Holy moses that was a long article. I couldn't get to the end to see if the punchline was different than, "Yes, we get paid for hard work, but we also get paid for having rare skills. Some think it's fair, some don't. The folks doing the paying seem to think it's reasonable, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it."
Not all web developers are "plumbers". If you are working on websites with heavy traffic, then you need to use complex algorithms to scale. That needs someone who is comfortable with algorithms, and that needs a quite lot of thought.
The author describes simple CRUD websites and then equates all of web development to trivial tasks like that. Even scaling simple CRUD needs a lot skills, intelligence and ingenuity.
And talking of design, there is a reason some pieces of art are valued so much. A designer who designs a great website is an artist too, and deserves as much compensation.
I agree. There are some that are worth a lot of money. But to be worth that kind of money you need deep domain knowledge. I won't pay $120/hr for someone to tinker with jQuery. I will pay that for a machine learning specialist.
The fact is that 'coders' are today's version of auto mechanics in the 70s. The barrier to entry is low- an old box, a linux distro, google- and off you go. So everybody who can't do something else can give it a try. Some will fail; some will succeed at a low level, and a few may find their calling. And a lot of people will pay for it because they don't know the difference.
But the one's who are truly good- who obtain that domain knowledge- are valuable. In their domain.
Perhaps you've been very lucky or found some especially naive people (right out of grad school, perhaps). Your rates immediately struck me as the kind of rate you would quote if you'd never, in fact, tried to hire somebody skilled. I allow the possibility you have been lucky and successful.
In general you'll be paying upwards of $250/hr for a machine learning specialist (sometimes upwards of $500/hr if they have a modicum of talent and experience) and more than $120/hr for a front-end webdev who can claim anything more than "I've heard of jQuery." Those are contracting rates of course; hiring somebody at salary has its own costs.
You caught me: I've not hired a domain expert coder. But I've also not paid $120/hr for front-end coders. I over-paid for one guy who knew far less than I did- horrible coding practice, always thought he was farther along on the project than he really was (and wanted money), and, in fact, never got far enough to even understand the problem before I terminated the agreement.
For $120/hr the person isn't fiddling- they've done it before, probably have a personal library they can pull, and a basic shell of a website can be ready pretty quickly. Their time is almost entirely spent on the custom part of the site.
Still it doesn't necessarily pay. There is a very large productivity gap between different people, for different tasks in software development (in the 1-50x range).
The fact you think price per hour is directly correlated with total cost to achieve a good result
I don't believe that. My point is that some web/coding skills are not that difficult to achieve, and those skills don't fetch seasoned defense-lawyer rates. At least, not from me.
Engineering the plumbing systems for the burj requires a different set of skills, but it's not done by plumbers. The actual plumbing part is pretty much the same as in any structure.
I'm not sure using increasingly complex algorithms makes a programmer move into some kind of new title bracket. You are still a "plumber", you just have to use more complicated distribution systems to deal with the increased building size (to stick with the analogy).
Very well written article, I always enjoy reading stuff from the intersection of writers and coders. What I found startling was how different my experience has been to that of the author's at the start of the article.
I've put up with some horrific jobs paying miserable money in some of the most uninspiring industrial parks you could imagine. I've taken work in dingy Victorian offices so cold that I've had to program through thick gloves. I've accepted commutes taking up to three hours and incorporating four different kinds of transport. More than once I've spent 18 hours on Saturday and Sunday circulating my CV to every job opening and recruiter even slightly relevant to web development.
Reverse interviews? People clamouring to have coffee with me? Beer constantly close to hand?? These are unheard of things. Conditions are definitely better for me now but my skills certainly don't mark me out as a celebrity. Maybe the financial bubble of the dot-com era has been replaced by a cultural bubble, one that I'm definitely not part of.
The problem is that it's hard to show your real skill level (especially on back-end work) so getting access to these better jobs is 90% how you market yourself and where you are (New York and Silicon Valley rents are horrid, but worth every penny in comparison to 95% of places) and only 10% based on your skill level (much less unrealized potential).
You don't have to be a celebrity, but you have to be some combination of accessible and validated.
The good news is that marketing yourself is actually a lot easier than programming. You don't need a natural social acumen to do it. I know this because I'm pretty good at it and certainly do not have natural social talents.
If you want to experience "reverse interviews", you have to be in a technology hub.
That said, the dynamic is not as engineer-favorable as people make it out to be. Sure, a good engineer can get 5 in-bound contacts from recruiters per week-- again, that has more to do with self-marketing than skill level-- but most of those don't mean anything. Most often, it's just an invitation to send a resume into the normal process.
Here's how I got people contacting me for jobs in the Valley and NYC. And not recruiters either, potential bosses.
1.) have a Github account, and release open-source software that helps coders be better at what they do. Basically release tools of sorts.
2.) Make the documentation for those tools absolutely stellar. Look at the .raw for the readmes of the various Github repositories you like and love. Emulate some of the stylistic choices to improve your documentation.
3.) Make a Show HN. Or, whenever your software can help a situation you notice in the comments here, promote it. Don't be afraid to do this, because this promotion is absolutely necessary.
4.) Post to the subreddit of the language that your software is for, but don't be commercial about it. You have to be honest. So write like you're talking to a friend. This is easier if you're talking out loud as you write.
==============
Doing these things will add eyes to your projects. People can see your nicely documented code, see your screenshots, and can imagine how this will help their coding. This is GOOD. If you can make the front page of HN or the frontpage of the subreddit for your language, you're in business. Basically you want to be trending on Github for the language of your choice (top 5 starred today is what you're aiming for). That is the hardest part, but from that point, it's a piece of cake. If you're trending on Github, there WILL be blog posts written about your repo, there WILL be unsolicited tweets about it, and you WILL get good feedback about your coding. The eyes on your repo have now exponentially gone up - and your coding is in front of a lot of people.
The thing is, technical directors like productive coders. If your repo/tool makes ALL coders more productive, then they will love you. It's as simple as that. You know the whole 10x engineer hoopla that's thrown around on here? You'd be doing that for other people. A multiplier of multipliers. If you do that, people will be in contact with you. Just stick with it.
It's particular to the New York startup scene. There is a lot of money sloshing around and startups have a different hiring strategy than in Silicon Valley. It's quick to hire, quick to fire. I've had six figure offers without even going through a real interview. This leads to a lot of churn. One place I worked at ran through three almost entirely different engineering teams in 18 months. It will be interesting to read if the author of this article still has the same job in the fall.
Silicon Valley is a bit different. There is usually a gauntlet of multi-day interviews even for the lowliest position at a startup nobody has heard of. It's even more of a gauntlet at the large, established companies. I've heard of someone doing 10 days of interviews at amazon.com, and they are a company most want to avoid. Companies are very afraid of hiring the wrong person.
As you have noted, most everywhere else the developer is made to feel lucky to work at a folding table in an unheated area next to the men's room.
Not necessarily true. I think if you aren't in those tech places (beyond SV and NYC, there are other hotbeds too), you have to get known amongst a tech community and this is where social shines. I've been open sourcing software fairly frequently lately and was contacted by potential future bosses at three very well-known companies for software engineer roles, two in California and one smack-dab in Manhattan. I've also been leveraging things like Show HN and putting stuff in appropriate subreddits to get an initial jump. Once you break the trending barrier in your language of choice on Github, it's practically smooth sailing. Getting on the most-starred today (just on Objective-C) has resulted in two extra days of blog posts, tweets and mentions from all over the internet that I didn't even solicit at all. Two of my open-sourced repositories ended up trending number one overall on Github for a day each. I think if you make stuff that helps coders, and position it correctly on sites that care about that, then it's easier to get noticed and technical directors are more willing to consider you for a job (why wouldn't they hire someone that makes their team more productive).
I have a BA in Art with a minor in Advertising. If I can get noticed using these tactics, then surely people with CS or EE degrees can too.
Given your educational background, I think it could be argued that you are better prepared to do this type of personal promotion than others who have a purely technical background. In most cases, raw technical talent isn't as important (thought technical folks usually think it's all that matters) as being able to do the job at hand and being able to convince others that you can do that job.
Good for you for realizing that "marketing" doesn't have to be a dirty word and hopefully others can learn from your example.
True. People shouldn't shy away from personal promotion, just do it at appropriate times and in appropriate places. I hated advertising in school, but thought it was the only way I could make money with a graphic design degree. Turns out coding with a graphic design degree is a lot more rewarding (for me at least, I'm a builder by nature).
I did 10 interviews at Amazon, for a freaking sales job. 3 on the phone and then they flew me from DC to Seattle for a 7 more interviews in one day. After all that I didn't get an offer.
If you work in finance (City or Canary Wharf) you might get that treatment from recruiters. See, as a contractor, you are going to make a lot of money and a part of it is going directly to the recruiting agency so you're definitely going to get some free coffees.
I imagine you could have that too in Shoreditch if you're like the special one.
A CFO is paid more than the coal miner because the skills required to be CFO of a Fortune 500 company are scarcer, and more wanted, than the skills required to be a coal miner. It’s the combination of scarcity and wantedness that drives up a salary. Coders (Read web-developers in the authors case) are paid more because of a demand for them which the author tries to understand.
I think the real issue is that there's people with lots of money that are willing to fund a lot of different companies in the hope of stumbling across the next facebook. Result? A whole host of well funded but ultimately useless apps and websites. Meanwhile, the people who can make these websites are making lots of money.
It's probably a bubble to some extent. Eventually, if the return from all these web apps is less than the money spent on them, the money will dry up. (I'd imagine that this will be the case - most of the value of the most-recent crop of high-value tech startups seems to be based on hype and even bigger companies buying them, rather than profitability or revenues). In the mean time, there's still people queuing up to fund things they don't understand. The biggest thing to remember about bubbles is that they always seem to keep growing far longer than any sensible person would expect. Will the money run out eventually? Probably.
People with lots of money have been disappointed by the performance of traditional investment vehicles for the past 5 years; meanwhile a lot of extra money has been put into the financial sector.
If you're a fund with $100 billion under management, dropping $2 billion into various venture funds is a reasonable part of the mix. Multiply that by the fact that several hundred funds, banks, trusts and companies collectively control trillions of dollars and these little 1 or 2 percent investments pump billions of dollars into tens of thousands of companies with collectively perhaps a few hundred thousand employees.
When every buyer is cashed up, prices for sellers rise.
(I don't know much about this but) I kind of believe it is a good thing that the traditional investment vehicles are not that good anymore. That was like betting on the outcome of the players of the roulette, right? Money against money against something that may make money. This last bit, investing in something that might make money, brings the world new ideas. It's probably a completely incorrect picture I'm drawing here though.
Not sure I understand why we shouldn't have another facebook - sure it's not disruptive anymore - but facebook needs competition and social it is a massive market.
I don't hear anyone saying - don't bother making a smartphone unless you are Apple or Samsung (of course this might have been Motorola or Nokia in the past :-) )
Investments almost work on a loss leader model - while there is still decisions made on who to invest in (some VC firms/investors/angels making wiser decisions than others), they are still banking on the small percentage of those investments actually making a return on investment. This return covers the failed investments that they might eventually write off.
The general rule is 1/3rd of investments will fail, 1/3rd of investments will under perform and 1/3rd will meet expectations - and to put that in to a better perspective, "expectations" should be read as a 5x to 10x return on investment. A better firm might be able to skew that more to the successful side, while another firm might be more on the failure side.
