Yes - the 5% of elite devs have seen a dramatic increase in salary recently. You're one of them.
The rest of us do not make that and haven't seen much change in wages in the last 5-10 years. At most in the midwest I'd top out at $150k as a Senior dev and that's if I busted my ass. The exception is if I worked for FANG but just like me, 95% of devs couldn't pass a FANG interview even if they put in some real effort.
Personally my dream is to have a side-business anyway, so I put up with my $100k salary because it's low-stress and I have energy for my own projects. If there was a real shortage I would be paid more. But there isn't a shortage for average devs who get shit done. Google just wants the top 5%.
Google's hiring is like if Google visited a homeless dog shelter and said to the employee (Federal Gov) that there's not enough cute puppies. "We need to import some dogs from Asia. There's a cute-puppy shortage here, let's get some Visas for more dogs."
You're just f-ing picky Google. Those dogs in the shelter are good dogs.
Pay scale for programmers at large organizations I'm aware of starts around $55K and tops out around $100K. And non-profits or small businesses pay even less.
I browse job ads on indeed frequently and see offerings in the $40-50K range for IT positions in the NYC area.
What do people think that offshore employees of an American IT company are paid? I haven't any definite figures for places I've worked, but I have gotten the impression from Indian job ads that $10K/year is in the ballpark. Why would a typical company pay more than five times that for US-based employees?
I’m nowhere near the west coast - I’m on the opposite coast. In most major cities in the US outside of the west coast your bog standard enterprise developers make $110K - $170K. This also excludes NYC.
Well in the US, look at the top 20 cities for developers - a simple Google search and then go to salary.com. That range is average.
As far “bog standard”, I’m referring to a CRUD developer doing “enterprise software” that may never see the light of day outside of the company or your yet another software as a service developer. They don’t spend all day worrying about “computer science” and algorithms and they don’t spend time worrying about the complexity of reversing a b-tree on a whiteboard.
Look at it this way, what I think you're talking about requires roughly the same level of talent as being a decent mechanic, electrician, or whatever, and clients get billed about the same per hour, like $100-150. So, if we pretend we don't have preconceptions, and with the knowledge that the programmers are competing with people who are paid $5/hr, whereas my other examples aren't, does it make sense that they would be paid much more than $50-100K on average?
Pay scale for programmers at large organizations I'm aware of starts around $55K and tops out around $100K. And non-profits or small businesses pay even less.
That’s clearly not the case in the US for any of the top markets even if you exclude the west coast and NYC. It’s easy to find average salaries in major US cities.
Why are companies willing to pay more? Because they have to to even get your bog standard CRUD developer. Outsourcing to other countries is either not an option or come with its own share of issues.
I find it annoying when people think using words like "clearly" is debating.
Whenever you think you know what the average is, you should ask yourself whether the population being averaged is remotely complete (or representative), and whether the data points are remotely trustworthy.
And what do you mean by "outsourcing to other countries is...not an option"? The largest and best known companies, including members of FAANG outsource work to lesser known US companies that use offshore labor. There are plenty of loopholes, even for things that you'd think would require US or EU citizens.
As a matter of fact, I do know firsthand about some jobs that are restricted to US citizens due to security requirements, so I have some specific data that points to those starting upwards of $80K. That makes me more confident that my estimate of the others is accurate.
Well, as “annoying” as you might find it. I mentioned both the source (salary.com) and the population (the top 20 cities in the US outside of the west coast and NYC to not skew the numbers).
I’m using readily accessible sites that have publicly available numbers.
Salary.com is not a source any more than wikipedia. I don't think that is just pedantry; I'm not saying they're wrong or you're misrepresenting anything, but you're just not addressing why you have your opinion in a way that makes me think there is something I should read up on to change mine. Or motivates me to search.
Do the top 20 cities in the US have most of the developers, or an unbiased sample? If you haven't considered that, fine, but without some idea, I, again, don't feel motivated to question my opinion.
TL;DR (in advance): I think you are correct in your estimate, though household income is higher than that. $100K household income is still considerably higher than most Americans make.
Just to give some real numbers, the median household income in the US is $63,688. Unfortunately I couldn't find reliable numbers for dual income families in the US, but it appears to be over 60% (I saw numbers anywhere between 60-69%, but unfortunately no authoritative references).
Rough histogram of income distribution is:
10th percentile: < $15K
20th percentile: $15K <=> $25K
30th percentile: $25K <=> $35K
40th percentile: $35K <=> $50K
50th percentile: $50K <=> $65K
60th percentile: $65K <=> $80K
70th percentile: $80K <=> $130K
80th percentile: $130K <=> $160K
90th percentile: > $160K
I constructed this from a variety of different sources since I couldn't find anything that stated it explicitly. It is not entirely accurate, but it should give you a rough idea of the distribution. Would be nice if someone could find better data.
You're more than likely the exception so enjoy it while you're still a youngster as the next generation to replace you will be along shortly. I hope with that amount of finance behind you that you are self-sufficient if it suddenly vanished. It will.
