[sanj]

Go find a better company to work for.

All of those issues are company-specific. Sadly, most companies have at least some of the problems.

And I find your McDonald's story insulting: talk to me after you run one a single McD's by yourself and then you'll be able to convince me that a programmer should get paid more.

Dealing with people is hard. Dealing with short term employees is harder. Dealing with people who don't have skills to work higher up the employment chain is even harder. Doing it through two levels of surly middle management would give me an ulcer.

So are there multi-McD's owning entrepreneurs who make more money than me? Hell yes. And they deserve every penny. It's a harder than sitting down in an Aeron chair, staring at 30" monitor and trying not to drip the condensation from your iced coffee on your MacBook Pro.

[dstorrs]

You do realize that the two of you are in violent agreement, right?

You're both saying that the owner of the McD's will earn more money than the programmer, and that this is absolutely fair and reasonable.

[HilbertSpace]

When I was an MBA prof, one of my students was running a Wendy's, in Columbus! He explained some of the opportunity: Watch staffing CAREFULLY. To do this, more than once a day, watch the weather, various public events, say, a high school football game, or anything and everything else that can affect traffic, Then staff accordingly.

If are one person short on a shift, then lose revenue. One person long, then waste money. Getting the staffing right, for each shift, for the year, is a LOT of money -- add it up yourself.

Net, there's a LOT of difference between running a good fast food restaurant and not. So, someone who knows how to run 10 such restaurants can be getting annual cash income over $1 million a year, with a VERY stable job, where they can't be fired and where they can bring their children into the business. Go to a yacht club, and it is mostly such people you will find.

The blunt point is, in the US, some of the best opportunities remain just doing well in a Main Street business.

Then, if some computing expertise can help, still better. But, generally in the US, getting away from just owning a Main Street business is a risky career direction.

[nostrademons]

That's an information problem, though, right? A McD's manager uses information and domain knowledge they have to lever up efficiencies in the business. They're every bit as much of a knowledge worker as a software engineer.

Now imagine that you partner one of those with someone who has technical skills in data mining, expert systems, and real-time data feeds. They build a system that watches local events, checks the weather feed, looks at traffic, etc, and predicts likely sales and staffing needs. Heck, it could even call the employees in to work while the manager sits on his yacht.

This lets several marginally profitable McDonalds owners suddenly start living the high life on $1M/year. The software might cost say $100K, quite a reasonable price if it saves at least that much on employee costs. There are 12,000 McDonalds in the U.S. The software engineer and his McD's partner are now head of a company doing roughly $1.2B/year in revenue, and there are maybe 10,000 newly-minted millionaires out there.

Any experienced McDonald's managers looking for a technical cofounder?

[HilbertSpace]

Nice. Then sell to Wendy's, Burger King, Domino's, and Pizza Hut.

Buried in the middle should be a little integer linear programming for the scheduling!

The 'qualitative' stuff about the impact of weather, high school events, etc. would be more difficult, and it may be that something like an expert system would work -- typically there's not enough data for some clean statistical attack so that some expert judgment might be essential.

Uh, the $1 million a year would be for someone owning 10 McD's, not just one!

Cute.

One potentially nice part of this could be the point of sales terminals: They may have been recording data on each Big Mack, fry, etc. along with time and date. Good data to have.