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Comment by _yosefk | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't the field extremely competitive now? The demand has been strong for a decade and a half; it seems like a lot of time.

(I'm not sure I have an explanation myself, really; perhaps it's something innate in people and perhaps it's something about education, but the fact remains that the world still hasn't churned out enough programmers even though the incentives have been there for a long time. One possible explanation is that much of the software implements bureaucratic processes and there's always more demand for this sort of processes - so demand will outstrip supply no matter what happens at the supply side.)

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"Why isn't the field extremely competitive now? "

Visas.

Most programming work (of the type talked about in the OP) originates in the USA, and most companies, even startups, need employees to come in the door everyday. (not taking on the question of whether this is ideal or not, that is the just the way it is, right now) .

Imagine (as a thought experiment) a scenario where a smart kid who lives in India or Ukraine or Africa is just able to get on a plane and land in SF for an interview or a job irrespective of whether he has the right degree, paperwork etc and without jumping through hoops at the consulate and rolling the dice.

The (edit: thanks @daladd for correction) supply would go way up and hence average salary would go down (which is why large companies are trying for more H1 Bs - they like easier availability of devs and lower salaries)

Or imagine the border with Mexico being completely officially open. See what happens to the dishwasher/fruit picker payment structure.

That perspective is from someone who lives in the USA. If you live in China, programmers are as hot a commodity as they are in the USA, but it's hard to find good programmers. I know of several companies in China trying to hire developers in the USA because it's easier to source high quality talent than locally in Shanghai. Every time there is a tech meetup talk in shanghai, around 300 people show up, but only 20 of them know what they're talking about. Maybe computing isn't a field that chinese people study hard to become good at.

The companies in the USA are competing with companies in China for essentially the same talent pool. It's a good time to be in software.

I just have to ask, where do I contact these companies in China looking for US programmers, and is Mandarin a requirement? This sounds a bit like the offers to make a good living teaching English overseas, where the reality is a bit different.

Surprisingly, they source them here by visiting the States and finding people the same way Zynga & Google would. I was recently recruited for a project for a startup in Shanghai recently -- the most complicated part is the compensation part as most USA based services don't accept payments from China, including Google Wallet.

And no, mandarin isn't a requirement. I'm not really teaching english like those stories from japanese blogs -- I'll be coding in coffeescript for my wages.

All this would do is a short-term depression of SF programmer wages coupled to short-term surge in worldwide programmer wages. Because guess what, smart guy in Ukraine was already employed there and when he moves the next guy coming to fill the gap will either cost more or be less smart.

Programmer talent is sparse worldwide, not just in the Valley.

Programmer talent is sparse worldwide

And yet, when I look around at the job postings in Canada, a job with requirements that go on endlessly tops out at about $80,000/year. Expect less if you are an average programmer. Such a low income, relative to what US-based companies are offering, doesn't really speak to a shortage in my mind.

I admit, there could be some kind of survivorship bias here: I'm only seeing the lower-paying jobs because the good jobs are less likely to be hanging around on the job boards. But then if an $80,000/yr. job is failing to attract talent, should it even be considered a real position with respect to shortage counting? I could hire dozens of programmers if they would only do it for $10/hr., but I don't think it is fair to count those as unfilled positions or a shortage surrounding that. Nobody with talent is ever going to do it for that kind of pay.

> a job with requirements that go on endlessly tops out at about $80,000/year

An endless list of job requirements is a sign the company doesn't know what it wants, so it's hardly surprising they don't know how much to pay their programmers, either.

Endless list was an exaggeration, but the requirements were very specific: A CS degree requirement, experience with specific technologies, etc. The kind of stuff you might add when people are fighting for the job in order to scare some away. You can't afford to scare anyone away if a shortage is real.

Though your point may still hold true, however I've seen it often enough that I find it surprising that so many companies (many of whom specialize in tech) are that out of touch.

They do not top out at 80k, but for positions that are truly senior companies don't even post those on job boards. You need to network and get noticed if you want to be earning 130 or 150 here.

