Slashdot Mirror
Is Programming a Lucrative Profession?
itwbennett writes "A pamphlet distributed by blogger Cameron Laird's local high school proclaimed that 'Computer Science BS graduates can expect an annual salary from $54,000-$74,000. Starting salaries for MS and PhD graduates can be to up to $100,000' and 'employment of computer scientists is expected to grow by 24 percent from 2010 to 2018.' The pamphlet lists The US Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics as a reference, so how wrong can it be? 'This is so wrong, I don't know where to start,' says Laird. 'There are a lot of ways to look at the figures, but only the most skewed ones come up with starting salaries approaching $60,000 annually, and I see plenty of programmers in the US working for less,' says Laird. At issue, though, isn't so much inaccurate salary information as what is happening to programming as a career: 'Professionalization of programmers nowadays strikes chords more like those familiar to auto mechanics or nurses than the knowledge workers we once thought we were,' writes Laird, 'we're expected to pay for our own tools, we're increasingly bound by legal entanglements, H1B accumulates degrading tales, and hyperspecialization dominates hiring decisions.'"
If you have experience, and are willing to lead a team, you can make decent money. Of course, how do you get experience?
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
This is one of those contexts where the standard deviation would be helpful, or even a graph showing the distribution of salaries.
I know some developers that are highly specialized in low-level DSP programming, and they make plenty. Also, if you are also responsible for architectural decisions and architectural design, you make more. I don't know many people who are just programmers, but I would have to assume they make less. My advice for programmers is take on more responsibilities and/or try to become a specialist. Unfortunately, there is a large supply of programmers, probably because the barrier to learning is quite low compared to say, FPGA design and development.
My starting salary in DC contracting with the Feds was $70K. Flash forward to a year of living in Cincinnati and my salary dropped to $40K. Now I'm back in DC contracting for Feds again. Starting salary? $105K.
60K in a place like Cincinnati, not bad. 60K in DC, can't live on it. Be sure to take regional salaries into consideration.
That's a terrible analogy. It's like saying a novelist is a book mechanic.
"Amateur night" object oriented systems are impossible to maintain, and Sharepoint is a train wreck. But you're right - as non-programmers increasingly come to view software as "easy", it devalues the profession.
I'm a contractor working at a 30k employee company that is almost exclusively Linux / Java / Oracle. Even though they have dozens of Java programmers they couldn't get any of them to pick up VS C# / Windows Mobile fast enough to support all of their mobile devices.
The position is going to be long term and pays 80k+ per year because of the limited number of programmers skilled in C# / Corporate Mobile & Web applications. I guess you could say I made a deal with the Devil by going MS exclusively, but it pays the bills.
William Howell
Guess it's time to stop reading Atlas Shrugged, pretending that those above us in the hierarchy are looking out for us, and start forming a union, eh?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Goes for programming and infrastructure and all things IT -- you have to move around a lot. Employers in general have no interest in paying you more once you work there. If you want another $15k, you have to move elsewhere. Time at a company is spend padding resumes and earning certifications. Then you move. You might move back to the original company if they make a better offer. Employer logic is "We got the guy for $x, why should we pay him any more once we have him?" Doesn't matter if you complete a second degree while you're there, move from jr. developer to lead designer, take on more responsibilities, you'll get piddle-shit raises.
This kills me. I don't want to be job-hopping. I'd like to build some time with a place, earn some kudos and sweat equity. But those things don't exist. Been at a company a month or twenty years, you are equally expendable. Treat your employer the same way. And die a little inside. People want to think of the office as family because we're social creatures. Few people enjoy living life out as a lesson in Randian objectivism, looking for leverage in the battle of who's screwing whom. We aren't meant to live like that.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The problem is, when people start working for the economy instead of the other way around, you get the problem of treating people like so many disposable parts. Unions have helped bring the human component to our work lives, but with their waning influence (and with people so willing to subsume their own interests to please the boss), we are going backwards and workers, even highly skilled, intelligent ones, become little more then means to an end (profit).
