
What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population - gkst
http://ramiro.org/notebook/income-software-engineers-countries/
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frogpelt
Is it meaningful to compare the _median_ annual income of software engineers
to the _average_ annual income of the general population?

I'm legitimately curious, what is the statistical significance of an average
versus a median?

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eterm
"average income" as reported is usually the median.

Edit: I'm not sure why I'm getting downvotes.

Anywhere you read about average incomes from a serious source it'll be the
median, no one uses "mean income" for average when dealing with incomes, since
the distribution is so skewed.

If you even just google "average income" it'll report you the median. Median
is so completely standard when reporting on income data that it gets short-
handed to "average".

~~~
cortesoft
I think you are probably getting downvoted because the article explicitly says
that they are using the mean for the general population:

"Moreover, we compare median annual values for software engineers with mean
annual values for the general population. Considering how large the income
share of top earners is in several countries, annual median values for the
general population might well show a different picture."

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TrickedOut
I really detest when software engineer salaries are compared to the salaries
of the general population (often to cite how our sector is "overpaid").
Usually lacking from such simple comparisons: 1\. Discussion of how software
engineers have to go to college for 4 to 6+ years, but the general population
is weighted towards those far fewer years of schooling 2\. Discussion of
downtime -- the amount of time software engneers spend unemployed (due to
economic cycle, startup bankruptcy, downsizing, etc.) compared to the general
population (e.g., government workers for example have superb job security,
often 100% lifetime job security.)

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V-2
A lot of software engineers are autodidacts and never graduated in IT. I
didn't (I have an MA in politics, obviously irrelevant to my profession). In
general unemployment in IT is very low, and there's always a shortage of
programmers, so job security is clearly above average. (And government
administrations have IT departments, too).

It's supply vs. demand, that's all there is to it. I'm not buying any of the
above as a justification for big salaries.

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Gratsby
While there is a segment of autodidacts, it's not like people can become
expert software developers overnight.

Software developers work longer hours. I've never been in an environment where
developers hang their coats up at 5:00 and go on with their carefree lives.

And while unemployment may be low in IT, developers do not enjoy job security.

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Gargoyle
> I've never been in an environment where developers hang their coats up at
> 5:00 and go on with their carefree lives.

And I've always worked in environments where they do.

Anecdata for the win?

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kingnothing
Same here. I've always worked more or less 8 hour days with occasional
exceptions for emergencies and crunch time to hit a deadline.

~~~
aprdm
+1 In London worked from 10 to 6 and went home. Canada 9 to 6 with 1hour of
lunch (unpaid) Brazil same as Canada.

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option_greek
While this is interesting, its conclusions should be taken with a grain of
salt as the average median income of general population in India tends to be
aggressively underestimated. This is because less than 5% of the populace
pays/declares tax. The ones in private/government employment happens to be the
ones paying tax while any one having "business" income tend to lets say
"downplay" their income to get various subsidies or to just hoard money.

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emodendroket
They're relying on voluntarily self-reported data, often collected by
essential coercion ("please enter your salary to see the averages") so I doubt
it's extremely accurate in any country

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joesmo
The data for Romania is completely incorrect or the OP just fucked up his
analysis royally. You're talking about a country where the average national
wage is just shy of $500 a month ([https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-
salary-european-union-...](https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-salary-
european-union-2014)) and software engineers are making well over a thousand
and sometimes thousands a month. See:
[http://www.developer.com/daily_news/romanian-developers-
earn...](http://www.developer.com/daily_news/romanian-developers-earn-five-
times-as-much-as-average-workers.html)

I don't care what numbers or technique he used, it's impossible to come to the
conclusion that software engineers in Romania actually make less than the
average salary. It's also just plain wrong.

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agentgt
I didn't find the data to be very compelling but the real world example with
Pandas and D3 very helpful.

Probably irrelevant but I feel the article should probably be titled
differently like "Using Pandas and D3 to get a rough....." as I'm not sure
many good conclusions can be drawn from that dataset (I could be vastly wrong
though?).

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carlob
Yay for Italy! Where not only software developers are paid less than the
general population, but also where the real wages of everyone are very low
compared to the cost of living of other European countries!

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paulmd
It's meaningless to directly compare software engineer salaries with the rest
of the general population because our work is a 'force multiplier'. A single
software engineer can displace the labor of 10 staff - often permanently.
While we're compensated more highly than 1 lower-skilled staff member it's
_still actually not_ commensurate with the amount of value we actually
deliver. My (unscientific) belief is that we actually capture less of the
value we generate than most other staff, out of the sense of "fairness"
espoused in this article.

This applies at all levels of the spectrum, from a junior developer working at
a contracting firm to high-end staff working for Google or whatnot. We
wouldn't be paid those salaries if we didn't bring in 5x more than our pay.

