I'm a software engineer with over 20 years in Java and more years in C# then C++ before that totaling 30 years and am seeing rates at $60 per hour (also what I made 10 years ago) and $50 per hour (what I made 20 years ago - even during the 2003 recession).
Is it being supported by the current corrupt administration or has it been supported by all the corrupt administrations. Rhetorical, I know.
Our grocery costs continue to rise, media streaming has gone up, nearly everything has gone up and drastically just the past 2 years alone yet wages being offered are from 10-20 years ago.
I feel this so hard. Whenever I read HN people are like "obviously we SWE's are economic elites who will never struggle financially, unlike everyone else"
Bro I have over ten years of dev experience, dozens of significant bug bounties including well-known projects like Chromium and Github, am a great competitive coder (love leetcode and codewars type challenges), and my brother makes much more money fixing air conditioners than I do as a dev.
Appsec is my specialty but my background is in React frontend (Node and Flask backend).
If it's hard for me, it must be brutal for new grads and people just coming out of bootcamps. I'm lucky that I focused on open source instead of going to college, because when I started looking for work I already had a portfolio and real experience, plus FOSS friends.
If anyone is looking for an appsec person who can find vulnerabilities, report them in a way that clearly explains the issue to other devs, and then write patches, please do reach out. Glad to work for WAY less than $60 an hour lol.
Currently I'm a freelancer, can show projects I've worked on. I don't mind hoops at all, send me a coding challenge or CTF or whatever you want :)
The job market is not great right now, but sounds like you could have moved up last year.
> Glad to work for WAY less
That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.
> instead of going to college
It's fine if you just want to have work. But won't cut it if you'd like a coveted job, as your resume is filed to /dev/null within minutes. Ask me how I know.
Oh yeah, I understand, last year I was indeed making boatloads of money.
Right now I'm focused on something other than making tons of money tbh. There's a job I covet, so I've been just focusing on maxxing relevant skills so I can join this elite club of extremely cool people working on this very cool thing.
But after that I'm gonna go back to money, for sure.
Btw I love your blog. That same essay "How to be a hacker" is the one I consulted as a teenager, which led me to switch from QBASIC (my first lang, on the recommendation of an IRC channel that was probably trolling me) to Python.
I'd like to know which country/region has a low average of >$400K/y for a SWE so that you'd be "lucky" to find one for less. I know we're well paid, but definitely not that well.
The rule of thumb I have seen is that you should charge around double the hourly rate when contracting compared to what you would make on salary to account vagaries of contracting. So this would be closer to $200k given that rule of thumb.
$200/hr fully loaded cost or $200/hr wage? Because a $60/hr wage isn't really that far away from a $200/hr fully loaded cost in some cases.
If you're hiring a non-employee contractor through some other company for $200/hr ... the SWE making $60/hr might just be that same person. Taxes, benefits, and overhead are very expensive.
$60 an hour, or around $120,000 is the average rate for software developers currently in DC. There's plenty of places that employ developers for less too.
$200 an hour is FAANG rates, at least, but there's an entire economy outside of that.
For example, I know a guy who does custom software development for a sawmill in rural Maryland. They don't pay $500k (I think they pay $180k), but he seems pretty happy with his McMansion and 4 kids in private schools. So long as your housing costs aren't in the $1 million range, you can have a lot of disposable income with less money.
It translates to probably around $170k pre-tax income, definitely less than $200k, after overhead if you're an employee working for a contracting company. Actually that's for govt contracting companies with mandated limits of how much profit they can make, so normal contracting companies are likely worse.
You can hire SWE's at the no-bullshit rate of $60/hr as soon as you ditch your own bullshit: the take-home exams, the 10 interview rounds, and the brain teasers.
Most of the country? I was happy to cross the $60 barrier after a decade of experience and job hopping a few years back and now all of the jobs are in the high $40s now. I got laid off and I can see why now. These companies wanted to save $20 an hour at least per developer per team and they can.
Contract SWE gigs on the US west coast. I have a guy at $175, a full stack dev who does fantastic work, but he's booked out a year in advance and it's like pulling teeth to get him to accept more than 5-10 hours a week.
