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Sure, but I was originally responding to someone who was worried about the labor market for programmers post-hypothetical collapse. All I was saying is that I don't think it's going anywhere. Edit- I also feel like the massive gap between startup/tech darling wages and the rest of the development industry is pretty relevant to the topic at hand.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:02
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In SF it's under $100k on average I think, and that's a super expensive city. Anyway, there are a few different tech industries. Everyone likes to focus on the flashy sexy silicon valley stuff, but hell, IBM employs 380,000 people. EDS employs 136,000 (not quite half of HP's 300,000). That's three quarters of a million jobs right there between two companies. Very few of which are in a Silicon X. Anyway, staff programmers and computer janitors out in the real world are where the 70k stable jobs are. That's the bulk of tech, if anything, and why places like Austin are particularly hillarious(they aren't even the 4th biggest tech city in Texas). It's important to take a step back sometimes and acknowledge just how overhyped and overvalued and unrepresentative all of the stuff in this thread is. I know choir yada yada, but it gives very familiar vibes to everyone who has been through it before - and is a big part of why I at least have bubble vibes. E: I'm really looking forward to a future where I get to talk Facebook and AOL parallels (there's a lot of them and they're hillarious). Buffer fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 20:11
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Mmm, not really true though for Google-level talent. Looking at my friends from college, the ones that decided not to go to Google etc. ended up in finance/fintech e.g., Bloomberg, Citadel, HFT shops etc. Comp for a fresh grad is about 150K these days.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:11
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Love the new thread title.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:13
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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You'll get recruited out of a top school for a pretty good salary unless you majored in something with absolutely zero demand. That's not really news and not necessarily indicative of talent.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:16
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Emacs Headroom posted:If you're good though, the market is excellent for you right now. Just walk up to Amazon / Google / Netflix and collect your $250K+ base. Chokes McGee posted:It's really terrifying to me as a tech worker. Yeah, Silicon Valley is the biggest, most visible example of this bullshit, but it's getting bad at a ground level. Eventually I'm gonna have issues finding a job. I've mitigated it by moving more and more into management and saving my coding for personal projects, but a lot of people are going to end up screwed if this goes as sideways as I think it will. (As in, the good people may take a salary hit, and may be unemployed for a short time, but there is always a pent-up demand for competent programmers. Be willing to relocate if necessary, and you'll be okay.)
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Mar 27, 2016 20:16
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Buffer posted:You'll get recruited out of a top school for a pretty good salary unless you majored in something with absolutely zero demand. That's not really news and not necessarily indicative of talent. Not for an undergrad degree and not to the extent devs are getting these days. I know for my alma mater, the median salary for a BS CS is 105K and for MechE is 70K. That's a 50% differential.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:18
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Emacs Headroom posted:(junior / early grad-ish) That's a bit of an exaggeration. Junior/early-grad total comp is definitely well below 250k in most cases, and base is usually below 150k. Netflix is an exception but it's just because their comp structure is different, and they don't hire junior or early-grad candidates. Amazon comp isn't even 250k for senior level candidates in most instances. The market definitely is excellent if you're good, but it's still not that easy to make 250k in cash or cash-equivalents (say, bonus + post-IPO RSUs). There are probably less than 10 companies that pay their median senior-level employee this much.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:44
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All this talk about how many well-remunerated CS jobs there are, imminent market correction aside, is riling me up. Makes me wonder what exactly I'm doing wrong, as all my job applications thus far simply built a wall of silence - to both the big players and whatever local shops are around.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:53
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 at the titleFilthyImp posted:Seems pretty in line with the rest of the country's hiring practices post Big Recession. I don't know about "dependable employee" and that's one of the things I think is a good thing about what's going on right now. Creating a "dependable employee" is usually corp-speak for "hold you hostage in lovely conditions because you have no mobility." People need a reminder that they have an obligation to treat their workers well, or they'll lose them in a heartbeat. There's a lot of industries that are in the complete opposite boat, and I feel incredibly privileged and lucky to have that power right now. Also, glad to hear there's still a dearth out there (kind of). As always, my concern is that paying a shitload for an experienced tech is always going to be a losing process when you can continue to throw junior techs and/or offshore into the meat grinder until you get a product, thus crashing the company in the process. I'm not going to name names, but the company I'm contracted to right now is a loving toxic fire drill. I really hope it's not like that elsewhere. 
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Mar 27, 2016 20:58
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Whether it's bubble-driven or not, you have to wonder whether devs are being paid what they should and other white-collar jobs are being grossly underpaid. I don't see how a millennial making 40-50K in a major city can afford the standard milestones of middle class life - home ownership, healthcare without worry, kids, retirement savings etc.