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
If you listen to people who don't do tech work talk about techies, you'll quickly realize that a lot of them do in fact put techies on roughly the same level as mechanics or bricklayers. You can think of yourself as a "knowledge worker" all you want, but the fact remains that you are going to be treated like a bricklayer. My most educated guess on why this is true is that techies produce useful products. In most businesses, the act of producing something (rather than selling something or organizing other people to produce something) severely limits your chances for advancement past the equivalent of senior foreman.
There are 3 ways to avoid this fate that I know of:
1. Do some serious and visible work for your company about issues that aren't tech-related. For instance, if you provide intelligent input about pricing, the salespeople will respect you a lot more.
2. Work at a company who's business is technology, which is still run by a techie. Make sure to leave once the suits take over.
3. Start your own company, and watch out that you don't completely become a suit.
I am officially gone from
Guess it's time to stop reading Atlas Shrugged,
That's good advice for anyone.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I agree with that. I have worked with nondegree'ed devs who were fantastic... in fact ALL of them were fantastic.
Which explains why they were employed. In order to make it without a degree one has to be way above the rest. Mediocre developers without a degree soon find themselves either unemployed or in school.
Ironic.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I know that is a lot of crap! I live in the uk and earn roughly £25K, prob about £35K? I've always thought that to really make money out of a programming career, you have to start you're own business, do it for yourself with an original idea. Otherwise you do seem to end up becoming another wheel in the cog. I might be wrong, but its just the way things seem to be to me.
There's a bell curve at play, though, which peaks at about age 35. After that experience becomes a detraction, and unless you settle on one company that looks stable enough to keep you till retirement, going from job to job will lead to decreasing salaries/rates.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Simply put, there's three factors that determine what you're going to make. Where you work physically (Palo Alto and Austin have significantly different pay rates for the same job), where you work financially (startups pay less than huge companies, state governments pay less than the feds, banks pay less than almost everyone ;^), and where you work professionally (it's unlikely that an C or Java programmer with 10 years experience will make as much as a CCIE w/ 10 years experience). A CS/BS is a ticket to ride, but you still gotta find your seat on the car and some have a better view than others :^).
"I don't think software should necessarily be free
It's an excellent analogy because that's how managers and other non-computer scientists in many (maybe most) workplaces view their software developers, software engineers, web developers, sysadms, etc. I spent years fighting to educate my coworkers who didn't understand what a web developer does, and put up with frequent comments like "any monkey can make a web page" and "I can make a web page in Word"... like "making web pages" was what my job was actually about (and, yes, those are actual quotes from high-level professionals).
(...)and start forming a union, eh?
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not yet convinced that the unimaginative or unskilled Computer Scientist needs to be leveraged up.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
No-hire and non-compete agreements are pretty common in contracts especially when the development work is specialized. This sidelines a lot of talent and helps exacerbate the software developer labor shortage employers are always complaining about. It also lowers wages for developers since they'd have more trouble finding work if they left their job. I think we need to severly limit what kind of restrictions companies can place on their employees' future job prospects.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
I got into programming because I love building stuff. I don't really care what I get paid as long as I can live in contentment, and I do. I'm very lucky to have found a profession that aligns with my interests. A lot of people got into programming in the 90s because it was lucrative; well, it's not now. Be glad you have a job, Quit bitching. Welcome to reality.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Never ever let anyone tell you what you can or should earn. Your salary is your choice. Do what you love, take control, and don't whine. This approach has worked well for me for the past 30 years. I've survived more than a few industry changes over that time.
So we're all just supposed to starve to death because we're doing something for a career that we 'enjoy', but pays shit?
While it's great to be studying computer 'science' and all, when the student loan bills come due, YOU NEED TO HAVE A JOB. Four-year universities should focus on giving students marketable skills, not a bunch of useless theory that has no real-world impact.
