[sfpotter]

I think the last point is really important... how many people really want to work at a tech company? There are many other jobs that frankly provide significantly more meaning and personal gratification to the person doing them. Doctor? Teacher? Nurse? Public defender? Chef? The list goes on. I hope the tech bubble deflates permanently and allows salaries across professions to normalize so that there is more balance in society.

[avgDev]

This is a very oblivious take.

I have friends who are doctors.....their work doesn't feel meaningful. They are constantly pressured to move from patient to patient like they are cattle.

Friend is a pharmacist, she stands 12 hours a day. She he is forced to go in sick. She gets written up for being late.

Many teachers hate their jobs, they are underpaid and have to deal with all kinds of good/shitty kids.

Chef? Seriously do some snooping around subreddits/message boards for these professions. You will quickly realize how corporations can make any "meaningful" job a drag and unhealthy.

Programming can be extremely meaningful. You can create great things that help society. However, many of those projects won't pay for themselves. So, if I company wants to pay me over six figures to write some code, I will gladly take it.

Plus, I am a nerd, I like building stuff, sheds, racing sims, tinkering on bikes, cars and computers. My ability to tinker with computers, write queries and programming can allow other people to do their jobs. Imagine a health system without a computer.

[AndrewKemendo]

100% of lawyers I know hate their jobs. I can’t think of a single friend of mine that is a lawyer who enjoys their work.

I have three friends who are anesthesiologists and they are all generally meh about it. They treat it like being a mechanic.

There’s always a flip side to being a helper like a doctor too - not everyone survives surgery. The thing they don’t tell you about doing that emotional labor is that it’s poorly compensated and exhausting and so people tend to dissociate and become less and less compassionate the longer they do it just as a self defense mechanism.

[sfpotter]

My mother has been a nurse in demanding and intense units for nearly 45 years. She finds the work very satisfying and is reasonably well-paid.

I know a number of lawyers who find their work intensely meaningful and are willing to put up with the bull shit despite the challenges.

[jjlustig]

Lawyers are bimodal in this regard. Many hate the work with a burning passion. Many love the work and never want to retire. IMO, it really depends on the practice area + role (e.g., M&A work vs. civil rights work or big law attorney vs. AUSA).

[yamtaddle]

> I have friends who are doctors.....their work doesn't feel meaningful. They are constantly pressured to move from patient to patient like they are cattle.

Yep, doctors stopped being in charge of healthcare entities (hospitals, clinics) and now their work conditions suck. And not just during residency, any more.

> Friend is a pharmacist, she stands 12 hours a day. She he is forced to go in sick. She gets written up for being late.

If there's one thing that would be a shock to life-long programmers, it's how just one tiny step down the in-demand ladder (I'd write "social status", but we don't actually have any of note [doctors do, but fat lot of good that did them when the capitalists finally got ahold of them], rather, we're just in-demand) means operating under management conditions we'd find intolerable. No last-minute-notice skipping out for an hour to take your dog to the vet or whatever, certainly. That kind of shit's reserved for the top half of management, in most other environments.

> Many teachers hate their jobs, they are underpaid and have to deal with all kinds of good/shitty kids.

I don't think any teacher I know would advise anyone to become a teacher. Work environment is shit, the amount of time you get to spend on the part that's why anyone wants to do teaching keeps dropping, parents are jerks with too much time on their hands, admin's the most shockingly-stupid set of people with advanced degrees ever assembled (and a bad case of petty-dictator syndrome), pay & benefits have been slowly (or, recently, not-so-slowly) falling relative to the rest of the economy for at least a couple decades, and half the voters hate you for no good reason. Do. Not. Do. It. [EDIT: Oh, and that describes a decent school district. The bad ones are all that plus a whole pile of nightmarish crap, on top]

[giantg2]

"Programming can be extremely meaningful. ... Plus, I am a nerd, I like building stuff"

Maybe to you, but not necessarily other people. There are likely people in any role that feel the work is meaningful and fulfilling, and others who do not.

[sfpotter]

Did I say that programming isn't meaningful? No, I obviously didn't. But thanks for your hostile and blinkered response.

I can think of examples of people in my life who have these professions on either side of the coin (find it meaningful, find it a drag, whatever).

I'm a programmer and find it meaningful. I also know people who are programmers and hate it. In fact, I've also worked as a chef and a teacher. I found there to be both satisfying and unsatisfying things about each of these jobs.

Clearly, different people find different work meaningful.

Having a small percentage of the jobs in society be sufficiently well compensated is a sure path to a large number of people being unsatisfied in their careers.

[avgDev]

I'm not trying to have an argument but you've said "There are many other jobs that frankly provide significantly more meaning and personal gratification to the person doing them". I was providing a counter argument to that statement because it sounded very "the grass is always greener on the other side".

Not sure why you feel I was being hostile towards you. You seem to be really getting defensive in almost aggressive manner.

[yamtaddle]

I'm literally only doing this because tinkering on computers in high school got me skills that had me accidentally landing jobs that paid better than anything I actually wanted to do, with comically little effort. Never intended to do it as a living, don't really like it (and like it less every year), but don't want a 50-70% pay cut in middle-age, either.

[y-c-o-m-b]

Similar story here. I got into this because of video games and that accidentally turned into a career in software development. I originally wanted to get my shit together and go to med school (or in the med field at least), but got turned off by the cost, duration, and non-living wage during pre-med/residency.

I'm nearly two decades into the software dev industry now and working in a FAANG. I use "working" loosely as I've completely gone into quiet quitting mode for the last 5 months or so. I hate this job, I hate this company, I hate this industry. I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that I actually enjoyed working on a particular project and those were exclusively lone-wolf risks I took to advance myself (thankfully they paid off).

