Survey: 56 Percent of US Developers Expect To Become Millionaires

msmoriarty writes: "According to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S.-based software developers, 56 percent expect to become millionaires in their lifetime. 66 percent also said they expect to get raises in the next year, despite the current state of the economy. Note that some of the other findings of the study (scroll to bulleted list) seem overly positive: 84 percent said they believe they are paid what they're worth, 95 percent report they feel they are 'one of the most valued employees at their organization,' and 80 percent said that 'outsourcing has been a positive factor in the quality of work at their organization.'"

Comments

wait, what?

[jaymz666]

80 percent think outsourcing has been positive? They must not be working with the resources we do... They lie, lie and lie some more. Shirk responsibility and ignore questions.

Re:wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

80 percent think outsourcing has been positive? They must not be working with the resources we do... They lie, lie and lie some more. Shirk responsibility and ignore questions.

You are confused, 80% of them were H1B workers... ;D

Re:wait, what?

[radarskiy]

They only surveyed those still employed.

Re:wait, what?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

These sound like developers, not management.

And you know what? I agree with them. Mainly because I don't think outsourcing means what you think it means. Outsourcing doesn't mean "send your job to India." In many cases that particular job never existed within your company to begin with for one, and it may not necessarily go to India number two, but rather it goes to the company down the street.

Outsourcing takes advantage of trade, only on a much larger scale. For example, if your mom makes a batch of cookies and UPS'es them to you, she "outsourced" the task of bringing them to you to UPS. She did this for a multitude of reasons: UPS can deliver them cheaper than she can, UPS can deliver them in a much shorter amount of time than she can, UPS can more efficiently deliver them than she can.

When outsourcing goes overseas, it tends to be due to what economists refer to as comparative advantage. Steve Jobs (who I am not a fan of, but respect in various ways) once notoriously mentioned this: Some manufacturing tasks that you'll find they can do in China (such as rapidly changing design specifications in a mass production line) simply aren't available here. So it isn't necessarily that the labor is cheaper in China (it is cheaper) but that the jobs that you need to do just aren't available in a domestic US facility.

Generally it is easier to not to send work tasks offshore. This mainly has to do with issues like language barriers, customs, etc making offshoring more difficult. You need to really be able to justify doing it, not only due to those reasons, but for reasons like KKK type groups complaining that you're giving brownie a job, or liberal groups claiming that you're not paying dues to the labor unions, and both giving you bad press about it in their respective circles. Both of them are douchebags for doing that, by the way, but that's life. At any rate, if they can do it so much cheaper overseas than it can be done domestically, then you should do it. Why? Competitive advantage (not the same as comparative advantage.)

You see, you selling your product to Americans who will only buy American is fine, but Australians, Canadians, indeed even BRIC nations buy our products en masse. But you know what? They never follow the "buy American mantra." They go for whoever offers the best value, and that can't be you if you don't minimize your operating expenses, which may include getting cheaper labor if that's what it takes. No amount of mercantilism (tariffs, etc) will fix that, so don't even think about calling your congressman. If foreign companies can do the job much cheaper, eventually your entire company moves over there, or it just goes belly up because it can't compete with global competitors.

But anyways outsourcing is good, and in light of paragraph 3, 4, and 5, offshoring is also good. If I were them, I would also ignore questions asked by labor unions. Why? Because no good can come of it. No matter what your answer is, they'll always demonize you.

And I speak as somebody who is in one of those careers that is most vulnerable to offshoring and H1-B competition (by the way, I support H1-B as well.)

Re:wait, what?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

If quality and skill are heavily reduced, then it wouldn't be worth sending work there. You really can't have it both ways on this one -- either they're smart businessmen who know India saves money, or they're smart businessmen who are wise to a lack of quality and skill.

Often times you simply can't afford to hire your own in-house development staff. Imagine for example that you run a small business and you don't have any programmers on staff, nor does your business operate in the IT sector. Suppose you need a custom inventory management solution because no pre-built ones from any domestic companies are available. Your solution in this case may very well be to hire an outfit in India to do it. You may very well not have the amount of money that a US based firm would ask for, in which case what is your alternative? "Not doing it at all" isn't a good answer.

Re:wait, what?

[losfromla]

You are seriously quoting an article written by what appears to be a college freshman trying to get some points for a lower division english class as scientific proof of something? To further the absurdity of the article, it quotes as relevant authorities the USDA, WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. None of those care about nutrition, they care only about pushing the products of their sponsor organizations, agribusiness, big pharma, and the petroleum/chemical industry. There was no information about disenting views, their scientific evidence, their arguments, or trully any evidence of them really existing. Therefore, I find your MSG argument unconvincing. Furthermore, it was irrelevant.
Now, McDonalds as a health food? The stuff at walmart is healthy? Have you seen people shopping at walmart? I have, they load up their carts with frozen pizza (carbs mostly), chips (carbs mostly), cookies (carbs mostly), soda (hfcs), pasta (more carbs), and maybe some diet soda if they are feeling like health nuts. An optimal human diet is composed primarily of fat (from animals fed a natural diet), lots of vegetables (for bulk and satiety), and moderate protein. The walmart diet offers none of that. Now if you got healthier eating a mcdonalds diet, I wonder what kind of garbage you were eating before. Were you living on twinkies and mountain dew?
Also, processed is very much unhealthy, that is how I call it cause I am informed. Try to get your information from agencies that don't have a vested interest and are not sponsored (bought) by companies with a vested interest.

