skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're looking at the problem in the short term. What offering more money can do is increase the prestige of a profession, and increase the number of intelligent people going into the field.

Right now a large majority of very smart, creative people are going into medicine because they want to be challenged and most likely also want the prestige and security of a well paying job. I know more than a few very bright friends who took some CS classes in college and weren't challenged, they ended up going into physics.

Software Engineering should be a high prestige job, to better attract talent to the field, not necessarily to keep your star programmer working for you.
The problem is that when you interview you can't really judge those. At best during interview you meet a few team members for an hour each and maybe another hour during team lunch and everyone (including you) puts their best foot forward. There's no way to tell if they'll be a great team to work with or a daily nightmare.

The same goes for fun: rarely you know exactly what you'll be doing or how interesting it'll be.

The thing about money is that easy to compare. If you have 2 offers from companies that are both startups, both well funded with seemingly great people and interesting problems to solve, it's very compelling to decide based on salary, because all other aspects are hard to compare and judge before you spend a few months working at a company.
And they have it before the law comes into effect.
MySQL has a incomparable better marketing and internet presence (well written documentation and community sites).

Its success was due to illusion of simplicity and easiness + massive community of believers ^_^

PostreSQL sites is rather shy comparing to them.
Thank you. Great points, and gives me a good starting point.
As a programmer bonus and perks are definitely incentives, but a nice steady "I love your work" kind of vibe is a great way to keep me in my job.
I suppose this refers to us (and our Will the real programmers please stand up post). If it doesn't, excuse our self-centeredness and kindly disregard this message.

Our salary structure is designed to select for exactly the type of people we want to attract - the kinds of people that will go through walls to bend the world to their will, for some deeply ingrained reason unknown to anyone but them. For people like that, we pay an incredibly high salary that they're unlikely to find anywhere else (2.25% of everyone's contribution on the high end). If you're the type of person who wants to change the world and have a shot of building a one billion dollar business while doing it, you're unlikely to find a higher compensation anywhere other than choosing to start your own business.

If you're interested in having a stable, $200K job, RethinkDB is not for you. Neither of these choices is better or worse, simply different. It's a question of temperament. We weren't complaining, we were working to recruit great programmers who are driven to change the world. This is exactly what the post accomplished.
I'm talking about much more infrastructure than just broadband. They have good public health-care systems, public transportation systems, etc. --- not just good intentions, but good results. What reason is there to believe that they won't do public broadband just as well?
That's what I concluded too! If you raise industry standard average pay it's just going to attract even more incompetent people and therefore the flood of applications from non-programmers will increase.
I do (but I'm not sure I can talk numbers.)

Honestly: I like that it means I don't have to muck around with configurations, the fact that downtime is out of my control is frustrating, but at the same time, if I were running things, there would be more downtime due to mistakes I/my fellow developers make. Datastore latency is something of a painpoint, but it was something we knew going in and designed a bit for, and it also helps quite a bit that we're very read heavy in the ways that appengine wants you to be.

My friends at wolfire ran the humble indie bundle (and lots of other stuff like their blog as well), and it does well. (documented at http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-app-engine-s...)
"Drivers who may be drawn to the novelty may begin to fret over service and parts."

While Tesla certainly needs to build our a service and parts infrastructure, this will likely be far less challenging than with a normal car. This is because the vastly simplified nature of electric motors as compared to internal combustion, to wit:

"The typical four-cylinder engine of a conventional car comprises over a hundred moving parts. By comparison, the motor of the Tesla Roadster has just one: the rotor."

Such simplicity should, in theory, lead to less frequent, less expensive, and less parts-intensive maintenance.
The ethical policy you're imputing to most 'programmers' in the real world is far from the reality of it.

I regret not having applied to many great opportunities as a younger programmer because I filtered myself out, when many who are worse off never do.

Self-promotion: http://blog.codeboff.in/2010/06/25/good-programmers-are-hard...
Point taken. Thanks for pointing it out.

It's a general trend to rewrite history and present world leaders in glowing terms. The assumption is common people would loose faith if they know about their flaws.

I don't buy that. Ignorance, though bliss, isn't a solution to any problem. I would expect people to know the facts and then exercise their judgement.

I remember a slideshow a couple of days back from some startup which had a slide of a monkey saying "We don't write software for this", followed by a slide of Neil Armstrong on moon saying "This is what we write for; Humans who transcended moon and keep going higher"(paraphrasing).

The elite dumbasses at the top assume too much about common people.
An Avertible Catastrophe
Icon design, as well as logo design, deal with this normally. This is exactly why people charge you hundreds or thousands for icons and logos... things you don't really get at 99designs.
I don't know if it would work, but has anyone tried or heard of a job posting with a "name your price" salary? Similar to the "scariest pricing idea" that was on HN a while ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1279660). I'm not sure if this would improve the S/N ratio or make the whole thing more complicated - my idea of what I'm worth is probably quite different to someone else.
personal experience, we consider ubuntu as desktop class operating system.

go for debian stable releases, some of our servers have ran for over a year without rebooting/OS upgrade on Amazon EC2, or maintenance.

ubuntu is based on debian, so your transition will not be tough
I'll be 35 in like a week, but a few weeks ago I had a realization that has allowed me to make a lot more sense out of things:

There is metaphysical loneliness ("What is my purpose in life?"), and romantic/sexual loneliness ("I wish I had someone to share this with"), and and they both suck and they feel kind of similar, but don't expect one thing to fix both problems.
I'm interested to know who they are. I'm dead serious.

