People who don't earn much think they chose badly because they're not getting rich. People who chose jobs that pay well think they'd be happier in something more creative. People doing creative work wish they'd chosen something more stable. Practically everyone thinks they chose the wrong job. Most of them are right in the sense that they might actually be happier doing something else, but also most people could chose 50 different careers and still not find one that suits them.
Without wishing to go all "internet philosopher", none of us is introspective enough about what makes us truly happy to know what we actually want. We define "happiness" by looking at other people and being envious of what they have - if only we had what some other person has we'd not be miserable any more. But everyone is doing that. It doesn't work. Read some Michel de Montaigne or Immanuel Kant and figure out what you want out of life, and then get it on your own terms.
> By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.
Some context might be helpful. In that verse, god is literally cursing Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit. The author of genesis is not making some prosaic observation of human nature.
There may be some truth to the idea that work will always be work. But it certainly has nothing to do with a curse from a supernatural being for eating a forbidden fruit.
But if you look at what "eating the forbidden fruit" was meant to symbolise, i.e. self realisation, then it does speak to the point made by the first poster. Once you have theory of mind you realise that other people have it different experience than you do; some better some worse.
So then you could argue that happiness then comes from meta meta cognition; other people have it different from you, but you don't always realise the problems those others have. You come to the realisation that you can't control everything; you change what you can to make things better, and accept what you can't.
A lot of happiness thinking centers around focusing on achieving something, having the right job, “I’ll be happy when...”
But like that doesn’t work because we keep moving the goal post on ourselves. There will always be “one more thing” until I’m happy. Happiness is found in the journey to achieve these things.
Whenever people complain about their pay, like the author, I always ask them what they want to buy. Most people don't have an answer ready - they just believe in some general sense that they will be happier with more money. Sometimes they say stuff they could afford already, other times it's something that really requires time, rather than money.
I've not read any of their essays directly because I'm a frontend developer rather than a philosopher, but Sarah Bakewell's "How to live: A life of Montaigne" is a very good introduction to Montaigne's philosophy. I've only read parts of Critique of Pure Reason by Kant but it is fairly approachable. Most of what I know of philosophy is from things like https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
It's very, very important to note that the author is not a person who "doesn't earn much".
Looking at Figure 6 at https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... it looks like UKP 55k/year is around the 80th percentile for "professional occupations". The only groups that earn more than that on average (median? not clear) are various senior managers, doctors, lawyers, pilots, and train drivers (the latter surprised me). Being at 70k in two years would put the author -- a lowly programmer -- on a level with "information technology and telecommunications directors" (emphasis mine).
For whatever it's worth, the "finance and investment analysts and advisers" the author envies are listed at 37k, which is less than "programmers and software development professionals" at 44k.
The problem with looking at salary is that the fact you're in the 80th percentile doesn't mean much if everyone you know is in the 90th percentile - you're still going to feel like you're badly off.
Additionally, if you earn in the 80th percentile, you probably live in a high cost of living location, so your disposable income is not necessarily 80th percentile too.
Pay satisfaction is relative to your surrounding so if your pay is in the lower range of your peers/coworkers then you will feel badly paid no matter how much you earn relative to the general population.
I suspect he has an understanding of what his co-workers are paid at his company so he feels under paid.
I understand that the author isn't satisfied with their pay. But that doesn't mean that they are in fact paid badly. By any measure other than the author's feelings, they are paid pretty well.
He could probably go freelancing and earn a whole lot more.
I earned a lot more as freelancer when working in The Netherlands compared to permanent employee. And I feel in the UK it's probably much the same situation. In The Netherlands it's quite easy as freelancer to earn say 100.000 EUR a year and probably more. If you're a bit smart with taxes, you can have a very good standard of life, you'd be in the top 10% for sure.
And even better: just do this a few years, save money and then move to some country with lower standard of living. You could probably retire before reaching 40 years of age if you started freelancing in your early 30s and be careful with your spending (if your single). With a family (children) the situation would be a bit more complicated.
And yes, you could try to make some site or app to earn additional income outside of your job.
Yep, it is what I did (from the Netherlands) and it works well. I moved to South eu: quality of life, IMHO, is far higher even while it is cheap to live here, especially if you do not want to be in a popular city (which I never wanted). I moved when I was little over 30.
