Would you please stop posting snark and flamebait to HN? You've been doing it for a long time, unfortunately. It breaks the site guidelines and destroys the intended spirit of this place, which is curious conversation.
I'm afraid it's my job (I'm a moderator here). Unfortunately the system doesn't regulate itself without moderation feedback, so such comments are a necessary evil. In case it helps at all, they're more tedious to write than they are to read.
Do you sometimes think that instead of moderating bad behaviour, you're burying critisisms under the guise of rudeness, perpetuating the atmosphere in hn that seeps into (and from) the rest of the ecosystem?
That's unnecessarily rude. Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years. The parallel still holds. Times will be hard relative to the recent peak, but compared to just about every other industry we'll still be pretty fat and happy.
I know that's pretty thin consolation for people who are struggling to find jobs while their classmates from one year before were the subject of bidding wars. It's not what I wanted to hear myself when I was struggling through the tech cull ten years before dot-com. But it's still true. If anyone washes out of the industry now it's probably not because of COVID-19.
OP is supposed to be a message of hope in dark times. Most people are more resilient than they realize. Software jobs will continue to increase over any time span longer than a year or two. We'll get through this. It's sad that so many here are trying to turn a positive message into a negative one.
> Software is still the most well paid, expanding industry of the last 40 years.
In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.
Even in the U.S. I’m not sure where this myth of SWE being the most well paid industry comes from. Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations. They all pay much better than 95% of all software engineering jobs. It’s also well known that to be an incredibly high paid SWE, you need to be at a large public tech company. That means you’re making a huge bet on their stock - the folks making bank there do so because their equity has appreciated massively. I think one reason for the pervasiveness of this myth is that engineers talk about the fact that they are paid well. Folks in other industries are much quieter about it.
Software is one of the best paid and fastest growing fields that doesn't require a post-graduate degree plus years of resident/associate toil before you pay off those student loans and start getting ahead. Finance might be even better, but not everyone has the stomach for it. There are a lot of very unpleasant people and attitudes to deal with. A lot of the worst tech-bro-ism comes from contact with finance.
> the folks making bank there do so because their equity has appreciated massively
That's not entirely true. The salary scale is way higher than other places. For example, just my salary at one of those companies is higher than my total comp at a company outside the circle, and I was well paid by any standard there.
> one reason for the pervasiveness of this myth
It's always possible to look up at people making even more, and feel like you're not paid well enough by comparison. But it's also worth considering the many times more people making less, compared to which we're very well paid indeed. For some of us, the empathy outweighs the envy.
I generally agree with you. But many people say that software engineering de facto pays the best without acknowledging other options. I also think opinions are colored by media and public opinion. I’ve met many, many investment bankers, and 98% of them are really nice people that I enjoy hanging out with. Fundamentally I think people need to examine their skill set and the work environment in which they thrive the most in order to pick a career that will be most fruitful with them.
> Even in the U.S. I’m not sure where this myth of SWE being the most well paid industry comes from.
Because it basically is.
> Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations.
Selected finance jobs aren't an industry, neither is “medicine in certain specializations”, neither is big law (law as a whole is an industry).
> It’s also well known that to be an incredibly high paid SWE, you need to be at a large public tech company
To be incredibly highly paid within SWE, sure. SWE is still highly paid compared to the rest of the world outside of those firms, and an unusually accessible high-paying field, without any post-baccalaureate education requirement, or even a firm requirement for an in-field bachelor's degree.
Note that there are similar (and often much bigger) cliffs in other highly-paid industries (which your allusion to “big law” implicitly recognizes.)
The high-paying finance and big-law jobs are exceptionally competitive. You have to compare that to the pay at highly competitive jobs like at FANG, not just a bog-standard SWE job.
High-paying medical specializations take far more education than SWE does. You start your career at 30, not at 22 like SWEs do.
> Try many finance jobs and big law, also medicine in certain specializations. They all pay much better than 95% of all software engineering jobs.
But the stress levels and amount of hours you have to put in for both finance and law are exponentially higher than being a SWE. I honestly can't remember the last time I had to work 60-70 hour weeks, non-stop for months on end as a developer. The amount of stress in those industries also pales in comparison to the stress of being a SWE.
What places and professions are you talking about? I'm genuinely curious. I've worked with programmers outside the US and Europe, and my impression was that programming was still one of the "easier" ways (in terms of training and credentials) to reach the upper economic strata.
> In a lot of the world it's nowhere near as well paid as most of the professions which have comparable requirements in terms of the amount academic study, vocational apprenticeship and natural aptitude needed.
Teaching/Academia isn't a real job and can be replaced with the internet
Teaching/academia being a job has nothing to do with the comment you replied to, and even if it were, I'm curious how would you replace academical research "with the internet"?
It baffles me that you can even write "academia isn't a real job" while the entire planet is desperately hoping for biomedical breakthroughs. Almost all of the people working on COVID have advanced degrees; many of them work in academic labs.