I don't think the money will "run out" - but the better firms (think USV, Sequoia, Accel, etc) will continue having the experience in finding successful startups and the smaller firms might just not see the return on interest and exit the game.
The money will definitely slow down if the return from the industry as a whole (the industry being SaaS and web apps) is less than the investment levels put in. It's worth remembering that while the initial investors in Facebook have seen amazing returns which will subsidise other investments for decades to come, those returns are only because the hype in the industry as a whole has lead other people to buy into facebook. Facebook itself has fairly low revenues and they're struggling to grow them. Equally while anyone who'd invested in instagram would have walked away with a nice sum, the money to fund that acquisition came from the same Facebook investment.
There's a lot of hype about "tech" (in this context really only web apps) which has lead to a lot of money pouring in from people desperate to grab a slice of the pie. The reality is that while web apps and SaaS is a large industry, the size of the investment funds targeting the industry is due to hype and investors saying "me too" rather than a reflection on the available revenues. You have to look at even the success stories in this context.
The money won't run out completely, but if the money from investors late to the party slows down then the value of the successful web apps will fall to levels which reflect their revenues.
Definitely agree with this -- the cost of living in NYC/SF is absurd, and there's not really much of a market elsewhere. A few choice cities (Austin, Chicago, maybe Atlanta?), but the entire market everywhere else is dead in the water by comparison. There are certainly jobs in those places, but it's going to be very scary if this bubble bursts again because a lot of people are going to be out of work, and I don't know if the smaller markets are going to grow enough to compensate for everyone going back home.
Personally, I found it did go as far as I thought it would, in NYC. It might even seem like a bargain if you're coming from Australia. You finally get to live large, banking the same sums as an apprentice electrician from Perth.
I often worry that my job is, well, not that hard. The thing is, if it were as easy as it seems, more people would be doing it - or it would be automated - and either way the price will drop pretty soon.
So either what we do really is that hard, and worth that much, or there's a crash coming.
The irony of James' point – that engineers are in such high demand because of how cheap it is to start a startup – is that engineering salaries are actually being prevented from going up as a result.
There's too little supply of qualified engineers, but startups can't afford to compete in salary with the big guys (basically Facebook, Google, Amazon and the financial sector). So we compete on cheaper things like nice offices, gym memberships, etc. Basically, feel good stuff that doesn't cost much.
Facebook's budget for engineers is a good 20-50% higher than the salary a startup can pay.
Thus, it's not actually crazy that a law school student can become an engineer worth $80,000/year in only eight months. It's the startup's only option.
And that's a good thing: Companies like ours (http://www.thinkful.com/) are finding a way to build products in a way that doesn't break our budget. We're also providing great opportunities to people who want to become engineers. The only caveat is for companies greater than 50 or so people – they're struggling most of all: Too small to attract great talent that wants stability, too large to attract hungry new talent or accept junior talent that needs to learn on the job.
There's an upper limit, but our research indicates that there's a durable demand for engineering. This demand will look decidedly less sexy once startups become less cool, but software engineering will be an in-demand skill well beyond the current hype cycle.
I'm sorry, but a law school student cannot "become an engineer" in only eight months. That's an insult for people that either have studied an engineering degree (like I have) or have earned enough experience through the years to call themselves an engineer, experience that can't be earned in eight months. That's ridiculous.
Sorry – should be more clear: What I mean to say is that there isn't a fixed definition of becoming "an engineer." One's level of expertise and proficiency is defined by the hirer... It's not for me to judge, especially in the abstract, what it takes. If an employer thinks you're qualified, then you're qualified.
What's happening in the market right now is that people who may not have previously been considered qualified are now considered qualified. This is because there's so much demand.
too large to... accept junior talent that needs to learn on the job.
Huh? Being larger should make it easier to do this, not harder. The company I currently work for has done this for its last 3 developer hires, and it's about the same size as yours.
Yeah – This was too quickly worded. What I'm saying is that these middle-size companies are too large to be seen as sexy startups that can make you millions, yet still too small to provide the mentorship needed for jr talent. One or two jr hires can be mentored, but that won't meet the demand, and is super expensive.
I think the point about code being cool is rather shortsighted: Code has only been cool to anything like mainstream youth for maybe five or ten years. In US high school as an exchange student in 1999, the computer science class/team/whatever most certainly wasn't "cool" - and this was on the tail of the .com boom. In high school in Denmark 99-02, I saw the first general recognition that while "being able to make websites" was probably a useful skill, it certainly wasn't cool. Of course, the view changed at university, but then we're pretty far down the selection-bias rabbit-hole.
Given those 15 years of experience, I am not very surprised that I am in short supply. But now that coding is beginning to be cool, I'd also not be surprised if not too many years from now, basic computer literacy at the end of secondary education (or even earlier) includes the ability to crank out basic RoR-style apps.
I think you may be overestimating the capacity of the education system to change. I'm now a year removed from High School, but in my class of 350 there were maybe 10 who could program proficiently. Only two (myself and a friend) knew what linux was. I would say it wasn't treated as "cool", but certainly regarded with a wierd respect.
I'm not talking about education (admittedly clouded by my anchoring my post in school experiences), I'm talking about kids picking these things up on their own because it's easy, fun and useful. Nobody would learn Word in school for the sake of learning Word, they learn it because it's a useful tool - the fact that there's a class is helpful, but mostly tangential.
I don't accept that anyone can know how familiar everyone else is of a thing. It's possible that you're perfectly correct, but how you arrived at this was assumption.
What if, out of the 348/350 other students you claim were unaware of linux, there were more than 0 of them that were happy to play with linux on their own without broadcasting it to you?
My point in this is that hobbies may seem unique, and it's great that we can motivate the growth of our identity in this, but to take it to the extent that you and your friend were the only kids that knew linux is blissful ignorance. No offense to you, it's just your assumption that I feel compelled to respond to.
Yes there are some assumptions that play into my assertion. Were there others who may have toyed with linux on their own time, quietly? Quite possibly. However, I doubt it. When Lockheed Martin visited my school to mentor/start a cyber security (hacking) competition team, we were only able to get ~18 people (from multiple grades) to show up. I also know for a fact that there were only ever about 60 kids (across multiple grades) enrolled in the school's CS offerings during the year. I knew all of these kids.
I think you'll find that 300 is a much smaller number of people than it sounds. While I respect your challenge of my assertion, I feel it's mostly valid. The effect intended is that only a very small fraction of kids in my class were technically inclined.
This is a great reminder that the "just world" fallacy [successful people deserve their success because they worked hard and that the less fortunate/unemployed somehow deserve their failure] is just that, a fallacy.
> This is a great reminder that the "just world" fallacy is just that, a fallacy.
Where do you see that? He specifically concludes that he's making the right (ie "just") amount of money for writing and coding, and that it's "just" that the CFO makes more money than the coal-miner because his skills are more specialised and in higher demand.
He points out that he got lucky in his choice of professions (or one of his professions) and that it's easy for people to conflate that sort of luck (being in the right profession at the right time) with somehow being deserving of all the rewards associated with it. I know I don't work any harder than say a mechanical or chemical engineer, I'm just better paid.
What you consider virtuous may produce no economic value. Or maybe it does. There's no rigid formula that connects them and the Just World Hypothesis is an illusion that traps fools and wisemen alike.
Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures and I retain every confidence that it will be ever thus.
James Somers might find Hayek's writing to be a bit repetitive and languid; but he will find the ideas illuminating. It seems like his father tried, but failed, to make the insight really stick.
There has never been a Just World where Virtue = Value. No matter how badly we want it, there can't be. And trying to forcefully make one generally just makes it much worse.
I didn't feel like the author was trying to prove anything, or was trying to get people to pursue more "virtuous" pursuits. It is simply a personal reflection on the state of the startup ecosystem and what it means to be a computer programmer.
Trying to reconcile the virtues of what he does with his economic value is pointless. They're just not connected.
Demand for Ruby on Rails plumbing is ultimately connected with the current wishes and desires of most of the planet's population and has nothing whatsoever to do with how he, or anyone else, feels about it.
Well, sure, but there's a difference between understanding this on an intellectual level (which he already does) and coming to terms with it on an emotional level.
Granted. But if the existentialists taught us anything, it's that if you stop and look, I mean really look at your life, you'll find how thoroughly inconsequential it is.
Which is no comfort at all. Quite the reverse. Ignorance really is bliss.
I find the intellectual argument comforting because I can focus on the things I can control, the things that are within my sphere of power.
I used to be very interested in politics. These days I either ignore it or treat it as entertainment. Because I have no control over it, why drag myself down with it?
If nothing is worth anything then by definition everything is worth whatever you want it to be worth. My life is inconsequential from the perspective of the universe but from my point of view its pretty important.
Also, you certainly do have the ability to actively engage with your world and you have an extremely limited ability to change how certain aspects of that world works. Of course this has to be based on the idea that doing so is inherently worth it which you seem to have abandoned.
most of the planet's population != most of the planet's purchasing power
Demand for Ruby on Rails plumbing is connected with where that money is going, and it's alright to think that where that money is going may not equivalent to the wishes, desires (and needs) of most of the population, and to be pensive about that.
In moral terms: he's wondering if the concentration of spending on matters that he's a subject expert in is a negative thing in terms of the world he wants to see.
I think the actions or desires of most of the planets population, who don't have computers or internet-enabled phones, have virtually no impact on the market for rails developers.
That was my thought. Really it's the actions or desires of a small number of VCs with copycat investment strategies hoping to outperform VC as an asset class by backing a slightly different set of San Francisco startups working on a slightly different spin on social sharing that drives demand for developers in that particular corner of the world into the stratosphere.
(The market for Rails developers in many other parts of the world is not that different from the market for other locally-based professionals with a skillset that can solve defined business problems, which is probably what their code is actually doing)
That said, the billion plus people that joined Facebook and click on Google ads have had a bit of an influence on why LPs from all over continue to pump money into Sand Hill Road VC funds...
You've misread me. I didn't say "everyone in sub-Saharan Africa is hankering for a RoR coder of their own".
My point is that everyone who is connected to the global economy is indirectly connected to everyone else in it. The overall system pushes prices, goods and money around in an impossibly large web of interactions. We can see the local factors, but we can't see the whole picture.
Nevertheless, the price of lettuce at the supermarket, the price of a new laptop, the hourly rate I bill, the cost of bullets for an AK-47 being used in a civil war: these are all, ultimately, connected together.
Ah you guys. This is precisely the attitude that the article is talking about. The fact that you conflate most of the world with the tiny proportion of the world that has both money and internet and also the even tinier proportion that cares about whatever cool thing you've made in rails screams of the kind of self involved perspective that the author of the post is complaining about. I don't mean this to sound like a personal attack, apologies if it comes off that way.
People in 20-30 ages neither have virtue, nor know the meaning of value. They structure their lives around "fun", which is definable, post-hoc.
edit: by post-hoc I mean, facebook was never meant for memes, but it does now. So you say "facbook is about fun memes", "XXXX was fun". Both of them were not in the original idea, but you express the fallacy.
The fact is, the 15-30's people doze off in a third rate movie, have fun by poking and squeaking.
And I have watch, ppt's about my company's future.
> And now, like my dad I look for "virtuous" people/business to trust.