"Can I pay you a higher rate to take on project Z?"
"Nah man I'm as busy as I want to be. Maybe next year."
I'm sure he does the work in half the time stated, which is fine by me.
Supply and demand: there are more people in your profession. It’s why cashiers make so little. Truth is programming ain’t that hard so there are thirty years worth of new programmers competing for your same job.
And then the other side of this is that many tech companies are still spending more than they can afford long term with the current investor/interest climate.
I always have trouble with the argument that monetary policy = wage suppression. The argument is that when the central bank demands a higher interest rate on its loans to other banks, the bargaining power of labor is mysteriously diminished. The actual mechanisms in between "bank loans to other banks" and "wages to revenue ratio changes" are never precisely specified. (Could the unionists of Debs's era have been undone by interbank lending policies?) Instead, we get this handwaving bit about how the Fed doesn't want inflation and therefore its intentions show that it is suppressing wages. But as anyone who has spent at least thirty seconds reading about economic history knows, inflation is no guarantee of low unemployment or low inequality. And real wages need not track nominal wages.
Whenever I see this argument, the effect is basically to kill my trust in anything else the author says. I'm not aware of any historical examples where simply running up inflation to fight inequality worked (Turkey's Gini increased during the "Erdoganomics" 2019-22). And the "MMT" doesn't seem to have a good theoretical footing either. I'm generally sympathetic to leftist economic ideals. But the persistence of so much mumbo-jumbo keeps me at a distance.
Part of the issue is that inflation is lopsided towards the class of economy it affects. Rich and poor people pay the same prices for coca cola and most other goods and services, after all. If the entire issue of inequality is that too much of the GDP is gobbled up by the capital class relative to the working class, it stands to reason that inflation that targets this class exclusively and redistributes this wealth to the working class would serve as a great reset of things back to where they were, when labor could more easily afford the necessities of modern life. However, due to the fact the capital class has such an outsized influence on politics, and the working class is fractured on identity lines, such an outcome is unlikely to ever occur. The working class needs to unite, however anytime such things are preached the preachers wind up dead before long which is disturbing to say the least.
Weird to post an article whose central thesis (the fed is too aggressive at raising rates to combat inflation) was proved wrong almost immediately after publication.
I didn’t see anywhere in the article where it made a judgement on current fed policy. The article is about the period from 1979 to 2017.
The current period is interesting and deserves its own study, but I think it’s too early to come to any conclusions, although we all have our own intuition. Mine is that raising interest rates to combat a supply crunch seems like not the best tool for the job.
The fact that there hasn't been a federal minimum wage hike in 14 years should tell you we live in a fake democracy.
Inflation robs the working class of power without ever having to get so much as a bill past congress, and it's no accident.
The "Inflation reduction act" should have been nothing more than a bill that locks automatic increases to the minimum wage to accumulated inflation. The fact that it was anything else means it wasn't about reducing inflation at all, because the only way to do that is to destroy money. The only way to reduce the impact of inflation is to raise wages. The bill did neither, of course.
The Federal minimum wage isn’t relevant in the vast majority of States that set their own minimum wage. This is a good thing; the US is too geographically and economically diverse to have a single minimum wage. The minimum wage in expensive places like Seattle is the median wage in States with weaker economies and lower costs of living.
the problem with that argument is that the State minimum wage set is always at the Federal rate or higher...never ever lower...that destroys your point
It's a strong argument for keeping the Federal rate low, since it needs to effectively peg the lowest COL area (which may not be able to support higher wages).
The minimum wage also applies to Puerto Rico, where the median household income is about 21K. That's less than a what a dual income household would bring in making minimum wage.
Minimum wage is not a very useful policy, especially in a system with relatively low workforce participation.
Firstly, minimum wage is politically unpopular in most areas. Keep in mind the median voter is older or retired and cares more about expenses than income. So even modest cost of living increases can have huge political repercussions.
Secondly, minimum wages are very inefficient as a poverty reduction policy. For every dollar you impose on businesses, a % is going to be eaten by inflation, a % is going to into reduced labor demand, and a % is going to families well above the poverty line (second or third household earners).
