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.
I’m an adult on long-term sick leave so I have zero energy and money, but all the time. It’s generally not great, but at least I’m able to play all the games I want, watch all the movies and series of interest, discover music and learn about a ton of things.
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.
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.
Adult here, have plenty of money (and growing) actually. Wish I could easily buy more time with that money, but the system of wage labor mostly just isn’t flexible enough that there are many employers who will agree to “you get a few more weeks of vacation but a few thousand currency units less annual salary”. If I could do that, I would.
I guess in the modern version you’d have the child, then an adult with all bars empty. Then that’s just it because they died before reaching retirement age from stress and poverty related illness
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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