
High-wage skills, or why you might want to learn Clojure if you're not a lawyer - Panos
http://onlinelabor.blogspot.com/2012/02/high-wage-skills-on-odesk-or-why-you.html
======
tom_b
This analysis is deeply flawed.

The association between skills listed in a worker's profile and hourly wages
is accidental. The actual analysis we want to see should be project based,
showing what projects (in which I would like to see technologies used as
variables) command the highest hourly wages.

I would guess that most HN'ers do believe that using a better blub makes them
more effective as hackers. What we don't see FTA is a link between _USING_ the
better blub and hourly wages.

Maybe Clojure developers are a subset of the top 5% of Java hackers. One
possibility is they are then hired to work on projects using Java and that
they might command higher hourly wages (being in the top 5% of Java hackers
and assuming this is demonstrable to hiring orgs) rather than being especially
valued for their Clojure skills.

And, make your chart x-axis start at 0 instead of 25. :) Tufte rules.

~~~
john_horton
1) The data are what they are - these are the rates people are charging by
listed skill. It would be very interesting to look at prices by actual
completed projects, but that's just another approach one can take.

2) I make it very clear that there's an association, not a causal claim. I
flag the fact, make a lame joke about it and put "might* in the title.

3) There's no Tufte rule about starting charts at 0 - you make choices that
make it easier for people to make comparisons. Paul Krugman said it better
than anyone on this topic: <http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-
of-evil/>

~~~
achompas
Re #3, that's Tom's point: your decision is affecting HOW readers compare the
two numbers.

~~~
tatsuke95
Funny how different people see different things.

The vital piece of information in the graph is the relative size of the wage.
If the author had started at 0, it would be far harder to distinguish
differences between the skills, by the same principles that make pie charts
mostly unusable.

~~~
nitrogen
Relative (i.e. proportional/percentage) size is only apparent when you start a
chart at 0. The absolute difference between 25 and 31 is 6. If you start the
chart at 25, that's graphed as an ∞% difference, when it's really only a 24%
difference.

~~~
achompas
Thanks for making my point for me! The chart really misleads re: the
difference between languages. Do we even know if Clojure wages are
statistically different from, say, Scala rates?

Other problems:

1\. As hinted above, what are the standard deviations? Do we even know if
Clojure is statistically different from HAML? Do Clojure rates exhibit higher
variation than HAML?

2\. $4 difference between pattern recognition v. machine learning, where
pattern recognition is, effectively, a subset of ML? We see this with legal
services v. contract drafting, and (arguably) info architecture v. interaction
design (less overlap with these, to be sure).

Also, while John gets credit for joking about causality, I'd be very concerned
about sampling bias if he uses oDesk data to examine human capital decisions.

~~~
john_horton
We'll have to disagree about the axes---I think the choice of where to start
axes depends on what you're trying to illustrate. For me, absolute differences
in wages was what I wanted highlight.

Re: Standard error bars - you're absolutely right. I should have included
them, but it was my first time using the googleVis package & didn't see an
easy way to add them. I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but
standard deviation for each skill was on the order of ~$7/hour and each skill
had to have at least 30 obs., though many where much, much higher. If we say
n=50, that's an SE of about $1/hour, so clearly one shouldn't take much stock
in very small differences in wages. My goal was just to unearth some
interesting data---I probably should tone down the implied recommendation lest
I'm responsible for a glut of unemployable lisp hackers in a few years:)

~~~
achompas
Hah, no worries! Sorry for being so picky about your results, and congrats on
producing a novel insight.

------
fshaun
With a cap of $100/hr does the data really reflect "high-wage" skills? Lawyers
start well above that and it's smack in the middle of a poll from a few years
ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553794>.

~~~
vidarh
> Lawyers start well above that

Do they?

My wife works at one of the largest law firms in the world, and trainees there
makes about $10-$15/hour. On paper their salary is high, but the hourly rate
is pushed far down because of ridiculously long hours. Their secretaries make
as much or more than them.

Newly qualified lawyers there make $20/hour if they're _lucky_. This is in the
UK, specifically in a London "magic circle" firm - one of the highest paying
law firms in the UK. US firms in London pay up to about 1/3 more total yearly
salary, commensurate with the same firms salary levels in the US, but also
tends to expect even longer hours.