This relates to the virtue/value discussion elsewhere in this thread. As a consultant I'm learning that some companies are price-averse and some are risk-averse. The latter are willing to pay more to lower their risks. In other words they are willing to pay more to people they trust, which they base on perceived virtue. So here is at least one case where virtue really does have value precisely as virtue (leaving aside the difference between appearance vs. reality).
I don't know. I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined. (Virtue corresponding to filling human needs, value being economic value.)
Is entertaining people virtuous at least potentially? if so, then there is nothing wrong with selling video games, movies, music, or whatever. If not, however then you have a problem because while the world make seem nice on paper (no money to Hollywood since that would take away from cancer research), it isn't a world any of us would like to live in.
The problem is from where I sit that the expected value (what investors will put in things) is wildly out of proportion to the actual delivered value to customers. I think this is even true of giants like Facebook, so what we get are speculative bubbles because investors are assuming there is more value than there is.
> I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined.
This is an unproductive line of argument because either of us can just keep moving the goalposts until we're exhausted.
Economic value clearly doesn't follow any "gut" virtue. Here's how an early moral theorist put it in a notoriously influential book:
I returned, and saw under the sun,
that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Generally speaking, attempts to create ranking functions for virtue lead to mismatches with the observed state of the world. You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all.
But if you try to impose a virtuous order, it all goes kerflooie. Because the whole system of production and allocation relies entirely on value. When you take value you away, it stops working. Partial enforcement leads to partial derangement and in general, creates new evils, requiring still further ranking functions ... it spirals out of control thereafter.
We read this:
Dear friend, it is not possible for man to avert that
which God has decreed shall happen. No one believes
warnings, however true. Many of us Persians know our
danger, but we are constrained by necessity to do
as our leader bids us.
Verily 'tis the sorest of all human ills, to abound in
knowledge and yet have no power over action.
And imagine ourselves to be men and women both of knowledge and power. But it was always an illusion.
I'm doing a pretty poor job of explaining all this. Hayek's Social or 'Distributive' Justice does a much more convincing, thorough and erudite job. It was published in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, also in The Essence of Hayek.
edit: by the way, your blog about LedgerSMB and PostgreSQL is bloody marvellous.
You say this because we practically live in a post scarcity society. 500+ years ago people valued hard labor that brought food because food prevented starvation a vary real and horrible thing. Now, food is an evil that brings heart disease and obesity. Our desires for food and our well being are out of alignment. Value is now a function of are desires with little connection to our needs.
Stealing from people was never thought of as a productive economic activity, but legally things like patent trolls that act like stealing are legal. So, I suspect you could creat a society where virtue and value are at least aligned and historically they may have been closer. However, we don't live in such a place.
In post scarcity society things would be completely different, as the market value pretty much loses its meaning when everything you want to buy is free.
I think the evidence is that value and virtue have never correlated very well, scarcity or not. Hence quotations from two of the oldest books on the planet. Value and virtue are not orthogonal either, but it's messy.
Hmmm this is a very difficult topic to really do justice to. I don't think that Hayek is necessarily contrary to anything I am saying. The problem though is a definition of virtue.
> You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all.
But the problem here is that without a framework for deciding what is virtuous, all you are doing is assigning your own measure of value. In that regard your argument boils down to "what you think is valuable is not necessarily a solution that lots of people will pay money for." But I do think that virtuous solutions are valuable to the extent they are virtuous. A cure for cancer would be worth, I would expect, thousands or millions of times what a hollywood blockbuster would be.
However there are limits to this analysis. While I think valuable = virtuous with regard to solutions it doesn't necessarily follow that the coal miner is less virtuous than the Ruby programmer. Wages are determined in ways that both do and don't resemble market economics as even Adam Smith noted (he saw wage levels as being indicative of negotiating power differences between various professions).
So my caution is to avoid looking at wages (ruby programmers vs coal miners) in the same way you look at solutions (cure for cancer vs the next big MTV hit).
From memory, Hayek also mentions the problem of coming up with the ranking function for virtue. Basically "virtue" here is standing in as an alliterative reference to systems of ethics, morality, justice and justness etc etc. Huge fields of human thought in their own right. That sometimes value and virtue align is inevitable, simply because there's so many combinations available to test.
His general point is that trying to make complex, emergent systems fit into neat theories tends to break the systems.
That book I mentioned -- Essence of Hayek -- is worth getting. I began to review it on my blog and never finished writing my follow up ditties.
The problem though is that these are huge fields of thought and also that the very contentious. Ethics for example is usually defined to be asking the question of "what is good?" Obviously defining "what is good" is an undertaking which leads different people in different directions.
I take the approach of saying "what is good is what is conducive to human flourishing." This is largely an Aristotelian approach (and so you can't really accuse me of deriving terms to meet economics). Therefore I would say there is some virtue in entertaining people or rather that such is at least potentially virtuous.
The problem is that if you accept that human flourishing is the goal and thus the definition of virtue, and if you assume that to a large extent this is also the goal of the economy (something I think that both most economists and the Classical philosophers shared), then virtue and value can't be seen as separate at least in terms of solutions (as I say, wages are different).
Or are you saying that Hayek does not see distributive human flourishing as the ends to which our economic systems work?
FWIW what I understand Hayek as discussing is something different, which is that centrally imposed definitions of "good" have very little to do with local decisions that people make. Hayek is arguing, as I read him, against the idea that "social good" as we culturally construct it through centralized structures (church and state) is the goal of the economy.
There is a way out of this, and that is a 19th century Catholic idea (I am not even a Christian but Catholicism is interesting to me to the extent the Catholic Church is a torchbearer for pagan Greek and Roman phylosophy) called "subsidiarity."
The idea of subsidiarity is that it is theft for a group to accomplish what an individual could accomplish by him or herself, and for the same reason it is theft for a larger, more centralized group to do what a smaller group could do. The goal of larger groups should be to support, not supplant, smaller organizations. This idea of subsidiarity thus seeks to reformulate society and the economy on Aristotelian grounds, with the family household in the center (rather than the multinational corporation of liberal capitalism, or the state). From this view, virtue and economic value are the same to the extent that people seek to live just lives, and to the extent that central authorities only seek to accomplish on their own what are fundamentally impossible for the smaller entities.
I think this is one reason why libertarians have associated the Catholic idea of subsidiarity with the private sector which only makes sense in terms of Hayek (I don't think that equivalence quite works but one can easily see the similarity).
I don't know if Hayek would be on board with it. The main problem is that it introduces a new criterion for arranging production which doesn't emerge from the existing order.
Hayek isn't trying to build the Ideal World. He's taking the world he saw and said "here's how it works", and then, "here's why it wouldn't work if we decided to design a system instead of having it emerge".
So for example, if subsidiarity is imposed, how does that play out? You already create a requirement to deduce what the smallest group capable of producing a thing is. But we already have something like that in the market. It's lumpy and fuzzy, but it does eventually kill off the too large and the too small (modulo endless tinkering by legislators).
Coase explained that firms emerge because of transaction costs. Sometimes it's easier and cheaper to do a thing in existing groups. Sometimes it's not. The tension between these allows firms to emerge from the social order. I'd add that the rise of IT has enabled coordination on a vastly greater scale, which has helped to create the modern corporation.
The point of subsidiarity though is that it puts central authorities in the position of midwifery for having such a world emerge rather than in the position of architecting, designing, and building it.
You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all.
Ruby on Rails developers are scarce and valuable just because there still aren't a whole lot of them, and because they can crank out CRUD apps (which are just data collection apparatuses) more quickly and efficiently than anyone has been able to before. Once someone invents an even faster/more automated way to design and deploy a data-collection tool than RoR (which might be just a future version of RoR), then that will be the next big thing for a while.
What about benefits/a support system for vulnerable people? By helping people develop their own lives (which is pretty damn virtuous), you are in the long term preventing crime and helping the economy because those people go on to spend money in shops and what not.
Nonsense. Just because "is" will never fully attain to "ought" does not make vain the pursuit of a better, more just world.
> Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures
There are so many examples (a single one of which disproves your "universal" claim) of idealists bring "is" more into alignment with "ought" that it would be almost impertinent to even begin enumerating them. Here's a small handful: Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage, and (from an economic perspective, since that what you seem to insist can never be touched by notions of "ought") the rise of Organized Labor, which made it possible for former wage slaves to earn a decent living wage.
If Hayek and Rand make you feel better about the fact that most of us over-earn relative to the "virtue" of our labors, fine. But IMHO it is best to be honest about the inequities and fortuitous circumstances which make our success possible.
I wasn't speaking of all cases of is/ought. I was referring to the idea that virtuous jobs should be valuable jobs and vice versa -- that the system of production can be turned to produce according to a ranking function of virtue. Civil rights and suffrage aren't jobs or economic production; they're matters of custom and law, which Hayek also discusses as similar but distinct forms of spontaneous order.
You correctly pointed out that the value of labour has been affected by simple economic considerations more completely than any theory of the native goodness of honest toil.
Rand's cardboard aliens all seem very smug and self-assured and basically I think her books have done more harm than good.
Hayek's tone is an exasperated old school master. He just wants people to understand that you can't create -- as in design or ordain ab initio -- a working economic system that aligns to virtuous ends. It will break.
I would certainly agree that the methods for bringing virtuous and valuable jobs more into alignment are quite limited, and it is a vain pursuit to hope to bring them into perfect harmony. However, I would disagree with my libertarian friends and say that such limited methods as we have are worth employing, and new ones are worth seeking out, as the endeavor has merit. The difficult part is finding a balance between seeking to control and throwing our hands up and saying "nothing can be done."
As an aside, I agree that this is a very difficult proposition for incomes, but gains are to be made with a strong public sector which provides numerous basic services such as healthcare, education, and affordable subsidized housing, so that the unfortunate man with a virtuous job of little economic value is not left out in the cold. Or dying of long-undiagnosed cancer due to lack of access to prohibitively expensive preventive care, like my wife's cousin is currently.
Is it just me, or is the photo a rather unlucky pick?
I'm seeing roughly 20 people, sitting in what is essentially a dark cellar. It would be completely colourless, if it wasn't for a handful of bizarre, childish gadgets here and there. I couldn't imagine working in such a crowded, depressing environment, let alone feel relaxed.
And from what I've seen, that's one reality for many programmers: The offices are often quite bad.
Open plan offices are popular (it's not like developers need to phone or anything, right?), developers are put in basements, under the roof, or into an unattractive second building. And home office is generally more difficult to pull off for programmers than for other knowledge workers, which I think is mostly caused by a general lack of trust.
Sure, the salaries are pretty good lately (although it's pretty much at the level of other professions requiring degrees, isn't it?), but I don't see much appreciation of programmers in most settings. The startup world is different (from my experience), but it's a very small part of our industry.
It's a valid observation, but does anyone have nice offices?
My parents are medical professionals, their offices were terrible. My sister runs a government org in Australia, has horrible office. One of my old bosses was the head of a department at Harvard, also had a disgusting office. I personally am not a fan of the open space bullpen, but almost every other professional I have met had an office that was worse. The only people I know with legitimately cool offices are interior designers.
It's not really about the office, more about appreciation and respect.
I've been in only one big company so far, but anecdotal evidence suggests many are similar.
It was a software company. Software was it's core business. Yet the programmers, about 10% of the employees, where kind of the lowest in the food chain. Sales got all the money and a lot of attention. Professional services and product management got a lot of attention, shiny offices and regular praisings. The developers were all but ignored.