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Mar 27, 2016 21:02
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shrike82 posted:Whether it's bubble-driven or not, you have to wonder whether devs are being paid what they should and other white-collar jobs are being grossly underpaid. I don't see how a millennial making 40-50K in a major city can afford the standard milestones of middle class life - home ownership, healthcare without worry, kids, retirement savings etc. They can't. And just to be clear, none of the posts I've made in this thread were intended to imply that it's a bad thing that developers are pulling in six figure salaries in big tech hubs. The problem is that a tech crunch where high end (and possibly low and mid-end) compensation ends up being slashed is a lot more likely than tens of millions of employees suddenly having their wages doubled. But yes, median US income isn't even close to where it needs to be for the lifestyle that most people expect/are promised.
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Mar 27, 2016 21:12
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E.g., GOOG - their rev per employee is 1.3MM and net income per is 300K. These aren't companies breaking the bank to pay wages.
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Mar 27, 2016 21:17
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Good riddance, gig economy: Uber, Ayn Rand and the awesome collapse of Silicon Valley’s dream of destroying your jobquote:Kan says the company also acquired a “false sense that the quality of service for our customers was better than it was” because the quality of the “average recruitable errand runner”—at the low pay and on-call demands that Exec wanted—did not result in hiring the self-motivated personality types like those that start Silicon Valley companies. (Surprise, surprise.) That in turn led to too many negative experiences for too many customers, especially since, like with TaskRabbit, a too-high percentage of its on-demand workers simply failed to show up to their gigs. (Surprise, surprise.) It turns out, he discovered, that “most competent people are not looking for part-time work.” (Surprise, surprise.)
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Mar 27, 2016 21:23
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Prof. Moriarty posted:Good riddance, gig economy: Uber, Ayn Rand and the awesome collapse of Silicon Valley’s dream of destroying your job  It turns out that there are enough smart people whose life's passion is building companies and being ideas men to create more than enough companies with ideas men. But everyone else just wants a 9-5 job where they make a product and/or provide a service in exchange for money without having fallen in love with the concept of being a worker. Shocking.
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Mar 27, 2016 22:47
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Mar 27, 2016 22:50
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I like that this trend has yet to reach "life physical and social science" since thats the only one i'm interested in for myself
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Mar 27, 2016 22:51
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Awesome link, thanks. The bit about people citing Snapgoods long after it crashed and burned is hilarious.
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Mar 27, 2016 22:59
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I was too young to experience the pricking of the first tech bubble. Any old-timers who were in SV at the time have any anecdotes about the time and how it compares to now?
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Mar 27, 2016 23:02
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shrike82 posted:I was too young to experience the pricking of the first tech bubble. Any old-timers who were in SV at the time have any anecdotes about the time and how it compares to now? So, as I might have mentioned earlier once or twice, I lived through the 1980s collapse of the minicomputer industry in the Boston area, the collapse of the workstation industry in favor of generic hardware, the dot-com era, and a couple of others that I have no doubt forgotten. What happens is that the crazy high salaries vanish for all but a few, people who were rich on paper suddenly aren't, people who went heavily into any kind of debt are screwed, the housing market loses value, and a lot of people are unemployed. Some of those people look around them and say "Whoa, time to change my life, I'm going to do something else." The others use their personal networks to move sideways, possibly at a lower salary. New graduates are temporarily screwed if they don't have contacts. And then, a few years later, another bubble starts, lather rinse repeat. At some point the software industry as a whole will collapse for good, no doubt; over a career of nearly four decades I haven't seen it happen yet. e: In Silicon Valley, in particular, the housing market collapses slightly, but the pent-up demand means that it doesn't collapse far, or for long. There are a lot of semi-wealthy people who want to buy houses, and when the ridiculously-wealthy people stop buying sight-unseen with no inspections, the semi-wealthy step up. The middle, working, and poor classes remain screwed. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 23:19
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Is this chart basically lumping all freelance workers into the gig economy?
