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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> Why are programmers so well paid?

Because the companies paying have silly amounts of money and can afford to pay them silly amounts of money. See also: bankers.

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The companies paying have silly amounts of money because programmers can create an enormous amount of value. An extreme example, but think of Linus who created both Linux and Git. A single person created billions of dollars in value. I don't know that there are other professions where an individual can create massive scale like that.

You don't need to be Linus to deliver a lot of value quickly, either.

- the cost to start delivering value is effectively nothing (a computer and access to the internet)

- the cost of delivering value is small (you need to provision hardware your stuff runs on, sometimes) which gives you high margins

- you are not limited to one geographical area nearly as much as other engineers are (since you don't make anything physical, and legislation is relatively light)

- you don't need to wait a lot of time for dependencies like you do in manufacturing

You can go on and on.

There is a field like that; movies. And we see this to an even greater degree there. A big name star can literally boost the number of people who will go see the movie. Studios are some of the most unethical money-grubbing cheats. They wouldn't be paying $10m to A-list stars if their bean counters weren't sure it would be a good return on investment.

The dynamics in software are different obviously but the core truth is the same: good engineers make a difference and the return on investment justifies the cost.

Well, inventors did. There are so many single inventions (or discoveries) created by one or two persons, which have created value for hundreds of years and will continue to do so.

Just think about Fritz Haber who (with Carl Bosch) created nitrogen fixation, which completely changed our agricultural landscape. That is actual, real value (=increased food production) we all benefit to this day. Or look at Alexander Fleming, Edison, Tesla, Nobel, etc. this list can go on forever.

Yes, Linus did good on Git and Linux, but I think with RCS/CVS/SVN and Windows/macOS the world would not have lost that much value.

I think the point is moreso that developers can be self-sufficient in the full value chain. Haber didn’t personally go to farms to create improvements in their agricultural process, the industry did that jointly by incorporating his invention in their manufacturing. Edison and Tesla never mass produced their inventions to get them into people’s homes, that required thousands of people working manual labor and many corollaries of factories. Whereas Linus can push changes and millions of people can pull them in to add value immediately without any extra steps. You can argue that Linus didn’t build the communications infrastructure and hardware surrounding that and that is true, but the salient difference is this was truly a one-time exercise. For “physical” inventors like you described, mass production is hard precisely because it is bespoke and requires so many physical resources. Until we have a general purpose self-configuring factory, their leverage is fundamentally lower compared to the world-tier software engineer. And even then if that did exist, it would require programming to operate it to usher the physical inventors into complete self-sufficiency in their value chain.

Maybe billions is even understating it...

Git's CLI is so bad (for example compared to Mercurial's) it could be argued it's destroying billions in productivity.

Disagree, banks do not pay software devs a lot. Tends to be average or slightly above average. But nowhere near tech company salaries.

Bankers see powerful staff as risks, they much prefer having subpar staff that are guarded by rigorous process and management, as that is viewed as less risky. A single staff member who knows a lot and controls a lot of systems means they have dangerous leverage over the business.

Tech companies don’t view labour as a risk, they are part of the product.

I wasn't talking about banks paying tech workers a lot. I was talking about banks paying bankers a lot. There are plenty of bankers of various sorts making $500k+ salaries.

Sounds more like investment banking vs retail banking?

He meant bankers get paid a lot.

Depends entirely on the bank. Retail banking pay is about average, investment banking pay is generally slightly under FAANG but still relatively high.

Using childish terms like "silly" does not help the debate its also the same sort of term like "gold plated" used to attack civil service pensions.

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