I stuck to smaller software companies (mostly startups) again ever since. I always felt valued there, and that's important for my overall job satisfaction.
Ours certainly isn't a beautiful masterpeice of architecture and modern art, but it definitely qualifies as nice.
A little bland and "airport-lounge-y" despite logos on the walls and brightly coloured chairs/sofa in the casual meeting areas (imagine an off-white and less saturated take on the pallet used for Mirror's Edge), but we have perfectly reasonable desks and chairs, plenty of space (I've seen more than twice as many people crammed into similar spaces), a good amount of natural light (though in the middle of the office the artificial lights still need to be on all day), and a useful kitchen area with plenty of space should lots of use want lunch in at the same time.
Yeah, but even in poorer countries there's always a demand for programmers, because there's a global market for software. A lot of my friends in other professions have been jobless or taking shitty part-time jobs. Even the ones that have a job are scared of losing it. Me? I had the audacity to quit my job just because I didn't like it enough. Other people in my country can only dream about it. And every month now I get one or two job offers, usually when a friend or former colleague recommends me.
Bad programming (coding) is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are Dummies.
-- HtDP2
btw, 5 opening paragraphs with so many Is and numbers hardly could be considered a good writing. I guess that the word for this (writing style and the content) is hipsterism.)
I'm not sure if English is your first language, but the writing in this article is actually very good. I don't have any problem believing that people are willing to pay Somers for his writing. (And $10K is, by magazine standards, a princely sum.)
This was a depressing article. Sometimes, I often think of this myself. And then I think about investment bankers and what they do. That makes me feel better.
interestingly in my experience in the north of England this culture is much more applicable to designers - web development doesn't pay very many standard deviations above the average wage, where designers can command high freelancing rates and comfortable working conditions.
"In today's world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect."
This might be true only by a VERY narrow definition of "world", specifically Silicon Valley. Or maybe I live in a very peculiar place, but the developers (Web or otherwise) here are in the low to mid income range, regardless of their skills and experience. And don't even get me started on freedom and respect...
I got a call from a poor recruiter in Chattanooga, TN trying to fill a Rails job. Seemed to be getting a little desperate. Being in Atlanta, I have no trouble finding stuff right here. When he tried to punk me by saying, "Well, if you have roots I can understand," with a tone like I'm hurting my career prospects by not being willing to move, I asked, "Well, just for kicks, what kind of compensation is being offered here?" When he said $60-70K I almost laughed in his face. "Yeah that's not nearly enough to get me to move. Oh well, good luck!"
You don't have to be in a startup hub to find work, just willing to move somewhere. That makes you much more marketable.
Yeah, I feel a bit bad for the recruiters trying to get senior/lead level guys for "fresh from GT CS program" wages. Or trying to hire iOS devs for $50 an hour.
Yeah, I have worded my question poorly, but the problem here is that simply moving is sometimes so difficult that it barely remains an option.
One important reason for that is that a lot of people who have enough skills and experience to be able to find a much better job elsewhere simply are not allowed -- or face extreme obstacles -- to move to that elsewhere. Visas, work permits, relocation expenses and other issues pile up quickly.
Adding to that other factors like age, family, lack of network in the new place (which is crucial when finding a job) etc, and you will see a quite different issue than you might be used to in terms of relocation.
Not sure where you are located but I'm in the middle of nowhere Ohio and my experience is fairly close to the Author's. Salary is scaled down but not a ton. I have had three emails for jobs this week and it's been at bit slow this week. Being involved in the community and active on different sites like linkedin help though.
Interesting. I'm a decently skilled web-developer in Ohio (but not middle of nowhere) and I'd say decent jobs are pretty scarce. I've recently gotten more into the local tech scene and started on LinkedIn but it hasn't revealed any SV like opportunities. I keep wondering if moving to a large city is the answer but I feel bad for the area having suffered through a massive brain drain over the past few decades.
I will say that the closer I get to Cleveland the better the jobs are. Also I target startups pretty hard when looking for jobs. It's just my preferred environment.
We are not the shovel, we are the ditch diggers, just slightly better paid. Either way, who wants to be a commodity. Your analogy doesn't make me feel lucky, but like I need to get out of the ditch.
There is a lot to this piece. I do think good coders are worth it, but I also think the current social/mobile bubble will burst (not that there aren't important gains to be had in those spaces but that the gains do not live up to investors' expectations). It seems to me so many businesses are chasing playthings because solving the real problems of the day are hard. To be sure not one of us can solve any of them, but if we build our businesses with the problems in mind (rather than the hype), then we are all doing our part. That isn't a lot to ask but it seems like too much.
For my money the businesses I am starting (including the new cloud ERP start-up Efficito (http://www.efficito.com) are intended to continue to chip away at real problems. They may not seem like much but they will hopefully contribute in one way or another to helping support small businesses, the self-employed, and such against the leviathan multinational companies. Some problems (like too much corporate control) are bad matches for venture-capital backing. Other problems though may not be.
Too much corporate control over our lives as individuals is a problem a small family business can monetize a small piece of a solution for, but is not a problem a VC can, because the problem goes contrary to any VC exit strategy.
Now the second point though is that corporations may end up doing some of that anyway. The movement towards open source/free software and open data is helping establish that in at least some cases this problem is monetizable even on a corporate level if one realizes that the corporation is subject to the same restrictions as an individual. If we look at software or data as potential means of production, then this is a welcome way in which the industry is moving towards spreading around control over means of production.
But what I am advocating is not solving the important problems but building business with the important problems in mind, seeing what one can do to help with them in one way or another, either through operations or through product development. They don't need to be the primary focus (and maybe shouldn't be the primary focus) but the idea that we are living in a new world where virtue is not a prerequisite to value suggests two words to me "speculative bubble."
Too much corporate control over our lives as individuals is a problem a small family business can monetize a small piece of a solution for, but is not a problem a VC can, because the problem goes contrary to any VC exit strategy.
Now the second point though is that corporations may end up doing some of that anyway. The movement towards open source/free software and open data is helping establish that in at least some cases this problem is monetizable even on a corporate level if one realizes that the corporation is subject to the same restrictions as an individual. If we look at software or data as potential means of production, then this is a welcome way in which the industry is moving towards spreading around control over means of production.
But what I am advocating is not solving the important problems but building business with the important problems in mind, seeing what one can do to help with them in one way or another, either through operations or through product development. They don't need to be the primary focus (and maybe shouldn't be the primary focus) but the idea that we are living in a new world where virtue is not a prerequisite to value suggests two words to me "speculative bubble."
The question is not if its worth, i'm a programmer, and i do believe that construction workers and lady cleaners should earn more then me, since they are forced to do their job, and generally don't like it.
I in the other hand, i like my job. yet i earn more for doing more easy stuff (for me ), seams unfair, this has struck me some time ago. But what we have to accept is that, our income, or the income of a general profession, is based purely on supply and demand, and little more.
Wonderful writing, I loved the way it circled several times around the central issue - the value of work, and I particularly liked this conclusion - much validation and reward in our society is driven by how much people are willing to pay you for your chosen work, and it's very hard to separate your self-worth and confidence from that. It's hard to reconcile when your values don't meet those of the people around you, as expressed in the salaries for various jobs, which vary wildly without much sign of reason or relation to what society ostensibly values. I think what he's trying to get at is why we overvalue these jobs, which on the face of it are not particularly rewarding either to society or the individuals doing them (apart from monetarily). If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no, and yet we have hundreds of inchoate and uninspiring replacements being worked on and funded right now, so it's hard to see where the demand is coming from, or why this work is valued so highly, and whether it is in fact a bubble which will burst.
Going back to 17C Holland there was probably a huge demand for market traders able to distinguish fine differences in and trade tulip bulbs, until all of a sudden there wasn't - this is the kind of illusory value the writer posits for today's fêted startup web workers. I'm not sure I entirely agree, but it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, because he's not just saying it's unfair, but that it may be unjustified.
The price of a word is being bid to zero.
This sentence near the end cuts to the heart of the matter for me - for writers or other producers of original content like photographers there is a cruel and dismal comparison to be drawn between the wages of those paid to frame content and present it to the world, and the wages of those who produce the content. The creative content (writing, photography, art, travel guides etc) is all in demand, but no-one wants to pay for it, perhaps because it's so easy to produce something yourself, and so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre.
>so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre
I just paid several thousand dollars to a wedding photographer for my wedding. That is pretty standard from what people tell me. I wouldn't say that no one is willing to pay for content. It depends on the content.
I would argue that the premium you are paying for the wedding photos is attributed to the service rather than the content. You are paying several thousand dollars to a professional photographer rather than a hundred bucks to your nephew so that they do not mess up your special day. While I'm sure the photos are exquisite, no one else would pay several thousand dollars for the exact same photos you received.
No, but what matters to the photographer (our stand-in for software developer) is that there are many people willing to pay them several thousand dollars for those kinds of photos :)
>> If you ask people in the street whether we need another Facebook, most would say no
Don't take this as a disagreement with your whole comment (it isn't), but one trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for, which is what shareholders and VCs care about.
There was an article on HN a day or two ago about how asking people to bet on political propositions affects their stated beliefs - when there's no cost, people will happily spout whatever their favoured party's line is, but if you ask them to put their money where their mouth is, they will often skew away.
VCs are investing based on where they think people will actually put their money, not on where they say they will. If evidence is that people spend a lot of time social networks, AND evidence is that advertisers will pay money for web adverts to people, then it might follow that a new social network is a good investment.
The main issue as I see it is that as we use money as a proxy for value, we disproportionately weight the desires of the rich over those of the poor. A service for rich people (e.g. an online photo sharing website) doesn't need to produce much utility to be worth a lot of money, whereas a service for poor people (e.g. clean water for poor villages) can produce a lot of utility and still be worth little money.
VCs are investing based on where they think people will actually put their money, not on where they say they will. If evidence is that people spend a lot of time social networks, AND evidence is that advertisers will pay money for web adverts to people, then it might follow that a new social network is a good investment.
If VCs were funding companies which made solid profits from customers and were therefore able to pay the VCs a multiple out of that profit I'd find this argument that money talks more convincing. As it is it seems that value for internet companies is not based on revenue or even potential revenue.
This disconnect between the money invested and the money earned completely breaks the connection you talk of - customers willing to put their money where their mouth is. Someone in the chain is paying lots of money, but it certainly isn't the actual end users or customers of most startups - often they run at a loss for a substantial period, and then they have no way to turn their free readers/users into paying ones in sufficient numbers to support their valuation or the money put in. VCs really don't care about that though, as long as they are paid more than they put in - that can easily happen if the companies are bought by larger corporations like IBM or Yahoo in the mistaken belief that the customers can be converted - the question of revenue then becomes academic as the companies are folded into a larger parent and the actual value impossible to discern.
It's an interesting time to be alive and an interesting market to be working in, but I do find the distortions created by massively inflated valuations and companies built just to be sold on worrying. Forgive me though, I must stop wittering on HN and get back to work now :)
While I think you are right that there is a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want --
I would suggest that there is also a difference between what people actually want, and what people demonstrate with their behavior, what they actually do.
What people do is not neccesarily what they want either! For all sorts of reasons. Poor self-control, costs/risks (financial/social/psychological) to doing what you really want, etc.
Just becuase someone spends money on something doesn't actually mean that, in an ideal world, they want to be paying for it, or want it in their lives.
