If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?

China was an inferior student of the class, he used to get F for his final exams, but now he has improved to C or may be B, Admittedly he has been improving really fast, but this is because he was so bad that he had a large room to improve. How hard to improve from A to A+?

You mentioned that Chinese leaders are engineers, that's true. But I can tell you why, because 25 years ago, there was no such thing called "finance" in China. Did they have it in the Soviet Union? North Korea? Cuba? Also, in a country without a real legal system, why would people want to be a lawyer?

Those Chinese leaders became leaders, not because they are excellent engineers, but because they have connections. In fact, I seriously doubt how they got their engineering degrees.

I agree with you that engineers should play more role in politics and government. I'm willing to see more presidents with engineering backgrounds.

In China, people have the impression that engineering students are the smartest, whereas in the U.S. people think smartest student go to law school.

Everything is boring when you don't understand its meaning. A good lawyer can easily figure out what is important in a legal document, and make smart decisions based on it.

I don't think legal language is as unpleasant to lawyers as it is to people without legal training and experience.

I keep reading this again and again. A doctor, lawyer, or management is not necessarily smarter than a programmer. They have to work longer before they can start practicing their profession but that doesn't make them smarter.

I'm more highly trained, and engage in more ongoing training than any of them. All of these professions involve ongoing training, though for lawyers and judges, once they get their degree the need drops dramatically. In fact, speaking of these people I know myself, they all have practices that are pretty routine with each case being very much like the others.

In my experience, as a software developer, I am constantly having to learn new areas of expertise. For instance, NoSQL has become relevant in recent years, and on previous jobs I had to learn the intricacies of fairly arcane businesses. My lawyer and doctor friends don't do this level of continuing education.

Also, you seem to be debating a point I'm not making. I never said it wasn't risky or expensive to go into those careers, in fact, that is part of the point I made: In both cases there are gateway organizations and laws that exclude people from the practice, preventing competition in salaries.

I don't know where you can get a good programming job if you don't even have a university degree. You can certainly freelance, but then there are no guarantees.

The more frequently picture is that, to get a really good job (at Google, for example) you frequently need a MSc, and not few software engineers have a PhD too.

My guess is that the profession would become a lot more attractive to the average kid that is very smart, but doesn't have an interest in law or medicine. Other guesses are that security would become absurdly good in general, and a lot of tools would be perfected.

Instead, the importance is placed on loving programming, because you're going to have to love figuring out what you need to be educated in and love providing for that education out of pocket, and with no credentials to show for it. So you're on an equal playing field with anybody off the street when dealing with an HR department, and at a disadvantage against a CS graduate who may not be able to program to save his/her life if you didn't go to school to learn the math, but simply learned your profession.

To have a capital-p Programming educational track like Law or Medicine could really be a boon for the profession in most ways in my opinion. Could somebody tell me where the Perl class is? Because I can't seem to find it or get student loans to cover it.

The one thing that I think would be problematic would be an injury to Free/Open Source software, because practitioners wouldn't feel the necessity to put that evidence out there that they actually can program, like surgeons don't feel like they have to stream over the web live operations they are doing for free.

And this is how crap code comes to be.

And of course there are exceptions, but from what I've seen it seems like there are more opportunities for programmers to bring personal creativity to their work than doctors and lawyers, just because the field is less established and there are more open questions.

A Bachelors degree does not compare to medical school + residency (they also have to get a bachelor's before starting those two). While you're making money for 8 years at a comfortable 9-6, they're spending over 100k to train themselves and performing physically and mentally exhausting work.

Also, in the medical profession, those in primary care don't make the huge amounts you posted - many are below 200k, some far below. It's the specialists that you're thinking of.

Actually it's not. Name calling would be if I called you an entitled whiner. There's a difference between attacking your argument and attacking you. (And if we're sticking to the taxonomy, that part of my comment would be DH2, "responding to tone".)

Evidence?

That was the crux of my post. Programmers do get filthy rich (usually via starting tech companies). You're right that at that point they're not programming, but that's because programming in isolation has limited economic value. Using the skills one acquires as a programmer and aiming them at value creation has created a large chunk of America's billionaires. And while that phenomenon is not unique to programming in the least -- in fact, it holds across almost any skilled trade (i.e. soft-skills begin to dominate hard-skills) -- the upper bound is demonstrably higher for programming (as evidenced by the list of richest Americans) than it is for almost any field.

