[LRUG] Are coders worth it?

[Najaf Ali]

patio11 et al said so on twitter, this article misses two pretty big points:

* Venture-backed b2c companies with questionable value to society are
over-represented in tech news and the headspace of a lot of people who
write articles like this. If you build robots, write software for b2b,
aerospace, healthcare, non-profits etc you're not in the tech press much
because being in the tech press doesn't matter all that much to you or your
stakeholders.

* Developers in regular companies automate things, i.e. put people out of
jobs. If you can replace entire departments with software, *of course* that
job commands a higher pay. When you build the mining robot that does the
job half as well at a tenth the price, then yes, you're worth more than the
miner by any metric you could conceive of (apart from perhaps saltiness and
machismo).


On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 8:27 PM, Stephen Strudwick <stephen at strud.me.uk>wrote:

> Yes and no :)
>
> Some coders are not paid nearly enough, others earn more than they deserve.
>
> There is a trend of very young rails devs who only know rails and have a
> year or 2 experience
> but can earn amazing money...
>
> But they tend to know the framework very very well and for the problems
> they solve do a good job.
> However sooner or later as more people also jump on the bandwagon the pay
> for that skill set will level out.
>
> I guess for a lot of them when they have to step out of web dev into
> broader software development they suddenly come
> unstuck and build some nasty solutions. This is the learning curve to
> becoming a good dev but they are getting
> paid well to screw up which is unusual.
>
> However a good rails dev with great and diverse development background
> will make your company and be worth 5 mid
> level devs at least :)
>
> Rails development is in a bit of a bubble atm with high demand, but give
> it a few years and the market will be saturated !
>
> Stephen
>
> On 6 Jun 2013, at 17:16, Benji Lanyado <benjilanyado at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sure many of you have read this already, v thought provoking:
>
>
> http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-somers-web-developer-money/
>
> The writer (a Ruby dev) essentially, argues that he is overvalued, and
> that what he does has little meaning.
>
> Fwiw, I think he's wrong, but mostly because I think he demonstrates one
> of the things that troubles me the most about devs (I've only been one for
> a year): the seemingly permanent succession of talented, interested devs
> taking jobs they know they won't enjoy, or won't interest/challenge them,
> purely for the money. The problem, imo, is not an underlying vacuousness of
> coding itself, but rather a lack of self-worth, and not being able to see
> the wood from the trees when lotsa money is floated in front on your nose.
>
> But that's just, like, my opinion.
>
> Can we all cuddle now?
>
>
>
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-- 
Ali, http://happybearsoftware.com
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