I have wondered what my secret sauce is. Mid 50s, worked my way through a series of jobs with several faangs, now doing the latest of several 2 year stints at startups. You can make well over 200k in cash comp at startups in west cost cities. I guess I have good exp by this point.
You actually make way more than that if you are reasonably experienced. If you have 20 years experience your goal should be 400-500k+ total comp (ie actual valuable stock like you get from amazon or microsoft, not worthless future vapor startup stock). I like living here, but no place is perfect for everyone. My house tripled in value, my kids are getting a good education. I wish there was less growth though.
I've done a fair amount of hiring. It's usually pretty easy. The managers complaining about it are just bad at their jobs or work for employers with bad reputations. Don't take their whining too seriously.
> Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.
This reminds me of the phrase "if you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail".
> Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes
One implication of the above statement would be that everyone is now buying less and yet somehow the economy is growing? Those two ideas aren't strictly necessarily opposed to one another but it certainly doesn't seem like a good place to start. The economy could only be growing through investment if this were the case.
> Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food.
Is there any junk food that isn't composed of organic matter primarily? Most "junk" food in the US that I can think of is corn based which would of course still require fertilizer...
Yeah, more likely he already has various clauses in his contract. But since his new company is doing business with Apple they could also add conditions to that deal.
Sure. Looking at each of the external sphere holes, each seems to be associated with a triangle of connected internal sphere holes. The central point of each sphere is therefore associated with the central points of three others in an adjacent plane.
It is easily possible to conceptualise the 'grate' of this mac-pro as a set of interlocking tetrahedra of origins of the spherical spaces, instead of interlocking tetrahedra of the joints; a little like a photo-negative.
I dislike the appearance myself, it provokes a mild feeling of trypophobia, but I don't see anything dishonest about their term.
I would say that it doubles the cost of backups, but using this math, we start with one copy plus one backup, and add a second backup; that means only a 50% increase.
This is true if you only consider the first order effect of copyright.
However, the second order effects would lead to, for example, significant decrease in investment of the creation of any work that has marginal production of near $0. Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters? They, of course, would not as there would be no way to recoup their investments. Now the millions of "the many" who have freely exchanged their dollars for movie tickets are worse off. Nobody wins, not the few and not the many.
Why would GRRM write the next two works in ASOIAF if ANY publisher could take the text, print it and sell it without remuneration to GRRM? At best he would because he's already rich but would he ever have in the first place?
The winners in your world may very well be Amazon and others with the easiest/best distribution platforms at the cost of the creators and in turn at the cost of all as the creators no longer create.
We could transition into a model where works are crowdfunded before they are made by people who want them the most. Creators set the amount they want for their work and if there are enough people that wish to see the work it will get funded and will be free for everyone to enjoy without artificial scarcity.
Crowdfunding exists today. We don't see this model much at all and certainly not at the levels of quality or scale seen in for-profit, copyright/IP based enterprise. Why?
1) To gain a crowdfunding base of sufficient size to replace the current models and achieve the necessary budgets in the first instance would require massive marketing spend. This would HAVE to be forked over prior to obtaining funding and therefore represents a major risk because with crowdfunding, it's all or nothing.
2) Tragedy of the commons/freeloading. Why agree to pony-up when I can wait/hope for some other saps to do so?
3) Crowdfunding means paying for something that doesn't exist to be created and trusting that the creators can/will create it at a level of quality that matches what you expected from their pitch. But wait, you've already committed your resources to them. Why should they actually strive to create an optimal good when they get your money regardless of the quality? This is a huge problem with crowdfunding. In today's world, you can rely on word of mouth, reviews, previews, etc.
So, no, the proposed world would be much worse. The set of above reasons are really showstoppers, imo, and they don't even cover the full scope of the problems with your proposal.
> Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters?
Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?
So many things made possible by copyright that we are accustomed to look like severe pathology when you look at them with fresh eye.
> Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?
We aren't far away from that, but it's important to remember that creators now have the option to create without attaching copyright to a work. Copyright isn't mandatory. Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.
Also, it isn't mandatory to consume copyrighted media. Just find something else that isn't encumbered by it if you wish.
Of course it is not. What I'm saying is, optimal economic decissions of some people might not be good for people in general. When it comes to copyright we can't consider only the good of the creators and people who paid creators.
Copyright is not just for popculture. Also learning materials, software and culture in general. Tonnes of people in the world got their higher education on pirated software and xeroxed books.
If your "fresh eye" take on copyright is "Hey man, one day just a few dedicated people will be able to do this and we should just wait til then because it will happen and those people will do it for free and it will be of equal or greater quality to what we have today or would have in the future regardless" without a clear path to that being a reality nor a clear argument for why these people will actually do that, then I'll stick with the "severe pathology" which to date is still clearly the best means through which resources are put to productive use.
Long live capitalism, free choice and property rights: the greatest human forces of all time; the creators of prosperity.
Most folks who like complaining about perl5 are doing so because they've worked with some terrible old codebase written in it. Terrible code is terrible code. But well-written perl5 code can be fun to work with.
I'm 28yrs old and I make ~$400K/yr. That doesn't happen when there's some major abundance of talent sitting around.