Why do we get paid so much?

I was just thinking today about why software developers are typically paid so much more than other people in similar kind of work. One reason might be because software companies generate more revenue per employee as compared with other industries.

Construction or any other engineering discipline is as complex as software, but software is unique in the sense that building software is the easy part, this is very different from the other engg. disciplines where manufacturing is the hard part. Think of construction, It is such an immensely complex task that if you don't know how it's done you'd wonder how anything even stands up. Can you imagine if we had bugs in skyscrapers? But coming back to the point, it means that constructing a building is like building a piece of software with a quality level so high that maybe only NASA can achieve. Then why don't construction people get outrageously high salaries?

The answer IMHO is standardization, the construction industry is so standardized and they have such well-defined patterns that although to a layman a building construction may look incredibly complex, to the builder it's just like putting Lego blocks together.

So that means if the vision of software factories becomes a reality, it would mean that building software would require an architect who would design the system and then junior guys just use standard off the shelf components to build it. Nirvana. Yeah but not for us,[ :)] once that happens the cost of software goes down and hence so do our  pays [:)]

So why is that the software industry has not yet mastered component based development, again IMHO these things take time, again look at construction, human beings have been building ever since they moved out of the caves, serious architecture and building techniques have taken thousands of years to be perfected, how old is our industry? about 50 years, so we have a long way to go before we reach the level of sophistication that the consstructuon industry has. Which means that we are safe atleast in our lifetimes. [:)]

Let's speculate a bit more and try to see into the future, so what will be the software industry of the next generation, my guess is bio-tech. Bio-tech is in it's nascent stages just like software was in the 50's and the 60's, but in the next few decades it's going to make a huge huge impact on our lives. And you can be sure that IIT or MIT elite will be opting for bio-tech rather than computers in about 10-15 years.

11 Comments

  • I doubt that our vocation will standardize to such an extent that the process will have the complexity of bridging loosely coupled objects - the occupation is not immutable; imagine if this were the assumption in COBOL's reign "one day we will have sufficient COBOL routines that the industry will be little more than putting these pieces together..."



    Never happened.



    Also to them who question the high salaries of programmers; well, coding a color and alpha channel transform in an object oriented application with C# and then extending over to a few others as C++, JS, CSS, PERL before finishing in ActionScript requires more intelligence than the professions of them who complain about our high pay. So sorry we STUDIED in school!

  • COnstruction people don't get paid high because it's not up to them whenever or not there are bugs in buildings... Architects are the people who do the thinking and get paid ridiculous money for that. Constructions workers are just bees.



    Besides, buildings do have bugs... whenever your elivator breaks down, or hot water suddenly gets cold... Same goes for bad design... whenever you have a bearing wall right smack in the middle of your appartment, or you have terrible piping...



    I think it's all quite alike... people who do the thinking get paid alot more than people who execute that thinking.

  • Paied so much? Maybe in USA... in Italy there are to much consultant company that don't pay so much for a developer.

  • Uh, construction people do get paid lots of money. I know lots of people who build houses that make 6 digits.

  • I think it's the other way around: there's bugs galore in most buildings but one bug in an app is something that *must* be fixed or people get angry.



    Buildings are a myriad of cracks and not-quite-square walls, a missing bolt here, too much liquid nails there. Building engineers can live with it, because they can simply over-engineer other parts to compensate. Like you build the foundations a few metres deeper than actually needed so that imperfections in the ground don't tumble the whole building.

  • In one word...



    Immature.





    The software industry just like any other new technology is currently immature, 20 years ago there was no demand whatsoever in the general business market. Now with desktops everywhere that has changed - with the advent of the internet we all know what happened with India.



    The biggest hoodwink at present is purported by the software sales industry - it is those guys/girls who are winning the money that pays your wages and they're taking home even more ;-)

  • how much do you get paid an hour? whats the total for one year?

  • how much do architects get paid an hour?

  • Sahil Malik go have a curry or something

  • we hardly get paid enough
    i am a bin man and i get paid £4 an hour and my brother Andrew gets paid £3.50 an hour, he works in a call centre.

    You only get paid alot when you are a doctor or something.

  • The software industry just like any other new technology is currently immature, 20 years ago there was no demand whatsoever in the general business market. Now with desktops everywhere that has changed - with the advent of the internet we all know what happened with India.

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