
Tech Jobs Lead to the Middle Class, But Not for the Masses - lordgilman
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/tech-jobs-middle-class.html
======
seibelj
There has always been a bottom-tier category of software development, which is
programming at the level of "tweaking wordpress websites". Not that all jobs
at this level are doing this, but the technical skill is what it takes to
setup, configure, operate, and tweak a wordpress website, which requires some
understanding of how websites work, web servers, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, a
plugin ecosystem, backups, etc. It is quite simple for a software pro, but
light years beyond what someone untrained could do.

Also, this can be extremely high-impact to a business. Consultancies exist at
this technical difficulty making lots of money but also delivering lots of
value. Go into a non-tech business, notice how 1000 man hours per month are
essentially updating Excel files, automate most of it with a Python or VB
script, and save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You don't need to feel attacked or nervous that these jobs exist. "Software
[Developer|Engineer|Architect]" has no legal definition and the title is
meaningless, which is why hiring developers has overhead where you need to
check far beyond what the resume says to assess a candidate's true skill.

It's great that $50-80,000 salary jobs can exist for people who have a modicum
of software development talent. I'm very happy for these people.

~~~
BadJokeReality
I work 9 to 6 on one of the most prestigious companies of the country, write
high-quality C++ and Java for a complex domain almost on daily basis, and only
make $15,000 a year.

You people live in a great country.

~~~
throwawaytoday5
Are you willing to say what country and what company you work for?

~~~
Bombthecat
At least which country...

------
frankbreetz
I worked teaching factory workers how to use a software, and can say that no
matter how much education and training the majority of these people receive
they are not going to become software developers, and it isn't just the older
generation. It takes a certain level of abstract thought to be a software
developer. The kind of software development jobs that a typical factory worker
is capable of are quickly disappearing if they aren't already gone.

~~~
crazygringo
Indeed.

A friend of mine wanted to give back and started teaching programming to
disadvantaged kids.

He was shocked to ultimately discover that for most of his students, they
simply didn't seem to be fundamentally capable of the abstract thought
required, and it didn't matter how much time he spent with them. He came away
from the experience fairly disillusioned, and I also never expected the
difference in ability to be so extreme.

I personally really wonder -- is this something "genetic", like an athletic
ability? Is it something learned, but somehow acquired at a young age? Is it a
mindset, that we just haven't figured out how to communicate? Or a question of
motivation, if it seems "hard" to think that way?

~~~
gumby
Not genetics usually but rather simply screwed up educational system system
that discourages thought

~~~
shortoncash
So true. Always takes a bit of a spark to free your mind from the way the
educational system makes you do things. Once you get away from the comfort of
routine and embrace the danger of thinking in ways that the machine likes to
discourage, the sky's the limit.

------
jstewartmobile
" _Today, Mr. Davis, 27, is a cybersecurity specialist working on an incident
response team at the company. He earns above $40,000, more than twice his
salary in retail._ "

Isn't that like what people at Costco make for running a cash register and
being friendly?

And who do you think has more job security?

edit: To be less coy about it, if you are any good at this stuff and are only
making "above $40k", you are getting f-ed.

~~~
javagram
Costco jobs are an outlier in retail as I understand it.

$40k/ year in Georgia may be a liveable salary, and if this is an entry level
job for him there’s probably the possibility to increase that salary by a 1.5x
factor or more over 5 years if he can continue career growth (not sure exactly
what a cybersecurity job path looks like, but I assume there is some upward
mobility or increased ability to transfer to other higher paying tech roles).

~~~
rayiner
The explosion in cost of living in places like SF has severely distorted
peoples’ views of what is a reasonable salary in the vast majority of the
country. $40k/year is a good salary almost anywhere in the US. It’s above the
median starting salary for college graduates. For a couple, that’s probably
$60,000-70,000 in household income. In my county you can get a 3BR house in a
good school district for $200-230k, which is affordable for a family making
$60k. And I’m not even in a particularly cheap area (an hour from DC, and
these houses are maybe a 15 minute drive from the Metro).

