

What’s a mid-career software engineer actually worth? Try $779,000 per year - dkasper
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/whats-a-mid-career-software-engineer-actually-worth-try-779000-per-year-as-a-lower-bound/

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greenyoda
_" Thirty years ago, programming was an R&D job. Programmers had a lot of
autonomy: the kind of autonomy that it takes if one is going to invent C or
Unix or the Internet or a new neural network architecture. Programmers
controlled how they worked and what they worked on, and either answered to
other programmers or to well-read scientists, rather than anti-intellectual
businessmen who regard them as cost centers."_

Thirty years ago (1984), most programmers were employed by big corporations
doing whatever IT was called back then ("data processing"? "MIS"?). They were
very much a cost center. The average programmer had to program in whatever
language was installed on the company's mainframe or minicomputer (PCs were
just beginning to enter the business world), coding primarily database
transactions and reports for executives.

R&D? Autonomy? Working for scientists? Inventing C or the internet? That was
for a small minority of programmers, as it still is today. The only difference
is that CRUD web apps have replaced CRUD batch jobs as the average
programmer's work.

(By the way, working for scientists can be just as crappy as working for
businessmen, since they both consider mere programmers to be lower life-
forms.)

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dk8996
I wish...