I don't like the headline. But the article does explain why he feels it's the wrong career choice for himself. I can understand many of the reasons he cited, but many can be refuted. For example he can double or triple his salary by moving to the USA and working for a FAANG company. He can also choose to work at companies that view programmers as a valuable resource than a cost center.
"moving to the US" is a very generic statement. For starters, one can't simply move but needs to fulfill the immigration requirements, one of which is employment which one has to first find.
So no, it's not as easy as you may make it sound like.
People, when picking a career in college, still seem to believe that you can have a 9-5 job for life. I know quite a few university bank employees (ubs, Barclay's, etc) before and/or now still in London who are not programmers; sure they make more, faster after uni, but they work stupid hours. And get kicked fast if they kick up a fuss.
The expectation that things are like what you were told by parents or grandparents maybe needs adjusting. You are not hireable with this attitude, it is not a programmer-only problem.
I tend to agree, but there's been two competing posts on HN today, one about attracting developers like ants to honey with exciting new technology and the other about avoiding hype and delivering products with stable tech.
If i were a lawyer, I'd go to school once, and reap benefit form that education as an assets and build on it with experience.
Software is not like that. Yes school is an asset, but it dates, and so does experience when the market moves constantly.
The problem is that there are a lot of technologies that are simply insufficient or bad. jquery is critically insufficient. A lot of one way databinding frameworks are merely insufficient. The reason why react and the VDOM won is that it's literally just client side html rendering with the exact same flow as a server side html template. VDOM is merely an implementation detail that makes this type of client side rendering efficient enough that you can trigger it all the time, no matter how trivial the interaction is.
Although I personally dislike React itself and rather use preact I consider the API itself to be pretty solid and definitively worthy of building a career on top of it that would last at least 10 years. Above a certain level of sufficiency any change in framework/language is just churn.
I consider PHP to be critically insufficient because you have to force people to learn Lavarel otherwise they get the stupid idea of writing an old school apache PHP app. It also has some stupid warts that provide no value. Overall it's not meeting the level of quality necessary to build a career on top of it. The only benefit it provides is that once you learn all the warts its merely ok.
Java is also insufficient because it is missing very simple features. The foundation is solid but the details just aren't there. Getters and Setters shouldn't be a thing. They only exist to please certain frameworks and some theoretical futureproofing. Replace them with properties (that automatically generate getters and setters) and end the discussion right there. It's really sad how much effort it is to write a small data class in Java. I have a small project where I chose to use groovy simply because I had to define 30 data classes. With Java 50% of the codebase would be getters and setters to please the serialization library. Groovy is mature but it's not exactly popular, since people who don't want to use it are forced to use it (Gradle).
The software industry isn't mature. That's the reality. There are lots of established but insufficient solutions. There are lots of sufficient but not established solutions. React is right in the sweet spot. PHP is clearly insufficient. Java is insufficient but close. Modern languages and frameworks rarely get traction and are replaced all the time. Groovy is something that you could in theory build a whole career on but the jobs aren't there.
Await with promises vs monadic promises is also a point of contention. The only thing that everyone agrees on is that raw callsbacks should be wrapped in a promise or future, but whether a promise is supposed to be used as a monad (chain of .then calls) or whether its supposed to be used via special compiler support is still open. I honestly don't know. I would go with await because C# has adopted it with great success but it's also not something that can just be added to an existing language without rebuilding the entire ecosystem and thus causing it to be a bad career choice.
You see; I am also confused by this. The author chooses to work for free, and yet complains about his pay relative to the amount of time he must spend doing cognitively taxing work.
In my 10 years as a professional software engineer I have seen this same thing happen time and time again. My colleagues devalue themselves constantly by working for free.
If you earn $80k a year as an engineer, you rate is roughly $38.46 per hour if you work 2080 hours in the year. Let's say you opt to work an extra 30 minutes a day (very often the case for many devs who work into their lunch break); that equates to an extra 130 hours of work per year for free. So what you're actually doing is earning $80k a year for 2210 hours, or $36.19 per hour. That's roughly ~6% less pay for your time for working an extra 30min a day. Now imagine what happens when you work those extra 30mins + a few weekends here and there. The total percentage of your salary drops significantly as a result.
I'm sure there's a small section of society for whom this statement is true, but I think most people of my generation in the UK take the American view that it's the money that counts. There are probably more extremely high-paid banking and lawyer jobs in the UK than there are programming jobs though
I agree with the article's author. He should definitely go to another field, programming is not for everybody. You need passion in the first place and then you need the will to see through with the passion. From his rant he seems to lack both.