It's first quite a few years post qualification that their salaries get high
enough that their hourly rates starts to become decent.

Average salary for a solicitor in the UK was around $37k/year a couple of
years back, for longer than average hours, at a time when the national average
salary in the uk was ca. $40k/year...

I'm sure there are lawyers who start out at high hourly rates from day one,
but I'd be surprised if more than a tiny fraction starts out around the
$100/hour rate.

Actual billed out rate from a major law firm, sure - my wife is billed out at
around $300/hour as a trainee.

~~~
fshaun
Good point, I was looking at it from the perspective of a client wondering
"how much will I pay." As you say the lawyer doing the work won't be taking
home nearly that much. I didn't know it would go as low as $20/hour though. My
conservative estimate for a new lawyer in the US would be $80K/2400 hours = ~
$34/hr. How do the expected hours compare in the UK?

~~~
rayiner
In a big market (NY, Chicago, DC) at a firm working for corporate clients,
you're looking at ~$170k/2700 hours. For a more senior person (5-7 years in),
you're looking at ~$280k/3000 hours.

You can almost certainly make more on a per-hour basis as a contractor in the
software sector, but lawyers are risk averse and prefer a stable flow of work
and decent health insurance. :D

------
tluyben2
Point: if you want to make nice money on oDesk, offer a niche expertise. I
started a small company doing node.js/mongodb/redis and I can pretty much ask
what I want. There is no competition. On the other hand, when i'm short
handed, it's impossible to find people with these skills on a non-beginner
level who are not really insanely expensive, so it's not exactly a highly
scalable business ;)

------
balloot
The article is only looking at the relationship in one direction. It's not
entirely that learning clojure makes you money, it's that high level academic
types that are predisposed to high wage jobs are more likely to know clojure.
I would actually argue that this is the far more significant causation
relationship. But what do I know - I don't know clojure. :)

------
modoc
There are many niche skill sets out there where the demand far exceeds the
currently supply, and as such hourly rates from $100/hour (lower level) to
$200+/hour (architect level) are quite common and you really can pick your
job/location/work from home, etc... The trick is finding one, and learning it
quickly/well.

I've often thought about grabbing a bunch of folks with a similar relevant
skill set, investing 6-12 months in training them, and then running a hugely
profitable consulting company for a while. The problem being it's hard to
prevent people from hanging out for your 12 months of training, and then
jumping ship to do their own thing afterward...

~~~
jandrewrogers
The kind of expertise that consistently commands the high rates requires a
level of experience that cannot be developed through training. It requires in-
field domain expertise developed over a few years. What you are talking about
is what many consulting companies actually do, and it is one of the reasons
that consulting companies have such a poor reputation for execution. Customers
are paying for the expertise you will not pick up in training or by reading a
book.

I ran a successful consulting business many years ago (and hated it). One of
the things you learn is that you live and die by the quality of the people you
can deploy because that goes straight to your reputation. In practice,
consulting businesses are very difficult to scale. While you may start out
high-end with a great reputation because you really know what you are doing,
it is very difficult to bring in additional people with your level of skill
because there is almost no overhead to them working independently. As a
result, "scale up" often involves diluting the quality of your overall team to
the point where the rates you can charge decline as well. Consequently, you
either have to run a very small boutique consulting shop that can maintain its
standards and billing rate or run a large generic shop that makes up for the
lower billing rate in volume. For people that care about the quality of their
work, the former is more rewarding but the economics work out such that you
will make about as much money by going direct as a highly-paid contractor to
another company.

~~~
modoc
In this particular case I'm not talking about grabbing random people, I'm
talking about people who are very skilled in a similar tech stack (which has a
much higher supply/demand ratio, and getting them up to speed with the very
similar but niche stack. Basically you're just learning some new APIs and some
new service providers (i.e. proprietary ORM instead of Hibernate).