Very interesting. However, I think by differentiating what people "actually want" from what they do, you have made it completely inaccessible. How can we possibly find out what people actually want if it's different from both (1) what they say and (2) what they do? In other words, is there any way you can validate your thesis? I suspect you can't. You will have to fall back to what they say they want.
One possible way to validate your point is by asking people if they ever regret their actions. However, I think this isn't robust. Regretting my past action now doesn't mean that I didn't want it then.
That's a good point too, I'll have to think about that.
The sorts of examples I was thinking of though, would be:
* Someone who wants/says they want everyone to be paid a living wage and are willing to pay somewhat more for products made by people earning such -- but still consistently buy the cheapest products, made in sweatshops.
(That one might be, in part, about a lack of trustworthy information?).
* Someone who wants/says they'd rather there be fewer McDonalds around and more healthy restaurants, but still spends lot of money at mccdonalds, and maybe not at an available healthy restaurant.
(lack of willpower?)
I think you are right about the, er, epistemilogical problems, but I think there are still some examples that make it pretty obvious that what people actually want is not always represented by their actions.
Or at least not always by their _purchase actions_. Maybe the larger point is that, contrary to certain religions, the market is not in fact a perfect aggregator of people's true desires. What is successful in the market is NOT always representative of people's true desires, for all sorts of reasons (including the obvious one that some people have more market power than others, so are better represented in 'the market' -- but that's just the very beginning of reasons).
This is insightful. Lack of information, lack of willpower (eg. laziness, addiction) and bad decision-making (for reasons such as cognitive biases, poor reasoning under uncertainty etc) can be reasons why actions may not be consistent with the real wants. I agree with your larger point.
Given this, as a business, one has a choice of focusing only on what you can get people to do (eg. cigarettes, farmville, tabloid journalism, in fact any business that exploits the above reasons) as opposed to focusing on what they truly want - even though we want people to act in a certainway. The first kind are the businesses which are generally considered "evil".
Your idea of wants differentiated from actions seems to be quite fruitful. I used to tell people "don't ask your customers, instead, observe their actions". Clearly, something more is required to make a non-evil business. Thanks for teaching me something new. :)
People are willing to pay for Heroin because it scratches a chemical itch in our brains. People don't say they want heroin because they intellectually know it ruins their lives and does nothing positive for them.
There's a disconnect between what people want, what they want to want, and what they say they want. This seems to be universal to humans; the connection with capitalism is tenuous, at best.
>The main issue as I see it is that as we use money as a proxy for value, we disproportionately weight the desires of the rich over those of the poor. A service for rich people (e.g. an online photo sharing website) doesn't need to produce much utility to be worth a lot of money, whereas a service for poor people (e.g. clean water for poor villages) can produce a lot of utility and still be worth little money.
That is the essence of free markets. If you look up the "welfare theorem's" you will see that the free market promises to do precisely what you describe: maximize the weighted sum of individual utilities, where the wealthier individuals generally have higher weights.
Ultimately, it is in human nature to care more about oneself and one's family (and possibly other people who you consider to be part of your in-group) than others. The free market just happens to make this fact very stark. Each time I buy a coffee for myself instead of donating to a poor village, I cannot avoid the conclusion that I care more about my momentary happiness than whether someone in that village gets some avoidable disease.
> One trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for
Another trap people fall into is equating what people are willing to pay for something, with the amount of value that's actually able to be captured in the market for that item.
The finance industry, say, is able to capture a lot of the value they create (some might say more than they create). Some other industries, less so.
The price of an already taken photograph, or that of a pre-packaged software or web service tends towards zero, however if you want original content, or to build software, hiring the talent to do it is going in the opposite direction (e.g. good wedding photographers charge a lot of money, as photos may be cheap and plenty, but good photographers aren't neither cheap or plenty).
> this is the kind of illusory value the writer posits for today's fêted startup web workers
The real value of a "web worker" is not in its ability to write PHP to serve HTML, but rather in their ability to find and solve problems. Good engineers that solve problems will always be in demand. Example: I would put an engineer to do marketing, because a good engineer would know how to do measurements, statistics and A/B testing.
Basically, the majority of people cannot appreciate art. Abstract ideas and brilliant commentary are simply not valued by the majority as much as a working system, even if it's as obvious a concept as Facebook. When you hire someone to write something, it's almost impossible to predict the audience's reception to it. When you make a website, a logical machine, you at least know you have something less abstract. A website is more tangible than a piece of prose. Words indeed have no value in themselves.
You would expect the people who make the software that facilitates web publishing to be paid more on average, no? Developers get paid more because they make the stuff that people want -- stuff that does something or solves a problem. It's that simple.
>The creative content (writing, photography, art, travel guides etc) is all in demand, but no-one wants to pay for it, perhaps because it's so easy to produce something yourself, and so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre.
The real reason is not really that people don't want to pay for it, but rather it's available for free, so there's no need for most people to pay for those things. If there were no free travel guides etc., people would still pay for them.
A comparable situation is happening with newspapers. People will pay for news if they cannot get them for free. Since you can these days get news for free, a lot of people are getting rid of their newspaper subscriptions.
Unfortunately I feel we're in a negative spiral, where good content (e.g. quality reporting and analysis, as in the example in the article) competes with free content which is just good enough to draw attention and pay for itself with advertising. Something is lost there, and in the rush to make everything free we're also losing the incentive for quality journalism or investigative writing, which are just too expensive to sustain on advertising alone.
If that results in a gradual erosion of quality as less and less effort is put in to researching and writing articles, and more and more of the content is churnalism or opinion pieces, then it's a net loss for everyone - eventually the adverts will be more interesting than the real content which lives in the interstices of advertising - I think that would be a shame. I've seen that happening in major newspapers in the UK like the Independent or the Guardian. We've seen the same in television with the rise of Reality TV etc - cheap to produce, controversial, and the perfect filler to squeeze between advertising segments.
The thing is, people never bought newspapers because they cared about democracy. They wanted to be entertained, and have something to talk about with colleagues.
At least with regards to written content, most people have access to much more interesting content. Heck, hn is more interesting than my newspaper. And we manage to find stuff to talk about.
Investigative journalism is just a case of the tragedy of the commons, that now run out the huge luck it got n the past. And we as a society need to start looking at it as such, and not fantasize that it is a standard business.
In response to you and grey-area about news: yes I get news for free, and it is normally good enough. But... Some of the recent reporting from the NYT has really made me reconsider paying for a news subscription, just to be able to fund great investigative reporting. If I wasn't in a low income country making low income wages it would be a no-brainer. But I really do think that there is a market for high quality reporting, and people willing to pay for it.
‘What about somebody in a coal mine — wouldn’t you say he works as hard as you? Why should you get paid so much more than that guy?’
If this is a question to yourself, then my response is: start sending part of your paycheck to the guy in the coal mine. Don't blame someone else for society's ills and not be willing to fix such problems yourself. Find a miner, adopt him, send him half your paycheck, keep tabs on him: how the job's going, how the family's doing, etc.
If this is a question for me, a creator of software, then my response is: I build things that enable new activities, I don't perform a task that maintains someone else's status quo. I (as a freelancer) or my employer (when I'm an employee) have found someone willing to pay what we charge. Period. How am I able to do that? By learning. Continuously. By adapting to changes in technology and the market. Why do I get paid more than the coal miner? Because he has settled for that life. If he needs something more, he needs to learn how to attain it.
But maybe, just maybe, our coal mining friend is doing what he loves. If he's happy ... leave him alone.
I would be cautious with this callous mentality towards the miner. I wouldn't jump so quickly to the conclusion that he/she is not "learning. Continuously" as you say you are. The miner may very well be. The issue the article raises is a good one, what validity is there that someone can put the value they create so much higher then another.
What happens one day when your profession is no longer well paid? Think for a minute that you did not have the mental capacity to compete in the new 'tech world' in 20 years. Would you expect that you are paid in accordance with your lack of ability, or would you hope you are still given an equal shot.
Personally this article hits at the heart of the somewhat libertarian style commentary on Hacker New. One that I myself am all too engulfed in as well. Perhaps we aren't as valuable as we may think?
>start sending part of your paycheck to the guy in the coal mine
...that sounds incredibly insulting. It's not like he's homeless.
>Why do I get paid more than the coal miner? Because he has settled for that life.
bullshit. This is exactly the kind of attitude that the article is criticizing.
>maybe, our coal mining friend is doing what he loves
Maybe, and that's great. But for most people, "doing what you love" is simply not viable, at least career-wise. Don't forget how incredibly fortunate you are to love doing a job that also happens to pay extremely well.
There does seem to be the same sort of frenzy in Canada. You can hear it in normal conversations all the time: 'Wow I can't believe you do that, it's so confusing to me. I could never write code.' It seems this mystique is what is paying us so well.
Depends on where you are. Toronto? Definitely. I get recruiters every day asking if I want a job (always onsite though, never contracts). Anywhere else I've found salary and perks drop quickly. Case in point, my last location (PEI) the salary was barely above minimum wage (35-50k/year), even though they keep complaining about shortages in skilled IT folks
Well I put it this way to friends of mine out in the Maritimes. Back in 2012 I was laid off due to government cutbacks (the company I worked for did the Tourism site), and in the three months afterwards I had three interviews across the maritimes. In a week visit to Toronto, I had twenty five interviews.
And salary is like night and day. The highest PHP salary I heard of out there in my interviews and travels was 55k. Toronto PHP jobs start at 60k and many are in the 70's and 80's. I've heard an even larger gulf for Java devs, especialy as you get up to the senior ranks. I don't know about salarys for other languages, but if you don't know Java, .Net, or PHP in the maritimes, you'll be waiting a long time to be employed. There's the occasional C++ or Python gig, but youd' make twice as much in Toronto.
And remote jobs, in Canada, in my experience, do not exist. I've seen maybe five in the last five years. Meanwhile I see remote gigs in the States daily. Basically if your'e looking for remote work, you're looking in the US. Canadian employers I've found are leery to openly hostile about folks working remotely.
Now things could have changed in the last year, and that's just my own experience, but if your'e looking for solid work, and good pay, and in Canada, it's effectively Toronto or bust.
Yeah, it is really too bad that there are such few jobs in the GTA that allow for more flexible working conditions. Guess things haven`t changed much since I left. I hope employers` attitudes will change once more and more startups mature, or do they not even allow a flexible schedule?
323 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadThe author describes simple CRUD websites and then equates all of web development to trivial tasks like that. Even scaling simple CRUD needs a lot skills, intelligence and ingenuity.
And talking of design, there is a reason some pieces of art are valued so much. A designer who designs a great website is an artist too, and deserves as much compensation.
The fact is that 'coders' are today's version of auto mechanics in the 70s. The barrier to entry is low- an old box, a linux distro, google- and off you go. So everybody who can't do something else can give it a try. Some will fail; some will succeed at a low level, and a few may find their calling. And a lot of people will pay for it because they don't know the difference.
But the one's who are truly good- who obtain that domain knowledge- are valuable. In their domain.
In general you'll be paying upwards of $250/hr for a machine learning specialist (sometimes upwards of $500/hr if they have a modicum of talent and experience) and more than $120/hr for a front-end webdev who can claim anything more than "I've heard of jQuery." Those are contracting rates of course; hiring somebody at salary has its own costs.
For $120/hr the person isn't fiddling- they've done it before, probably have a personal library they can pull, and a basic shell of a website can be ready pretty quickly. Their time is almost entirely spent on the custom part of the site.
