Hot said:
Hot Tamales ! wrote:
[snip]
Should programmers be paid like customer service
representatives rather than demigods ?
if you want your average programmer to be as qualified as your average
customer service representative, sure.
Are most programmers really that 'qualified'
don't know most programmers, so it's kinda hard to say. point is, however,
that programming is a fairly complex activity, with an absolutely staggering
productivity difference between really good and really bad programmers. iow,
it's an activity where your abilities really can make a difference, and yes,
if they do, i think it's not unreasonable to compensate you for it.
I think there are a lot of *fakers* amoung us...
unlike which profession again?
You miss my point.
What I'm saying is that with sophisticated platforms like .NET with
automatic garbage collection, we can substitute a lot of low paid
programmers, ala India, for a few high paid programmers.
i had understood your original remark as suggesting that locally the income
of software engineers is too high. maybe that was wrong?
offshoring is a different issue, i think. while, say, indian software
engineers are being paid substantially less than local talent, that seems to
be mainly a matter of relative income levels than qualification.
So, the job no longer requires quite the twists and turns of what was
needed in the past, just a lot of reasonably competent people.
actually, i don't think that the fact that programming has moved up in terms
of abstraction implies that it is any less difficult. in fact, one could
argue that some of the effort in constructing good software has moved away
from struggling with technical issues and more towards design, architecture,
and more, well, "high-level" concerns.
that is a fscking scary thought!
writen in Advanced XML, would require a lot of
$55,000 a year people, to basically make sure there were enough try/catch
blocks to insure stability.
But nobody would have to worry about null pointers, for instance, so why
pay big bucks ?
at least in my experience, the big bucks are not paid to people worrying
about null pointers. they are paid to the architects, and i am not aware of
either .net or advanced xml having made any significant contributions to
automatically creating good architectures.
apart from that, next year it will be .somethingelse, and
advancedyetanotherml. unless you want to exchange your entire workforce at
the whim of some marketing department in redmond, you better hire people who
can assimilate this new-fangled stuff as quickly as it comes and goes.
no, i am not convinced that the need for intelligent, highly qualified
people with a solid understanding of the basics will go away anytime soon in
the field of software engineering. perhaps some phbs think so, but those
will be dealt with by the darwinian forces of the market.
-- j