I don’t agree. I am very passionated about programming and love learning about new stuff. But I can understand you could feel trapped. For example, when you have kids and are in a demanding job, or are in any other way responsible for other things, there are only so many hours in a day!
So often a programmer’s merits seems to be measured by what they do outside their working hours. Do you value an accountant on the work they do during the weekend?
I have 2 kids and I do freelancing for 13 years now. My wife goes to work and I often talk to clients while my kids are also doing online school nowadays. I don't feel trapped at all, on the contrary I have total freedom. Like I said, programming is not for everyone, who feels trapped should change fields.
I can certainly sympathyse with those vibes, when I was just starting I was really happy to spend extra time outside work, was happy to see all the new frameworks,etc.
Now its all starting to rub me the wrong way, I thibk the culture we have around it is unhealthy
I initially thought this article was satire - poking fun at how easy programmers really have it on balance. But no, it’s just a contentless, envy fuelled moan from a position of privilege.
Take a step out of the FAANG-SV-HN salary distortion field for a moment, and the London financial one too for the matter, you will clearly see that 55k is a great salary in the UK. Far more than the average.
If you picked a career that you don’t innately enjoy because you thought it would make you rich, and it’s not, then that’s on you.
I think that misses the OP’s point. They point to the lack on “innate” or intrinsic value in the job. In other words, the article seems to be selecting the wrong metric in determining a career choice that is meant to maximize happiness
Indeed; £55k is well over median UK income. I’m quite a senior software engineer in the UK and I don’t earn anything like that — forget about £70k! That’s because I don’t work in finance and I’m fine with that. The hedonistic treadmill is not worth getting on, imo.
Yeah London is kinda the outlier with this. Give me that pay in say Cardiff and I wouldn't really have anything to complain about money wise. I could be happy slowly getting pay rises collecting my mountain of gold.
Edit: But of we look at the title of the site I think we can see what the post is actually about
Exactly, I'm currently at 56k and while I'm looking at getting paid more because there is room to do so it's fascinating to me that this person who is in top 10% in term of income think they are doing a job that pays badly...
£55k is not a great salary in the UK for a middle class professional with a degree and >5 years of experience.
Lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, front line sales, and even some nurses earn comfortably more than that - never mind MPs, many of whom are both clueless and useless and still manage to earn more than £80k base before expenses.
Some blue collar workers - mostly trades - can also earn a lot more, especially for contract or high-availability work.
Of course it's not a great salary compared to someone who works a checkout, stocks shelves, or talks to customers on the phone.
But qualifications and experience should matter at least a little.
How quickly does the mind go from "my career is stagnating and finding better jobs can be hard" to "this is the worst choice of career". One of them is a valid concern, the other is a gross exaggeration that people who actually have bad jobs would laugh at.
I worked in finance for 5 years, passed all 3 CFA exams, and was ready to start studying for the GMAT to get in a top MBA school. Decided to take a hard right and learn programming instead.
I loved studying finance, but didn't like working finance jobs. Finance is getting more automated anyways, here's an excerpt from the front office salary link that's in the OP's article:
> As banks try to automate as much as they can, and as trading takes place electronically using computer algorithms, human beings are becoming far less plentiful in the front office. Goldman Sachs, for example, famously replaced the 600 equities traders it had in the year 2000 with electronic trading systems. Now, Goldman says it only has two actual human traders left.
I love working with code. Finance spreadsheets were a bore for me. Complex Scala codebases are a delight.
Programming has been an awesome career for me and the flexibility has enabled me to live a completely different life.
I'm feeling kinda weird about this. Programming is a craft, it's specific set of skills which enables you to develop computer software. If your intent is to sell your skill eg. time to employer then you are probably never going to be "rich". I think that software development have one of the lowest financial barriers to go into own business even as a freelancer. This attitude makes author think that it's his "worst choice". Obviously not the fact that he have clearly above the average salary.
I can easily see how someone could end up in such a mental trap despite having chosen a career that is arguably one of the best paid one for something that's not requiring a top level education.
My first employer was a service company selling programmers to big companies to do routine maintenance and evolution job. They would staff you in really boring departments, doing really uninteresting job, and would happily keep you in that same situation for years if the client was ready to pay. I could have stayed there, learning nothing, being employed to the minimum of my abilities, and wake up ten years later once the end customer didn't have any need for that particular skill anymore.
