There is substantial wage stagnation in tech. I'm pretty sure average compensation hasn't really risen much in 20 years (50k-75k entry, 125k after 5 years, average dev peaks around 200k). This is while many of these developers are making the companies they work for millions in value. Of course there are outliers, and a lot of big blowout top-of-HN companies qualify, but the number of developers has grown substantially and thus diluted the income pool to largely maintain the status quo.
And it feels like there is an active campaign by tech companies to obfuscate that fact. That they can guilt trip developers into saying "well we are still getting paid better than most people being exploited by corporations for huge profits per worker!" as if that means they shouldn't argue for their fair share of the value they create.
Some developers should be paid millions because they are making millions for the company. Some should also therefor not even be employed because they aren't actually doing anything valuable - there are a lot of "developers" that snake their way into teams where they don't contribute functional or productive code and just manage to exist as a fixture of bureaucracy where the dozen layers of management over them don't understand what programming is or how to evaluate their performance so they just collect their 6 figure check as a trick of good fortune.
So there is a faction of developers who don't want to see greater pegging of their salaries to their value, the executives usually don't want to do it because underpaying your top talent is hugely profitable, and the productive devs that should be arguing to be paid according to the value they create are guilt tripped by everyone that they shouldn't. But that absolutely produces tremendous wage stagnation. Just because developers are fortunate to be in short enough supply to demand a higher base salary doesn't change the fact the only reason there is so much demand is because there is so much money to be made.
I think this is why tech companies and venture capitalists are investing in bootcamps. Take the Lambda school for example - it got funding from Peter Thiel, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital, Google Ventures, GGV Capital, Vy Capital, and Y Combinator.
Offering 4-day weeks: Do you see this often? Just curious -- I feel like it's rare, so my guess would be the opposite. (I do know several people that work 4 10hr days as machinists or window installers).
My intuition is also the opposite of yours on affordability :), at least in tech...
I live in a country I where yeah it’s common enough (let assume for good workers not borderline ones) but we’re not paid as highly as the US, so supporting a family on a 4 day senior dev salary is a push unless you end got a paid off house.
The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40 hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible <20 hour employees or salary + forced-overtime is basically throwing money away.
Tax code relating to benefits and labor laws (which kind of assume the environment encouraged by the tax code.)
As an example, benefits have fairness tests between highest and lowest paid employees. Fail those tests and the benefits are taxed, possibly as normal income. Companies find tricks to get people out of the group of normal employees under the IRS rules to beat these tests.
Woof, timely. I'm doing all of these bad-initial-traction-methods on my side project right now, and feeling quite burnt out, thinking about moving on to the next thing.
Perhaps especially when building on the side a couple hours a day, easy to get wrapped up worrying about what the max return on my time could be, and just default back to code... and writing these cold emails always takes me sooo long :D.
Does this work best if your work is well-planned by someone else? E.g., you have a list of prioritized tickets with requirements complete, and can just code down the list?
I work 32h/wk (mon-thu), and I feel happy with my productivity, but also recognize that I spend tons of time in meetings, clarifying requirements, helping other devs, etc. These aren't all really my role, so I could theoretically optimize them away and hope the invisible tasks get picked up successfully by someone else, but I know we'd have worse outcomes if I wasn't involved and "just" did my explicitly assigned tasks.
Can someone with team lead/management responsibilities optimize for 'job done' this aggressively?
In May, myself, my wife, our two kids (8, 6), are amtraking from Chicago to San Francisco in a family sleeper. I'm excited. We've enjoyed our (much shorter) amtrak trips from Ashland, VA to DC.
There are fun and less-fun parts of programming -- building a new feature? Fun. Analyzing requirements, or doing code review, or spelunking through a crappy and undocumented 3rd party API? Less fun. But all can be part of the same 'job' of developing a feature.
The article is saying the amateur is the one who skims off the fun parts, and avoids the others, whereas the professional does the entire job -- gets to done-done, vs just 'it works'.
On golf:
You are correct that Tiger Woods did not pick up the ball on the putting green when playing amateur tournaments. I don't think the article's making a point about the official USGA definition of 'amateur'.
My complaint is that the author appears to be using the term "amateur" as a slur.
There are professionals - people who get paid to work on projects for a living - who shirk the less-fun parts. The author seems to want to call those people "amateurs".
There are amateurs - people who are not paid to work on projects - who are very serious about their work and do the less-fun parts. Should we call these people "professionals?"
We need only look at volunteer organizations to see non-professionals doing hard and often thankless work. We see people work hard to excel in amateur sports all the time, even if only to make a personal record. It therefore doesn't seem right to associate "amateur" with the qualities that the author is trying to describe.
I pointed out the USGA example precisely because the author seems to think that those terms and definitions can be applied to golf. Since they can't, they likely can't be applied to other fields either.
Wouldn't "lazy worker" and "good worker" be more appropriate terms than "amateur" and "professional"?
I think it's something in those steps, starting with "What to do next", that leads down that rabbit hole.
Maybe try working backwards -- "what do I want my life to be like in a year/2 years?"
I think working back helps narrow down the infinite immediate options - some things become obvious must-dos, others not so much.
Years go by really fast. This sucks on one hand, because anxiety and lack of direction can easily suck up a whole year with nothing to show for it. But it's also awesome to view things on longer scales, because you don't have to "be" anything next week, or next month, just slightly better than the week before, and at the end of a year, a lot has changed.
Thanks very much! I'll definitely move this up. I've spent a lot of time rewriting/moving/mangling copy in the past few weeks -- reasonably sure I've made it worse. ;)
I also find that typing doesn't work as well as hand-writing for me. I think my brain is in a different mode (publish), so it's judging/editing things as I type -- vs handwriting, where maybe the mechanics are so unconscious the brain can mull the thought over instead of trying to edit it. Maybe talking out loud has the same benefit.