As a bonus, here is a quote from one of the commenters on the site you linked:

scientists believe that primates are susceptible to excitotoxic damage[26] and that humans concentrate excitotoxins in the blood more than other animals.[27] Based on these findings, they claim that humans are approximately 5-6 times more susceptible to the effects of excitotoxins than rodents are.[28] While they agree that typical use of monosodium glutamate does not spike glutamic acid to extremely high levels in adults, they are particularly concerned with potential effects in infants and young children[29] and the potential long-term neurodegenerative effects of small-to-moderate spikes on plasma excitotoxin levels.[30]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

A million dollars isn't *that* much

[neminem]

I think I have a good shot at becoming a millionaire in my lifetime - not from hitting it big, just from saving more than I spend (especially into my 401k, with company matching).

And what *about* the current state of the economy? It seems to me that it's mostly recovered at this point. And it's not unreasonable for white-collar workers to expect *some* kind of raise at least every couple years, even if it's just a raise on par with inflation.

Shock

[American AC in Paris]

In case y'all hadn't noticed, our community is rife with hazardously inflated egos. This is a natural extension thereof.

Inflation means lots of millionaires

[unimacs]

I've got a rather dumpy house in a nice urban neighborhood. It's paid for and worth a bit over $200,000. Looking at long term trends and the increasing popularity of urban living, it will most likely appreciate a fair amount before I retire.

That alone will get me a good chunk of the way towards being a millionaire in terms of net worth.

Now add in the gobs of money that they recommend you save for retirement and by the time you do retire... well, you've got a lot of money. This assumes of course that you can navigate yourself past the agism that's also part of being a developer and remain a well paid part of the workforce until you retire.

A million is easy

[byteherder]

If you can't find a way to get to a million by retirement, something is wrong.

Here is a simple way to do it. Put $16,000 in your 401k and $5,000 in your IRA every year. Investing in a good S&P500 index fund which will return about 10%. In 18 years, you will be a millionaire.

Now getting to $10 million is tough.

Infrastructure

[DaMattster]

The infrastructure guys always get fucked over, always! Without infrastructure, what will your whiz bang application run on? Software Engineers, developers, you guys have it made whereas the lowly systems and network admins only get recognition when something takes a shit.

Re:I must be in the minority.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

They must just be asking a lot of people who are understand math and have a little discipline. A carpenter can become a millionaire by retirement, all you have to do is start saving and keep saving.

I fully intend to be a millionaire by the time I retire, and with inflation that should be enough for a tent and some camping supplies.

Re:I must be in the minority.

[Khashishi]

It looks like you skipped over the part, "that doesn't rely primarily on luck".

Re:I must be in the minority.

[mysidia]

It looks like you skipped over the part, "that doesn't rely primarily on luck".

It doesn't depend primarily on luck. It depends on your ability to select a sequence of investments that will have an average payout of more than twice what they cost. You don't know the outcome of any one investment (success or failure), but your ability to pick a sequence of investments that are expected to offset each other's random risks and have sufficient average payout when taken together (expected total gain minus loss averaged more than twice cost), is one of skill, and it relies on decision making abilities.

Good luck is when the average payout turns out to be twice as much as expected and happens less than 1% of the time. Bad luck is when the payout is half or less, and happens less than 1% of the time.

This is assuming a skilled selection.

When we say "high risk"; we do not mean visiting a casino and placing bets, where you have an expected loss of 10% due to the house edge, (assuming you had infinite cash and placed bets forever).

Re:I must be in the minority.

[lgw]

Unless the meaning of millionaire is changing to mean "a seven figure income", then why would anyone with a six figure income not expect to become a millionaire? Are people just really bad at saving? That's too low to even be a good retirement goal, unless you're sure of Social Security to compliment it (in which case it's about right - but who doesn't expect SS to be "means tested" and taken away from those who save?)

Headline is silly...

[bwcbwc]

If you earn $80k+ a year, you need to be a double millionaire just in retirement savings to maintain your income when you retire. I guess this means 44% of developers don't expect to retire at age 65?

So...

[benjfowler]

So, no different to the peculiarly American trait of considering poor people "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". No thanks to the self-serving ideology peddled by the rich, that we'd all be better off if we all worked harder, never mind the fact that the rich get rich by capturing the surplus value of your labour.

There's a degree of this everywhere (e.g. the hundreds of millions of retards out there who consider themselves "middle class", despite needing a paycheck each week/month to survive), but nowhere is this stronger, than in the US.

Re:I must be in the minority.

[MalleusEBHC]

I'm tired of all this "six figures is just-getting-by" bullshit. I'm a software engineer in the valley who only a few years ago was making almost exactly six figures, and I was doing far, far better than just getting by.

I bought a house even before making $100k. It's a small house in a good part of San Jose. I probably would have had to get a roommate for the first few years had my then-girlfriend not been chipping in rent, but that's somewhat expected with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. My monthly payment will stay the same forever, and inflation and salaries, even for non-engineers, are generally only going up in the long run.

Even with the house payment, I've always been able to stuff a significant amount of money into my 401(k) and IRA. By starting early and investing in index funds, I'm going to easily have enough money in retirement.

Even after putting a lot of money into a house and retirement, there was still plenty of money leftover for fun stuff. I was able to go out to nice restaurants, I bought myself nice toys like laptops and bicycles, and I generally didn't have to worry about money.

Admittedly I don't have kids and wasn't trying to support a family by myself, but a second income would also balance that out.

Are you able to buy a 5 bedroom, 3,000 sq ft house in Palo Alto on $100k? Hell no, but you can still live an extremely nice life. It's an insult to the people living paycheck to paycheck to say that six figures is just getting by.