It's one of the most dangerous situation to be in, as a developer. You feel comfortable, you earn a decent pay, and then wake up one day in a state of crisis, realizing you're now completely obsolete and on a precarious situation.
Luckily for me, people close to me had warned me of that kind of trap very early, and so I stayed there only for a year then moved on to a start up (where i could work on great tech and great problems with great people, and being paid for that).
In some countries is one of the safest way to get a job. Trying other careers may get you more free time, but it could be too much free time because you can't get a job at all. I'm not sure about if its a good long term strategy, but you need to survive the present to reach the future.
And you can get outdated in other careers too, there are a lot of advancements all over the field, and a lot of it is related to IT (i.e. data processing).
There are ways to make programming an excellent career. I've found quite a few of them - some more lucrative than others, and some more creative than others. I don't think author of this article is on their way to finding any of them.
I never got into this career for its earning potential, but because I just always loved programming. Somehow I've ended up in a FAANG making a lot of money, but the actual "programming" (writing code) portion of my job is small. I feel like there's some paradox there, but really, I just want to complain on the Internet. If you asked me at 10 what I wanted to be when I grew up it was "computer programmer" and here I am, though I took a very zig-zagged path to get there (no degree, and half a philosophy BA for example). And I'm living far from where I grew up and my parents and brother, because this is where the work is. etc.
So I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for this article. I kind of understand the tone, but frankly, my dad was a machinist, another kind of skilled labour job and until he got a job teaching it, he was miserable and mistreated and I got to see, growing up, what real blue collar sweatshop work was like and what real job dissatisfaction, underpay, severe long term unemployment, etc. was like.
The money I make is nice now, and I have a nice life, though I feel trapped. Maybe I can retire early and make skis and walk in the woods with my dog more.
That article is very specific to the author's case, and to be sincere, it seems to be most because of the author's fault than the career he chose. He says coders are badly paid and it is getting worse but this is not true for many regions and niches.
For example, a backend Java Programmer specialized in Commerce Platforms (Hybris, SFCC, etc) earns very well in Latam because naturally after the pandemic there is a rush after the online channel and we have a shortage of professionals. I'm sure the same just applies to different programming areas and regions around the globe.
Another great advantage of the coder profession is that you can do it from anywhere in the world, so if you make the effort of learning which country/job pays the best (and accept english speaking coders) you can live in a place with low living costs earning a very decent salary (I mean, director level salary). I met many coders in Brazil that work for companies in the US and earn 5x what a local company would pay for the same job/skill.
So it is just a matter of better exploring the options you have and lose the neighborhood job mindset. It's not the career it's you.
Exactly! Here in Mexico having a programming career is guaranteed to give you a good income an QoL. So much that in the past 5 years we've had lots of lawyers, accountants, designers and people from other backgrounds fall for the developer bootcamps
If you’re a programmer and tired of being a cost center then work at a company where software is the product not a cost of doing business. Then you’ll find the company is focused on growing you and your team instead of trying to minimize your effect on the bottom line.
Programming is a cost center even at a software company. It's a form of production. The goal is to reduce its cost while increasing quality and quantity.
Programmers don't like to hear this but what the software designers do is what costumers ultimately see and pay for. For the most part is what differentiates one software package from another with in a group type.
£70k ($92k) seems like a pretty good salary to me? Probably quite a bit more than median income in both the US and UK, no? Doesn't seem like the worst choice of career even as experienced by OP, if we're talking about that in terms of income, which the OP largely is.
While the center of the short essay on it's surface is about income, I suspect, maybe, the real dissatifaction is that the author simply doesn't enjoy their job on the day-to-day, they find it unpleasant?
£55k is average for someone in the South outside of London. In London you can add £20k to that, and maybe another £10k in the City. (At least you could until recently.)
The answer is contract work. If someone can dodge IR35 rules and call themselves a "consultant" or a "solutions architect" they'll earn a lot more for almost identical work, with the useful option to leave gracefully if a project is toxic and on fire.
The other answer is to leave the UK. Engineering jobs pay much better in some EU countries, and engineering gets a lot more respect as a profession.
Engineering jobs pay much better in some EU countries
Which ones? £55k is a pretty decent salary ( 75-85k is a very high salary) for a developer in basically all EU countries I've looked at.
engineering gets a lot more respect as a profession.
