[cageface]

A lot of senior devs are making that kind of money not because they are domain experts but because they have been in the same spot collecting raises for a long time. Those are the kinds of people my warning was intended for and I think a lot of these people wildly underestimate how hard it would be for a bright young somebody to walk in and do their job.

I'm not denying that older, experienced programmers with strong domain skills are in demand, of course. I'm just saying that beneath that level the competition is heating up.

[tptacek]

It should cheer you substantially to realize that you have come around to what I believe Patrick's way of thinking has been all along.

[cageface]

I don't think we were in substantial disagreement to begin with. I just don't find language like Do it ridiculously better than they do. to be very useful. Certainly English superlatives have lost most of their punch at this point but for most people their best isn't going to be ridiculously better than everyone else's.

[tptacek]

Next time, read the comment carefully before fixating on a single word and starting an unproductive argument. I know it's hard; I do it all the time too.

Re-read Patrick's comment, but this time, take the Cliff's Notes with you:

* It's not enough to be better; you have to find ways to be measurably better; implied: better along axes that people who write checks care about.

* Learn to market yourself; implied; the business world is not like Github, and nobody is going to invest any effort into learning how awesome you are, because your awesomeness is not inherently interesting to most people who write checks. You have to make it interesting.

* Develop non-commodity domain expertise; implied: not only is "learning Merb" not a credible differentiator, but, all respect to Yehuda Katz who is smarter than me, it's likely that writing Merb isn't either.

* Own your company.

The fact that Patrick managed to pack this into 91 words and all you appear to have taken from it was "Do it ridiculously better" may account for some of the downvotes.

[cageface]

Were we arguing? I thought we were discussing.

Patrick's built a nice business for himself but I spent the last ten years working with some of the people that wrote the foundational research papers on computer graphics, not building bingo card generators, so maybe we're looking at this from different ends of the pipe.

[Poiesis]

Summary:

Cageface: the old guys better watch out because there's lots of hungry smart young guys.

Patio11: anyone regardless of age needs to understand how they create value and aggressively point this out unambiguously. And creating value doesn't mean solely working hard or being smart.

Cageface is cautioning to not assume more experience means higher value. Patio11 sorta did the same thing cageface did earlier and keyed in on the "60+ hours" bit. His (patio11) point is that the way to demonstrate value is not to count yourself among the young, or old, or authors of foundational research papers on computer graphics.

I've been in my position a few years now, and I have accumulated domain knowledge that is valuable to my employer. I have no doubts that someone else could come by this body of knowledge, but it would certainly take time an mistakes. If I do not make these differences obvious (measurable and visible), I fail to do so at my own peril.