Sometimes I wonder we make too much or at least the devs at corps.... (Not a bad thing...)

But compared to everyone else like chefs, teachers, builders, scientists, etc that actually need to revert physical labor... We just push buttons all day or half the day...

Just looking over this month's income... Basically only spent 10%...

An I really worth that much... To me the work I do isn't hard... Or don't see how it connected to the bottom line...

Most of us don't make enough. Our degrees are expensive, our jobs require continuous study and significant monetary investment to remain current and relevant. We also have to live is extremely high cost of living areas if we want to be at the top of our field.

But don't worry, corporations are actively trying to reduce our compensation, and few people want to do anything to stop it, so it'll happen eventually.

@SortOfTested hmm..

Well my degree was paid off pretty much after 4yrs of work... And well it wasn't for CS... In theory I could've done the same job just graduating from HS.

At big corps feels most of the times like YAGNI... always tech that is 5yrs old.

Openshift/Docker is new... and only need some basic knowledge to stay slightly ahead of everyone else on the team.

Plan is I will today and TMR, but basically all I need is to login try setting up a project and go over some reference books to see how to design the apps, how it all works.

Biggest investment seems to just be time. And what I find is pretty much like JIT.... learn just enough when needed and just stay aware of new tech on the radar (not much these days at least for big corps?)

I'm pretty sure I'm the only one on devrant so I think most other don't code or think about work, tech outside of work... So not that difficult to stay ahead?

@donuts
When you say big corps, I lack a frame of reference. Fe, if you're an engineer at amazon, you will have 10 hour days and a serious workload just to keep current.

Enterprise? Maybe, but that's usually because most enterprises are failing to compete, and doing everything possible to commoditize labor which requires critical attention to detail, ime. Openshift is a good example; they'll pay through the nose for it, rather than learn kubernetes, and it ends up being as or more expensive than running their own DC. When it fails as an easy button for cloud migration, they'll then use "Redhat support" as an excuse for the expense.

I've been able to measure the collective contribution of my colleagues and my work at various companies, in 3 and 5x multiples to cost reduction and increased sales. If the result of my work enriches the company, it should also enrich me, and everyone else at the company.

Cutting our salaries just means that we don't see the fruits of our labor; all labor should be paid more, corporations are sitting on trillions in cash, 18 companies hold 30% of the nation's wealth and all of them are engaged in cutting liability and actively marginalizing workers.

@SortOfTested ah yes tech companies but even then I thought most people aren't doing cutting edge stuff like the cool new products/features we hear in the news.

Hardest part is just getting in. Do the technical questions they ask in interviews actually prove anything? The thing I hear is one your in, you don't use algo, ds, at least not very often.

I work for a bank so yes there a lot of maintenance, migration work so doing new dev, learning new stuff is more like an opportunity I guess.

@donuts
You have to be current or the next startup, major competitor will eat your lunch. If you're not growing, you will be let go at the organization. Even in the group I worked in where our product was fairly static, we introduced containerization, spark, kafka, apollo, several different columnar data strategies, and replaced Oracle with a robust data management strategy spanning multiple persistence and query providers, all of which tied into an expansive public api that was used by millions.

We used data structures daily; specifically behaviored lists, dictionaries, trees, etc. The algo questions are there to show, "do you have basic engineering competency?" It's important because of scale; if you're not able to tell the difference between O(n) and O(n^2) instinctively, that will translate into a high cost over a few billion calls. When your day 1 feature launch adoption hover at 30%, things have to be reasonably optimized from launch or the budget is obliterated.

I'm a spender.

I don't give a fuck.

But I see my loan as two sides of a coin:

1) work I get paid for
2) Non disclosure and compensation for personal suffering

I don't want to reach high payment levels, but number 2) is my primary concern.

To sum it up: The shit I see and I have to deal with every day is reflected in my pay.

@SortOfTested my group doesn't pick up new tech... Only when it because a standard and we need to migrate to it...

Next step is Kafka, Microservices, event driven. I've known the theory for years but never got to use it. But I guess my team isn't on the frontlines, discovering and setting the path... just following when we're told to...

@SortOfTested yes so here most devs do O(n^2) and then ask wtf why is it so slow in prod after a year.

I'm usually telling them that their design is shit, whole thing needs to be redone instead of trying to duck tape it...

But the thing is it's very hard to redesign a database with 50mil records already in prod... And I'm not the one controlling the loading or how data should be moved from hot, warm, cold states so at least your not running queries on a huge dataset....

Which is why for me learning new stuff is useless.... Its more like "I told you so" ... For the Nth time.

So yes actually a lot of the time I spend telling ppl what they **should** do and fixing things when they finally fck up... Except that I can't burn and redo it...

Even with this openshift thing... I'm just exploring it and figuring out how to get started with it... If they want to build a pile of shit on it...I can't stop them...

our work is as much about pushing buttons as writer's is about typing on a keyboard, or painter's is about dragging the brush on the canvas, or a singer's is about flapping their mouth.

that is: it's not at all about that.

our work is about thinking and solving problem. and if you ever tried to notice how few people are willing and able to solve problems, you would know we are usually not paid enough.

Nah I think devs are compensated well for their troubles: fulltime development is exhausting mentally for me personally, especially when implementing specialized algorithms or debugging. The loan is both for your continueing development and your expertise in a particular niche which results in higher loans the more specific the niche gets since its basically demand and supply.

You know who gets way too much money for what they do? Professional sports. Yes they do it for a living and have intensive training, but they're essentially just doing sports and not contributing anything to society although they get paid multiple factors of for example a doctor who spent half their life studying to help and save others.