But only if you are an actual engineer. Developers without the degree aren't, in my experience, given much more 'respect' outside the UK compared to the UK.
what problem are you solving? no, you cant get rich by coding as an employee, anywhere. you can try to sweat your balls as a contractor + do tax magic and have a 'decent' living, or start a company and make a product - very risky.
as job coders are 21st century factory workers, its not on lawyer/doctor/accountant level.
> Fair enough, but this proves the author's point. Development used to be on such a level and has steadily declined.
I agree, I know a few "old timers" and they seem to have it better in the early days. I guess this is the case with all human activity, over time it becomes optimized as know-how spreads to more people.
The best professions long term are those where gate keeping is employed (license, nepotism, high creativity, people able to perform at top 1%), short term profession gets a boost from being "the new thing", which programing is not anymore.
I work in the exact same industry as him and earn considerably more. As always coding jobs are not fungible and finance coding jobs are not fungible either (a .net back office programmer is not going to earn the same as a front office quant dev doing C++).
I should know, I worked my ass off to transition from one to the other via a startup (which I sold shares in for $500k) and tech firm.
I didn't just accept my initial job was the end of my career (my first job I was on £19k, first finance job £24k or so), I made things happen in spite of being set back massively due to serious issues at uni which was not my fault (long story).
So unfortunately my sympathy is zero. If you don't like it, work at changing it, or shut up.
Also the idea that programming is not in demand is truly laughable. I interviewed 200+ people throughout my career. Trust me the issue is not on the demand side.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadWithout wishing to go all "internet philosopher", none of us is introspective enough about what makes us truly happy to know what we actually want. We define "happiness" by looking at other people and being envious of what they have - if only we had what some other person has we'd not be miserable any more. But everyone is doing that. It doesn't work. Read some Michel de Montaigne or Immanuel Kant and figure out what you want out of life, and then get it on your own terms.
> By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.
In other words, work will always be work.
There may be some truth to the idea that work will always be work. But it certainly has nothing to do with a curse from a supernatural being for eating a forbidden fruit.
So then you could argue that happiness then comes from meta meta cognition; other people have it different from you, but you don't always realise the problems those others have. You come to the realisation that you can't control everything; you change what you can to make things better, and accept what you can't.
But like that doesn’t work because we keep moving the goal post on ourselves. There will always be “one more thing” until I’m happy. Happiness is found in the journey to achieve these things.
It's very, very important to note that the author is not a person who "doesn't earn much".
Looking at Figure 6 at https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor... it looks like UKP 55k/year is around the 80th percentile for "professional occupations". The only groups that earn more than that on average (median? not clear) are various senior managers, doctors, lawyers, pilots, and train drivers (the latter surprised me). Being at 70k in two years would put the author -- a lowly programmer -- on a level with "information technology and telecommunications directors" (emphasis mine).
For whatever it's worth, the "finance and investment analysts and advisers" the author envies are listed at 37k, which is less than "programmers and software development professionals" at 44k.
I suspect he has an understanding of what his co-workers are paid at his company so he feels under paid.
I am a programmer and sometimes think of what else I could have done.
I remind myself I don’t hate my day to day, and often enjoy it.
I remind myself that many other careers are available to me as a hobby since I can afford cameras, paint, whatever. I also have the time to do it.
Many of the other careers don’t afford this.
Get some hobbies! They can be really great. Reading, of course, can be one of them. Here's a good list to try out:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/hobbies-for-men/
I earned a lot more as freelancer when working in The Netherlands compared to permanent employee. And I feel in the UK it's probably much the same situation. In The Netherlands it's quite easy as freelancer to earn say 100.000 EUR a year and probably more. If you're a bit smart with taxes, you can have a very good standard of life, you'd be in the top 10% for sure.
And even better: just do this a few years, save money and then move to some country with lower standard of living. You could probably retire before reaching 40 years of age if you started freelancing in your early 30s and be careful with your spending (if your single). With a family (children) the situation would be a bit more complicated.
And yes, you could try to make some site or app to earn additional income outside of your job.
So no, it's not as easy as you may make it sound like.
I agree that the author isn't saying anything much, but "just work somewhere else" also isn't a very strong point.
I would never hire him.
The expectation that things are like what you were told by parents or grandparents maybe needs adjusting. You are not hireable with this attitude, it is not a programmer-only problem.
If i were a lawyer, I'd go to school once, and reap benefit form that education as an assets and build on it with experience. Software is not like that. Yes school is an asset, but it dates, and so does experience when the market moves constantly.
