[onion2k]

... software engineers, who have to do crazy feats of applied math, manage absurd levels of complexity, deal with ridiculous deadlines, and work on increasingly critical pieces of the global economy

Individual engineers tend not to do anything like that though. They work on tiny cogs that build up to a huge economic machine. No tiny cog is unimportant, but none of them have any real power either. Tiny cogs are replaceable.

An analogy would be suggesting people who design truck windshield wipers should earn millions because trucking is the basis of the retail and industrial economy, and without trucks everything who stop and we'd all starve. It might be true if you do a bit of mental gymnastics, but it's never going to change anything.

[eldavido]

All I'm saying is that, if you look at the number of people qualified to do this kind of work (high-end software engineering) throughout the economy, it's vanishingly small.

Personal anecdote: I'm in the process of appealing my property taxes in Cook Country, IL. The attorneys who do this regularly work on commission and charge 10-20% of what they save you. This nets them in some cases 3-5K for a day, or even half a day's, work.

I'm not suggesting there's some terrible moralistic injustice being done here. Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL. Keep in mind, huge numbers of people graduate college in the US and can barely write a coherent paragraph, let alone manipulate symbolic logic or apply the kind of structured, rigorous thinking required to write bug-free code. And then consider how much overall demand there is for it, all the things computers can be made to do, the reach, and the scale, and it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.

[onion2k]

high-end software engineering

Your original post was about the average salary engineers get, which implies you're referring to average engineers. Shifting the post to be about high-end software engineering means you should also shift to talking about high-end lawyers. You can't reasonably talk about high-end engineers who get average engineer wages compared to median lawyers. That doesn't make sense.

Only that, if you look at the sheer mental capability required to program computers, right away, this is a task that, if I'm being charitable, maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.

That's absolutely not true. Programming includes all manner of things from complex tasks like hacking on the Linux kernel or writing shaders for games, right down to making a VBScript macro in Word or writing a formula in Excel. Once you realise that you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program" in the sense of turning an algorithm in to something a computer can understand. Programming is relatively easy. What's hard is programming well, designing programs that interact with each other, and working out what needs to be programmed in the first place.

[jstanley]

> > maybe 10% of the entire human population can do, AT ALL.

> you'll see hundreds of millions of people who can "program"

"hundreds of millions" seems comparable to 10% of the population.

[speedplane]

> it's not hard to imagine a future where software devs are compensated as least as well as, if not better than, attorneys.

That future is already here. Starting salaries for attorneys at top-tier firms are higher than starting salaries for engineers at top tier tech companies, but not by much, around 10%. Once you factor in the 3 extra years it takes to get a law degree and tuition costs, it's fair to say that attorneys are paid less than engineers.

While attorney compensation at top firms grows pretty quickly every year (5 years out of school, you can hit 300k with bonus), very few attorneys last this long (average attrition is 3 years), and again, this is only the very top tier. Also, generally attorneys work far longer hours than engineers and have a much more stressful work environment.

[hiram112]

Unlike a lawyer (say top 25%) at a good law firm pushing 15 years of experience, I'm was already salary capped at about 35 years old, and can count on barely inflation-level raises for the rest of my career unless I move to management or start my own business.

At 40, a good lawyer is making partner and starting to enjoy a share of his or her firm's profits. I'm still sitting in an open office working on Jira tasks without any idea of how my company is doing because engineers are completely isolated from the financial books, even at smaller firms. I am learning yet another JS framework, and not able to network or learn anything related to the business. I'm glorified 'IT'.

The lawyer is wearing $1500 suits, flying business class to meet with clients and other attorneys, has an office and an expense account. I'm relegated to JIRA monkey tasks, and on another death march on Friday evening fixing bugs and eating "free pizza and snacks" our scrum master bought us for working another weekend.

