
Why great programmers don’t make as much money as soccer stars? - coliveira
http://coliveira.net/2008/12/why-great-programmers-dont-make-as-much-money-as-soccer-stars/
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mechanical_fish
Because, thanks to our society's investment in stadium, television, and
sports-bar infrastructure, the work of a soccer star scales really well? The
best of them have an audience in the _billions_.

Meanwhile, the game of soccer -- like all major spectator sports -- has been
deliberately designed for... spectators. It is designed to give the scant
handful of brilliant outlier talents a stage on which to shine. If soccer
became too boring to watch, eventually they would tinker with the rules until
it became exciting again -- that is how soccer itself was invented, after all.
Hence, soccer makes money because it was designed to be popular. Programming,
on the other hand, was designed for various other purposes, ranging from
personal pleasure to scientific exploration to actually getting things done.

High school soccer players don't make money, because high-school soccer
doesn't consistently produce the highest caliber of play. The world's best
fencers, or chess players, don't make much money because their talent is
difficult for the average spectator to appreciate. And the world's best
dancers and acrobats only make money if they are good at self-promotion, or if
they plug themselves into a system that was built to create stars, work really
hard, and then get some lucky breaks. ( _See:_ Jackie Chan. For whom the term
"lucky breaks" is well chosen.)

It might be possible to design a programming sport that showcased the talent
of the best programmers at the highest level. (In a sense, that's what YC is
trying to do, although a startup is a test of more than just raw programming
skill. But, then, team sports are a test of more than just hand-eye
coordination...) But it's probably pretty hard to make programming as exciting
as soccer. So what? Programming is _a different game_.

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kragen
The work of programmers scales really well, too. There are a number of pieces
of software used by more than a billion people: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft
Word, Firefox, Google, Apache, PHP, and the operating system they run on:
Linux. And that's exactly why the best-paid programmers make a lot more money
than the best-paid soccer stars.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_And that's exactly why the best-paid programmers make a lot more money than
the best-paid soccer stars._

Upmodded, of course.

The irony is that this was the thesis that I set out to write about when I
started composing my post. And yet I somehow completely lost my train of
thought! I guess I had more fun thinking about why, when a soccer star makes
$49M a year (which, of course, happens only at the peak of his career), people
notice:

[http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/best-paid-soccer-biz-
soccer...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/best-paid-soccer-biz-soccer08-cx-
cs_0430players_intro.html)

... but when a programmer makes an average of $12M a _day_ over _24 years_
people can manage to forget about him.

(That's Bill Gates, assigning him $0 when Microsoft was founded in 1975 and
$101 billion in 1999 when his wealth peaked, and assuming linear growth --
which is obviously wrong, of course; I was just too lazy to do the exponential
assumption. He was obviously making money at a much lower rate at first... and
a much higher rate later.)

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helveticaman
I'd guess that, as percentiles go, programmers make much more money than
soccer players. Sure, there are stars like Ronaldo that make more than almost
anyone here, but he's up against Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

~~~
josefresco
I would imagine soccer salary levels fall dramatically once you drop below the
very top of the sport. Unlike programmers which can be far from the top
(Gates? bad example) but still make a reasonable living.

Does anyone know a low level soccer player who makes a decent middle class
living? Is there a working 'minor-leagues' for the soccer world?

~~~
ms01
You can look at Major League Soccer in the US. David Beckham makes $6.5
million/year and the median salary for all players is $53,000. Lowest salary
for developmental players is $13,000.

[http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=427678&...](http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=427678&&cc=5901)

$53k a year is probably not too bad unless you live in expensive areas, but
it's really not a lot considering that the length of your career is probably
less than ten years.

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mattmaroon
The top programmers (in terms of profitability anyway) have made infinitely
more than the top soccer stars. Bill Gates could buy every soccer star with
the money under his mattress.

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pchristensen
The Bill Gates and Larry/Sergeys of the world are rich because they are
_business owners_ , not because they are programmers. The sports equivalent
would be if Michael Jordan started his own basketball league, grew it to many
teams/cities, got TV and merchandising contracts, etc.

Sports stars are some of the highest payed _employees_ in the world because
they, like musicians and movie stars, can use the infrastructure that
mechanical_fish mentioned. But they are nowhere near as wealthy as the team
owners, just like great programmers _that aren't also business owners_ aren't
nearly as wealthy as the companies that employ them.

~~~
kragen
Michael Jordan is part-owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, actually, and I think
there are a number of Google and Microsoft employees who are richer than
Michael Jordan (who apparently has about US$400M and recently had to pay
US$168M in a divorce settlement). It's true that it's because they're part-
owners of Google and Microsoft, but that ownership was granted because of work
they did, not (for the most part) because of dollars they contributed.

So I think the premise of the article is wrong; some programmers do earn as
much as sports stars and star musicians. I don't have a good sense for how the
numbers shake out in the aggregate.

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hopeless
Why great programmers don’t make as much money as soccer stars?

because most of us think abs is a numerical function not a muscle group.

~~~
justindz
I get nervous every time I use Math.sin().

At least it's not Math.sin!(), which seems more unrepentant.

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Dilpil
"Programmers have to work in a team if they really want to do anything of
moderately large scale"

I would disagree with that statement.

~~~
coliveira
Yes, programming history has a few star programmers that implemented operating
systems, editors, web sites, etc. The problem is that, in the end, they all
had to work with a team to take that creation to the next level.

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BigZaphod
Have you ever just stood back and watched a programmer work? You can't sell
tickets or ads for that! Therefore programmers don't make as much as soccer
stars...

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kqr2
The highest paid soccer stars are usually celebrities too. That is, people
will go to the game to just watch that person play.

Although there are software franchises that people will follow (think games),
people in general don't care who programmed the software.

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mynameishere
The average pay of all soccer players is probably less than the average pay of
all programmers. I can tell you that the median soccer pay is zero.

------
Feynman
Because of Supply and Demand.

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misterbwong
One word: Sexiness.