And cue all the overeducated computer 'scientists' claiming that they use what they learned in their 'theory' classes every day. That's great up in your ivory tower, the rest of us grunts need to be able to write actual code.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
This is why languages like Java, C#, and VB need to die. It seems that nowadays, these are all that is taught at colleges. My company hires these "dudes" right out of school, and they suck. We do real-time embedded systems. We use "real" languages (predictable languages) like C, C++, Ada, Fortran, and assembly. We do use scripting languages for tools and build systems. These "dudes" come in and think because they are lost, it is the language's fault, or the coding conventions are to restricted, or there is too much process, or the testing is too much. I try to help them because they don't learn thing like real-time or fault-tolerant in school, and all they ever uses were kiddie languages. But they won't listen.
There's nothing wrong with reading Atlas Shrugged, any more than there's something wrong with reading The Wizard of Oz. It's only a problem when you expect the real world to be like that.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You get that attitude even amongst programmers... hell especially from some programmers.
I'm no web developers, I know enough web design and development to be sure I'm no web developer and I've seen some fantastical cockups from programmers who've decided they are web developers.
I'm in software. I freely admit my spelling and grammar skills SUCK. :)
(re)Learning spelling would be a good idea. I'd hate to be the one to debug human resources code with a variable named /*Whether or not higher subject*/
bool higher=False;
which actually determined if someone was hired, but another coder thought it was a boolean for hierarchical levels, and was making it flip-flop between true/false.
Coders, as the future jacks of all trades, need to know a little of everything, and a lot of the fundamentals.
I don't give a rat's ass about their (for example) Java experience quite frankly. And why should we?
You shouldn't. Well, not directly, anyway, given it's not a requirement for the work you do.
But not caring about "breadth of knowledge" is a little silly. Breadth (and depth) of knowledge is a good proxy indicator for an individual's ability to learn on-the-fly and pick up new skills as needed. It also indicates a deep-seated passion and curiousity about their profession, something that's vital in a truly skilled developer. Plus, a broad range of skills means a larger range of tools (for example, the ability to approach a problem from a functional, procedural, or object-oriented perspective as needs require), which can only be a good thing.
So, while it's true that, from a checklist standpoint, candidates should have the specific set of skills you need, it should definitely be considered a plus if the individual shows a wide range of skills.
Indeed. I started college in 1999, and I remember in my first semester of Freshman year some guy coming in to talk to our CS 101 class. He was exclaiming how wonderful it was and how he could probably place most of us in a good job ALREADY with just 8-9 weeks of college under our belt.
Fast forward to graduation in 2003. I managed to get a job teaching computer classes at a certificate factory "school" within a month, but only for $10.00 per hour. A few friends from school went on to work in fast food for a while. It took me nearly a year to move from the teaching thing to a "real" job, and now almost 7 years later I've worked my way up to just BARELY $50,000 per year (I'm in South Carolina so cost of living is lower here than in say, California). It's a living - it pays my bills and I have enough money left over to have some fun, but the idea that programming is the easy-street ticket to rolling in gobs of money for almost no work is long gone.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I love the job requirements that are literally impossible to meet. Like, 10 years of C# experience. I wonder if they actually do any research or if they're just going the H1B fast track ("Hey, we couldn't find any American workers...but some guy in India says he's been doing C# for 20 years!" "Wow, that's amazing! Let's interview him!")
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Why is your company hiring people that only know interpreted languages when your company mainly uses "real" languages? That's very strange to me. I also find it odd (and funny) that you that you blame programming languages for your co-workers incompetence, then in the next sentence complain about how your coworkers blame a programming language for their incompetence.
As C++ programmer with 10 years of experience, and about 5 years of C# experience, I can tell you that C#, Java, etc. can be very useful tools for the right type of software. People who know these languages can be very valuable for the right company.
To be honest, if I were a manager I would not hire someone who is so narrow-minded about programing languages. Computer Science is not a static field. Don't expect them to teach the same things they taught 20 years go.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
After 15 years I can say to the younger generation coming in with 100% certainty - go independent.