Apart from that, supply and demand/etc also apply. We're highly-trained staff
who often deal with mathematics that the general population can't or won't
deal with.

~~~
_yosefk
Erm... How many people are fed by a combine harvester driver? How many babies
and mothers are saved by the staff of a modern hospital, who drastically lower
child mortality? If 10 future programmers are delivered by a single nurse,
should she be paid 10x what a programmer makes?

(Supply and demand I get, "force multiplier" I don't get.)

~~~
paulmd
If a combine harvester allows a farmer to feed as many people as 100 farmers
working by hand then they have a force multiplier of 100x. If you can train
one nurse to deliver as many babies as 10 normal nurses then they have a
force-multiplier of 10x. This doesn't necessarily translate into 10x or 100x
the salary - farming is still an extremely capital-intensive business,
probably moreso than it was pre-Green Revolution. Tractors and fuel and
fertilizer don't buy themselves. There really hasn't been a single improvement
that produced a 10x improvement in the number of babies a nurse can deliver.
Maybe if someone goes out and invents the robo-midwife, but I can't see that
being real popular...

The other way you can go is a qualitative improvement, which is where the
child mortality example comes in. If one engineer can remove 75% of the fuck-
ups caused by manually performing a task, then that is also worth money, but
it's not valued in quite the same way. You'd value lower child-mortality in
person-years of economic output (accrued to society), quality-adjusted-life-
years (accrued to the individual) and diminished malpractice suits/insurance
(accrued to the hospital or the insurance company).

Perhaps a better term would be "productivity multiplier". Productivity is a
pretty standard economic measure (average economic output per individual), and
engineers both have much higher economic output per individual, and can
greatly increase that output for other individuals as well (often with a one-
time investment).

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_yosefk
I got that "force multiplier" had to do with productivity, but I didn't get
how compensation is supposed to be set as a function of productivity (as
opposed to supply and demand, and/or arbitrary rules), or even why it should
be. Certainly (and thankfully, for those of us buying their food) a combine
harvester driver does not get paid 100x the compensation of a farmer who
harvested before combine harvesters were invented (of course the driver
neither invented nor manufactured the combine harvester; well, a programmer
neither invented nor made computers - or compilers, or most of the ideas they
apply.)

I kind of believe, I think not controversially, that compensation results from
supply, demand, and a bunch of more or less arbitrary rules which either
affect supply & demand or directly affect the price (price controls, visa
regimes, etc.) Productivity (value created) sets an upper bound for
compensation (well, actually, it doesn't, _perceived_ productivity does; and
even that isn't true - building a barely working website for the government
for several hundreds of millions of dollars is one of the countless counter-
examples), but productivity certainly does not set a lower bound for
compensation - competition does. How much labor you save is beside the point.

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foobarrio
I clicked around the PayScale and IMF pages and could not find how they define
"Software Engineer". Is this the same as "Programmer" or "Software Developer"?
These titles are quite broad in some places. For example where I sit now, we
are all "programmers". However one of our programmers is a CPA + some other
certs and spends as much time talking to accountants, lawyers, reading IRS
notices as she does spec'ing out and developing software. Is she a "Software
Engineer"? I spend most of my time fixing bugs and operating our software
systems does that make me a "Software Engineer"? I program a lot sometimes but
I'd hardly call what I do engineering. I'm in the U.S. and we don't have
formal engineering accreditation for software.

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donquichotte
Peculiarly, in Romania, the median income of a software dev is 0.7 times the
average income whereas in neighbouring Bulgaria, the factor is 3.2. Does
anybody have an idea why?

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bluetomcat
The dataset probably has a huge error margin. In my observations, the factor
in Bulgaria is almost 4 and in Romania it is something like 3-3.2.

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dudul
Am I the only who thinks that the "average income" in a country is a
meaningless metric? Depending on the area (e.g. big city, desirable area, etc)
average salaries and cost of living may be very different. It is easy to see
in the US for example.

~~~
turnip1979
You are quite right. I never had an idea how immobile I would be as a tech
worker. The best tech jobs are concentrated in a few, high cost of living
cities. While we can work remote, the quality of the career opportunities are
not the same.

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ThomaszKrueger
The use of the term Engineer is very unfortunate. In many places (Texas and
Florida come to mind) one cannot claim to be or perform the functions of
Engineering without being properly licensed and member of a board of
professional engineers.

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khedoros
If I engineer software, then I can be described as a software engineer. I
_couldn 't_ be described as a licensed PE (because I'm not and don't claim to
be). The fact remains that "software engineer" is a common industry term. What
is unfortunate is FUD from various Boards of Professional Engineers trying to
appropriate the term for their sole use.

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nowey
I'm in the 90th percentile in household salary in my country. I'm single so
double my salary to accomodate the 2.5 people living on average, and I jump to
to the 93rd percentile.

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z92
Comparing software engineer's salary with other graduate's salary would have
been more meaningful. Instead of with general population.

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emodendroket
There is no requirement that you have a degree to be a software engineer.

