Software engineers get paid more than any other engineering discipline so that part is wrong AF but yea the rest is valid
Programmer pay is so bizarre, it makes me cynical about our entire economy.
If I’m a blue-collar worker maintaining the wires between banks, I get paid little. If I’m a programmer maintaining the banking software that controls everyone’s money and is essential to the entire nation, I’m paid a little more, but not as much as some programmers.
If I’m a young man who creates a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions of dollars into my hands.
(Although, creating a webpage was the hot thing last decade, now the hot thing is creating an AI.)
You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.
COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.
I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn’t be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between “the proper way to do things”, and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it’s been around and having things built on top of it.
That’s probably true. My father has been developing in COBOL since the '70s. I didn’t bother learning it because I was under the impression that he was being paid more for experience than his basic skills.
not sure what you’re talking about with lisp lol, the military may have some dialect they wrote but lisp started as an academic language and there’s plenty of still supported and used dialects outside of that
There may be, but as far as I can tell, they won’t pay what the people that still need COBOL are willing to pay
It’s pretty simple isn’t it? If you want to be paid a lot of money, learn how to do what other people can’t or won’t. In the software industry those opportunities are all over the place. You just need to find it and take it.
Dude, should I learn COBOL?
I’d recommend against it. Seems to cause my father no end of headaches
A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.
Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.
Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.
I think it makes perfect sense. Those people are building something from scratch. That’s a lot more responsibility and skill needed than to maintain a tiny part of a huge well established system. The people capable of doing an A+ job at building something totally new are very few and far between and the competition to hire them is fierce. The best way to move up in this industry is to build up your skill and jump ship to a new job as soon as your skill has outpaced your salary.
buddy there are a lot more reasons to be more than cynical about the economy, take a good look at things and you’ll probably want to bring out the pitchforks.
Yeah man, me too.
I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient … Buuuut… The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase… All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.
The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.
I think it really just comes down to scale. Relative to other professions there aren’t that many software engineers, but the work produced by each one has the potential to reach an extremely wide user base. Someone working at Google could write code that gets deployed on a billion devices. This is pretty clear when comparing between different software engineering roles as well. Companies that serve a global market pay significantly better than local companies.
On top of that, there’s no supplies or logistics required for software engineering. It just takes one person and a computer, so expenses are minimal compared to other engineering disciplines.
The post literally above this one is about a manufacturing job with shit hours and pay and I work a 8-4 (sometimes longer) but im paid abnormally high (we start new devs at 70k and average dev is six figures).
But the other stuff like free time can absolutely suffer as even at the senior level, I’m taking so many courses and outside education to stay relevant.
Software also gets a plethora of remote work. I have zero sympathy as a mechanical and manufacturing engineer.
I work almost 100% on a computer for a municipality using software that’s already 100% web-based.
But I have to drive 90+ minutes each way every day because a citizen might want to have an in-person meeting once every few weeks instead of an email or Teams meeting.
You’re an outlier for sure
Oh, I’m not a programmer. I’m just bitching about how many of us have to go to an office for no reason.
Ah my bad
Most old people don’t have that much money. Many UK pensioners freeze in their homes every year.
My wife and I make a decent income between the two of us, and we nearly froze to death winter before last! £500pcm+ to keep our house at like 10°C, absolute madness.
Britain got it so bad with the natural gas prices in the last few years.
I’m from Vancouver, Canada, so everything seemed so cheap when I moved to the UK…except natural gas and electricity. Like I held the lease and had all the utils in my name for a house when I lived in Canada, 14 people, all gamers. And the bills in winter were less than half what my wife and I were paying this past winter.
That’s wild, how big is your house? My monthly spend on heating is 1/4 of that during winter to keep it at 21.
Single glazed everything, shoddy extension that’s falling to bits, and no insulation anywhere, 12ft ceilings and also our boiler is shit. It’s a two bedroom Victorian terrace, ground floor. Fighting with Edinburgh Council to get approval for a much needed renovation, but even though the category of listing our home is literally only covers the front facade, our really quite modest renovation plan would “be a detriment to the character of the neighbourhood”. Our upstairs neighbour also paid significantly less that winter…but they got approval to rip all their floors up and install insulation and double glazed windows.
What the fuck. That sounds personal
Just Edinburgh planning are fickle. We got someone on the wrong day, and they decided, fuck these guys in particular. They are notorious for things like stringing an application along for 5 years for no good reason. We’re requesting a formal rejection, a decision was supposed to have been made in January, so we can take it to appeals. Thankfully since we’re in a listed building the appeal goes directly to the office of a minister and not back to Edinburgh Council planning.
That’s rough :(
Lmao, no.
Go work a job in a different industry before thinking you have it so tough.
Programmers make more money, have more vacation and free time, and consequently typically have stabler lives, than literally every single other professional industry.
Also their careers grow faster and steadier even in a recession, changing jobs is easier and comes with a significant pay raise each time, and they mostly don’t have to deal with costumers.
Nah, I took a pay cut at my new job from where I was laid off due to the recession.