What does this mean? Well obviously you need experience so getting a job to bootstrap yourself and pay your rent is first priority. But what you do on the side will impact your career greatly.
Things you can do in your spare time:
1. Work on an Open Source project and wrap it into a solution you can sell as a service
2. Create your own shrink-wrapped application and sell it
Either way you are partaking in the foundation of wealth - ownership. Only through ownership can you be truly "free" in the western world. Owners are first class citizens in any country. Everyone else is just a worker bee.
Just to convince you let me break down a little math for you. I currently bill our clients at around $190/hr for my programming services and I'm in an average "enterprise software" development position. But I only get a fraction of that - let's say around $50/hr for argument's sake. Some goes to infrastructure but the majority of that profit goes to the ownership. If you are the owner you get it all. Yes it's more work. But let me ask you this - would you put in 10-20 more hours per week to make 3-4 times as much? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Some indy developers have really made a name for themselves and a fortune to boot.
And if it all fails, you still have that experience to learn from. Nothing ventured nothing gained.
A friend of mine went through this as a graphic designer, in the 80's. Once Adobe software showed up on the receptionists' desk, she knew it was time to get out. By not forming a professional group, they let their worth be watered down.
What programmers need to do is form a professional society that has licensing, regular career development, etc. and get employers to sign on and have various levels of gov't require licensed work for public software projects. 'Course, this may be too late. Probably shoulda' been done back in the 90's.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Indistinguishable? Really?
I have yet to meet a non-graduate with who I can discuss a performance problem in terms of time and space complexity. Big O notation? What's that? Some kind of cheerio?
That's not to say that there aren't some very intelligent people without University degrees and some very stupid people with them. I've just found that most people with a passion for their profession are those with degrees. They did have the drive to spend 4 extra years of their lives going to school after all.
I'd like to hear more on your suggestion to "avoid web application programming like the plague". Why? I'm genuinely curious as this is where most of my own experience is.
There's another reality: it's really, really hard to manage projects remotely. I have tried this for a number of projects, and have learned the following things:
Not that I disagree entirely that it may be more difficult to manage someone in India, and I've certainly heard horror stories, but come on. These could all be applied to just about any remote contractor who isn't worth their salt. I have worked with/currently work with plenty of Indians who really knew/know their stuff.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Java, C# and VB are real languages (they have and will continue to solve problems for actual customers). You are just hiring the wrong kinds of people, or are hiring them and not training them properly.
There's some differences, though.
1) Yes, you could have most of these same problems with any remote contractor, but you won't have them with an on-site employee. Ergo, if a project is critical, don't rely on remote contractors, rely on actual employees who have a stake in your company.
2) Remote contractors in your own country are also in your timezone, and you can call them up while you're at work to ask quick questions to. Not so with someone on the opposite side of the planet. Waiting a full day for an answer to every single question causes project schedules to slip badly.
3) Remote contractors in your own country can sign contracts with you, and you can take them to court if things fail due to bungling. Good luck filing a lawsuit against a contractor in another country.
I don't think it's possible to do it "right". I looked into it a little for a personal project I wanted to do (I'm an embedded C programmer by profession), and quickly came to the conclusion that web development is a fundamentally broken paradigm, basically a bunch of hacks piled on top of each other, starting from the simple fact that the WWW was initially designed to show static pages using a simple mark-up language. Every attempt to do so much more with it has resulted in a whole framework of hacks, including JavaScript. So, unlike other types of programming where you just write in one language (like C++) and that does everything you need, to make a decent website with dynamic content, you have to so something like write pages in one language (PHP), which will render into HTML on the server side, and then can be modified on the client side by a totally different language (JavaScript), plus they have to fetch data from your database using an altogether completely different language (SQL). It's a giant mess IMO.
The whole thing needs a complete redesign. I think doing something to get rid of the whole HTML thing would be a giant improvement; just display things straight into a window from application code like we currently do with C++ applications, instead of mucking around with a intermediate markup language. It's trivially easy to run full applications remotely with the X Window protocol; why can't something a little more like that be done with the web?