The median household income for a married couple in the US is about $80,000,
so two people making $40,000. Although that’s poverty level in San Francisco,
that’s a problem with San Francisco, not the country. It’s among the highest
in the entire developed world, and a very comfortable life in most places.
(Particularly so if, like many Americans have done over the last few decades,
you move to a sun belt state where your dollar goes a long way.)

~~~
jstewartmobile
" _3BR house in a good school district for $200-230k, which is affordable for
a family making $60k_ "

Maybe if you have no children, live in a low-tax area, have an awesome deal on
homeowner's insurance and a fantastic health insurance plan, and neither you
nor your spouse ever get laid-off or injured.

Otherwise, that's cutting it pretty close.

~~~
rayiner
With 10% down at today’s rates a $230,000 house will cost you $1,200 per month
in mortgage, taxes, and home insurance. Little bit less with the mortgage
interest deduction and real estate tax deduction. The rule of thumb is 36% of
gross income, which is $2,000 on $70,000. The rule of thumb cuts it close, but
this is well below that—20% of gross income.

Net pay on $70,000 in Maryland for a married couple is $4,750 per month.
(Maryland is not a low tax state.) At that wage level, your job quite likely
includes health insurance. (Excluding people who are on Medicaid, Medicare, or
military insurance, 84% of people in Maryland have insurance through their
employer.) But let’s pretend it doesn’t. For a family of four with two kids
making $70,000, an ACA Silver plan in Maryland is $538. About $1,700 for
housing and health insurance combined, leaving almost $3,000 a month for
saving and other expenses. That’s a very comfortable middle class life.

Say your earnings are split $40k/$30k, a typical split for a married couple.
The higher earning person losing their job will reduce the household income to
$50,000, raising the housing expense to 29%—still within an acceptable range.

~~~
jstewartmobile
Original was " _affordable for a family making $60k_ "

Drop the fam back to $60k, and that " _$3,000 a month for saving and other
expenses_ " drops to $2167--and I would put special emphasis on "expenses":
few hundred a month for vehicles, a few hundred for groceries, occasional co-
pays (that can get pretty big as you get older and have more things wrong with
you), emergency repairs, school clothes, etc.

There will probably be some left over if both parents are employed--not a lot
though. I guarantee that the average family will go deep into the red if mom
or pop are unemployed for more than a few months in the $200k house + $60k/yr
combined scenario.

~~~
rayiner
I said $60-70k, the idea being that the person making $40k is married to
someone making $30k. Nonetheless, $60k is 24% of gross income is still well
within the recommended affordability range, and well within the 31% lenders
will qualify you to borrow. Even if one person is on unemployment (in Maryland
it pays half salary for 6 months), that’s 32% of income. Tight, but on average
that should last just a few months.

~~~
jstewartmobile
Even if we pop it back up to $70k--still too close if you ask me. Shit
happens. Most people would be better off economizing on the house a little,
and locking those savings in, rather than micro-managing nickel-and-dime
expenses.

What the lenders will do is neither here nor there--given that most will do
just about anything for a short-term buck. We all saw how that movie ends back
in 2008. I just happened to see it over and over again.

What is so objectionable about telling people to give themselves a little more
wiggle-room?

~~~
rayiner
A $230,000 house on a $60-70k income _is_ giving yourself more wiggle room. At
$60k, you could qualify for something closer to a $300,000 house. That’s what
most people do—yet the default rate for prime borrowers stayed below 5% even
in 2008 (and is around 1-2% typically).

------
csense
"Your job screwing bolts on cars disappeared? Learn to code and be a
programmer." Great advice for the typical HN reader, but a lot of people who
can learn to screw bolts on cars just don't have what it takes to be a good
coder.