But I agree with your assessment of consulting firms and the scaling/quality
issues therein. I also feel that consulting shops expenses tend to scale a lot
closer to profits than some other businesses, so I stay out of it:)

------
Zak
These wages are shockingly low. Who's actually working as a programmer doing
NLP and only charging $30/hour?

~~~
fbuilesv
You'd be amazed at how much $240 a day is in developing countries. In some
latin american countries $240 is the minimum wage for a month; earning $4800
per month is more than what a typical worker makes in an entire year.

$30/hour would make you part of the 1% in these countries.

------
swalsh
On a completely unrelated note, I'm curious if anyone has tried odesk from a
developer point of view? Freelance websites like elance seem to play host to a
pretty poor type of client, so I've stayed away. Curious if odesk is any
bettering that way?

~~~
garethsprice
Problem is, you're competing with people in places with a far lower cost of
living - especially in "mainstream" technologies.

oDesk clients tend to be one of two types: Skilled project
managers/architects/agencies looking for subcontractors, or businesses looking
to save a buck by not hiring the former.

The first group are great, they know exactly what they want and will pay for
quality. The latter are hell as they often have no idea how to communicate
requirements, scope, process, etc and want everything cheap.

If you live in the first world and have the communication skills, the best
place to find freelance development work (IME) is still community networking.

------
prof_hobart
Apologies if I'm missing this in the article, but it doesn't seem to take into
account the level of demand for those skills. It's all very well having a
skill that demands $50/hr, if openings for that skill only come up once in a
blue moon.

~~~
john_horton
You're right---there's nothing about the demand side yet. That's my next blog
post. I'll show the earned wages by skill and some measures of demand & trade
volume in different skills.

~~~
larrys
John - Can I get a link to the "controlled, centralized vocabulary of about
1,400 skills"? Not finding it anywhere I've looked.

------
mootothemax
Judging by the number of people who contacted me about Python work when I
accidentally implied I had Python experience, I'd say that's a pretty hot
market right now. Certainly compared to PHP at least ;-)

------
itmag
I didn't RTFA yet but what I want to ask HN readers: what are some good niches
in IT work that are proven to reap high wages in consulting?

If I'm going to be a highly paid consultant instead of an underpaid employee I
have to do something more desirable/uncommon than .NET boilerplate coding...

~~~
bostonvaulter2
The article is short, you should just read it.

~~~
itmag
It's just a particular way to analyze some data on oDesk, I wouldn't take it
as a gospel of pure truth.

I want to find out about the tried and tested niches that HN readers might
know about.

Background: my goal is to find some in-demand yet rare skill and hammer the
crap out of that so I can get paid more per hour and cut down the percentage
of my life that is spent generating income for food, shelter, clothes, etc.
Working 40 hours per week doing boring C# code is very inefficient when I have
so many other projects that need to be done. And for the time being (ie until
I build the next Facebook :)) I think consulting will be the best way for me
to reach my objective.

------
jnbiche
This data only reflects the oDesk labor market (which is notoriously a race to
the bottom). I would hesitate to draw any other conclusions. However, it would
be interesting to see this data broken down by geographic region.

------
larrys
"High-wage skills on oDesk (or why you might want to learn Clojure if you're
not a lawyer) "

Totally a link bait title. Clojure hasn't been around that long and therefore
hasn't been in demand that long.

Heading off in any one particular direction based upon the way things appear
to be now vs. what they will be long term wouldn't be what I would do. Do you
think "clojure" is like "plastics". I don't think it is.

Also, as has happened with many career/skill (nursing at some point, law now)
once the word gets out that something is in demand (because of supply and
demand in balance) that changes as people are drawn by the chance to make
money.

And clojure is a skill it's not a profession. That skill can quickly be
replace by the next new thing.

------
ux-pro
Information architecture is the 4th item? What does that even mean?

------
klochner
I take "Amazon RDS" being in the top 6 as a sign that these numbers are pretty
worthless - the whole point of RDS is that it's _easier_ to set-up and
administer than a do-it-yourself install.

------
berntb
Comparing MongoDB (in absolute bootom) to Redis (5th place) makes me think
I've missed something?

Is Redis that hard to use or does the number of Redis users increase
exponentially with a resulting lack of skills? (Or is the web site not a good
salary predictor?)

~~~
achompas
MongoDB is a VC-backed technology, which has spurred its adoption at funded
startups. Since they're funded, those startups can also afford to pay
engineers more.

~~~
simonbrown
MongoDB is one of the lowest-paid, not highest.