Again I'm not complaining, but it's a thing.
Although I personally dislike React itself and rather use preact I consider the API itself to be pretty solid and definitively worthy of building a career on top of it that would last at least 10 years. Above a certain level of sufficiency any change in framework/language is just churn.
I consider PHP to be critically insufficient because you have to force people to learn Lavarel otherwise they get the stupid idea of writing an old school apache PHP app. It also has some stupid warts that provide no value. Overall it's not meeting the level of quality necessary to build a career on top of it. The only benefit it provides is that once you learn all the warts its merely ok.
Java is also insufficient because it is missing very simple features. The foundation is solid but the details just aren't there. Getters and Setters shouldn't be a thing. They only exist to please certain frameworks and some theoretical futureproofing. Replace them with properties (that automatically generate getters and setters) and end the discussion right there. It's really sad how much effort it is to write a small data class in Java. I have a small project where I chose to use groovy simply because I had to define 30 data classes. With Java 50% of the codebase would be getters and setters to please the serialization library. Groovy is mature but it's not exactly popular, since people who don't want to use it are forced to use it (Gradle).
The software industry isn't mature. That's the reality. There are lots of established but insufficient solutions. There are lots of sufficient but not established solutions. React is right in the sweet spot. PHP is clearly insufficient. Java is insufficient but close. Modern languages and frameworks rarely get traction and are replaced all the time. Groovy is something that you could in theory build a whole career on but the jobs aren't there.
Await with promises vs monadic promises is also a point of contention. The only thing that everyone agrees on is that raw callsbacks should be wrapped in a promise or future, but whether a promise is supposed to be used as a monad (chain of .then calls) or whether its supposed to be used via special compiler support is still open. I honestly don't know. I would go with await because C# has adopted it with great success but it's also not something that can just be added to an existing language without rebuilding the entire ecosystem and thus causing it to be a bad career choice.
This industry is even fuller of unemphatic know-it-alls quick to judgement than disillusioned programmers.
Have others encountered this? I have not but I do wonder if the hiring process is becoming more demanding / time consuming.
Maybe the author needs a coach or needs to network more.
In my 10 years as a professional software engineer I have seen this same thing happen time and time again. My colleagues devalue themselves constantly by working for free.
If you earn $80k a year as an engineer, you rate is roughly $38.46 per hour if you work 2080 hours in the year. Let's say you opt to work an extra 30 minutes a day (very often the case for many devs who work into their lunch break); that equates to an extra 130 hours of work per year for free. So what you're actually doing is earning $80k a year for 2210 hours, or $36.19 per hour. That's roughly ~6% less pay for your time for working an extra 30min a day. Now imagine what happens when you work those extra 30mins + a few weekends here and there. The total percentage of your salary drops significantly as a result.
Say no. Don't work for free.
It seems like generally speaking, science and engineering lacks prestige over there compared to being a lawyer or banker?
Possibly due to the “two cultures” problem combined with the English class system.
I have no idea if this is accurate or not, and the English class system is pretty opaque to me.
I honestly don’t know but it seems like some kind of different attitude towards technical work could be one explanation.
So often a programmer’s merits seems to be measured by what they do outside their working hours. Do you value an accountant on the work they do during the weekend?
Now its all starting to rub me the wrong way, I thibk the culture we have around it is unhealthy
Take a step out of the FAANG-SV-HN salary distortion field for a moment, and the London financial one too for the matter, you will clearly see that 55k is a great salary in the UK. Far more than the average.
If you picked a career that you don’t innately enjoy because you thought it would make you rich, and it’s not, then that’s on you.
Edit: But of we look at the title of the site I think we can see what the post is actually about
Lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, front line sales, and even some nurses earn comfortably more than that - never mind MPs, many of whom are both clueless and useless and still manage to earn more than £80k base before expenses.
Some blue collar workers - mostly trades - can also earn a lot more, especially for contract or high-availability work.
Of course it's not a great salary compared to someone who works a checkout, stocks shelves, or talks to customers on the phone.
But qualifications and experience should matter at least a little.
Every career has underdogs, even presidents.
I loved studying finance, but didn't like working finance jobs. Finance is getting more automated anyways, here's an excerpt from the front office salary link that's in the OP's article:
> As banks try to automate as much as they can, and as trading takes place electronically using computer algorithms, human beings are becoming far less plentiful in the front office. Goldman Sachs, for example, famously replaced the 600 equities traders it had in the year 2000 with electronic trading systems. Now, Goldman says it only has two actual human traders left.
