A lot of you all in here seem incredibly smug
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Software engineers are overpaid
- Thread starter ApatheticDolphin
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OP keeps asking for empathy and saying you were misunderstood. Yet you haven't shown that you acknowledge the plethora of people here saying they're not overpaid like that one twitter person nor the very valid reasons why some people may get paid more than the others. OP just continues to attack.
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It's understandable when people read stuff like this it upsets them, to someone working retail never getting a break, or breaking their body into an early grave that's like cadre-class stuff. Generally the perception is most people in your position aren't out there advocating for the fast food worker even though you have more of the means to do so, but that's not true in every case. I don't know an effective way to redirect the ire onto the ownership/ruling class when it seems like the system is set up to keep us at each other's throats.
Maybe if basic needs were met by existing in society people wouldn't have paycheck envy. I can say as I earned more I stopped giving a shit how much I make because that's no longer the most important thing.
In my opinion and experience, full stack is something that newer developers (and maybe even older developers) should avoid in a large production environment. Playing the role of full stack in a prototyping project can be valuable and efficient, but I don't think it's scalable into large, complex projects that move quickly. In the time you spend away from one thing working on something else, the original thing could be completely different, and you're no better than a new hire working on it. You simply can't know everything about everything, and so the lack of focus and constant context switching becomes wickedly inefficient as a result. You're more prone to making serious errors when working on things you aren't entirely familiar with.
Focused development on a particular piece or few pieces can be boring and tire people out quickly, but when done right, there's nothing quite like a developer who knows their piece of a project.
You're not wrong, but it is advantageous to be familiar with multiple aspects of a SDLC. I think most references to "full stack" merely communicate that someone is comfortable with many layers of the pie. No one is expected to know everything about the system. "Full stack" is more "I'm multilingual," not "I know everything about everything."
Oh I agree. I'll be honest, I was a hardcore a capitalist, but these past few years have shown me that the current system is fucked beyond repair. We need a big change. Like.... I can't believe the fucking minimum salary is so low and all the inequality. I voted for Bernie in the primaries at least, hopefully to help spark a bigger change down the road. Crossing fingers.
Ultimately, I can't accept any system that directly correlates people's quality of life with arbitrary "value" decided by market forces. I don't think any one person's labor is worth twice as much as another's, nevermind four times, or ten times, or a hundred times. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
This I don't agree with. At all. At some point I wrote an automation software to expedite some medical claims to almost immediate levels. It was a complex piece of automation with impact to hundreds of thousands of lives in a major healthcare insurance company. I wrote the whole thing. I believe my impact is bigger, and requires a specific skill set, that deserves to be remunerated like so.
Title: Lead Software Engineer
Pay: $120K
Market: Washington, DC
Exp: 7 years
I started at $48K. Had to jump companies like 5 times to get where I'm at. CS degree was not easy to finish. Plenty of people drop out of the major. Anyone can learn how to code, but that does not mean you can be a good developers/engineers. Too many bad developers that I have seen do not know enough about data structure, logics, and algorithms.
Is my work much easier than someone doing physical labor? Heck yeah! But my skill sets is not easy to find. I have knowledge of multiple Programming languages, database, servers, logics, business logics, and so on. Also, I work on a government project, so my salary is probably half of what actually get charge to the client. So no, software developers/engineers aren't overpaid in most areas around the country.
My job isn't as simple as just writing codes. I have to apply business logic and make things work. Knowing how to code is just half of what I have to know to do a good job.
Pay: $120K
Market: Washington, DC
Exp: 7 years
I started at $48K. Had to jump companies like 5 times to get where I'm at. CS degree was not easy to finish. Plenty of people drop out of the major. Anyone can learn how to code, but that does not mean you can be a good developers/engineers. Too many bad developers that I have seen do not know enough about data structure, logics, and algorithms.
Is my work much easier than someone doing physical labor? Heck yeah! But my skill sets is not easy to find. I have knowledge of multiple Programming languages, database, servers, logics, business logics, and so on. Also, I work on a government project, so my salary is probably half of what actually get charge to the client. So no, software developers/engineers aren't overpaid in most areas around the country.