Expensive (per hour) developers are often far cheaper.
I don't believe that. My point is that some web/coding skills are not that difficult to achieve, and those skills don't fetch seasoned defense-lawyer rates. At least, not from me.
I imagine plumbing the Burj Khalifa needs a different and more advanced set of skills than plumbing a prefab home.
I've put up with some horrific jobs paying miserable money in some of the most uninspiring industrial parks you could imagine. I've taken work in dingy Victorian offices so cold that I've had to program through thick gloves. I've accepted commutes taking up to three hours and incorporating four different kinds of transport. More than once I've spent 18 hours on Saturday and Sunday circulating my CV to every job opening and recruiter even slightly relevant to web development.
Reverse interviews? People clamouring to have coffee with me? Beer constantly close to hand?? These are unheard of things. Conditions are definitely better for me now but my skills certainly don't mark me out as a celebrity. Maybe the financial bubble of the dot-com era has been replaced by a cultural bubble, one that I'm definitely not part of.
You don't have to be a celebrity, but you have to be some combination of accessible and validated.
The good news is that marketing yourself is actually a lot easier than programming. You don't need a natural social acumen to do it. I know this because I'm pretty good at it and certainly do not have natural social talents.
If you want to experience "reverse interviews", you have to be in a technology hub.
That said, the dynamic is not as engineer-favorable as people make it out to be. Sure, a good engineer can get 5 in-bound contacts from recruiters per week-- again, that has more to do with self-marketing than skill level-- but most of those don't mean anything. Most often, it's just an invitation to send a resume into the normal process.
1.) have a Github account, and release open-source software that helps coders be better at what they do. Basically release tools of sorts.
2.) Make the documentation for those tools absolutely stellar. Look at the .raw for the readmes of the various Github repositories you like and love. Emulate some of the stylistic choices to improve your documentation.
3.) Make a Show HN. Or, whenever your software can help a situation you notice in the comments here, promote it. Don't be afraid to do this, because this promotion is absolutely necessary.
4.) Post to the subreddit of the language that your software is for, but don't be commercial about it. You have to be honest. So write like you're talking to a friend. This is easier if you're talking out loud as you write.
==============
Doing these things will add eyes to your projects. People can see your nicely documented code, see your screenshots, and can imagine how this will help their coding. This is GOOD. If you can make the front page of HN or the frontpage of the subreddit for your language, you're in business. Basically you want to be trending on Github for the language of your choice (top 5 starred today is what you're aiming for). That is the hardest part, but from that point, it's a piece of cake. If you're trending on Github, there WILL be blog posts written about your repo, there WILL be unsolicited tweets about it, and you WILL get good feedback about your coding. The eyes on your repo have now exponentially gone up - and your coding is in front of a lot of people.
The thing is, technical directors like productive coders. If your repo/tool makes ALL coders more productive, then they will love you. It's as simple as that. You know the whole 10x engineer hoopla that's thrown around on here? You'd be doing that for other people. A multiplier of multipliers. If you do that, people will be in contact with you. Just stick with it.
Silicon Valley is a bit different. There is usually a gauntlet of multi-day interviews even for the lowliest position at a startup nobody has heard of. It's even more of a gauntlet at the large, established companies. I've heard of someone doing 10 days of interviews at amazon.com, and they are a company most want to avoid. Companies are very afraid of hiring the wrong person.
As you have noted, most everywhere else the developer is made to feel lucky to work at a folding table in an unheated area next to the men's room.
I have a BA in Art with a minor in Advertising. If I can get noticed using these tactics, then surely people with CS or EE degrees can too.
Good for you for realizing that "marketing" doesn't have to be a dirty word and hopefully others can learn from your example.
I imagine you could have that too in Shoreditch if you're like the special one.
A CFO is paid more than the coal miner because the skills required to be CFO of a Fortune 500 company are scarcer, and more wanted, than the skills required to be a coal miner. It’s the combination of scarcity and wantedness that drives up a salary. Coders (Read web-developers in the authors case) are paid more because of a demand for them which the author tries to understand.
It's probably a bubble to some extent. Eventually, if the return from all these web apps is less than the money spent on them, the money will dry up. (I'd imagine that this will be the case - most of the value of the most-recent crop of high-value tech startups seems to be based on hype and even bigger companies buying them, rather than profitability or revenues). In the mean time, there's still people queuing up to fund things they don't understand. The biggest thing to remember about bubbles is that they always seem to keep growing far longer than any sensible person would expect. Will the money run out eventually? Probably.
If you're a fund with $100 billion under management, dropping $2 billion into various venture funds is a reasonable part of the mix. Multiply that by the fact that several hundred funds, banks, trusts and companies collectively control trillions of dollars and these little 1 or 2 percent investments pump billions of dollars into tens of thousands of companies with collectively perhaps a few hundred thousand employees.
When every buyer is cashed up, prices for sellers rise.
I don't hear anyone saying - don't bother making a smartphone unless you are Apple or Samsung (of course this might have been Motorola or Nokia in the past :-) )
The general rule is 1/3rd of investments will fail, 1/3rd of investments will under perform and 1/3rd will meet expectations - and to put that in to a better perspective, "expectations" should be read as a 5x to 10x return on investment. A better firm might be able to skew that more to the successful side, while another firm might be more on the failure side.
I don't think the money will "run out" - but the better firms (think USV, Sequoia, Accel, etc) will continue having the experience in finding successful startups and the smaller firms might just not see the return on interest and exit the game.
There's a lot of hype about "tech" (in this context really only web apps) which has lead to a lot of money pouring in from people desperate to grab a slice of the pie. The reality is that while web apps and SaaS is a large industry, the size of the investment funds targeting the industry is due to hype and investors saying "me too" rather than a reflection on the available revenues. You have to look at even the success stories in this context.
The money won't run out completely, but if the money from investors late to the party slows down then the value of the successful web apps will fall to levels which reflect their revenues.
Rap Genius pays $150,000 + $10K signing bonus, dude feels kinda weird about it.
So either what we do really is that hard, and worth that much, or there's a crash coming.
There's too little supply of qualified engineers, but startups can't afford to compete in salary with the big guys (basically Facebook, Google, Amazon and the financial sector). So we compete on cheaper things like nice offices, gym memberships, etc. Basically, feel good stuff that doesn't cost much.
Facebook's budget for engineers is a good 20-50% higher than the salary a startup can pay.
Thus, it's not actually crazy that a law school student can become an engineer worth $80,000/year in only eight months. It's the startup's only option.
And that's a good thing: Companies like ours (http://www.thinkful.com/) are finding a way to build products in a way that doesn't break our budget. We're also providing great opportunities to people who want to become engineers. The only caveat is for companies greater than 50 or so people – they're struggling most of all: Too small to attract great talent that wants stability, too large to attract hungry new talent or accept junior talent that needs to learn on the job.
There's an upper limit, but our research indicates that there's a durable demand for engineering. This demand will look decidedly less sexy once startups become less cool, but software engineering will be an in-demand skill well beyond the current hype cycle.
What's happening in the market right now is that people who may not have previously been considered qualified are now considered qualified. This is because there's so much demand.
Huh? Being larger should make it easier to do this, not harder. The company I currently work for has done this for its last 3 developer hires, and it's about the same size as yours.
Given those 15 years of experience, I am not very surprised that I am in short supply. But now that coding is beginning to be cool, I'd also not be surprised if not too many years from now, basic computer literacy at the end of secondary education (or even earlier) includes the ability to crank out basic RoR-style apps.
What if, out of the 348/350 other students you claim were unaware of linux, there were more than 0 of them that were happy to play with linux on their own without broadcasting it to you?
My point in this is that hobbies may seem unique, and it's great that we can motivate the growth of our identity in this, but to take it to the extent that you and your friend were the only kids that knew linux is blissful ignorance. No offense to you, it's just your assumption that I feel compelled to respond to.
I think you'll find that 300 is a much smaller number of people than it sounds. While I respect your challenge of my assertion, I feel it's mostly valid. The effect intended is that only a very small fraction of kids in my class were technically inclined.
This is a great reminder that the "just world" fallacy [successful people deserve their success because they worked hard and that the less fortunate/unemployed somehow deserve their failure] is just that, a fallacy.
Where do you see that? He specifically concludes that he's making the right (ie "just") amount of money for writing and coding, and that it's "just" that the CFO makes more money than the coal-miner because his skills are more specialised and in higher demand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
Value is not virtue.
What you consider virtuous may produce no economic value. Or maybe it does. There's no rigid formula that connects them and the Just World Hypothesis is an illusion that traps fools and wisemen alike.
Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures and I retain every confidence that it will be ever thus.
James Somers might find Hayek's writing to be a bit repetitive and languid; but he will find the ideas illuminating. It seems like his father tried, but failed, to make the insight really stick.
There has never been a Just World where Virtue = Value. No matter how badly we want it, there can't be. And trying to forcefully make one generally just makes it much worse.
Trying to reconcile the virtues of what he does with his economic value is pointless. They're just not connected.
Demand for Ruby on Rails plumbing is ultimately connected with the current wishes and desires of most of the planet's population and has nothing whatsoever to do with how he, or anyone else, feels about it.
In literary terms: he's tilting at windmills.
Which is no comfort at all. Quite the reverse. Ignorance really is bliss.
I find the intellectual argument comforting because I can focus on the things I can control, the things that are within my sphere of power.
I used to be very interested in politics. These days I either ignore it or treat it as entertainment. Because I have no control over it, why drag myself down with it?
Also, you certainly do have the ability to actively engage with your world and you have an extremely limited ability to change how certain aspects of that world works. Of course this has to be based on the idea that doing so is inherently worth it which you seem to have abandoned.
I change my mind about the boundary line pretty frequently.
Demand for Ruby on Rails plumbing is connected with where that money is going, and it's alright to think that where that money is going may not equivalent to the wishes, desires (and needs) of most of the population, and to be pensive about that.
In moral terms: he's wondering if the concentration of spending on matters that he's a subject expert in is a negative thing in terms of the world he wants to see.
He's not fighting hallucinations.
I think the actions or desires of most of the planets population, who don't have computers or internet-enabled phones, have virtually no impact on the market for rails developers.
That said, the billion plus people that joined Facebook and click on Google ads have had a bit of an influence on why LPs from all over continue to pump money into Sand Hill Road VC funds...
My point is that everyone who is connected to the global economy is indirectly connected to everyone else in it. The overall system pushes prices, goods and money around in an impossibly large web of interactions. We can see the local factors, but we can't see the whole picture.
Nevertheless, the price of lettuce at the supermarket, the price of a new laptop, the hourly rate I bill, the cost of bullets for an AK-47 being used in a civil war: these are all, ultimately, connected together.
edit: by post-hoc I mean, facebook was never meant for memes, but it does now. So you say "facbook is about fun memes", "XXXX was fun". Both of them were not in the original idea, but you express the fallacy.
The fact is, the 15-30's people doze off in a third rate movie, have fun by poking and squeaking.
And I have watch, ppt's about my company's future.
My old guy, would goto
* The same barber
* Same Grocery store
* Have the Same locally made cigar
* Listen to the same news casters.
I was always the type of person who would experiment. Age is fucking with me now.
And now, like my dad I look for "virtuous" people/business to trust.
I structure my life around virtuous behavior because I have kids.
In short, people my age give money(value) to virtue.
The above addresses,
> Virtue is not value.