I love working with code. Finance spreadsheets were a bore for me. Complex Scala codebases are a delight.
Programming has been an awesome career for me and the flexibility has enabled me to live a completely different life.
Even if he might have over-simplified things, the bottom line is true.
My first employer was a service company selling programmers to big companies to do routine maintenance and evolution job. They would staff you in really boring departments, doing really uninteresting job, and would happily keep you in that same situation for years if the client was ready to pay. I could have stayed there, learning nothing, being employed to the minimum of my abilities, and wake up ten years later once the end customer didn't have any need for that particular skill anymore.
It's one of the most dangerous situation to be in, as a developer. You feel comfortable, you earn a decent pay, and then wake up one day in a state of crisis, realizing you're now completely obsolete and on a precarious situation.
Luckily for me, people close to me had warned me of that kind of trap very early, and so I stayed there only for a year then moved on to a start up (where i could work on great tech and great problems with great people, and being paid for that).
happily keep you === happily stay
And you can get outdated in other careers too, there are a lot of advancements all over the field, and a lot of it is related to IT (i.e. data processing).
So I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for this article. I kind of understand the tone, but frankly, my dad was a machinist, another kind of skilled labour job and until he got a job teaching it, he was miserable and mistreated and I got to see, growing up, what real blue collar sweatshop work was like and what real job dissatisfaction, underpay, severe long term unemployment, etc. was like.
The money I make is nice now, and I have a nice life, though I feel trapped. Maybe I can retire early and make skis and walk in the woods with my dog more.
Programmers don't like to hear this but what the software designers do is what costumers ultimately see and pay for. For the most part is what differentiates one software package from another with in a group type.
While the center of the short essay on it's surface is about income, I suspect, maybe, the real dissatifaction is that the author simply doesn't enjoy their job on the day-to-day, they find it unpleasant?
The answer is contract work. If someone can dodge IR35 rules and call themselves a "consultant" or a "solutions architect" they'll earn a lot more for almost identical work, with the useful option to leave gracefully if a project is toxic and on fire.
The other answer is to leave the UK. Engineering jobs pay much better in some EU countries, and engineering gets a lot more respect as a profession.
Which ones? £55k is a pretty decent salary ( 75-85k is a very high salary) for a developer in basically all EU countries I've looked at.
engineering gets a lot more respect as a profession.
But only if you are an actual engineer. Developers without the degree aren't, in my experience, given much more 'respect' outside the UK compared to the UK.
In which EU countries do you earn a lot more than EUR 64,000 on average?
Germany and Ireland are the same as the UK
https://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...
https://www.payscale.com/research/IE/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...
Denmark appears to be slightly higher but Denmark is also more expensive than the UK.
Overall far from the alleged big difference.
one thing is what is on payscale another is what you see on the payslip, 60k+ in DE is not hard to get for senior dev
And as for Germany, it shouldn't be 60+, but rather 80+ to match the expectation of being significantly more.
The suggestion of moving simply is flawed.
what problem are you solving? no, you cant get rich by coding as an employee, anywhere. you can try to sweat your balls as a contractor + do tax magic and have a 'decent' living, or start a company and make a product - very risky.
as job coders are 21st century factory workers, its not on lawyer/doctor/accountant level.
> as job coders are 21st century factory workers, its not on lawyer/doctor/accountant level.
Fair enough, but this proves the author's point. Development used to be on such a level and has steadily declined.
I agree, I know a few "old timers" and they seem to have it better in the early days. I guess this is the case with all human activity, over time it becomes optimized as know-how spreads to more people.
The best professions long term are those where gate keeping is employed (license, nepotism, high creativity, people able to perform at top 1%), short term profession gets a boost from being "the new thing", which programing is not anymore.
I should know, I worked my ass off to transition from one to the other via a startup (which I sold shares in for $500k) and tech firm.
I didn't just accept my initial job was the end of my career (my first job I was on £19k, first finance job £24k or so), I made things happen in spite of being set back massively due to serious issues at uni which was not my fault (long story).
So unfortunately my sympathy is zero. If you don't like it, work at changing it, or shut up.
Also the idea that programming is not in demand is truly laughable. I interviewed 200+ people throughout my career. Trust me the issue is not on the demand side.