Thank god we don’t have to deal with costumers, imagine what outfit you’d have to wear to deal with them. And to make it work you’d probably have to wear make up too, it’d feel like halloween everyday.
I mean, American programmers seem to make a ton.
Yes but they live in places that cost a ton, and then get fired with no notice.
Agreed to the part about job security being terrible in the U.S, but it’s worth mentioning that the premium you get in income for living in for example San Francisco far outweighs the cost of housing.
You can always cut back on expenses, you can’t just increase your salary. I will take high cost of living with a high salary any day and just cut back on non essentials. If you’re eating out all the time and a meal is $20 vs $5, that will add up to a lot, but if you’re spending 50 cents on an egg instead of 10 cents, you’ll still be making way more in a HCOL area. Plus programming has the best paying remote opportunities, so you can have the best of both worlds if you’re talented.
I live in rural Pennsylvania but I work remotely for a San Francisco startup.
I get paid less than my coworkers who live in big cities, but more than any of my friends who live in my area except one who’s also a programmer.
That’s the best possible outcome. We’re super lucky in this industry because we have the best paying remote work opportunities out there. Before you couldn’t get an SF job in a LCOL area, and even with a COL adjustment, you are still making closer to an SF salary than a rural Penn salary.
Exactly. I got extremely lucky on top of actively trying to game the system.
Ive always thought thsoe graphs were bullshit, im a college student and I have no time, energy, or money. I feel like this will not change drastically as i age lmao
Depends on Major, I have more time as a Worker than I did in College. More energy, too.
Im a physics major so it is likely my own doing
I read your first comment and thought “I wonder if they’re studying physics too, this sounds way too relatable”. lo and behold
hang in there!
Keep at it! Physics is cool as hell!
If you think programmers make less than other jobs then you’re totally out of touch.
Not all programmers live in the US. In the UK, especially outside of London, the pay is surprisingly bad.
Yes, but the pay for other jobs is even worse!
My wife is a teacher. Her pay was mostly comparable to mine throughout our careers. My pay has literally tripled since working in London.
Currently, there are senior design and development roles in my home city of Bristol that pay less than what you’d get paid as a fast food manager.
I knew pay in the UK was bad for developers but that’s completely cuckoo. It sounds more like the uk is the odd one out though since while EU pay is lower than US I do know that it’s still better than most other jobs in the same area even if you aren’t in the Capitol. But there’s also always remote work if you live somewhere with no jobs.
It’s a mix of both. My wife makes good money as a teacher, primarily because she’s very senior in her role, and takes leadership responsibilities. Teachers are required in (mostly) equal measure everywhere, whereas software engineers always gravitate towards HCOL areas where the jobs are. If you’re not in one of these areas, you’re stuck with limited jobs, with limited pay.
My commute is close to two hours, one way, but the pay I can get here is over double what I’ll get where I live. Comparably, as a senior I probably get paid less than a new graduate in a HCOL city in the US.
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Yeah but all the other jobs don’t leave you with crypto debt up to your eyeballs. I have $83k in credit card debt that I used to buy LUNA.
Hmm, yes. This reasoning is perfectly sound.
Pretty sure you can lose all your money in a casino regardless of how you earn it
That’s your jobs fault?
I genuinely can’t tell if this is incredibly dry humor or if you’re being serious.
Implying money ever reaches 100% full
old
money 100
doubt
I invite op to Turkey
Most programmers I know have a SO and make bank. What is this?
you haven’t met me yet
I think it’s Europeans. I’ve heard that many European countries don’t have high pay for devs.
Still high relative to the average but nowhere near their American counterparts.
I’ve worked with programmers from Europe, they have above average pay.
european countries also have a lower maintenance fee for staying alive, which evens things out a lot.
programmer pay here means you can just save up and retire early.
It is lower than the US, but it’s still higher than average EU salary, plus you get tons more benefits and job security. Also, with remote work, you can get a US job in Europe. You’ll get paid less than if you were in the US, but more than other Europeans, while still enjoying the social benefits, and since you can accept less that makes you attractive to US companies. Main downside is having to adjust to US meeting hours.
The making bank brings the SO
I actually got bucket loads of free time after finishing my studies, I didn’t know what to do with it. Like why does everyone always act like students have time? It’s a full time job plus you have to do projects and homework.
I’ve recently changed to a part-time contract, thanks to decent wages we get in IT. None of my friends outside of IT could afford that. If anyone claims IT professionals earn too little, they should change their job and see how much their life improves then.
This is warm fuzzies level of jpg
I like the joke but I suspect the levels for “young programmer”, “adult programmer”, and “old programmer” would all look a lot like “programmer”. It’s true at least in my case. The occupation does seem to attract the more spicy-brained among us. 😆
✔️reduced interaction with people (mostly)
✔️work with systems with well defined rulesThat might be what I believed when I first started but it’s so far from the truth…
Don’t stop I’m almost there. 😆
Only if you plan to let your career stall out at Senior Engineer.
right but my github commits number is off the chart
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