At 45, the lawyer is now making more and more money, and respected more as he's now an experienced attorney, and can assume he will probably continue his upward path for the next 15 years

At 45, I just got replaced by some 25 year olds on H1Bs, and after doing well on several interviews but receiving no callbacks after the in-person, am researching Just For Men™ to get rid of the gray in my hair. I'll find it harder and harder to find jobs as I'm told I'm "not a great fit" for most teams, and will spend increasingly longer time periods completely unemployed, burning through savings. The jobs I do eventually get, will pay less than I earned at age 30.

At 60, the lawyer, now full partner, owns a large chunk of his firm in equity, and can work what he wants. He's made enough to take it easy, or can put in more hours and keep pushing up his salary.

I've pretty much given up as half the corporate jobs in my city were offshored or using H1Bs, and the rest are only hiring cheaper 20 somethings as there is now not much demand since the bubble just popped (again) like it did when I was 30, 40 ,and 50. At this point, I just pray I can make it to 65 and Medicare before getting really sick, and that my 401K will last me until I can take early social security at 63.

[bshimmin]

This is an incredibly glamorised version of what a lawyer's life looks like (I say this as someone whose father was a lawyer for 49 years). You're describing, by the sounds of it, a partner at a Magic Circle law firm, and you've missed out all the negatives; most lawyers' working lives are nothing like you've described, and the ones who do manage to make it to the upper echelons of the profession still have to deal with colossal stress and pressure, the kind which I doubt an expensive suit and an expense account will really do much to alleviate.

[joshuamorton]

I think you're underestimating how difficult it is to make partner at a good firm. After ~10 years, between 5 and 10% of associates will make partner.

You're comparing approximately the best possible outcome for a lawyer (makes partner at a high paying firm) with a mediocre-bad outcome for an engineer.

[leonroy]

I deal with a fair few lawyers here (in the UK) and most of them are in their 40s and 50s - freelancing between multiple firms or their own small one man firm and billing £100-200 per hour. Their businesses make money from their billable hours - if they're sick - tough luck.

Most of the bills I get are in the region of ~£500 and for that I get a 5-10 page legal document or in depth review of some semi-complex legal matter which took them a day and then some several hours back and forth of revisions - all included in that price.

Visiting their offices is far from glamorous - most are literally piled high with document boxes (a dozen easily) and their desks the same. None of them wear Rolexes or fancy suits. I certainly don't get the impression that they're making bank - just that they're doing okay, same as your average software engineer or white collar job.

The office juniors in these small legal firms do commensurately less well than that...

Now there are big city firms which doubtless do very well and where partners do better than your average lawyer - but then outliers like that are the same in any industry.

[NhanH]

At any given moment, there are at most around 500k H1B visa holders in the US, for all industries and companies. There are 90 millions working American, may be a third (half?) in white collar jobs that would employ H1b. There just straight up aren't enough H1bs to affect the job market.

I don't live in the US, for the usual disclaimer.

[chrshawkes]

I think those numbers are bogus based on my personal experience. I do live in the USA and work in tech the past 10 years.

[joshuamorton]

Those are the official numbers. In fact in 2018 it was 419637.

There are other visas (GC, as an example), but H1B are more of a Boogeyman than they deserve.

[eldavido]

I think the portrayal of the lawyer's lifestyle is a little exaggerated, but I agree with the larger point. Pay and work conditions are determined by social status as much as anything else and in the US, at least a lot of it (perhaps not the Bay Area), lawyer is a higher-status job than most.

I'm 35 and I can already feel this happening. There just isn't much of a career path if you don't go into management or own a business. Maybe at the huge companies (Apple, FB, etc), but not most, and definitely not in most geographies.

What I don't understand is why it's different in tech vs. other fields. Maybe because they're professionalized and can't be cut out? Whereas tech is more capitalistic overall and reinvents itself every 5-10 years in a way most other professions couldn't imagine? Not sure.