> Value is not virtue.
No one feels happy for being called a master chef and be paid, when he works for a fast food chain. That's the gist of OP's feeling.
> I'm trying to save him some angst.
No, you are arguing for business without morality, like the late night infomercials which, the entire 20-30 oriented startups are, in a way.
Things you never wanted, but you have an ab-cruncher in your house anyway.
This relates to the virtue/value discussion elsewhere in this thread. As a consultant I'm learning that some companies are price-averse and some are risk-averse. The latter are willing to pay more to lower their risks. In other words they are willing to pay more to people they trust, which they base on perceived virtue. So here is at least one case where virtue really does have value precisely as virtue (leaving aside the difference between appearance vs. reality).
I guess some skills do improve with age.
Is entertaining people virtuous at least potentially? if so, then there is nothing wrong with selling video games, movies, music, or whatever. If not, however then you have a problem because while the world make seem nice on paper (no money to Hollywood since that would take away from cancer research), it isn't a world any of us would like to live in.
The problem is from where I sit that the expected value (what investors will put in things) is wildly out of proportion to the actual delivered value to customers. I think this is even true of giants like Facebook, so what we get are speculative bubbles because investors are assuming there is more value than there is.
This is an unproductive line of argument because either of us can just keep moving the goalposts until we're exhausted.
Economic value clearly doesn't follow any "gut" virtue. Here's how an early moral theorist put it in a notoriously influential book:
Generally speaking, attempts to create ranking functions for virtue lead to mismatches with the observed state of the world. You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all.But if you try to impose a virtuous order, it all goes kerflooie. Because the whole system of production and allocation relies entirely on value. When you take value you away, it stops working. Partial enforcement leads to partial derangement and in general, creates new evils, requiring still further ranking functions ... it spirals out of control thereafter.
We read this:
And imagine ourselves to be men and women both of knowledge and power. But it was always an illusion.I'm doing a pretty poor job of explaining all this. Hayek's Social or 'Distributive' Justice does a much more convincing, thorough and erudite job. It was published in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, also in The Essence of Hayek.
edit: by the way, your blog about LedgerSMB and PostgreSQL is bloody marvellous.
Stealing from people was never thought of as a productive economic activity, but legally things like patent trolls that act like stealing are legal. So, I suspect you could creat a society where virtue and value are at least aligned and historically they may have been closer. However, we don't live in such a place.
> You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all.
But the problem here is that without a framework for deciding what is virtuous, all you are doing is assigning your own measure of value. In that regard your argument boils down to "what you think is valuable is not necessarily a solution that lots of people will pay money for." But I do think that virtuous solutions are valuable to the extent they are virtuous. A cure for cancer would be worth, I would expect, thousands or millions of times what a hollywood blockbuster would be.
However there are limits to this analysis. While I think valuable = virtuous with regard to solutions it doesn't necessarily follow that the coal miner is less virtuous than the Ruby programmer. Wages are determined in ways that both do and don't resemble market economics as even Adam Smith noted (he saw wage levels as being indicative of negotiating power differences between various professions).
So my caution is to avoid looking at wages (ruby programmers vs coal miners) in the same way you look at solutions (cure for cancer vs the next big MTV hit).
His general point is that trying to make complex, emergent systems fit into neat theories tends to break the systems.
That book I mentioned -- Essence of Hayek -- is worth getting. I began to review it on my blog and never finished writing my follow up ditties.
I take the approach of saying "what is good is what is conducive to human flourishing." This is largely an Aristotelian approach (and so you can't really accuse me of deriving terms to meet economics). Therefore I would say there is some virtue in entertaining people or rather that such is at least potentially virtuous.
The problem is that if you accept that human flourishing is the goal and thus the definition of virtue, and if you assume that to a large extent this is also the goal of the economy (something I think that both most economists and the Classical philosophers shared), then virtue and value can't be seen as separate at least in terms of solutions (as I say, wages are different).
Or are you saying that Hayek does not see distributive human flourishing as the ends to which our economic systems work?
It's like seeing a purpose in the weather. It just is.
There is a way out of this, and that is a 19th century Catholic idea (I am not even a Christian but Catholicism is interesting to me to the extent the Catholic Church is a torchbearer for pagan Greek and Roman phylosophy) called "subsidiarity."
The idea of subsidiarity is that it is theft for a group to accomplish what an individual could accomplish by him or herself, and for the same reason it is theft for a larger, more centralized group to do what a smaller group could do. The goal of larger groups should be to support, not supplant, smaller organizations. This idea of subsidiarity thus seeks to reformulate society and the economy on Aristotelian grounds, with the family household in the center (rather than the multinational corporation of liberal capitalism, or the state). From this view, virtue and economic value are the same to the extent that people seek to live just lives, and to the extent that central authorities only seek to accomplish on their own what are fundamentally impossible for the smaller entities.
I think this is one reason why libertarians have associated the Catholic idea of subsidiarity with the private sector which only makes sense in terms of Hayek (I don't think that equivalence quite works but one can easily see the similarity).
Hayek isn't trying to build the Ideal World. He's taking the world he saw and said "here's how it works", and then, "here's why it wouldn't work if we decided to design a system instead of having it emerge".
So for example, if subsidiarity is imposed, how does that play out? You already create a requirement to deduce what the smallest group capable of producing a thing is. But we already have something like that in the market. It's lumpy and fuzzy, but it does eventually kill off the too large and the too small (modulo endless tinkering by legislators).
Coase explained that firms emerge because of transaction costs. Sometimes it's easier and cheaper to do a thing in existing groups. Sometimes it's not. The tension between these allows firms to emerge from the social order. I'd add that the rise of IT has enabled coordination on a vastly greater scale, which has helped to create the modern corporation.
Ruby on Rails developers are scarce and valuable just because there still aren't a whole lot of them, and because they can crank out CRUD apps (which are just data collection apparatuses) more quickly and efficiently than anyone has been able to before. Once someone invents an even faster/more automated way to design and deploy a data-collection tool than RoR (which might be just a future version of RoR), then that will be the next big thing for a while.
> Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures
There are so many examples (a single one of which disproves your "universal" claim) of idealists bring "is" more into alignment with "ought" that it would be almost impertinent to even begin enumerating them. Here's a small handful: Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage, and (from an economic perspective, since that what you seem to insist can never be touched by notions of "ought") the rise of Organized Labor, which made it possible for former wage slaves to earn a decent living wage.
If Hayek and Rand make you feel better about the fact that most of us over-earn relative to the "virtue" of our labors, fine. But IMHO it is best to be honest about the inequities and fortuitous circumstances which make our success possible.
You correctly pointed out that the value of labour has been affected by simple economic considerations more completely than any theory of the native goodness of honest toil.
Rand's cardboard aliens all seem very smug and self-assured and basically I think her books have done more harm than good.
Hayek's tone is an exasperated old school master. He just wants people to understand that you can't create -- as in design or ordain ab initio -- a working economic system that aligns to virtuous ends. It will break.
As an aside, I agree that this is a very difficult proposition for incomes, but gains are to be made with a strong public sector which provides numerous basic services such as healthcare, education, and affordable subsidized housing, so that the unfortunate man with a virtuous job of little economic value is not left out in the cold. Or dying of long-undiagnosed cancer due to lack of access to prohibitively expensive preventive care, like my wife's cousin is currently.
I'm seeing roughly 20 people, sitting in what is essentially a dark cellar. It would be completely colourless, if it wasn't for a handful of bizarre, childish gadgets here and there. I couldn't imagine working in such a crowded, depressing environment, let alone feel relaxed.
And from what I've seen, that's one reality for many programmers: The offices are often quite bad.
Open plan offices are popular (it's not like developers need to phone or anything, right?), developers are put in basements, under the roof, or into an unattractive second building. And home office is generally more difficult to pull off for programmers than for other knowledge workers, which I think is mostly caused by a general lack of trust.
Sure, the salaries are pretty good lately (although it's pretty much at the level of other professions requiring degrees, isn't it?), but I don't see much appreciation of programmers in most settings. The startup world is different (from my experience), but it's a very small part of our industry.
My parents are medical professionals, their offices were terrible. My sister runs a government org in Australia, has horrible office. One of my old bosses was the head of a department at Harvard, also had a disgusting office. I personally am not a fan of the open space bullpen, but almost every other professional I have met had an office that was worse. The only people I know with legitimately cool offices are interior designers.
I've been in only one big company so far, but anecdotal evidence suggests many are similar.
It was a software company. Software was it's core business. Yet the programmers, about 10% of the employees, where kind of the lowest in the food chain. Sales got all the money and a lot of attention. Professional services and product management got a lot of attention, shiny offices and regular praisings. The developers were all but ignored.
I stuck to smaller software companies (mostly startups) again ever since. I always felt valued there, and that's important for my overall job satisfaction.
Ours certainly isn't a beautiful masterpeice of architecture and modern art, but it definitely qualifies as nice.
A little bland and "airport-lounge-y" despite logos on the walls and brightly coloured chairs/sofa in the casual meeting areas (imagine an off-white and less saturated take on the pallet used for Mirror's Edge), but we have perfectly reasonable desks and chairs, plenty of space (I've seen more than twice as many people crammed into similar spaces), a good amount of natural light (though in the middle of the office the artificial lights still need to be on all day), and a useful kitchen area with plenty of space should lots of use want lunch in at the same time.
-- HtDP2
btw, 5 opening paragraphs with so many Is and numbers hardly could be considered a good writing. I guess that the word for this (writing style and the content) is hipsterism.)
This might be true only by a VERY narrow definition of "world", specifically Silicon Valley. Or maybe I live in a very peculiar place, but the developers (Web or otherwise) here are in the low to mid income range, regardless of their skills and experience. And don't even get me started on freedom and respect...
You don't have to be in a startup hub to find work, just willing to move somewhere. That makes you much more marketable.
For starters, you'll have more money.
One important reason for that is that a lot of people who have enough skills and experience to be able to find a much better job elsewhere simply are not allowed -- or face extreme obstacles -- to move to that elsewhere. Visas, work permits, relocation expenses and other issues pile up quickly.
Adding to that other factors like age, family, lack of network in the new place (which is crucial when finding a job) etc, and you will see a quite different issue than you might be used to in terms of relocation.
For my money the businesses I am starting (including the new cloud ERP start-up Efficito (http://www.efficito.com) are intended to continue to chip away at real problems. They may not seem like much but they will hopefully contribute in one way or another to helping support small businesses, the self-employed, and such against the leviathan multinational companies. Some problems (like too much corporate control) are bad matches for venture-capital backing. Other problems though may not be.
Not only are they hard, it's that they're not obviously monetizable.
Too much corporate control over our lives as individuals is a problem a small family business can monetize a small piece of a solution for, but is not a problem a VC can, because the problem goes contrary to any VC exit strategy.
Now the second point though is that corporations may end up doing some of that anyway. The movement towards open source/free software and open data is helping establish that in at least some cases this problem is monetizable even on a corporate level if one realizes that the corporation is subject to the same restrictions as an individual. If we look at software or data as potential means of production, then this is a welcome way in which the industry is moving towards spreading around control over means of production.
But what I am advocating is not solving the important problems but building business with the important problems in mind, seeing what one can do to help with them in one way or another, either through operations or through product development. They don't need to be the primary focus (and maybe shouldn't be the primary focus) but the idea that we are living in a new world where virtue is not a prerequisite to value suggests two words to me "speculative bubble."
