While I get the sentiment, you can still be a software engineer and enjoy a very, very comfortable life. It’s okay to not become a distinguished engineer.
Among my friends I count teachers, office workers and lawyers. My compensation to work required ratio compares very favourably to all of them (though in the long term I suspect my lawyer friends will win there…)
I agree. I don’t live in Atlanta anymore and I now work remotely. But these numbers jibe from what I saw when I worked there as far as what the well known Atlanta based companies were paying. Companies like Delta, Coke, Home Depot, GE (GE Transportation), etc
It’s also around the same range I’ve seen from other major cities that aren’t on the west coast.
Before anyone replies, yes I’m well aware of what BigTech and adjacent pays and I did a stint in BigTech.
While I pivoted to cloud consulting specializing in app dev in 2020 and that help me get to the tip top end of “enterprise dev”, I could have lived comfortably in Atlanta off of that income
So... that senior engineer plateau is real. And yes, it means you'll be making about the same amount of money, inflation-adjusted, after about 8-10 years, if you don't ever want to do the work to break into staff engineering. (And even if you do, you should plan on starting back at senior in a down market.)
So, is it the worst thing in the world to be making $150,000 in the United States? (That's an average Senior in the US, according to Indeed. 183k in San Francisco, 143k in Durham, NC.)
That's really not a bad life. No, we all don't end up in FAANG. That's okay. Yes, we're in a current downturn. That will change again, even if AI speeds up development by 20%.
I don’t see that changing in the next decade - comp going up inflation adjusted. Enterprise dev comp (where most developers work) has been suprisingly stagnate and even going down inflation adjusted.
Especially with the current oversupply of developers abs remote work. Every job opening gets 600-1000 applications within the first few hours.
I was looking for a job both in 2023 and 2024 and bog standard “full stack developer” jobs with AWS experience was my plan B. It’s a shit show out there and they were offering “senior developers” with those qualifications $150-$165K. The same as I was seeing in 2020 before Covid and before I pivoted to strategic cloud consulting focusing on app dev.
I’ve been working a lot longer. But really only started focusing on my career in 2012.
Get off the hedonic treadmill or never get on it. I’ve done my stint in BigTech. But I’m good with the very high end of “enterprise dev” comp.
Sure, but look at what they’re doing. Are they in the same salary band, same basic job description they were in ten years ago?
This described me from 2002 (5 years into my career) until 2014. My compensation was basically stagnant all those years inflation adjusted. I spent a lot of that time until around 2012-2014 as an “expert beginner”.
By 2014, I knew the only way to move up and stay competitive was to lead projects, start dealing with architecture and get closer to “the business”.
In 2020, I pivoted to cloud consulting specializing in app dev and was working more on strategy than tactics and became more customer focused. By “consulting” I don’t mean “staff augmentation”.
I can easily see myself doing the same thing 5-10 years from now. The technology will change. But the focus on strategy and adding business value won’t
I’m not saying “learn cloud”. I am saying do something that involves dealing with decision makers and helping companies use technology to create business value.
I am so happy I am not this jaded after over 20 years in software. I have never felt like I have hit a ceiling in terms of salary or skill. I still learn each and every day. I would get bored if this were not the case. Would I recommend it to everyone? Hell no but I wouldn't choose anything else.
Has your compensation been up much inflation adjusted each year or even three years over that time span?
Yes, you can keep learning and you must to stay competitive. But most will plateau if they are aggressive over the first decade especially if they don’t jump to the FAANG side of comp.
The article seems very one sided in that it only considers the “total addressable compensation size” and nothing about your interest or satisfaction that one gets with the work.
I doubly my 20yo self thought about these and just jumped to software because it was cool. My parents weren’t that involved with these decisions.
the # people that find comfy fulfilling jobs is less than 5% and are all nepotism right time right place in a market that doesnt need to be efficient.
we need to create proper regulation that requires software engineers to actually be engineers. no more collapsing bridges and finger pointing. thats the historically proven and optimal way to put engineering back on top.
I used to be strong proponent of this but after learning about the actual professional ethical constraints "real" engineers operate under I have changed my mind. Engineers are forbidden to mislead their clients, and from taking shortcuts and cost-cutting measures that are known to increase certain risks of unanticipated harm.
But they may still harm! If "real" engineering ethics allow them to make landmines and cruise missiles, it certainly allows us to make spyware and racist sentencing algorithms. It would help with data breaches I'm pretty sure, but therac-25 and 737-MAX type incidents are already pretty rare. Most of the damage caused by software is intentional.
Whatever we need here we can't copy from traditional engineering, because they don't have it either.
engineers being liable and doing what they say is the proper outcome. an engineer can choose to not work on projects. tech needs to face rule of law and be liable for damages.
> and are all nepotism Right time right place in a market
Are you absolutely sure its this way and not the fact that there isn't a real market because the market was collapsed to socialism through money printing, collusion, and corruption.
You really can't have economic calculation when the entities involved all cooperate regardless of profit, which naturally happens when debt financing decouples these needs.
Other distortions to increase said profits in said environments such as artificially constraining supply to raise price level also create chaotic whipsaws which first strain, then destroy distribution networks, just like Atari did to video games back in the 80s, where retailers lost so much they refused to even place Nintendo on their shelves without a guarantee.
The historic record is fairly light with regards to fiat money printing and actual collapses that have occurred. We know its happened, but the chaos it produces seems to remove all the important details leading up to crisis.