But a shortage would see throwing those $150K+ jobs to just about anyone who can turn on a computer. The fact that you have to have existing networks and secret handshakes to even find such jobs is not what a shortage looks like, it is just a normally functioning market.

I'm guessing the payment scales depend on the cost of living in your area. They pay more in Silicon Valley compared to Toronto because a 1500 sqft single family home in SV is around $1M.

You'd be surprised at the house prices in Toronto or Vancouver (2 of the top tech cities in Canada). Yes, we're undergoing a housing bubble here, but $1M is the average price of a detached home in Vancouver...and that's for a 50+ year old hunk of junk (or 'crack shack' as we call it here).

One of the reasons that the housing bubble is starting to pop in Canada is that the incomes can no longer support the housing prices. We tend to have lower incomes than the US, but our houses are more expensive, cost of living is here, higher taxes, goods are more expensive, etc etc.

I wonder if SV incomes are higher simply because people expect them to be higher, or maybe there are more fundamentals to it.

And then there are Stockholm where I paid about $300k for roughly 365 square feet a month ago or so...

What is the average job offering in Canada? How does it compare? What occupations pay significantly more? Do they pay that immediately after joining or the good compensation does not kick in until quite a few years has passed? How large are those professions by the headcount?

I think we can find the source of this distortion if it exists. All I can say right now is that areas where you have access to money not backed by productivity tend to trump programming or any other jobs where the employer has to make ends meet. Those areas are usually law, sometimes medicine (often not), and some public sector / government contractors.

in Toronto area you can get senior dev position fairly easy in range 95k - 110k and I can tell you from personal experience it is very hard to find decent developer (just decent would make us happy) , usually is 1 of 20 interviews if we are lucky

> The demand (and hence average salary) in SF for programmers would go way down

I think you mean the supply would go way up, and thus the market-clearing salary for new hires would go way down.

Also (all other things being equal) the number of programmers employed would go up as the equilibrium shifts to a lower-wage, higher-number-employed point on the demand curve.

yes you are right. Thanks for the correction. fixed in the original.

"Visas."

I live on a small island in a small city and I wont be short of work for the next 20 years.

Developers/programmers are hard to find. Finding good ones that pass the interview process are even harder.

  > The demand (and hence average salary) in SF for
  > programmers would go way down

Wouldn't this be detrimental to the SF area, considering as the high cost of living? I realize that cost of living will probably lower to meet what people can afford, but not without growing (or shrinking) pains, I imagine.

Detrimental for whom?

The changes to the cost of living are primarily a function of the now thousands of google and apple commuters. Not that that is stopping them from complaining when they wonder why moving up to a 2BR costs $4k/month now.

The growing pains associated with pay not meeting (or barely meeting) the cost of living.

The effects on the cost of living would be harder to predict, I believe. Because even if you have less wealthy individuals, if they are more of them, they will still drive prices up.

Perhps, for say land or houses, people will still pay the same price or more per square meter. But they will get by with less area.

There's definitely more you could do with education. A lot of professional programmers are people who started doing programming as a hobby as kids. Attempting to teach programming to 20-year-olds entering an university seems to not work terribly well, while the basics can be picked by a 10-year old.

If you waited until people are 20 to start teaching them to read and write, you would probably also get poor results, while the weird kids who learned to read for fun when they were 12 would end up outperforming the regular students when they grew up.

On the other side of the coin, people who picked up programming as a hobby while they were 10 might have picked up some rather nasty habits that need to be unlearned, where as someone who is learning in school at age 20 won't have those problems.

Depends on the schooling, too.

This is a very interesting idea. It certainly seems plausible, I wonder if anyone has studied it.

Programmer is like the modern villager. Villagers grew food and made stuff and that's what you ever needed. The programmer writes code and everything in our civilization is already code or it will be.

Therefore, programmer is a much broader occupation than almost any other. It's still a seller's marker because of that. Look at everything around you, and while there is at least one item that doesn't execute code inside, we haven't hit peak coder yet.