I don't know if it's due to innate intelligence, upbringing, environment,
attitude, or what. But there are millions of people out there who just don't
seem to be able to master the abstract thinking required. And I'm not sure
they'll ever be able to, regardless of how much education we give them.

What should our economy do with those people going forward? For social
stability and ethical reasons, we ought to give them a path to decent middle
class lives. How do we make that happen?

I think the key's that from 1880 to 1980, we invented mainly technologies that
pulled more and more people into the labor force. Now we've started inventing
technologies that push more and more people out of the labor force.

How do we reverse the trend? What kind of technology can we try to invent that
pulls in a huge number of people to work, the more laborers, the better?

------
richdev
Remember why Agile/Scrum sucks and you'll see when attitudes started to get
out of whack :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406384)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44bmmq/why_agi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/44bmmq/why_agile_and_especially_scrum_are_terrible/)

------
ngcc_hk
Can everyone (the mass) is in the middle ... is the middle ...

------
killjoywashere
> Training, mentoring and counseling people — often from disadvantaged
> backgrounds — is not a mass-production process.

Yes, yes it is. It literally is. Maybe you need some additional sorting of raw
materials in, maybe the machines (the teachers, the mentors) have a relatively
low number of cycles in their lifespan (number of students they can teach),
maybe there's more sorting on the output (just like chips are sorted after
production), but at nation-scale software engineers are definitely mass-
producible.

~~~
richdev
This is a nonsense answer. Total BS.

~~~
dang
Maybe so, but can you please not post like this to HN? We're trying for
thoughtful conversation here, and that means being kind and responding
substantively (or not at all), even when another comment is completely wrong.

If you'd read the site guidelines and take the spirit of HN to heart, we'd be
grateful. We're trying to be less hostile and a bit more interesting than
Internet Default, if you know what I mean.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
marsrover
I'm tired of the continued devaluation of my profession.

Software development (I hate the term "coding") is not a manufacturing job, as
much as some company wants it to be. And apprenticeships at body shops isn't
going to create software developers, it's just going to create terrible
software with obvious rot and decay as the years go own.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
I'm a sysad in a software business.

Sure, the professional developers are paid well. However the more Jira and
agile ideas takes over, you become more replaceable. Why? You're just a card-
filling machine dealing with feature requests or problem reports.

And sure, the next developer may fill less cards, but they will improve with
time.

And if you don't work in a protected area (federal, etc), then you can buy
card-filling devs for 1/5 to 1/8 of US... And have them QA'ed for less than 1
USA dev.

Face it: I, a sysad, am a service worker. And devs are line workers. We're
well paid, but so were factory workers at one time.

~~~
ellius
I disagree with this completely. Development is not line work, and doing it
like line work creates unmaintainable, expensive crap. "The Mythical Man-
Month" explains this well. Conceptual coherence is of the utmost importance in
effective software systems, and you don't get that by just knocking out
stories one-by-one like they're desktop support tickets.

~~~
geodel
> Development is not line work, and doing it like line work creates
> unmaintainable, expensive crap.

Huh, it is already happening. I see everyday so many web services are created
via auto generating scaffolding tools like Spring boot etc. One just fill in
environment details, bits of JSON parsing and service is ready to be deployed.

Good for you that where you work people are intelligent enough to read Fred
Brooks. Most places, including the ones with fancy gleaming buildings, open
office floors, lounges with couches and organic smoothie bars are just making
CRUD services with some cloud backed data storage. More so terminology I see
at work is more inspired by factory floor not some intellectual venture.

~~~
ardit33
Great, looks like you have discovered "That one trick that all engineers
hate!"

If all it took was some scafolding, some database columns and some html and
sprinkle, you should be a millionare by now?

~~~
geodel
Well I am arguing it is all 'factory' work. And factory workers do not become
millionaires. Are you saying they do?

~~~
czbond
You have not operated where software defines the industry, but where it is a
third tier service to the industry.

