[benjaminwootton]

I don't think expecting $100k+, benefits, telecommuting etc necessarily indicates entitlement.

Most people in finance, senior managers, doctors, lawyers, architects, management consultants etc wouldn't get out of bed for less than that, especially in a big city with high cost of living.

I think its great that techies are starting to realise their value and grab a piece of that for themselves.

[PixelPusher]

What dictates entitlement is asking or expecting something without actually having earned it.

Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They earned it.

Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts, have not.

[benjaminwootton]

Market value has nothing to do with having 'earned it' or the numbers of years that you have put in at school.

It's a function of supply and demand and the value that the individual can create.

[PixelPusher]

Well now you're arguing market value not entitlement, which I didn't say it was a bad thing.

If you're a Rails dev, yeah you're valuable and you should be getting paid that much.

However, you still have a lot to learn, and if you're asking for telecommuting and you don't even know what a thread is. That's entitlement, because you think that just because you know Rails, anyone will hire you and that you're 'good enough' to work from home.

Developers we'd want to hire don't just know Rails.

[benjaminwootton]

I am arguing that people are not asking for these packages out of entitlement.

They are asking for them out of increased awareness of their market value.

In the end the market will sort this out, and some developers will inevitably be left disapointed.

However, I think it's quite reasonable that techies of all skill levels are pushing for and often achieving the salaries and working conditions that they want.

(I really don't see how asking for telecommuting is entitled by the way. I would love to do it for quality of life and productivity reasons, but that is completely divorced from how well I rate myself etc.)

[PixelPusher]

Asking for telecommuting, equity, and time to work on other projects is ridiculous. I've gotten these requests from developers who have only done basic Rails projects.

Do you think you deserve a better quality of life than say, a teacher? a doctor? I fail to see how even comparing yourself to them is not entitlement, especially if you're not a CS major.

The whole productivity bit is crap, I've been on that side and I know it. You may be more productive, but for very selfish reasons. The business is not more productive, and you isolate yourself from everyone else.

Businesses don't generally fail because of bad tech, they fail because they're not nimble enough to adapt and test ideas quickly.

[RandallBrown]

I can't explain map reduce. I generally know what it is but I've never needed to use it or implement it.

That doesn't mean I'm not a good engineer. It just means I haven't done something before.

[PixelPusher]

That's great, I don't expect an academic explanation but just having heard of it is pretty good. That question by itself is not a deal breaker. An 'engineer' should at least know about things like data structures or just anything beyond Rails. Most interesting problems require more than knowing how to create CRUD apps.

[doktrin]

Yeah, I agree. This is one of the pitfalls of working in a fairly unstructured and nascent industry. Everyone seemingly has their own collection of miscellany and trivia that encapsulates what a Good Engineer (tm) ought to know.

[zalew]

why are you comparing a qualified doctor or lawyer to a web dev who doesn't know anything about database design?

[benjaminwootton]

I would argue that it's possible for even an average web developer to create at least a comparable amount of economic value as the doctor or lawyer.

I don't know why our own community find this hard to accept?

We're a rare species who can create massive value for ourselves or our employers. We can build great products that many would pay for, or automate away whole departments of people with our code - not that I take any pleasure from the latter.

And yet we tacitly accept that there should be a whole class of people above us who have the right to earn more because they ground it out at school for a few years?

[PixelPusher]

An average web developer in no way can compare to a lawyer or a doctor.

First of all, doctors generally save lives. And they have to go to school for at least 8 years. Lawyers, almost just as long.

How long does it take to learn Rails, HTML, and Javascript? A few months?

Average web developers are not that special. However, great engineers for whom Rails is an afterthought compared to what they know, are indeed comparable.

[zalew]

a web dev who doesn't know databases is like [some creative analogy about a doctor hurting people]

[doktrin]

It's practically impossible to be a web developer without knowing anything about databases.

Most of the topics the parent listed are significantly more complex than "knowing about databases", which implies that "database design" in this context isn't simply drawing an ER diagram and correctly identifying the purpose of a foreign key.

Given that the other topics listed include sockets, parallelism & map reduce, my guess is that "database design" might in this case mean distributed database concepts and/or sharding.