"Free pizza and snacks" does feel pretty infantilizing. Heading into my late 30s, I'm not game for that anymore. It's not even just the money, it's the overall approach to work, the open-plan offices, having little autonomy, little networking or visibility into the business, routinely having my judgment overruled by the latest VC-backed 22-year-old, dealing with stupid and avoidable tech debt, death marches, and cleaning up others' messes. After three failed startups, it's gotten tiresome to the point that I've decided not to work in those companies anymore, and really given a hard think to my personal career plans. Even as the executives of these bankrupt businesses have all failed upward into senior director roles at larger companies and sama and co. continue to preach the gospel of fast wealth and career growth at the latest darling run by "geniuses" 3 months out of YC.

[speedplane]

> I think the portrayal of the lawyer's lifestyle is a little exaggerated, but I agree with the larger point. Pay and work conditions are determined by social status as much as anything else and in the US, at least a lot of it (perhaps not the Bay Area), lawyer is a higher-status job than most. ... "Free pizza and snacks" does feel pretty infantilizing.

You point to two pretty important reason why lawyers continue doing what they do, and why the career path remains attractive compared to engineering, even if lawyers ultimately earn less.

1 - In general, as a lawyer, your perceived value goes up over time (gray hairs are money-makers). Whereas, in general, as an engineer, your perceived values goes down over time.

2 - A lawyer has a sense power. The legal field requires them to be independent (they are beholden to their clients, but not anyone else) and also knowledgeable on how to navigate (or manipulate) the system of rules that society has put in place. This provides some sense of power and agency. Today, even though many engineers probably "know" more about how individuals or society is manipulated, they generally work for major companies, and even those that do not don't have the incentives to properly bring such injustices to light.

If engineers were somehow incentived (i.e., make money) from outing perceived technical injustices, I suspect they would quickly eclipse lawyers in both compensation and stature.

[hiram112]

Yes I exaggerated the lawyers' career paths, but I did say we're talking about the top 25% of developers. Let's not forget the bottom 50%, and others who aren't even counted because they got out immediately after a year or two.

And from what I've seen, even in smaller cities, decent lawyers who 'make it' by mid 30s usually find a niche, and start gaining more respect, book of clients, and just generally are immune to the ageism and short careers in tech.

And exactly like you said, it isn't even about the money so much anymore as I do okay. It's that we're completely isolated from anything related to business, and that really screws us as we don't get any insight in what the numbers really are (or how much I'm billing my own customers as a consultant), how to increase sales or contracts, strategy, networking, etc.

At 40 years old, if development jobs dried up, I'd have no clue how to go out on my own because all I know is 10 different MVC and JS frameworks.

At I'm really getting worried because I do see that there are so few engineers over the age of 50. Where do they all go, since I know many can't or won't get into management?

[eldavido]

https://blog.shortbar.com/the-end-of-the-country-developer-7...

I wrote that about two years ago. There are many parallels between how attorneys and software people work which I think you recognize.

One I've brought up several times already in this discussion is that where one chooses to work -- not just how well one interviews, how hard one negotiates, etc., has a big bearing on pay. And there are many reasons why someone might choose to work in a non-FAANG (parallel: BigLaw) setting. Maybe they want to live somewhere else, they enjoy a more specialized boutique area of work, they want more lifestyle flexibility, etc. Larger point, us devs could learn a lot looking at how attorneys or other professions think through these tradeoffs.

Funny, I was talking to my wife earlier tonight about what we should aspire to. Is making as much money as possible really the goal? How much income is it worth to have a short commute and less stress? With a kid on the way in 2-3 months, I find my thoughts coming to this stuff rather often.

[jjeaff]

Comparing an annual salary to attorney's contract rate is not apples to oranges. Developer median salary is quite a bit closer to attorney median salary. Additionally, salary is not based on difficulty. It is based on supply and demand. Sure, high difficulty is going to reduce supply. But more people need lawyers than they need programmers and as mentioned above, attorneys enjoy some regulatory capture (including the extra, expensive schooling and testing required) that keeps supply low as well.