[Jasper_]

> Software engineering salaries are not exorbitant. In fact, engineers may be consistently underpaid for the value delivered.

What about the value of those who cooked your lunch? Without them, software engineers would starve and die, so that makes them have far more value, no? Do you think that food service workers are also underpaid?

[kragen]

Consider a food service worker in Facebook's cafeteria. In an hour, perhaps they make 30 lunches, which in the best case delight 60 people for an hour: 60 person-hours of delight for an hour of work.

Now contrast a Facebook programmer, who in one hour might be able to fix a bug that has been annoying 0.1% of Facebook's 2.5 billion users, causing them to be frustrated rather than delighted for, say, two minutes a day, for the next three years before the feature gets rewritten. Maybe that sounds trivial, but if so, shut up and multiply: 2.5 million hours of delight per month for 36 months gives you 90 million hours of delight, for the same hour of work.

So, at a rough estimate, then, the gourmet hacker is 1.5 million times as productive as the gourmet chef. Maybe if I've been overoptimistic it's only a factor of 100,000 or 10,000, but it's huge. And that's how Facebook can be profitable at all despite all the shitty and stupid things they do: capturing even a tiny fraction of the value they produce makes them wildly profitable, as long as they can successfully externalize the harm they do. Some software companies don't even need to externalize their damages.

And that's why software is eating the world.

That isn't the only reason hackers get paid more than foodservice workers. No business is going to pay more for its inputs than it is forced to; that reduces its profits. Hackers also enjoy a dramatically better bargaining position than most foodservice workers, because a hacker with US$3000 has a better BATNA than a cook with $3000: the cook is going to be trying to sell $3 burritos out of an Igloo ice chest outside of concerts while the hacker can buy a laptop, bring up a couple of VPSes on AWS, and spend a few weeks putting together a useful web service, maybe get a few dozen to a few thousand users, but at any rate can easily scale to hundreds of thousands of users. The cook is dependent on someone investing a few hundred thousand dollars (in the US) to have top-quality tools and a good location. Difficult to do yourself unless your family is rich or you graduated from the Cordon Bleu.

This is purely factual reasoning, so it cannot answer normative questions like whether it would be ethically better to pay hackers more or less. It only purports to explain the chains of cause and effect in the world that give rise to that situation, and illuminate the other possibilities inherent in the current state of affairs, and how they might change.

[tomc1985]

The cook trying to sell $3 burritos "out of an igloo chest" at a concert is a lot less favorable an example of the successful, entrepreneurial, optimal software engineer that he's compared against. The cook could also start a successful youtube channel and turn into the next cooking superstar -- and you could argue that, in ideal circumstances and optimal execution, their actions have just as much or more impact as the software engineer. But few know and can execute their optimnal path and thus their (our) reality is much more mundane.

(Also I don't know where you're from that burritos might be sold out of an igloo chest, that just sounds gross)

[kragen]

There's a difference between working in foodservice and making a TV show about it. I was talking about foodservice workers. You can probably build a successful cooking channel without much capital investment, but not a successful restaurant. Starting a successful restaurant requires talent°, equipment, and land; starting a successful website only requires talent.

That's what FAANG are competing against when they hire hackers. And that's still true even though most hackers didn't apply to YC last fall, because they can sign on as employee #2 or employee #20 with someone who did. Because the other factors of production are not scarce enough to matter, jobs for hackers are abundant in a way that jobs for chefs are not. Patents, noncompetes, H1Bs, the anti-poaching conspiracy, and API keys are efforts to change that, but mostly they haven't been very effective.

(What makes you think the cook is a "he"? Both of the people I was basing that sketch on were women.)

° By "talent" I mean "strenuous and persistent effort by highly skilled people", not some kind of inborn genius. You can't start a business by sitting around thinking deep thoughts; you have to work hard. But for a restaurant, working hard isn't nearly enough, and that puts foodservice talent at more of a negotiating disadvantage with respect to investors.

[artsyca]

I'm calling bullshit on this because without the cafeteria worker the whole place would be a cockroach infested dump with moldy lunches in the fridge

It's a fallacy to view anyone's work as less valuable when contributing to the whole -- everyone's work is essential in the ecosystem even if all they're doing is unclogging the toilets of all these knowledge workers toxic turds

[kragen]

You may have replied to the wrong comment

[artsyca]

The mythical person-delight-hour

[jodrellblank]

> Without them, software engineers would starve and die

Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves, bringing a packed lunch, or surviving on an empty stomach for a few hours until they get home. Not to mention buying lunch from somewhere else or ordering delivery food if one cafe is gone.

Unless you're positing a world where all food production, farming, fishing, etc. has vanished, then software engineers are in no worse a position than chefs, cooks, baristas, grocery store employees, or anyone else.

[Viliam1234]

> Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves

I have an idea! Let's call it DevFood, and make it a requirement for everyone.

I mean, we already expect the software engineers to analyze the requirements, so we don't have to hire analysts; we expect them to test their products, so we don't have to hire testers; and we expect them to do the operations, so we do not have to hire an administrator. So tell me, why do we have to waste money on an extra guy who makes the lunch? DevFood is the future of software development!

[Tomis02]

> Software engineers are perfectly well capable of making a sandwich themselves

Their productivity would drop a bit, though. The idea is that people making food enable developers to deliver their best work.

[dv_dt]

I think both engineers and food service workers are generally underpaid.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Some engineers go around making APIs that are as fun (and slow) as doing taxes. I hope they get paid.

[theK]

People are generally capable of cooking to nourish themselves. Learning enough cooking to cook for yourself can be achieved in one afternoon. The foodworker employment market is completely based on convenience culture. The software engineering employment market is very different to that.

[pietrovismara]

>Do you think that food service workers are also underpaid?

Yes.

>Without them, software engineers would starve and die

Have you ever cooked your lunch?

[the_other]

Definitely.