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I disagree completely.

Unlike other jobs, you need to always update your skills, learning new languages.

And there is no safety, since your position can always be outsourced by an MBA who wants to save the company a few bucks.

And thanks to blackberry/remote computing, you are pretty much always connected to your job...and can be called in to work at night, on the weekends...and any time your boss pleases.

And there is a huge age bias...so the longer you work, the worse off you are going to be.

And unlike other jobs, with programming, your salary tends to peak early. 5 years experience? $100,000. 15 years experience? $115,000

So sure...programming pays well...but not really as much as you are worth. There are plenty of jobs that will both pay you more, require less hours, require less commitment, and will be a very safe career(from outsourcing)

I mean sure...programmers make a decent salary...but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we struck some sort of lottery by deciding to go into programming.

"There are plenty of jobs that will both pay you more, require less hours, require less commitment, and will be a very safe career(from outsourcing)."

Tell me more!

I'd imagine he is referring to sales/business/management roles which can tick a lot of those boxes in many cases but the type of work might drive a lot of engineer-types insane

Any of the medical careers, from nursing to MD to podiatrist to dentist.

T14 law school and BIGLAW.

MBB consulting drone and then BigCo Apparatchik.

Buy-side finance, like equity research, portfolio manager, private equity, etc.

Commissioned officer in the US military.

CPA Accountant.

Patent attorney.

I can't speak for some of the items on that list, but I call BS on the medical jobs. I know some doctors and dentists, and let me tell ya, the only thing they've got on engineers is the pay (and even then, sometimes not). They've got an order of magnitude more stress, worse hours, and way more required commitment than even the worst coding job I've ever had.

lol when you get laid off at 50 and they continue to pull $200k we'll see who's got more stress

Last time I checked median income across the US population was around $50k, so maybe you should count your blessings.

Also what does constantly being on-call have to do with programming? Plenty of professionals have to deal with this across the board. And plenty of programmers don't have to.

>>if you really see it as a lottery then you're devaluing the impact that individual decision-making plays, and you will never be an A-player with that attitude.

I am not downplaying the efforts of so many individuals that make it big in start up's. And I know very well how hard people work, and that is precisely my point. All I'm saying sometimes you don't succeed despite best efforts, sometimes other things which have nothing to do with your performance go wrong.

There are many things that you can't control. That is OK. And despite all this, I will still keep trying, anyway.

My problem is that we are not paid in proportion to our work. And that most of the times becomes the biggest source of frustration and pain in our industry.

I don't deny that luck is a factor, but dwelling on luck will decrease your chances because successful entrepreneurs tend to focus on things they can control. That was my main point in response of the pessimism of the GP.

As for being paid in proportion to your work, that's not how markets work. You're paid in proportion to what someone is willing to accept to the task. If you want to be paid in proportion to what you're worth then you have to start your own company. That way if you're worth nothing you earn nothing and if you're worth a million dollars you make every penny. When you take a job you're essentially offsetting your upside with no downside risk, it's actually not a bad tradeoff considering how hard it is to make a $100k profitable business. A guy that could add $100m to Google's bottom line might not be able to do 1% of that by himself, so Google could pay him $90m, but why should they if he's willing to work for less?

>>Being a skilled programmer is one of safest careers you could have in these days of cold economic downturn.

This is temporary luck, which will probably be different in the next downturn. (Just consider the IT death, ten years ago.)

The only thing I saw happening at that time was that even though a lot of companies disappeared, all the good developers found new or kept their jobs, but all the crap developers lost their jobs.

It isn't that simple.

I saw something similar for good developers -- that network very well and/or had a visible backlog. But sure, my data points might have been unrepresentative or the IT death might have hit harder where I was at the time (Sweden).

What I can say: Ten years before that (ca 1992), Sweden had an even worse crash (think Ireland, today) -- and I know of good people that couldn't find a job.