Also, there has always been a non-fiat currency to pivot to up until now, where the underpinning global currency tied to all other currencies is about to fail. Its unprecedented in scope, and risk because failure of a currency translated to failure of production, and modern production is needed to feed half the people currently alive today. Malthus law of population and its regressive states (reversion), seem to indicate that when it fails completely, most will starve.
Few seem to recognize the debt trap they find themselves placed in foolishly by previous generations who have failed to cede power (hanging on to it to their death bed), or respect the rational principles that guided their fore-bearers.
We live in an age stark with evil and evil naturally begets destruction through complacency and sloth which are two sides of the same coin.
If you ask yourself, is your life better, and do you have more options today than 10 years ago, and 10 years before that? Most will say, no, and no.
Plot the trend and you'll see we move ever closer to ruin, goose-stepping forward, with the majority of people burning the bridges as they go. The dynamics are there to be seen for those wise enough to pay attention.
To clarify, not just any socialism, non-market socialism; the kind that always fails given sufficient time (none longer than 50 years). Markets require adversarial decisionmaking, and when few participants exist they always coordinate, even opposite profit because they receive profit from bailouts and monopoly distortions.
Coordinated moves regardless of cost, cannot perform economic calculation, which is why shifting inventory around at any level doesn't solve core problems under socialism. Mises covers this quite well.
Runaway money printing inevitably runs afoul of the two participants requirements to continue the economic cycle, and those requirements are in purchasing power.
The producers will cease production when they can no longer make a profit, and that happens when the stable store of value of their assets is undermined (chaotically).
The factor markets will cease having children when they can no longer afford to support a wife and three kids (sufficient to get one to the age where they have children). Our birthrate is at 1.44 at last check, significantly below replacement.
The state apparatus who receives money directly from a money printer can continue production, but not efficiently, and certainly not indefinitely, and they typically engage in constraining the supply artificially to raise price level, which distorts the economies chaotically with a whipsaw effect as well.
All in all, it runs into the socialist calculation problem, and that chaos destroys the distribution network. Without that network, it all fails, including food getting to your local grocery store. Been to the store lately? Seen all those empty shelves? See the price of eggs up at the same price as meat. Its all going to come crashing down in the next few years.
The former producer side is fairly immediate in their leaving the market (sieving through merger, acquisition, bankruptcy etc), the latter consumer side may take up to 40 years. We are in year 35 of having dipped underneath the required compensation to raise children, in purchasing power.
Your comments here and on other threads indicate that you have confused “socialism” with “state capitalism”. An unfortunate and increasingly common mistake.
You are mistaken. Socialism is normally a broadly defined term which is why its understandable that people can make the mistake you say, but that didn't happen here, because we are talking about structure related to economics, and not political theory or ideology.
Importantly this is why Mises took such lengths in his works to define it consistently. It looks like you confuse the terms yourself, and not the other way around.
What it comes down to is whether or not there is private ownership, and ownership is the power of individual disposal. Without that power, you do not own anything.
Any limits on such rights and agencies, is the process of socialization, and when the names are divorced from such traditional terminology or handled over to another entity with new names, or same names but differing meanings, the old terminology or old meaning is essentially unimportant. What matters is the current terminology, and existing structure to the matter being discussed at hand, and when one uses the same words, they can easily delude themselves and others implicitly over those meanings, which is without rational basis.
The main nuance differentiating socialism from many other names/forms is in the ideology, or unrelated policy. These differentiations are unimportant to this discussion here, and muddy the waters for the people who have not educated themselves properly.
If the collective ownership in all things is in the hands of the state, this is socialism. Its important to be clear, socialism is not only an observable state (a noun), but also a process towards such a state (a verb). If it leads to, or is already in such a state it is socialism.
The money printer is state apparatus, the money printer decides and controls production by issuing debt, which eventually has a shortfall dovetailing into the many ways socialism fails. and by extension how society fails towards annihilation once production fails.
Non-reserve debt issuance is money printing. Reserve systems that do not account for subjective value are broken reserve systems that enable money printing. You can easily see that in 2020, the fractional reserve was set to 0%. It has remained there. They claim to have adopted Basel 3, but Basel 3 assumes objective valuations under Capital Reserve based in fiat, when subjective value was proved by Carl Menger, that industry will continue until there is a whipsaw or contagion and then it will fail overnight because of subjective value.
In true capitalistic exchange societies such property, including the means of production is in the hands of appropriate individuals, its decentralized, and these people are members of the general public as opposed to state apparatus.
When the majority of all property is in such money printing hands, where the debasement of all other goods occurs through currency, and worse fuels a sieve towards all property ending in such hands, this is socialism. The inevitable outcome is slavery for any but those at the top.
Eventually those people at the top cause collapse, they win so much that they lose, and that's because they don't have the calculation information to continue forward without shortfall.
Property obtained by these malevolent entities is property that has passed into the hands of the state.
When the market fails because its been sieved into fewer and fewer hands, to the point where independents can no longer profit. Producers leave, and all that's left is a collapse because its a faux market of state actors which is non-market socialism.
I would highly recommend you reread Mises's work on Socialism. Specifically Chapter 2: Socialism, Subpart 1 which covers these definitions and other common knowledge related to these type of discussions.
Malthus and the dynamics of depopulation describes why society would fail towards annihilation once production fails and people starve.
Among my friends I count teachers, office workers and lawyers. My compensation to work required ratio compares very favourably to all of them (though in the long term I suspect my lawyer friends will win there…)