My job isn't as simple as just writing codes. I have to apply business logic and make things work. Knowing how to code is just half of what I have to know to do a good job.
Anyway, i was laid off a month ago bc my company lost funding but before:
Remote frontend engineer
Education: Self-taught
Experience: 9 months full stack / way too much else for startup + 6 months freelancing (overlapping w/ startup stuff) + 6 months intership
Salary: 70k
Now interviewing for roles that are 100k-ish. I'm absolutely horrible at math, and not going to ever whiteboard or balance a stack tree.
Remote frontend engineer
Education: Self-taught
Experience: 9 months full stack / way too much else for startup + 6 months freelancing (overlapping w/ startup stuff) + 6 months intership
Salary: 70k
Now interviewing for roles that are 100k-ish. I'm absolutely horrible at math, and not going to ever whiteboard or balance a stack tree.
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This feels like an attack. I'm probably a terrible developer lol.
I had to hop once from the job I described to my current one. Each place is a bit different - you're still somewhat subject to office culture. In the first setting, I had self-important project managers nearly yelling at me about their own fuck ups. In the interim: a highly unstable environment where the PMs dragged every dev along for client meetings to ultimately try and remedy a shit COTS product.
You really just have to find a good group of people under the right leadership. It sounds impossible, but it's "merely" difficult.
Lol, nothing against you or anything. You might be a great developer. But too many developers that I have come across can program, but when things start breaking, is where you will see that what they wrote or can debug is just horrible. I do front end, back end, and servers too.
An example: for my project we had to mitigate security issues for migration. The project has been around for decades. I had to come up with mitigation strategies since it's would take so much time and effort to rewrite it. Some of the developers had no idea what the security issues are and how to fix it at all.
That's very important. But I don't think it makes you a better person than anyone else, or that you should have a better life than anyone else.
Ultimately, I don't think people are "quantifiable" in that way - our skills, qualities, and personalities are all arbitrary, and the people are is pretty much entirely out of our hands. It's a combination of biology, upbringing, environment, sheer luck. You can say, maybe, "but it's what people do with it," but I just don't think that tracks - "what we do with it" all comes from a predetermined place, too.
It is what it is - people are animals and they need carrots. It's the only way we can keep society running. But honestly, most days I kind of think society is a mistake. An unequal sharing of blessings isn't better than an equal division of miseries.
Part of why I feel uneasy about software developers feeling like they are undervalued is that it feels like it's a slippery slope to the SF types with no expertise in an area who have tried to disrupt social issues like homelessness with coding knowhow and it's been an absolute fucking disaster time and time again. People assume because they generate tons of capital they must know better than the people who are actually in an area.
Yeah I think I'm going to try and move to industry for a better work-life balance and hopefully better money. Burnout is real in academia and it sucks.
Being honest, were you told to write that or did you discover and write it? Just curious.
Me being in Asia, I wish my pay is like this. People might say it's relative as the cost of living here is cheaper. But I'm currently in Singapore lol.
I disagree. Software engineers do a job that not everyone can do, and they are pretty essential to a lot of business.
I currently work a shitty job that involves hard physical work, as well as dealing with awful customers. While sure I'd like to be paid more, but in reality its a low skill job, and I could probably train just about anyone to do my job in a day or two. You can't teach someone to write effective code in anywhere near that time
Title: Software Engineer III
Education: Bachelors of Science in Computer Science
Experience: 5 years
Salary: 90k before annual/quarterly bonuses
Location: Arkansas
Cost of living is insanely cheap over here so that's a big plus as well. I've never really thought about if my career field was under/overpaid. Hell I never even really thought about the pay when I decided to get into the field. I just loved computers and software so much that it seemed like a natural fit. When I think about it though...the huge corporations that I've worked for pretty much rely on IT to do work. If there's a server outage or any kind of software bug that causes issues with the business unit I'm in then the difference of solving the issue in 5 minutes vs 30 minutes can literally be millions of dollars. Additionally the things we create/modify for the business can also net them millions of dollars of additional profit (granted it's developed right). In that sense I can see why being a Software Engineer is a lucrative career choice since it requires a specific set of skills.