This is why you see lots of Western countries not even bother with them.
(Minimum wage as a policy to induce immigration - that's another story).
> Firstly, minimum wage is politically unpopular in most areas.
In the US raising the minimum wage is wildly popular, with 89% wanting to raise it some amount and 62% supporting $15/hr.
> For every dollar you impose on businesses, a % is going to be eaten by inflation, a % is going to into reduced labor demand, and a % is going to families well above the poverty line (second or third household earners).
Only if you assume a perfectly efficient labor market, which is often far from how things play out in studies regarding the minimum wage.
> This is why you see lots of Western countries not even bother with them.
There are only a handful of western countries without a minimum wage and most of them either have very strong collective bargaining, a strong social safety net with some form of guaranteed minimum income, or both. I think those are reasonable policies but they aren't what opponents of the minimum wage are generally advocating for.
> Secondly, minimum wages are very inefficient as a poverty reduction policy. For every dollar you impose on businesses, a % is going to be eaten by inflation, a % is going to into reduced labor demand, and a % is going to families well above the poverty line (second or third household earners).
The CBO data actually highlights this. These are all miniscule improvements for the big outlay of costs.
You can see this in the huge predicted decline in Real Family Income (most of that is only felt by people in middle class or above, but still, if this is just a redistribution mechanism there are more efficient ways to do that).
Actually it doesn’t — the decline in real income is not huge even on the high end and actual site comments on its findings:
“ How would increasing the minimum wage affect the number of people in poverty? By boosting the income of low-wage workers with jobs, a higher minimum wage would lift some families’ income above the poverty threshold and thereby reduce the number of people in poverty. But low-wage workers who lost employment would see their earnings decrease, and in some cases their family income would fall below the poverty threshold. The first effect would tend to be larger than the second, so the number of people in poverty would generally fall.”
Yes there would be job losses but that effect is shown to not be nearly as large as the number of people lifted out of poverty.
Increasing wages is itself inflationary. If the costs of a company increase then so too do the price of their product or service. I’m not disagreeing that we shouldn’t increase wages, but I just want to point out that wages and inflation are correlated.
Strongly disagree. Strictly speaking inflation is the result of adding money to the system faster than you add value. The effects of that are not themselves inflation.
Study of the Zimbabwe hyperinflation makes it really easy to see that this is true.
Increasing wages correlates with inflation, but it's a _very_ weak correlation. In most industries labour does not make up the lion's share of business expenses.
Studying minimum wage increases between 1978 and 2015:
> we find prices grow by 0.36 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage.
Considering that company profits and the income of the top 20% went up, it seems fair that other income goes up too. There may be some inflation but I think wage earners would still be much better off.
With that logic you might as well pay no one anything because that would increase the prices. It just doesn't pencil out logically when you think it through. Fact is, wages are historically depressed. We've shown you can have higher ratios of wages to prices in the past, we've just never bothered to keep the ratio maintained as we've seen GDP growth over the years, and have instead favored having the capital class to gobble up the resulting gains instead of seeing more redistribution of all of this accumulated wealth as in years past.
I'm for wage increases but wouldn't that push inflation higher? Raising interest rates and a funding package to weather the hit seems reasonable to me.
It's a fallacy that an increase in a workers productivity due to better technology or innovation *on the part of someone else* should result in an equal share in the profits of that increased productivity.
If I have a factory that makes widgets, and I pay a skilled worker to laboriously craft one widget at a time by hand, and then I invent a machine that allows unskilled workers to make tens of widgets at a time, why would those workers see any increase in pay at all? In fact, their pay would likely go down, because now I can hire unskilled labor instead of skilled craftsman.
The benefits of technology will always be exponentially unequal.
Why would an owner do that? The owners would be incentivized to increase production of widgets and try and find even more uses for their widgets, because the margins on them all just increased exponentially.
It's also not just capital that benefits. It's being able to direct capital that benefits. If it takes the same amount of skill and work to make a widget as it does to run a cashier, why should the widget-maker get a higher wage? The owners that direct capital towards widget making will benefit more than owners directing capital towards retail.