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Mar 27, 2016 23:23
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shrike82 posted:I was too young to experience the pricking of the first tech bubble. Any old-timers who were in SV at the time have any anecdotes about the time and how it compares to now? i showed up for work at my dotcom v1.0 job to find an office stripped of furnishing. my manager was at his desk but no one else was. he told me if i wanted an aeron or a printer i had better grab one before my badge stopped working later that day. i wish i had kept the aeron and the ibm laptop i liberated
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Mar 27, 2016 23:26
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Paradoxish posted:Is this chart basically lumping all freelance workers into the gig economy? Relevant chart 
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Mar 27, 2016 23:28
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Seriously, dude, there's not really any "first tech bubble". Bubbles go back at least to radio and probably earlier; there were certainly railroad bubbles and telegraph bubbles. There was an aerospace tech bubble that collapsed in the early 1970s; a lot of the housing in Mountain View was built for aerospace engineers. Thanks but I was thinking more about actual anecdotes about working for a tech firm then I think we all know academically what a bubble popping causes
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Mar 27, 2016 23:31
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shrike82 posted:Relevant chart Jesus, I had no idea contract staffing had taken off like that over the last ten years.
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Mar 27, 2016 23:33
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shrike82 posted:Thanks but I was thinking more about actual anecdotes about working for a tech firm then And life goes on. Seriously. Now, what happens when you're a senior employee and not a known god is a lot chancier; in a non-bubble economy, employers want cheaper employees, which benefits younger people. e: Concrete example. Prime Computer bought Computervision in 1988, and the merger was obviously going to be a disaster. The combined company merged two losers, and held the traditional "we're just removing duplicate employees and trimming fat" layoffs. Everybody I knew realized the company was dead in the water. I got a job at Apollo Computer, where my husband, one of our college best friends, and a writer I knew worked. I helped pull in many of the best people I knew from Prime. Others went to Sun, or moved to California, or (poor souls) went to startups that didn't pan out. As long as I had kept abreast of technology, I could say "Person XX knows my work, and I know distributed systems/object-oriented development/Java/ ..." and that was good enough. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 23:40
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blah_blah posted:That's a bit of an exaggeration. Junior/early-grad total comp is definitely well below 250k in most cases, and base is usually below 150k. Netflix is an exception but it's just because their comp structure is different, and they don't hire junior or early-grad candidates. Amazon comp isn't even 250k for senior level candidates in most instances. We seriously lost a junior grad (PhD coming out of the Blei lab) to Netflix for 280k. We also lost a junior person to Amazon who offered 100k cash signing bonus (same base comp as us). I think we pay more base comp than Facebook, but we don't have Yann Lecun on staff to brag about... edit: Paradoxish posted:It's hard to make any kind of informed comment without knowing your specific needs, but I can't help but feel that your hiring process is too restrictive if you're seriously competing with Google, et. al. Like, if the expectation is that the only programmers who can/should get jobs are ones that can command six figure salaries right out of the gate then we really are in for an incredibly hard, incredibly painful correction in the tech labor market. We try our best to hire for potential, and to hire people who places like Google or Facebook might overlook (people coming from less traditionally CS-heavy fields like biology or sociology or music, say). But the reality is that a lot more people think they can do the job than can actually do the job. Emacs Headroom fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 23:45
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Emacs Headroom posted:We seriously lost a junior grad (PhD coming out of the Blei lab) to Netflix for 280k. We also lost a junior person to Amazon who offered 100k cash signing bonus (same base comp as us). That's antihistamine money. "Nothing to sneeze at." -- Bullwinkle the Moose
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Mar 27, 2016 23:48
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I'm in Chicago and the junior dev market is plenty hot here. Junior devs don't stay junior for long either, you can easily be making 6 figures after 2-3 years out of a bootcamp or CS bachelors. As for passing Google/Amazon/etc interviews that's a separate skill from doing the actual work, it's not like your average Googler reverses a linked list on a whiteboard every day.
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Mar 28, 2016 00:04
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shrike82 posted:I was too young to experience the pricking of the first tech bubble. Any old-timers who were in SV at the time have any anecdotes about the time and how it compares to now? Not in SV and not an old timer but heard from elder co-workers about how things were around the dot-com bubble in Ireland when investment money was flowing. They said it was great time to be in the industry. Loads of companies forming to develop a product of an idea, didn't even need to have any proof of concept, the money would flow in off an idea alone. No need to show eventual revenue streams, investors just assumed if your idea's good and you get it to work the sales will follow. Years of work might eventually show the product was technologically or financially un-viable but there was enough firms about that you could move to another. They said it was great time to be an employee but everyone on the ground floor knew it couldn't last forever, one day investors would need to see a return and couldn't write off the losses forever. Today though it feels like the money's opened up again and we could be back to those heady days.