Is Programming a Lucrative Profession?
No, it is not. And it shouldn't be just because it's "programming"
There is a big difference between modifying JSP/ASP/PHP pages vs low-level programming or programming and architecting highly available e-commerce back ends. There is a big difference between IT support calls where you try to help users how to press the any key vs being a Tier III support Sysadmin/Network guy who knows that kind of shit inside out.
Just as software-related jobs run the spectrum from mundane to highly complex, so the salaries that go with them. That is reality. We got to "thanks" the dot-com brainfartopocalypse and the washing down of undergraduate CS curriculum that we still get new graduates that think they'll make as much as the under qualified prima-donas of the late 90's even if don't know the difference between a pointer and a coconut or don't know the difference between a Vector from an ArrayList in Java or who think C# is the same as C++ or who have never written anything more than a "hello world" program in assembler.
You can tell the difference between the graduate who just went through the bare minimum course curriculum and the one who took far more programming courses and who tried to work at the college labs or tried to get internships somewhere (anywhere!) or who at the very least tried to run Linux at home and played with as many programming classes as possible and who found big-O notation fascinating.
What type of job should each of these two should get? And what salaries should they get? There are people who graduate from MIS and CS now who should have never been able to graduate 10-15 years ago. But they graduate. Schools let them as a response of what the industry need.
And what the IT industry now needs is a gamut of software professionals that can do a variety of jobs, from the mundane to the holy-crap-this-is-hard(10+1)! With more of the former than the later. The drop in salaries is just a reflection of that.
If programmers want more moolah, then they should try to tackle harder jobs that warrant better salaries. That requires specialization of skills: be it embedded programming or system-level programming or becoming a JEE specialist/architect who knows how to write solid back-end systems, or becoming a systems engineer, or a software architect, or work your way to become a team lead, or become a solid gold SysAdmin/DBA, etc, etc.
Being a "computer guy" stopped being a cash cow a long time ago. It can provide for a decent living (just like any other well-done trade or profession). But for those who go to school and graduate thinking they should deserve $70 just because their diplomas read "Computer" somewhere, nope. Graduate and become an specialist that can tackle hard problems. Then earn it. The reality is that salaries are going down, and that's a justified reflection on the fact that the software industry is inundated with mediocre programmers.
I'm sure I am in the minority, but I am proud of the fact that I got rich as a programmer and not by being a suit. How did I achieve that? I co-founded a small software company that was acquired by a large tech company. True we didn't pay ourselves much until we started making some good revenue, and it took us 7 years before we were acquired, but ultimately my ownership stake in the company got me more money in the end than if I had been working as an investment banker right out of college. I didn't turn into a manager or director or some suit who forgot his developer roots, I remained pretty much an architect/developer the whole time. I am really proud of that achievement.
But anyway, my salary at the acquiring company was quite good ($135k with bonus, stock, etc.). I checked on glassdoor.com and it looks to be comparable to other developers at the company. I agree with some previous posters that if you want to be treated more than just a code monkey, work for a company that understands what developers bring to the table, that programming is very much a creative art and not at all like a bricklayer. If you work for a company whose core business is far away from tech (off the top of my head I am thinking a manufacturer or an insurance company, etc.) you will probably not be thought of as key and so I would assume your salary would reflect that. Check out salaries for software developers at companies like Cisco, Apple, Google, and Oracle and you will see they are pretty good.
Now you do have to consider the location. These companies are all based in expensive areas (Silicon Valley, east coast areas like NY and Boston) so their salaries will have to be higher just because of that. But still, overall I do believe that tech companies will give better salaries for developers than other companies.
An engineer is someone who spends 3 hours trying to solve a 2 hour problem in 1 hour - Anonymous
Yeah, ActiveX was incredibly stupid, because of its complete lack of security and full access to system resources. Why they didn't think that would be a problem, I have no idea. A sand-box system is exactly what's needed. Java did that in a way, but it was incredibly slow.