“ No, the structure of society matters little. Like I said, technology will benefit the people who are able to harness it.
The man who can make and use the spear and the atlatl will outpace the man still throwing rocks. It doesn't matter what the structure of society is.”
I upvoted you and I’m quoting here so that I can reference this later when somebody questions why we need things like unions to protect them from narcissistic psychopaths
Capitalism should incentivize efficient allocation of resources. If a job becomes easier or less in-demand, it should see a pay decrease. It's not the capitalist's job to pay above-market wages just because "they should". It's the government's job to redistribute wealth to compensate for unhealthy concentration.
Perhaps even using the word capitalism has become unhelpful since it's so charged. I think we're basically agreeing with each other. I just think this particular responsibility falls on the government rather than individual employers.
> give them the same pay and reduce their hours so they can live a better life while your margins still increase.
Not that I disagree that would be nice, but what's the incentive to the company owner to do that under capitalism? As a purely business decision, you'd fire the highly paid experts and replace them with lower-paid less-expert labor. Which is exactly what's been going on with layoffs in the tech sector, just without the magic productivity multiplying machine, so this is not theoretical.
The investor in Facebook, and the one in Pets.com could very well be the same person, making a very mediocre return. If, on the other hand, the investor manages to only invest in successful enterprises, thereby enabling a huge amount of consumer surplus, they should probably be rewarded (thus permitted and enabled to support even more consumer surplus in the future).
I agree with the point you're making but I think this is a less than ideal example:
>Did an early investor in Facebook do more work than an early investor in Pets.com?
It's quite possible that an investor who does more research, spends more time networking with smart young people, etc, would have to do more work in order to invest in better things.
And even if not, meritocracy means rewarding the quality of work, not just the quantity. Making smart investments should pay better than making dumb ones, even if it's not more work.
I own a machine shop in Houston. In 1980, our best machinists were making $20-$25 an hour using manual machines. In 2019 (pre-pandemic), they were still making $25 an hour while being much more productive on CNC machines. Forget real wages - they were making the same nominal wages after 40 years.
It's a hard truth that capital garners the majority of the additional profits from labor efficiency increases.
I struggle with this. Yes, it seems almost a law of nature that fitness begets more fitness. But surely we can structure society to be above mere nature?
So what's the mechanism to protect against it?
Market forces don't seem to work too well.
Corporate taxes would/should work, if our government weren't also co-opted by capital?
Well-designed socialism, possibly including UBI, is the correct answer. Market forces are super useful and important, the government just needs to make sure competition is fair.
Why isn’t the craftsman a good candidate for overseeing/maintaining the machine and/or overseeing unskilled labor? If he becomes skilled in that regard, you will have to pay well enough to retain his services.
It is stupid too throw good, reliable people away especially in manufacturing.
The biggest issue with this is that companies must always make more money every quarter. We see how stock markets react when company's miss their quarterly estimates. It's enshitification on an economic scale.
1) Company sees explosive growth, pays workers a lot, workers spend a lot.
2) Company growth slows, reduces worker benefits, reduces raise frequency, workers restrict spending a bit.
3) Company growth screeches to a halt, layoffs ensure, benefits reduced more, bonuses for workers nixed, workers heavily restrict spending.
All this happening alongside inflation (standard or not) is where we're at now. Capitalism punishes that maintain stability in line with inflation, constant and unmanageable growth is what is rewarded. But constant growth is not possible, there's always a ceiling, always a limit, a finite amount of customers, a finite amount of money to be paid.
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". We have to have a cultural shift over what is considered success in business, because this isn't sustainable.
.. with you until the "we" part.. in a competitive hierarchy, only unordinary returns will bring "wealth" .. the carrot in most cases, in public, is to "get rich" .. and that motivator started the stampedes of "animal powers" that paved North America and beat out the would-be French and Spanish powers.. nobody is steering that ship, however, it seems..
Is it being supported by the current corrupt administration or has it been supported by all the corrupt administrations. Rhetorical, I know.
Our grocery costs continue to rise, media streaming has gone up, nearly everything has gone up and drastically just the past 2 years alone yet wages being offered are from 10-20 years ago.