It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams.
Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
> It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing.
That argument could apply to anyone who pays anyone well.
Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers.
(And by 'treat well', I mean the whole package. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.)
> Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
Huh, how is that 'dilution' supposed to work?
Well, and at least those 'evil' money grubbers are out of someone else's hair. They don't just get created from thin air. So if those rimarly-compensation-motivated people are now writing software, then at least investment banking and management consulting are free again for the primarily-craft-motivated people to enjoy!
They can be enjoyed/exploited (early retirment, savvy caching of excess income, etc) by workers but they don't win anybody progress and aren't a thing to celebrate.
Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts.
Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts.
Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families.
Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that. Like our peers in other engineering disciplines, it's practically our baseline state. What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, which is a different thing and gets developed in a different and more stable market environment.
Meta has products that are used by billions of people every week and has been extremely profitable for over 15 years, with no sign of obvious downward trend. I don't see how it can be described as a bubble.
> They can be enjoyed/exploited (early retirment, savvy caching of excess income, etc) by workers but they don't win anybody progress and aren't a thing to celebrate.
Huh, if I get paid lots as a worker, I don't care whether the company goes belly up later. Why should I? (I include equity in the total pay package under judgement here, and by 'lots' I mean that the sum of equity and cash is big. If the cash portion is large enough, I don't care if the stock goes to zero. In any case, I sell any company stock as soon as I can, and invest the money in diversified index funds.)
> Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts.
I'm more than ok with willing investors (potentially) losing capital they put at risk. Just don't put some captive public retirement fund or task payer money into this. Those investors are grown up and rich, they don't need us to know better what is good for them.
> Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts.
This says more about carefully managing the maximum amount of leverage you want to take on in your life. It's hardy an argument that would convince me that lower pay is better for me.
People freak out when thinking about putting leverage in their stock portfolio, but they take on a mortgage on a house without thinking twice. Even though getting out of a well diversified stock portfolio and remove all the leverage takes less than half an hour these days (thanks to online brokers), but selling your single concentrated illiquid house can take months and multiple percentage points of transaction costs (agents, taxes, etc).
Just don't buy a house, or at least buy within your means. And make sure you are thinking ahead of time how to get out of that investment, in case things turn sour.
> Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families.
Guess who's in a good negotiation position to demand respect and freedom and stability from their (prospective) employer? Someone who has other lucrative offers. Money is one part of compensation, freedom and respect (and even fun!) are others.
Your alternative offers don't all have to offer these parts of the package in the same proportions. You can use a rich offer with lots of money from place A, to try and get more freedom (at a lower pay) from place B.
Though I find that in practice that the places that are valuing me enough to pay me a lot, also tend to value me enough to give me more respect and freedom. (It's far from a perfect correlation, of course.)
> Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that.
Yes, have lived on a pittance before, and survived. I don't strictly 'need' the money. But I still firmly believe that all else being equal that 'more money = more better'.
> What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, [...].
I'd rather take the money, thank you.
If you want to fight, please go ahead, but don't speak for me.
And the whole thing smells a lot like you'd (probably?) want to introduce some kind of mandatory licensing and certificates, like they have in other engineering disciplines. No thank you. Programming is one of the few well paid white collar jobs left where you don't need a degree to enter. Let's keep it that way.
> Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers.
There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".
It's the same as "lowering prices to the benefit of consumer" vs "price dumping to become a monopoly".
Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.
> Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.
Please provide some examples.
> There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".
It's up to the workers themselves to decide whether that's a good deal.
And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.
I can also take that offer and shop it around. Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.
> Where has that ever worked? Predatory pricing is highly unlikely.
> See eg
Neither of the articles understand how predatory pricing works, assuming it's a single-market process. In the most usual case you fuel price dumping in one market by profits from the other. This way you can run it potentially indefinitely and you're doing it not in a hope of making profits on this market some day but to make sure no one else does. Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works. Netscape died despite having a superior product because it was competing with a public school so to speak. Browser market is dead up to this date.
> And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.
That's exactly what happens and people proceed to degrade professionally.
> Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.
Not unless that someone sits on the ads money pipe.
> Please provide some examples
What kind of example do you expect? If it helps, half the people I personally know in Google "practice the trumpet" in your words. Situation is slowly improving though in the past two years.
I'm not saying it should be made illegal. I'm saying it's definitely happening and it's sad for me to see. I want the tech industry to move forward, not the amateur trumpet one.
> For a period of time, the prices are set unrealistically low to ensure competitors are unable to effectively compete with the dominant firm without making substantial loss. The aim is to force existing or potential competitors within the industry to abandon the market so that the dominant firm may establish a stronger market position and create further barriers to entry.[2] Once competition has been driven from the market, consumers are forced into a monopolistic market where the dominant firm can safely increase prices to recoup its losses.[3]
What you are describing is not predatory pricing, that's a big part of why I was confused.
> Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works.
Please consider reading the article more carefully. Your interpretation requires the author to be an idiot.
---
What you are describing about browsers is interesting. But it's more like bundling and cross subsidies. Neither Microsoft nor Google were ever considering making money from raising the price of their browser after competition had been driven out. That's required for predatory pricing.
> Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.
Veterinaries (including technicians) have an absurdly high rate of suicide. They have a stressful job, constantly around death and mistreatment situations, and don’t get the respect (despite often knowing more than human doctors) or the salaries to match.
Calling these jobs “cute” or saying the veterinary situation is “fortunate” borders on cruel, but I believe you were just uninformed.
> Yet, people still line up to become veterinaries (and technicians). Which proves my point.
The informed reality is that the rate of drop out is also huge. Not only from people who leave the course while studying, but also professionals who abandon the field entirely after just a few years of work.
Many of them are already suffering in college yet continue due to a sense of necessity or sunk cost and burn themselves out.
So no, it does not prove your point. The one thing it proves is that the public in general is insufficiently informed about what being a veterinary is like. They should be paid more and have better conditions (worth noting some countries do treat them better), not be churned out and left to die (literally) because there’s always another chump down the line.
> So no, it does not prove your point. The one thing it proves is that the public in general is insufficiently informed about what being a veterinary is like.
That doesn't really matter. What would matter is how well informed the people who decide to become a veterinary are.
> They should be paid more and have better conditions [...]
Well, everyone should be treated better and paid better.
> [...] because there’s always another chump down the line.
If they could somehow make the improvements you suggest (but don't specify how), they would lead to even more chumps joining the queue.
(And no, that's not a generalised argument against making people's lives better. If you improve the appeal of non-vet jobs, fewer people will join the vet line.
If you improve the treatment of workers in general, the length of the wanna-be-vet queue, and any other 'job queue' will probably stay roughly the same. But people will be better off.)
I am fine with large pool of greedy people trying their hand at programming. Some of them will stick and find meaning in work. Rest will wade out in downturn. Net positive.
> Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
It's great to enjoy programming, and to enjoy your job. But we live under capitalism. We can't fault people for just working a job.
Pushing salary lowers help the society at large, or at least that’s the thesis of OP. While it sucks for SWE, I actually kind of agree. The skyrocketing of SWE salary in the US, and the slow progress US is making towards normalizing/reducing it does not help US competitiveness. I would not fault Meta for this though, as much as US society at large.
SWE should enjoy it while they can before salary becomes similar to other engineering trades.
I don't understand people who think high salaries are bad. Who should get the money instead? Should even more of it go to execs and shareholders? Why is that better?
> but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing.
I'm not convinced he's actually done that. Pretty much any 'profitable, sustainable business' can afford software developers.
Software developers are paid pretty decently, but (grabbing a couple of lists off of Google) it looks like there's 18 careers more lucrative than it (from a wage perspective), and computers-in-general are only 3 of the top 25 highest paying careers - https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-pay...
Medical, Legal, Finance, and Sales as careers (roughly in that order) all seem to pay more on average.
Few viable technology businesses and non-technology busiesses with internal software departments were prepared to see their software engineers suddenly suddenly expect doctor or lawyer pay and can't effectively accomodate the change.
They were largely left to rely on loyalty and other kinds of fragile non-monetary factors to preserve their existing talent and institutuonal knowledge and otherwise scavenge for scraps when making new hires.
For those companies outside the specific Silicon Valley money circle, it was an extremely disruptive change and recovery basically requires that salaries normalize to some significant degree. In most cases, engineers provide quite a lot of value but not nearly so much value as FAANG and SV speculators could build into their market-shaping offers.
It's not a healthy situation for the industry or (if you're wary of centralization/monopolization) society as a whole.
In general, it's probably not sustainable (with some exceptions like academia that have never paid that well leaving aside the top echelon and that had its own benefits) to expect that engineering generally lags behind SV software engineering. Especially with some level of remote persisting, presumably salaries/benefits equilibrate to at least some degree.
Because maintaining the organizational infrastructure to coordinate remote teams dispersed to time zones all over the world and with different communication styles, cultural assumptions, and legal requirements is a whole matter of its own?
Companies that can do that are at an advantage over those who can't right now, but pulling that off is neither trivial nor immediate nor free.
I worked for a company that was very good at that. It resulted in software organizations in 50+ countries.
I had teams in North American, Europe, Russia and East Asia. It resulted in a diversified set of engineers who were close to our customers (except in Russia where the engineers were highly qualified but few prospects for sales). Managing across cultures and time zones is a competence. Jet lag from travel was not as great...
It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams.
Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.