As for teaching, if you want to be intubated by someone who once a post about it on Medium, well...best of luck.
Survivorship bias. Our system is broken, humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure. Failure shouln't be hunger and homelessness...This will be another generation of hopeless dreamers lost in the looming financial depression.
Why is our antidote hope against the adversity of going against all the odds?. Congrats to those who made it but more recognition to those who failed and managed to overcome misery
> humanity needs a way to encourage success without punishing failure
Serious question - why? You state this as an objective fact with no argument for it.
> Failure [shouldn't] be hunger and homelessness
If you're smart about it, it isn't. What's wrong with saying "yes you should probably have savings to fall back on in case this doesn't work out?" What's wrong with saying "if you throw caution and all reasonableness to the wind and blow your life's savings trying to sell Amway products, your neighbor isn't going to be burdened with paying your bills while you look for another job?"
I think people are too quick to discount the importance of failure and feeling bad. If failing has no consequence, there will be far less motivation. However, in my opinion, this is a balance. Failure has to be sufficiently painful, but no more than that.
From the research I’ve done, two major items have made failure too painful: stagnant wages and rapidly inflating rent prices. People can no longer hold onto savings in case something doesn’t work because they barely make ends meet. Our system is inherently broken. We need unions, raises in minimum wage, worker strikes, etc. This is not going to be a generation of people going through economic hardship just because of the economy, but also because we are no longer willing to fight for each other.
Whether you have something to fall back on in the event of failure has a lot to do with where and whom you're born to. It's pretty difficult to have a fall back option as a kid from a poor coal mining town with 20% unemployment. If you move out west with no network and lose your job soon after, yes, you can find yourself hungry and homeless in short order.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, many of us are just one bout of extended unemployment or illness away from homelessness.
Also: thinking about these people helps the rest of us, the economy is extremely fragile because most people aren’t able to save (high rent+low wages) and have limited mobility.
I used to think all the SWEs getting paid well would make the world a better place because they were more capable of dealing with complex problems but comments like this make me question that.
You should look at statistics about how many countries are rising out of desperate poverty and joining the rich world. It's gotten so good that we've forgotten what desperate poverty even looks like.
Scammers, arbitrage stock-traders, and opioid drug marketers can also achieve success... On the other hand, some endeavors "succeed" by not-failing and being out of sight and out of mind, e.g. a plumbing installation. You don't think of your "daily plumbing success".
So, I'd say not success which should be encouraged, it is well-directed and well-applied effort.
PS - The plumbing example can well be adapted to nearly any pursuit, definitely including software.
> Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens.
This is endemic to business and is especially widespread in contemporary American-style business, and the general case seems to be a failure in pricing all kinds of tail risk. I suspect a key challenge in this space is the unsolved principal agent problem.
I think the principal agent problem is rampant because pricing information is extremely lossy information compression; only the grossest outcomes are recorded in the market. Those who exploit the principal agent problem rely upon externalities to succeed, and those externalities are not timely or fine-grained reflected in the compressed/price information.
Reputation systems lossily add the missing information back into the market as a side-channel. But what externalities to record is a whole other can of worms.
1. Because most people fail a lot in a lot of things.
2. Because failure often doesn't depend on you, and extremely often is at least partially dependent on external factors and context.
3. Because it's not that useful (psychologically) as opposed to other engagement approahces.
4. Because it can and will be misused to punish those who are disfavorable to the punishing establishment.
and last but not least:
5. Because the social systems which need to be in place in order to punish failure, and the ethos necessary for the punishers and for legitimization of the punishers' concrete acts, are themselves repressive to the general populace and make life a worse experience for everyone.
>It's inhumane to oversee a system with the capability to feed and house its entire population and refuse to do so for procedural reasons. (Welfare gap, Section 8 waiting lists)
>The system does not dole out failure meritocratically, therefore the existence of a total failure state will mean earnest and reasonably industrious individuals will still fail by chance alone. (Rust belt)
>The official sanctioning of a failure state is the impetus for a black market safety net, where failure is precluded at the cost of rule of law. (Drug-dealing, prostitution, gang-controlled ghettoes)
I think you missed the article's point: yes, over the last 20 years or so tech has been an awesomely-expanding career. But it sure didn't seem that way after the dot com bust or the Eleventh of September. I was around then, and it was terrible. That tech was awesome is the article's point.
I do not see any fundamental reason why tech will not continue to be an awesome career field. Software is still eating the world. Yeah, the economy is suffering right now. It will recover.
One thing that may be different here is that when we come out of this, there will be pent-up demand, for most industries and trades.
There will be some that will take a hit (the ones enjoying a surge now, like furniture, electronics, entertainment/distraction, PPE manufacturing, etc), but many categories will have pent up demand, some will recover slowly, some may never reach the levels we had before, still most I think will recover)