Education: Bachelors of Science in Computer Science
Experience: 5 years
Salary: 90k before annual/quarterly bonuses
Location: Arkansas
Cost of living is insanely cheap over here so that's a big plus as well. I've never really thought about if my career field was under/overpaid. Hell I never even really thought about the pay when I decided to get into the field. I just loved computers and software so much that it seemed like a natural fit. When I think about it though...the huge corporations that I've worked for pretty much rely on IT to do work. If there's a server outage or any kind of software bug that causes issues with the business unit I'm in then the difference of solving the issue in 5 minutes vs 30 minutes can literally be millions of dollars. Additionally the things we create/modify for the business can also net them millions of dollars of additional profit (granted it's developed right). In that sense I can see why being a Software Engineer is a lucrative career choice since it requires a specific set of skills.
This area get pay well, but not as much as Silicon Valley. Most of the SE jobs here are government consulting, which required a citizenship and level of clearance. One of the biggest reason why SE get pay like this is because of the shortage of good candidates. There is just a lot of jobs available in this market, but nowhere near enough people.
It's going to get more skewed in my market as Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and other big tech companies start migrating and building offices here.
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You're not wrong, but the people I met who claimed they were full stack, acted as if they knew everything about everything. Toxic teammates.
Honestly, start here.
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This is where I started. I wouldn't go too far into it, though. There's diminishing returns and there comes a time where you gain more from more guided lessons.
I was working on another program and noticed the manual process being done for things that could be done way faster. Literally someone would have to go in, check a code, check conditions and approve or deny a claim. Manually. It took 48-72 hours a day to approve something, and perhaps someone's life depended on this claim. No joke.
So I approached my bosses and proposed something to automate this as much as possible based on pre existing rules. If something fell off this rule set just flag it and pass it to an administrator for verification. If a claim was denied a percentage of accuracy was given to it, and if it fell below a certain threshold a claim manager could double check. Approved claims would go in without a hitch. This consisted of checking pre existing conditions or prior claims or multiple factors. Not all claims of the company go through this process mind you, only a subset of it. Before I left the company over a hundred thousand claims had gone through it. To this day I am particularly proud of it.
Don't take this the wrong way but that is a very high ask for so little experience. If you don't mind me asking what city are you working in?
You think a high skilled doctor should make the same amount of money as someone who washes dishes?
"AI". "Automation". Buzzwords that management loves. Easy to sell stuff to them when you spout this crap. They get all excited. But hey there was some math involved too 😛. Lots of sql query statements too. Lots. Didn't have the opportunity to use an ORM in here due to performance reasons.
You could say that a vast majority of jobs are useless too which reaches beyond software engineering. If we were to have peak optimization of jobs, a lot of jobs and projects would go away.
I guess I'm trying to figure out what you're trying to get at here. That fellow makes a lot more money for his 5.5 years of experience tbh even in software as plenty of other posters have mentioned.
Here's my question to you. Do you make enough money to be happy, healthy and have a bit of disposable income in your current situation?
If you don't, I totally empathize and feel that's not a great spot to be in. Then the next question, is there anything you can do about that? I see people moving around positions in a tech industry, and have colleagues that are hungry for more and negotiate themselves into a position they prefer. Figure out what you want within or outside of your company, especially if it helps your finances, and go for it.
If you are in reasonable financial shape, the next question is do you have a career path that will keep you in that same sustainable position if you start getting other obligations (a family, etc.).
Honestly having money is fine and all, but it's not all that's there in the world. Given how some of the richest people in the world still seem unhappy and all shows that very clearly. I'd take that frustration and see what you can make out of it. Just being sad that some folks make a lot of money won't really help anyone. Like others said there's a lot of demand for software developers and thus some companies can pay a lot for them.
Honestly finding good software engineers is hard, and these software companies are doing quite well. Thus they're willing to pay high salaries to attract said talent.
LA, I left off six months of freelance work too + 6 month tech internship. So I guess technically like 18 months? Also, I have like six years of stuff on Github.
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