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Mar 28, 2016 00:13
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Emacs Headroom posted:We seriously lost a junior grad (PhD coming out of the Blei lab) to Netflix for 280k. We also lost a junior person to Amazon who offered 100k cash signing bonus (same base comp as us). I don't really consider ML Ph.Ds who are recruited for their ML expertise to be 'junior' in any way; they get senior-level comp basically from day 1 and are probably the biggest single source of outliers for fresh grad compensation. Someone with a Ph.D coming from 'just' a generic STEM field, or someone coming out of undergrad with a couple of years of experience, is going to be making a lot less than them. Base comp is a pretty bad metric for competitivity imo. At Facebook or Google, as a high performer it's possible to be making 30-50% of your base salary in bonus alone, at senior your equity comp will be about 50% of your base salary, and at staff/principal+ it can be (well) over 100% of your base salary. Despite what Netflix says I actually think some tech companies pay more than Netflix, but no one does in cash alone. FWIW Facebook pays ~100k signing bonuses to a large fraction of returning intern SWEs.
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Mar 28, 2016 00:24
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That's fair. I personally prefer to have most comp in cash (other than health + 401k I guess) and not to have to worry about bonus / RSUs / whatever. But maybe not offering signing bonuses is hurting our ability to sign the fancy-pants candidates we need right now.
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Mar 28, 2016 00:38
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Buffer posted:In SF it's under $100k on average I think, and that's a super expensive city. Anyway, there are a few different tech industries. Everyone likes to focus on the flashy sexy silicon valley stuff, but hell, IBM employs 380,000 people. EDS employs 136,000 (not quite half of HP's 300,000). That's three quarters of a million jobs right there between two companies. Very few of which are in a Silicon X. quote:Anyway, staff programmers and computer janitors out in the real world are where the 70k stable jobs are. That's the bulk of tech, if anything, and why places like Austin are particularly hillarious(they aren't even the 4th biggest tech city in Texas). It's important to take a step back sometimes and acknowledge just how overhyped and overvalued and unrepresentative all of the stuff in this thread is. I know choir yada yada, but it gives very familiar vibes to everyone who has been through it before - and is a big part of why I at least have bubble vibes. Cicero fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Mar 28, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 02:00
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Cicero posted:(is 'accounting industry' a thing? anyway you get my point). Big Four and friends have to count, surely
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Mar 28, 2016 02:13
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Two more hilariterrible pieces on Valeant. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-21/valeant-sold-some-drugs-twice http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/03/21/you-ask-for-it-you-get-it
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Mar 28, 2016 02:33
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Arsenic Lupin posted:At some point the software industry as a whole will collapse for good, no doubt; over a career of nearly four decades I haven't seen it happen yet. I have to say, software is about as safe as it comes. Better languages and tools have automated some aspects of development but complexity goes up exponentially with functionality and consumer expectations are constantly higher. You can get canned e-commerce (or forums) sites for example but even moderate customization turns into full fledged development engineering quickly. And now most half decent websites resemble full fledged applications. And even after decades of software encroaching into every area of our lives it's not close to ending. Software complexity in automobiles for example is already significant but is about to explode with new types of automation like parking/braking/driving. Military projects are now as much software as anything else and government programs like healthcare require sprawling online systems. Meanwhile half the systems that have already existed for decades still have gaping holes in quality or functionality which only more development will fix.
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Mar 28, 2016 02:46
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asdf32 posted:I have to say, software is about as safe as it comes. Better languages and tools have automated some aspects of development but complexity goes up exponentially with functionality and consumer expectations are constantly higher. You can get canned e-commerce (or forums) sites for example but even moderate customization turns into full fledged development engineering quickly. And now most half decent websites resemble full fledged applications.
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Mar 28, 2016 02:51
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Arsenic Lupin posted:
Why? Isn't software everywhere and needs constant maintanence/upgrades from programmers than have intricate knowledge of how it works? Unless automation engineers or AI, etc. manages to replace a lot of software developers, I don't see the industry collapsing. BTW how many people in the Valley believe in the whole "singularity" thing? A friend works on the same campus as "Singularity University" and says those people are really intense. Is there really a good chance that by 2045 we'll have human or beyond human-level AI?
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Mar 28, 2016 03:47
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Ccs posted:Why? Isn't software everywhere and needs constant maintanence/upgrades from programmers than have intricate knowledge of how it works? What might happen is that "software" as an industry collapses, so that software is used but it's more of a tool for another industry than a separate industry unto itself. (So for example you have finance software, but it comes from the finance industry)
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Mar 28, 2016 04:38
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All these 150k salaries make me sad that I did CompE instead CompSci. I remember, a CS friend of mine got hired out of undergrad with at Apple for 80k or 85k in 2008 and I thought that was above average.
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Mar 28, 2016 08:25
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