I'm only doing this to support my family. There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours. Thankfully I'm able to stave off depression with hobbies and other interests.

[yamtaddle]

> I'm only doing this to support my family. There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours. Thankfully I'm able to stave off depression with hobbies and other interests.

I've preferred working tech support. I've preferred low-end service jobs.

But those pay shit, so here I am.

I think I might really enjoy & be good at product management, but breaking in without lucking into a role at an existing employer is tricky. Keeping an eye out for opportunities—I definitely do not want to still be killing Jira tickets and fighting broken tools and bad SDKs when I'm in the last third of my career. Started out ambivalent, and have grown to hate it.

[EDIT]

> There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours.

Oh, yeah, and this resonates, in particular. If not for having a family, I'd be out already. Find something with much lower pay but a quick little well-defined, "person asks for thing, I deliver, they're happy" reward loop, ideally with as little glowing-screen time involved as possible, and go back to having, like, any energy at the end of the day. All that extra money would not be worth staying in this industry, if it were just me (also I'd have a whole lot more saved up for early semi-retirement by now if nobody else needed any of it, LOL)

[robbyking]

That's really funny, my story is almost exactly the same. I was working an hourly job out of high school and my roommate was a web developer who not only made about 4x what I did (this was 1998), but he also got to wear jeans and death metal shirts to work and play Half Life at lunch. I bought an HTML for Dummies book, built a small portfolio of skateboarding websites and was hired at his company a few months later.

25 years later I'm a still working in software (though not on the web), and my motivation for doing so has changed very little.

[yamtaddle]

Haha, mine was within a couple years of your story, even. I wonder if that still happens—kids pick up some light computer skills, accidentally end up with a tech career and find it hard to leave because everything else pays a ton worse and/or requires extensive, expensive re-training—or if that was just a span of a few years we both happened to be the right (or wrong...) ages for.

[akavi]

You seem to be conflating two different things:

1) How personally validating a job is to a person

2) How valuable the job is to society at large.

To see how those might decouple, consider Superman continuously turning a crank to provide limitless energy for society (credit: SMBC [0]). Fabulously valuable to society, extremely lacking in personal validation for superman.

In general, you'd expect salary to correlate with 2, and inversely correlate with 1, since the sense of validation is in effect part of the compensation you're getting from a job. It also seems pretty common to (IMO wrongly) think that 1 and 2 are tightly coupled: the jobs that produce the greatest societal value are the ones that feel the most personally validating. But that's just because modern society is far more complicated than our brains were evolved to handle. Identifying the actual value of a job requires following a complex chain of incentives and value production through the vast networks of businesses and organizations that comprise our world.

Sadly for those instincts, it is probably true that a programmer writing a piece of code that makes $business_process_c56_2 0.1% more efficient, which is then run billions upon billions of times is actually producing more value in net than a teacher who changes the lives of O(1000) kids over their lifetime.

[0]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2305

[sfpotter]

What's your point? We should all find ourselves alienated as we turn cranks for the rest of our lives, under the assumption that we are maximizing societal value according to some arbitrarily imposed norm which is beyond our ken and outside of our control? Sounds like a great society! I can't wait to live in it!

[sjs7007]

That's a neat comic, thanks for the link!

[ghaff]

In general, pay in other branches of engineering even is pretty skewed relative to at least software salaries in Big Tech and adjacent. That was not really true historically and, arguably, it's self-correcting to some degree. If CS/EE had been the obvious high salary opportunity among engineering majors when I was an undergrad, it's not like I was really that wedded to the field I went into--and indeed didn't really work as a mechanical engineer for all that long.

[gumballindie]

> I hope the tech bubble deflates permanently and allows salaries across professions to normalize so that there is more balance in society.

Yeah but normalisation usually involves deflating people's pay instead of increasing that of "Doctor? Teacher? Nurse? Public defender? Chef?". A very odd wish to be honest.

[giantg2]

This is actually happening already to a degree. Due to the pandemic work situation and inflation, many lower paying sectors had better wage growth (or at least less real wage loss). Not a large change, but a slight shift.

[gumballindie]

That’s would be good but i dont think the wage growth is real. Rising prices eat away any pay rise they might get. It could even be that pay is actually getting lower.

[giantg2]

https://www.epi.org/press/new-report-finds-the-lowest-paid-w...

[gumballindie]

Thanks for sharing this piece of news actually makes me happy.

But it would appear that there is effort being made to “correct” it:

> The Federal Reserve should refrain from raising interest rates too fast in the name of controlling inflation. Even a “mild” recession resulting from these actions will do significant harm to low-wage workers and their families.

[sfpotter]

You think that my desire for people to be paid relatively equally so that they can pursue what satisfies them is odd?

[gumballindie]

No, i think the desire to pay others less is. Because that’s what deflating bubbles means - dramatic drop in whatever the context is. The normalisation you are talking about means everyone will be equally underpaid. Or did you think software devs were getting paid by money taken away from other jobs and now suddenly the central government will reallocate it? If anything they’ll get paid less because there’s less tax revenue and more corporate profit.

[sfpotter]

Why do you think software engineers getting paid less means everyone will be getting underpaid? How are you deciding what the correct level of pay is?

[gumballindie]

That’s twisting my words and deflecting my question. What i said was that instead of having at least some people earning what everyone else should we will instead have everyone earning a low wage. Worse, cutting pay from software workers would mean less tax paid and less money available. The money will accrue in tax havens and banks well hidden from you and i. Also do you think that software devs are taking money away from the jobs you mentioned? Do you think the money they will loose will be magically diverted to pay raises for workers in other industries instead of filling in the pockets of those inciting this class war?