. The economic article makes it clear that the aversion to this field may be very rational.
Although burnout affects everyone, I do think that software developers face greater age related employment issues than most fields as well.
I can't really quantify this, but I don't think that the PR around a "shortage" of nurses reaches the same fever pitch for software developers.
Overall, I'd recommend you just go through the "US News Best Jobs" list and check out salaries in high cost regions, relative to software development. Think about job security, stress levels, age discrimination, and so forth. Nothing's perfect, but I think you can make a good case that all of the fields in the top 10 may be preferable to software development.
Meanwhile, as this thread will surely very soon demonstrate, software developers have taken the old US notion of hating on unions, peppered in a lack of overtime pay, clauses that claim ownership to things developed in their free time, a culture of big company pretend startups (you know, 60h week little pay all the micro management none of the freedom and ownership) and an attitude towards their own field that equals that of pirates.
1. Because that's hard
2. Because it would require cooperation and coordination with large groups of people, and the grand mythos of the hacker is one of individualism. This applies to both personalities and projects
3. Disrupting US law isn't like disrupting taxis
4. There are powerful forces preventing labor organisation by hackers
5. Unions are viewed negatively by hackers (you actually covered this one)
So, I don't disagree with your points, but nurses and PTs have a lower ceiling than software engineers. By far.
How so?
That's pretty damn low for that amount of education and hours worked.
It's pretty difficult to beat the upfront cost/risk of "Fire up a web browser and a compiler/interpreter and start reading a tutorial". That can lead to an entry level job in 6mo - year or less. Software is really an anomaly in this area especially with tuition costs these days.
You can learn math or engineering on your own to lessen the risk of flunking out of a major, but you're still required to spend the time.
At one point I was given a Macbook Pro as a perk (iOS dev) which was slower than my personal Air because of the lack of SSD.
I have to say I am a true old fuddy-duddy when it comes to Instagram as I can’t think of a single use for it that appeals to me.
Now everyone is on snapchat, which fortunately, nobody's parents will EVER be aware of.
Nope, you Gen-Xers have fscked yourselvs as far as that goes. Nobody in my generation in the West will ever be able to have children. Hope you like immigrants.
On Facebook, people present a polished version of their lives as if it's reflective of everything in their lives.
On Instagram, the purpose is to show polished (and "filtered") versions of what you're doing. I like that Instagram is a bit more honest about what it really is.
In regards to the perks, having access to all of them mentioned is the exception rather than the rule.
It is a sad indictment of work culture that the freedom to make your own hours or rest when tired is seen as an extravagant benefit.
In most white-collar roles, "advancement" is synonymous with "going into management", and software development is no different.
2. Management is not automatically higher-paying than development, until you get into the higher reaches of management, which not everyone will.
3. To the extent people are flatlining, it might just be a case of starting high; if you're hitting a wall with a number that's in the top 5% of individual income nationally, well, you're doing better than 95% of people out there, so consider that it might not be so bad after all.
Growth slows down as you get older and more experienced, not everyone can grow beyond some level. A company isn't going to keep giving big raises to someone who isn't growing that much anymore. That seems fair.
Worst case for most people is that they hit a reasonably high wage quickly and can stay there for a long time, even if the increases become modest at best. That's a good thing.
If you are willing to develop the skillset you can still move into management and continue to increase your earning power. That's good too.
It does suck to think that as a mid level engineer I'll most likely get to a senior level in a few years and rise no further, but it's just something you have to get over.
It was interesting to see, in another part of the article, the suggestion that knowing what a company's goals are in relation to one's work can make one's work more satisfying. That makes sense.
I mean, I don't feel as apriciated or have as much fun, but I put money in the bank, I'll have healthcare for my family, retirement for my self and better job security.
Everyone is feeling pressure from inflation and stagnating wages, but let's not pretend an SDE with a six figure income is some how part of the working class now. The working class was relieved of health care and security a decade or more ago.
For the record though, cleaning up involves driving a dump truck, bobcat or excavator. It's not like I have a shovel in hand for more than an hour in the week.
You don't want to divide you shift into 30 second increments then do the same cycle 1000 times a day.
Funny thing is, if they would offer free lunch, they would get some more work out of me. They don't even offer free coffee; yes that's how fucking pathetic it is. Not even cheap black coffee. They'd improve employee health if they offered free fruit, but nope, that bag of apples from Costco is too fucking expensive. Instead they just fine us $2000 for not participating in biometrics.
Mind explaining?
Because, sure, if you're the person who does Crystal Reports at Bob's House of Widgets, or the VB person at Gary's Lawncare, or even (to some extent) one of the J2EE horde at MegaBankCorp, you're in a place where you're not core to the business, you're viewed as a cost center, you have a limited career path, and the main people at the company probably have you lumped in with HR and Accounting.
But I really, really, really doubt you're going to find that same sense of alienation, underappreciation, etc. at a tech company.
How many tech companies have you worked at?