>Programmer is like the modern villager. Villagers grew food and made stuff and that's what you ever needed. The programmer writes code and everything in our civilization is already code or it will be.

That's an extremely short-sighted way to look at it.

In fact, take out the non-programmers, and all programming will collapse -- literally come to a halt.

You know, guys like those that grow and transport out food, clean up the streets and the garbage, cook our meals, mine our coal, produce our energy, drill our petrol, build our houses, etc etc.

People seem to think that because he have the "information superhighway" (sic) we're, say, above actual highways. Where the fact is that without truckers and highways and oil and the like, the "information superhighway" will collapse in a few days.

In fact, you can take programming out of the picture, and the whole world will keep on turning, at least as well as it did in the sixties or fifties.

The reverse, not so much. Programming is indeed a pervasive but insignificant in the grand scheme of things addition to the workings of our society.

There would be computerized food transport, real world garbage collectors, pizza machines, miner droids and 3D plotters handling bricks for building.

There is no reason you can't replace most of those human tasks with machines. And while we gradually do that, we'll need more and more programmers. Or maybe we will fail horribly, but not because it could not be done; and somebody will do this a few centuries later.

>There would be computerized food transport, real world garbage collectors, pizza machines, miner droids and 3D plotters handling bricks for building.

This is sci-fi as for now, and for the foreseeable future. It's like someone in 1800 saying that the mailman is not needed anymore, because we could use electronic mail. Possible, but far off in the future. See the factories that make iPhones for example: some prefer manual to robotic labor, because it is cheaper.

>There is no reason you can't replace most of those human tasks with machines.

There are several reasons. One of them is that such technology and in such scale has not been invented yet (or has not been "engineered for widespread actual use"). Another is the power needed for all this, especially in a global scale.

And there are lots of social reasons too: what will you do with the BILLIONS of people whose work is not needed anymore? Unless you come up with some equal pay for all scheme, there will be blood.

As for programmers, by the same logic you dismissed manual labour in favor of robotic labour, we could have program writing programs, or trivial "connect the dots" programming solutions for non programmers, that would make the demand for programmers even less, not more.

We live in sci-fi. The only things withholding this sci-fi from happening: lack of competent workforce (programmers and roboengineers) and lack of vision. It's going to arrive.

Currently I'm a programmer not a politician, therefore social reasons are not my problem. My problem is converting as many tasks in the world to code. And that will keep me busy and pay me a salary.

We could have a program writing programs, but I won't bet on that. Somebody will still have to give it orders; and the guy giving orders to a program is a programmer by definition.

You will have a lot of programmers overseeing computers and robots do various tasks, and that would be the largest and busiest part of the workplace.

>We live in sci-fi.

So were are our servant robots and flying cars?

>The only things withholding this sci-fi from happening: lack of competent workforce (programmers and roboengineers) and lack of vision.

That's too generic an accusation. One could say that about any problem.

>We could have a program writing programs, but I won't bet on that. Somebody will still have to give it orders; and the guy giving orders to a program is a programmer by definition. You will have a lot of programmers overseeing computers and robots do various tasks, and that would be the largest and busiest part of the workplace.

So, your vision of sci-fi future is conveniently constrained such that programmers are always needed and in large quantities.

Why seeing everything we currently do becoming automated as an easy task, and not also the overseeing of "computers and robots doing various tasks"? If you trust them to do the work, you can also trust them to do it correctly, and built the required self-correction routines.

No. We don't have means of teleporting matter; this is a problem; and we can't blame it on lack of vision yet. We don't know how to do it, don't know if it's physiclly possible.

Sure you can automate more and more things, in this case programmer will be the last [productive] job remaining. One that slowly wane when more and more things are fully automatic and all other jobs already gone.

We already have cars that drive themselves and are getting sci-fi glasses with really primitive Augmented Reality. We're getting there, I just don't think we'll ever consciously realize it as we experience it.

People smart enough to be programmers have more options than being a programmer. Most of the people in my CS class ended up as managers, 15 years after graduation.

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