Too much corporate control over our lives as individuals is a problem a small family business can monetize a small piece of a solution for, but is not a problem a VC can, because the problem goes contrary to any VC exit strategy.
Now the second point though is that corporations may end up doing some of that anyway. The movement towards open source/free software and open data is helping establish that in at least some cases this problem is monetizable even on a corporate level if one realizes that the corporation is subject to the same restrictions as an individual. If we look at software or data as potential means of production, then this is a welcome way in which the industry is moving towards spreading around control over means of production.
But what I am advocating is not solving the important problems but building business with the important problems in mind, seeing what one can do to help with them in one way or another, either through operations or through product development. They don't need to be the primary focus (and maybe shouldn't be the primary focus) but the idea that we are living in a new world where virtue is not a prerequisite to value suggests two words to me "speculative bubble."
Going back to 17C Holland there was probably a huge demand for market traders able to distinguish fine differences in and trade tulip bulbs, until all of a sudden there wasn't - this is the kind of illusory value the writer posits for today's fêted startup web workers. I'm not sure I entirely agree, but it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, because he's not just saying it's unfair, but that it may be unjustified.
The price of a word is being bid to zero.
This sentence near the end cuts to the heart of the matter for me - for writers or other producers of original content like photographers there is a cruel and dismal comparison to be drawn between the wages of those paid to frame content and present it to the world, and the wages of those who produce the content. The creative content (writing, photography, art, travel guides etc) is all in demand, but no-one wants to pay for it, perhaps because it's so easy to produce something yourself, and so hard to distinguish the fine differences in quality which separate a remarkable piece of writing or photography from the mediocre.
I just paid several thousand dollars to a wedding photographer for my wedding. That is pretty standard from what people tell me. I wouldn't say that no one is willing to pay for content. It depends on the content.
Don't take this as a disagreement with your whole comment (it isn't), but one trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for, which is what shareholders and VCs care about.
There was an article on HN a day or two ago about how asking people to bet on political propositions affects their stated beliefs - when there's no cost, people will happily spout whatever their favoured party's line is, but if you ask them to put their money where their mouth is, they will often skew away.
VCs are investing based on where they think people will actually put their money, not on where they say they will. If evidence is that people spend a lot of time social networks, AND evidence is that advertisers will pay money for web adverts to people, then it might follow that a new social network is a good investment.
The main issue as I see it is that as we use money as a proxy for value, we disproportionately weight the desires of the rich over those of the poor. A service for rich people (e.g. an online photo sharing website) doesn't need to produce much utility to be worth a lot of money, whereas a service for poor people (e.g. clean water for poor villages) can produce a lot of utility and still be worth little money.
If VCs were funding companies which made solid profits from customers and were therefore able to pay the VCs a multiple out of that profit I'd find this argument that money talks more convincing. As it is it seems that value for internet companies is not based on revenue or even potential revenue.
This disconnect between the money invested and the money earned completely breaks the connection you talk of - customers willing to put their money where their mouth is. Someone in the chain is paying lots of money, but it certainly isn't the actual end users or customers of most startups - often they run at a loss for a substantial period, and then they have no way to turn their free readers/users into paying ones in sufficient numbers to support their valuation or the money put in. VCs really don't care about that though, as long as they are paid more than they put in - that can easily happen if the companies are bought by larger corporations like IBM or Yahoo in the mistaken belief that the customers can be converted - the question of revenue then becomes academic as the companies are folded into a larger parent and the actual value impossible to discern.
It's an interesting time to be alive and an interesting market to be working in, but I do find the distortions created by massively inflated valuations and companies built just to be sold on worrying. Forgive me though, I must stop wittering on HN and get back to work now :)
I would suggest that there is also a difference between what people actually want, and what people demonstrate with their behavior, what they actually do.
What people do is not neccesarily what they want either! For all sorts of reasons. Poor self-control, costs/risks (financial/social/psychological) to doing what you really want, etc.
Just becuase someone spends money on something doesn't actually mean that, in an ideal world, they want to be paying for it, or want it in their lives.
The sorts of examples I was thinking of though, would be:
* Someone who wants/says they want everyone to be paid a living wage and are willing to pay somewhat more for products made by people earning such -- but still consistently buy the cheapest products, made in sweatshops.
(That one might be, in part, about a lack of trustworthy information?).
* Someone who wants/says they'd rather there be fewer McDonalds around and more healthy restaurants, but still spends lot of money at mccdonalds, and maybe not at an available healthy restaurant.
(lack of willpower?)
I think you are right about the, er, epistemilogical problems, but I think there are still some examples that make it pretty obvious that what people actually want is not always represented by their actions.
Or at least not always by their _purchase actions_. Maybe the larger point is that, contrary to certain religions, the market is not in fact a perfect aggregator of people's true desires. What is successful in the market is NOT always representative of people's true desires, for all sorts of reasons (including the obvious one that some people have more market power than others, so are better represented in 'the market' -- but that's just the very beginning of reasons).
Given this, as a business, one has a choice of focusing only on what you can get people to do (eg. cigarettes, farmville, tabloid journalism, in fact any business that exploits the above reasons) as opposed to focusing on what they truly want - even though we want people to act in a certainway. The first kind are the businesses which are generally considered "evil".
Your idea of wants differentiated from actions seems to be quite fruitful. I used to tell people "don't ask your customers, instead, observe their actions". Clearly, something more is required to make a non-evil business. Thanks for teaching me something new. :)
Such is the predatory nature of the capitalist.
Honestly, that rhetoric is phenomenal.
That is the essence of free markets. If you look up the "welfare theorem's" you will see that the free market promises to do precisely what you describe: maximize the weighted sum of individual utilities, where the wealthier individuals generally have higher weights.
Ultimately, it is in human nature to care more about oneself and one's family (and possibly other people who you consider to be part of your in-group) than others. The free market just happens to make this fact very stark. Each time I buy a coffee for myself instead of donating to a poor village, I cannot avoid the conclusion that I care more about my momentary happiness than whether someone in that village gets some avoidable disease.
Another trap people fall into is equating what people are willing to pay for something, with the amount of value that's actually able to be captured in the market for that item.
The finance industry, say, is able to capture a lot of the value they create (some might say more than they create). Some other industries, less so.
Cuts to the heart of it indeed: "The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real."
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2006/09...
but it's the sad fact of me outperforming my peers, in something that is essentially a big pile of junk and waste of time.
i'm now thinking about going to some neuroscience lab in the states to get a ph.d and build something meaningful again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
The price of an already taken photograph, or that of a pre-packaged software or web service tends towards zero, however if you want original content, or to build software, hiring the talent to do it is going in the opposite direction (e.g. good wedding photographers charge a lot of money, as photos may be cheap and plenty, but good photographers aren't neither cheap or plenty).
> this is the kind of illusory value the writer posits for today's fêted startup web workers
The real value of a "web worker" is not in its ability to write PHP to serve HTML, but rather in their ability to find and solve problems. Good engineers that solve problems will always be in demand. Example: I would put an engineer to do marketing, because a good engineer would know how to do measurements, statistics and A/B testing.
Basically, the majority of people cannot appreciate art. Abstract ideas and brilliant commentary are simply not valued by the majority as much as a working system, even if it's as obvious a concept as Facebook. When you hire someone to write something, it's almost impossible to predict the audience's reception to it. When you make a website, a logical machine, you at least know you have something less abstract. A website is more tangible than a piece of prose. Words indeed have no value in themselves.
You would expect the people who make the software that facilitates web publishing to be paid more on average, no? Developers get paid more because they make the stuff that people want -- stuff that does something or solves a problem. It's that simple.
The real reason is not really that people don't want to pay for it, but rather it's available for free, so there's no need for most people to pay for those things. If there were no free travel guides etc., people would still pay for them.
A comparable situation is happening with newspapers. People will pay for news if they cannot get them for free. Since you can these days get news for free, a lot of people are getting rid of their newspaper subscriptions.
If that results in a gradual erosion of quality as less and less effort is put in to researching and writing articles, and more and more of the content is churnalism or opinion pieces, then it's a net loss for everyone - eventually the adverts will be more interesting than the real content which lives in the interstices of advertising - I think that would be a shame. I've seen that happening in major newspapers in the UK like the Independent or the Guardian. We've seen the same in television with the rise of Reality TV etc - cheap to produce, controversial, and the perfect filler to squeeze between advertising segments.
At least with regards to written content, most people have access to much more interesting content. Heck, hn is more interesting than my newspaper. And we manage to find stuff to talk about.
Investigative journalism is just a case of the tragedy of the commons, that now run out the huge luck it got n the past. And we as a society need to start looking at it as such, and not fantasize that it is a standard business.
If this is a question to yourself, then my response is: start sending part of your paycheck to the guy in the coal mine. Don't blame someone else for society's ills and not be willing to fix such problems yourself. Find a miner, adopt him, send him half your paycheck, keep tabs on him: how the job's going, how the family's doing, etc.
If this is a question for me, a creator of software, then my response is: I build things that enable new activities, I don't perform a task that maintains someone else's status quo. I (as a freelancer) or my employer (when I'm an employee) have found someone willing to pay what we charge. Period. How am I able to do that? By learning. Continuously. By adapting to changes in technology and the market. Why do I get paid more than the coal miner? Because he has settled for that life. If he needs something more, he needs to learn how to attain it.
But maybe, just maybe, our coal mining friend is doing what he loves. If he's happy ... leave him alone.
I would be cautious with this callous mentality towards the miner. I wouldn't jump so quickly to the conclusion that he/she is not "learning. Continuously" as you say you are. The miner may very well be. The issue the article raises is a good one, what validity is there that someone can put the value they create so much higher then another.
What happens one day when your profession is no longer well paid? Think for a minute that you did not have the mental capacity to compete in the new 'tech world' in 20 years. Would you expect that you are paid in accordance with your lack of ability, or would you hope you are still given an equal shot.
Personally this article hits at the heart of the somewhat libertarian style commentary on Hacker New. One that I myself am all too engulfed in as well. Perhaps we aren't as valuable as we may think?
...that sounds incredibly insulting. It's not like he's homeless.
>Why do I get paid more than the coal miner? Because he has settled for that life.
bullshit. This is exactly the kind of attitude that the article is criticizing.
>maybe, our coal mining friend is doing what he loves
Maybe, and that's great. But for most people, "doing what you love" is simply not viable, at least career-wise. Don't forget how incredibly fortunate you are to love doing a job that also happens to pay extremely well.
-Canadian working overseas
And salary is like night and day. The highest PHP salary I heard of out there in my interviews and travels was 55k. Toronto PHP jobs start at 60k and many are in the 70's and 80's. I've heard an even larger gulf for Java devs, especialy as you get up to the senior ranks. I don't know about salarys for other languages, but if you don't know Java, .Net, or PHP in the maritimes, you'll be waiting a long time to be employed. There's the occasional C++ or Python gig, but youd' make twice as much in Toronto.
And remote jobs, in Canada, in my experience, do not exist. I've seen maybe five in the last five years. Meanwhile I see remote gigs in the States daily. Basically if your'e looking for remote work, you're looking in the US. Canadian employers I've found are leery to openly hostile about folks working remotely.
Now things could have changed in the last year, and that's just my own experience, but if your'e looking for solid work, and good pay, and in Canada, it's effectively Toronto or bust.
Thanks for the info, appreciate it!