American Xs are paid better than non-American Xs because America has a high GDP per capita

No, I meant relative to GDP per capita. I live in Germany where programmer salaries are about 50% above the GDP per capita, whereas in the US it's about 75%. From what I've gathered, in the UK, it's closer to 25%.

Citation?

It's nigh on impossible to measure "respect" in some sort of meaningful way, but here's a list from a couple seconds of Googling on the "Best Jobs in America":

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/2010/full_l...

  1: Software Architect
  7: Database Administrator
  18: Software Engineering / Development Director
  20: Information Technology Manager
  21: Telecommunications Network Engineer
  24: Network Operations Project Manager
  26: Information Technology Business Analyst
  30: Test Software Development Engineer
  31: Information Technology Network Engineer
  33: Information Technology Program Manager
  38: Applications Engineer

One of the things that's somewhat endemic to your case is shifting back and forth between comparing the median with the top tier. Average doctors, bankers and lawyers aren't making the salaries you suggested. Median programmers aren't particularly impressive.

Let's split it out:

Elite programmers do things like start software companies, work at corporate research labs, work in financial engineering or work on high-profile open source projects. Those folks command respect and have high earning potential. (Though interestingly, among the elite of these groups, programmers probably have the lowest percentage of completed formal training.)

Elite investment bankers are measured heavily on their returns and a large portion of their compensation is bonuses. Elite lawyers are measured on their returns (wins) and compensated to a significant extent relative to their non-legal social skills (i.e. their network).

Median programmers write intellectually trivial code that solves uninteresting problems. Training is optional and there are virtually no systematic hurdles to cross to enter the trade. They still make relatively high salaries relative to societal norms.

Median lawyers work on intellectually trivial cases. Formal training and certification is required and compensation is relatively high, but nothing that will generate notable wealth. Median investment bankers (my father would have been in said category) mostly convince a handful of clients they've been given by their organization to invest in a 90% cook...

You could say that we deserve higher salaries but in my opinion the free market works perfectly there. And in fact, the same applies to respect. It's not something you can force, people respect those who earn their respect. It's not adjusted for IQ, skills, worked hours etc.

The actuarial profession is protected here, and fuck does that make it difficult to get a decent actuary who can also program.

True, you can't do that now. But going back to what he says about the industrial era of America, you could do that in an earlier age. The software industry and culture is only in its infancy in America.

"""But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

"""This software is the work of 260 women and men based in an anonymous office building across the street from the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas, southeast of Houston. They work for the "on-board shuttle group," a branch of Lockheed Martin Corps space mission systems division, and their prowess is world renowned: the shuttle software group is one of just four outfits in the world to win the coveted Level 5 ranking of the federal governments Software Engineering Institute (SEI) a measure of the sophistication and reliability of the way they do their work. In fact, the SEI based it standards in part from watching the on-board shuttle group do its work."""

Perhaps change the law to make companies legally liable for software quality and losses arising from it. Even require software to meet a certain SEI ranking, depending on the industry. Of course you need a phase in process. Eventually, salaries for software workers would rise.

Guys, Google is a top paid company in a top paid part of one of the richest countries in the world! Stop throwing around 6-figure salaries (in US dollars, no less).

I can attest to the fact that in Europe, programmers have respect on the level of assembly line workers. By Europe I mean countries from UK to Belgium to Czech to Romania. It's an ok job, you get paid some money, or even good money if you're skilled and know the right people. But your parents would much prefer you picked a respectable profession, like a doctor or a lawyer.

The reason I see for this is that IT is the wild-wild-west free market at the moment. That's why it's so successful, disruptive, productive and generally awesome. And why it scares parents. But it's also filled with wide-eyed, passionate kids who were so busy fighting each other and comparing e-penises that they didn't even notice when the old hands commoditized them. Remember, revolutions eat their own children.

Still, I am very much against introducing unions and regulations to artificially limit the market. The last paragraph of the original post is spot-on. The only way to gain respect is not to cry for it, but to realize your value and hold your head high. Sadly, programmers as a community seem to have already lost that battle.

I've gotten much better about charging rates I'm comfortable with, and finding clients that a) can afford it and b) find value in what I do at those rates. It would actually be nicer to do 'value-based' pricing, vs hourly, but it's not something that both parties are usually able to agree on. Unless you know a particular industry well, it may be hard to understand the full value of the work you do. Even then, the company may much prefer to pay hourly or much lower rates, simply because they can probably find someone else to do it.