There is a sense of alienation in being a small cog in a huge company shipping millions of devices, churning through code to get data from one point to another hoping that it'll make a difference to customers and that that feature isn't just another PR gizmo.
However, there was no 401k matching. No tuition reimbursement. There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real. Basically, if you couldn't market the perk to 20-somethings, they slashed it.
Meanwhile I'm told that my very existence screws over the poor working class police officers and firefighters, who make 80% of what I make but have job security and lifetime pensions awaiting for them. And they get paid for overtime.
While I absolutely feel like I'm privileged in many ways to work in tech, the industry has many incentives to make tech workers look more 'spoiled' than they are, and so they work their PR engines to do exactly that.
I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.
recently learned that a lot of places give employees incentives to leave positive reviews on glassdoor.. hopefully glassdoor doesn't go the same way as yelp
Free lunch doesn't get them anything - you already expect to be at work before and after the lunch hour.
Free dinner gets you to stay until it arrives (6:30, I'd bet) and probably afterwards.
I am a 20-something who was woken up every day at 1am for weeks to "handle emergencies" that didn't exist -- are you telling me the standard is compensating people for this? I did get the sense that if it cost the company meaningful amounts of money they would have let me change the alerting system so that only real emergencies woke me up, instead of "not your department"ing me.
EDIT: Realized I didn't address the question of whether it is "standard". I've heard that DevOps engineers have a bit of a compensation consideration (maybe $10-20k/year in the Bay Area where I live) for the on-call nature of their jobs, but I am sure that they are mostly paid enough to be exempt employees. This is totally anecdotal/second-hand and it would not surprise me if their pay is at parity or even worse than other software engineers.
Unfortunately the rather depressing trend seems to be towards shoving it all on devs and not paying them more then justifying the reasoning as "if you are the one being paged then you are incentivized to fix things.
Unfortunately, and this is what you are seeing, too often they don't give you the resources to fix things and you just end up in ops hell.
They get away with this because we (devs) have allowed ourselves to get screwed over because we chug the koolaid. We don't get overtime because for some reason we're exempt, this lets companies get away (financially) with crunch time caused by incompetent management. Oncall rotations which don't pay extra are just another offshoot of this.
I can't contain my ire at being woken up for phantom emergencies, though. That would be a cause for a new job, personally.
Oh and this pathetic low-life still has a badge and a gun. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/19/...
Yes. Also assuming that everyone who works in tech is a ".com millionaire", because either you worked at a startup and made millions in your stock options or you work at google and of course make at least $500k.
"But you love doing it! You love this tech stuff!" Sorry. Not if I have a solution of the top of my head. 30$ of help please.
Call me crazy, but when I see there's an on call rotation, I figure that's part of the work I have to do as a salaried and not hourly employee, and I calculate the extra work into my total compensations vs. time worked estimate.
I totally agree with everything else you're saying, though.
And put their life on the line, every call out. Never forget this.
But.
I am tired of the automatic assumption that police officers and fire fighters are to be lionized because they "risk their lives". It's true that there are police officers and firefighters and EMTs who work tough beats and have extremely dangerous lives. But by and large, these jobs are significantly less dangerous than many other jobs that pay less and don't come with the public respect of being a firefighter/PO/etc.
In NYC, for example, sanitation workers have higher rates of injury and death than police officers do by 2x[1]. Convenience store clerks and commercial fishermen also have much higher death and injury rates.
None of that means that we shouldn't respect and appreciate those who work hard to keep us safe. But it's also reasonable to recognize that these positions pay well and have excellent benefits relative to jobs with much higher risk and much lower social respect.
1. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-secr...
Just answering the original poster. Farming and construction are also dangerous and the risks, aside from random bad luck can be managed, while pay and conditions may vary. But that's not what was being discussed.
The OP was complaining about first responder over-time and pensions, while the most risk involved in well funded companies and startups is probably getting a paper cut. The distinction I draw is between the types of risk and reward being experienced.
Most programmers make about what they've always made, maybe less (adjusted for inflation). $120k/yr in 2001 is $160k/yr in 2015.
Keep shooting ourselves in the foot it is then. K. Carry on.
I wouldn't want to be doing anything else in my career and the tech press and media did little to influence or change it.
Netscape, then Google, then Digg, on to Facebook and Twitter, these were all early companies that got the press raving about how cool, how easy, how glamorous it was to work in startups and in tech. Yet at the end of the day, it's still solving mundane and sometimes really hard problems with you butt glued to the seat and writing a lot of code in a text editor.
I should also add that the biggest reward for me every day is solving a problem and finally getting that ah hah moment. It's not the foosball table or free lunch.
No career comes with a guarantee of job satisfaction, and very few come with much security. Less so in the tech industry, because tech itself is evolving quickly.
I'm a little disappointed that this reporter feels such a statement is newsworthy. To read this article, I would almost believe that its author doesn't believe in meritocracy or neo-liberalism, which is kind of bad faith, coming from The Economist.