
Ask HN: How much do you make working as a CRUD dev? - bo_Olean
I recently joined an agency in Bay Area and I&#x27;m getting paid roughly 50K&#x2F;yr. Work load is heavy and I got quickly assigned a lot of responsibilities and even have to deal with managing and training new hires. I&#x27;m fairly good and competitive on my skills but lately I&#x27;m having a feeling that I&#x27;m heavily underpaid. How much do you make working on similar agencies writing or maintaining traditional CRUD apps ?
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smt88
You aren't heavily underpaid. You're criminally underpaid. Glassdoor will be
helpful in looking up just how underpaid you are (check out competing agencies
for a more apples-to-apples picture).

To give you an idea of how badly that agency is exploiting you, where I live
(Atlanta), the cost of living is roughly 50% of the Bay Area. Your adjusted
salary for our city is $25k, which is arguably not enough to live on.

On that note, if you don't get a raise, you should see how you feel about
relocating to a place where the ratio of pay/cost-of-living is better. Few
places in the country have a worse ratio than the Bay Area.

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sreenadh
Unless you are desperate or just bored with IT and not interested in learning
anything new. I would suggest you to stay away from CRUD dev. No offence to
the CRUD devs, but I am one. Maybe I am just on the worst side of things but I
really regret no one suggest me to move away from this earlier. Now I am
struggling to move away. My skill as a developer is extremely poor and
limited.

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monknomo
You know, about 90% of software development is CRUD. You can make a lot of
money in CRUD. It may be true that it's not the cutting edge, but it is the
thing that most people actually interact with when using a program, so it's
pretty important.

I think some of the issue with CRUD development is that it feels like you're
at the highest level and everybody at lower levels is making cool stuff that
you only get to use. The fact is, at every level of programming, you're just a
user to someone else. A CRUD programmer is just a user to a backend
programmer, who is just a user to a server programmer, who is just a user to
language dev, who is just a user to a compiler dev, who is just a user to a os
dev, who is just a user to a hardware dev. Turtles, all the way down. I
suspect, without knowing, that they are all a little bored and a little
envious of each other.

Let's look on the bright side - even with CRUD, there are plenty of
technological rabbit holes to dive down and do something useful. For the
boilerplate - you could write a code generator. You could write something to
handle automated testing - that's often pretty hard for CRUD apps (at least in
the desktop world, IMHO). You could try out new design patterns, maybe state
machine backed CRUD? IDK, but as a fellow dev who does a lot of CRUD, it's not
all bad. It can even pay ok, if you can find a CRUD app to work on that makes
money (patio11's cost-center vs revenue generator frame)

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g8gggu89
Look for a better paying job immediately??

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bo_Olean
Yes I can.

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sauere
For bay area standards, you are underpaid.