With medical and legal professions, the licensing/regulation creates a large barrier to entry, and people have to go to those professionals for certain tasks. You can represent yourself in court, for example, but it's often frowned on, but you generally can't prescribe yourself your own medication. With software, no licensing/regulation exists, so there's generally a much broader range of skills and value in the marketplace, which dilutes the value perception many people have.

Agreed on the age thing. As long as there's a youth-obsessed focus in the software world (and I think it's done just as much by us inside than by the outside world) it'll be hard to get the respect we'd like as a profession, simply because most people don't treat it as a career. Would you rather use a 22 year old lawyer, or a 52 year old lawyer? How about a 22 year old developer vs a 52 year old developer? :)

There always exists a context where a given person is on the low end of the totem pole. You can almost always shift the goal-posts by moving around within society to find a place where you're a relative dunce. It seems totally plausible to me that programmers aren't at the top of the food-chain in positions in non-software companies.

But if you go out into the broader world ... the world where my brother works at Walgreens and my sister is a tour guide at the zoo, where my best friend just got fired and is about to move back in with her mom, my grandfather sold tractors and my mom is an elementary school teacher ... in that world being a computer programmer is a respected trade.

I feel like you zoomed out some, but if you zoom out even further, all of the sudden being a programmer is respected again. You're right that we orientate ourselves relative to our peers and that's the lens that we see the world through, but the broader world isn't all white-collar knowledge-workers.

As a somewhat disconnected point, and this probably partially owing to the fact that most of my professional experience is in Europe, being a 30-something programmer here is totally normal. In fact, I'm 31 and most of the programmers I've worked with have been older than me. The median age seems to be more 35-ish, with a lot of people still working in normal programming positions into their 40s and 50s. The distribution here more seems to follow the pattern of there simply being a lot more people that started programming in the 90s or 2000s than in the 70s or 80s rather than a particularly strong age bias against programmers.

I've also not experienced the total lack of interest in programming. Lots of my friends -- most of who are non-technical -- ask questions about it. I suspect part of the problem may simply be that a lot of programmers aren't particularly good communicators.

What saddens me is that it happens inside the industry too. Too many times I have seen and talked to programmers who seem to consider themselves 'glorified janitors'. If you mention anything science/tech/IT-related outside of 09:00-17:00 period, you'll get shunned for being a geek. I say, WTF? I respect people who came to programming 'for the money' rather than because of being interested, however I consider disrespectfully discarding science/tech/IT stories while being too happy to discuss tourism, sports and cooking as a sign of mental limitation and general lack of respect to other people.

</rant>

It's worse than that. Even in the tech sector, the situation you describe sometimes happens. I have yet to fully analyze that kind of situation, but i've already come with some criteria that might help identify such environments.

What is sad is that it's merely a reflect of the mainstreams governance models at wide scale (and only worse: democracy is even less frequent in companies than in countries...), which have proven to be poor, and will prove to be catastrophic in a near future.

Of course in the real world things happen on a continuous scale, but if by bad luck the environment you're in exactly fit below exacerbate description, run!

1. A strictly tree like, military like hierarchy, ruling everything in strict tree order regardless of its a tech, hr, or other issue. This is one of the most effective way to waste talent and to take non optimal decisions (and not even near to optimal) -- add not taking into account bottom-up proposals if you want the perfect mix to achieve a high level of ineffectiveness.

2. The hierarchical tree is strict enough so that programmers typically can't even be spontaneously inspired by new ideas, which often is not enough to kill a business, but just to impede it, so sadly the situation might persist.

3. Each programmer is considered as a "just another programmer" in the company, regardless of achievement, knowledge, skill. The paradoxical part is that does not mean that individual requests are not done to the good people when needed, but it looks like not much people would recognize that when they have no question. Improvements in achievement, knowledge, skill are neither fully exploited and often not rewarded at all, directly leading to a high turnover.

4. Small valorisation of tech realization for those who actually do them, regardless at which level (that can go as far as considering programming mainly as a cost center that needs to be beaten into submission to behave, and preventing it from getting helpful resources).

Lesser versions of those situations exist, leading to more effective tech companies that are more programmers friendly. The two often somehow go together. At the end of this better path, you have some companies like MS, Google. (not exempt from pb, but they arguably are not that bad)

The thing is that those apps don't have to be boring. Most apps are low-quality, in code and design, as a result of a management philosophy that considers developers as low-value. Apple is a good counter-example. They put a high value in quality of code and design, and as a result even their settings dialogs are a pleasure to use. I've never come across a category of software that couldn't be made pleasant to use with some inspired design and coding.