this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Programmer pay is so bizarre, it makes me cynical about our entire economy.
If I'm a blue-collar worker maintaining the wires between banks, I get paid little. If I'm a programmer maintaining the banking software that controls everyone's money and is essential to the entire nation, I'm paid a little more, but not as much as some programmers.
If I'm a young man who creates a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions of dollars into my hands.
(Although, creating a webpage was the hot thing last decade, now the hot thing is creating an AI.)
You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.
COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.
I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn't be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between "the proper way to do things", and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it's been around and having things built on top of it.
That's probably true. My father has been developing in COBOL since the '70s. I didn't bother learning it because I was under the impression that he was being paid more for experience than his basic skills.
not sure what you're talking about with lisp lol, the military may have some dialect they wrote but lisp started as an academic language and there's plenty of still supported and used dialects outside of that
There may be, but as far as I can tell, they won't pay what the people that still need COBOL are willing to pay
It's pretty simple isn't it? If you want to be paid a lot of money, learn how to do what other people can't or won't. In the software industry those opportunities are all over the place. You just need to find it and take it.
Dude, should I learn COBOL?
I'd recommend against it. Seems to cause my father no end of headaches
A lot of the time it's about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.
Or just working at a company that's well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.
Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it's premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can't pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.
buddy there are a lot more reasons to be more than cynical about the economy, take a good look at things and you'll probably want to bring out the pitchforks.
Yeah man, me too.
I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient ..... Buuuut.... The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase.... All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.
The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.
I think it makes perfect sense. Those people are building something from scratch. That's a lot more responsibility and skill needed than to maintain a tiny part of a huge well established system. The people capable of doing an A+ job at building something totally new are very few and far between and the competition to hire them is fierce. The best way to move up in this industry is to build up your skill and jump ship to a new job as soon as your skill has outpaced your salary.
I think it really just comes down to scale. Relative to other professions there aren't that many software engineers, but the work produced by each one has the potential to reach an extremely wide user base. Someone working at Google could write code that gets deployed on a billion devices. This is pretty clear when comparing between different software engineering roles as well. Companies that serve a global market pay significantly better than local companies.
On top of that, there's no supplies or logistics required for software engineering. It just takes one person and a computer, so expenses are minimal compared to other engineering disciplines.