Ask HN: How much do you make working as a CRUD dev?

[bo_Olean]

I recently joined an agency in Bay Area and I'm getting paid roughly 50K/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'm fairly good and competitive on my skills but lately I'm having a feeling that I'm heavily underpaid. How much do you make working on similar agencies writing or maintaining traditional CRUD apps ?

[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.

[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.

[monknomo → sreenadh]

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)

[g8gggu89]

Look for a better paying job immediately??

[bo_Olean → g8gggu89]

Yes I can.

[sauere]

For bay area standards, you are underpaid.