If "great programmers" work attitude is based on mood swing, business owner will be in danger hiring "great programmers". Cause what you just said boils down to human's mood to perform. "I'd like to do this because that's what I want to do now, I don't like to do X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z are usually "testing, documentation, and mentoring".
You mean the signal-to-noise ratio could go down, right?
That's hardly the fault of the tutorial writer. It's incumbent on the user of the code to understand it, not anyone else.
Because of a delicate power balance between Google and their partners.

Even if Google thought that those are things that need to be fixed, they can't just declare "my way or highway" to their partners because the partners have alternatives.

Another reason might be that Google is more realistic about what is easy and what is not easy to do. While from our perspective not upgrading everything to the latest version within minutes of new release can only be explained by criminal incompetence from everyone involved, maybe, just maybe, on planet Earth, those are caused by technical and managerial issues we're not privy to and therefore not fully capable of judging.
Second most important thing after judging whether you could handle being stuck in a hot office with the guy for a month.
I'm going to learn Lua for FreeSWITCH scripting. Thanks.
Upvote for being very honest.

Isn't this what happened throughout the industry? (with a very few exceptions).

This is exactly what makes my belief about "great programmers" just went out of the window: no matter how great an individual is, the fact that plenty software houses have terrible code base show something else.

People can blame the businesses, the time-to-market, the deadline or whatnot and I believe you guys.

But at the same time, are you being fair toward your profession at the same time?

If great programmers do exist, I'm expecting them to change these ugly code bases everywhere to the point where 50% of any companies out there would have good code base (and that includes unit-tests)
The only difference is in the protectionism of the other professions. Most of the barriers you mention are imaginary. Programming errors can have far worse consequences than medicine or law. I've never seen a doctor or lawyer make a rocket ship turn into the ground (Arian V) or oil pipelines explode (buggy versions of pipeline software stolen by Russia) or make airplanes refuse to execute commands ( airbus and apache FCS). They also can't destroy trillions of dollars of wealth (black- sholes and other flawed risk models, high frequency trading)
The whole "years of experience in X" thing is horribly broken and ridiculous. Because there isn't a uniform way of measuring it. It's apples-to-oranges with any one else's way of measuring it, even if you yourself were consistent within your own system. Plus every job is different. Plus, in software you can be programming for many years in a language but never at a day job -- only on home projects or (more recently) open source projects, and yet this experience wouldn't count in some people's eyes. Plus there's the whole multi-variable thing where someone with say 2 years of Ruby preceded by 6 years of Java is generally going to be a more experienced/senior programmer than someone who has 4 years of Ruby ONLY (nothing before that) -- but each person is "farther along" experience-wise depending on your particular crazy-ass assumptions about measuring experience. It's an utter joke.
It should be really innovative and self-evident service, otherwise it is impossible to convey people why they should pay attention to something other than Facebook or Twitter which are already serving them well.
Join the Sax Parsing Party
Last I checked, Apple had something like a 20% share of the market for the platforms on which those apps run. Their phone has a feature, which all other app phones share, that happens to get used far more than its competition. That doesn't make Apple a monopolist.
From my perspective: QuickBooks is easy to learn and as a founder you should have some basic grasp on bookkeeping and taxes or it will cost you later.
Do you want to Buy Bonzai ?
If you want to Buy Bonzai as gifts for your loved ones , then emperorsbonsai would be the great choce
Waking Life
Hmm, I was under the impression that senescence is a little bit degrading (= getting senile), but perhaps not...
Don't force a good habit, help it grow instead.

For example, ask them to fix bugs in a prepared project with a number of subtle errors without unit tests and comments, then another project with good tests and comments. After that, when you give them a group term project, not only will they be graded by you according to the code standards you set, but their peers will demand and expect that they write the code well.
Thanks for the idea of Assembla, I didn't know about it. At least, you pay for what you want.
Health care is dramatically less expensive in nearby Canada. Moreover, health care costs are increasing in the USA faster than any other country.

It is true that some US regulations do drive up costs -- you mentioned one. There are lots of other perverse incentives in the US system, because there are so many powerful players looking out for their own interests -- HMOs, hospital networks, drug manufacturers, politicians.

I would hate to see the usual libertarian/socialist debate ensue here on HN. I would like to challenge people who participate in this thread to not react reflexively, but go look up the actual data and understand what you're debating.

In the USA, many people who criticize single-payer health care don't have the first clue about it. They believe it's more expensive than the USA, there's more bureaucracy and paperwork, that there's less choice of doctors... all of which are false. False, as in not true. It doesn't matter what Milton Friedman says the world is supposed to be like. Or if you have to have a theoretical foundation before you'll believe data, go check out the foundational paper in health economics, "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care", by Kenneth Arrow.

That said, back to the original post, which is about broadband regulation -- again, I urge people to go look at what happens in other countries, or indeed what happened in the USA in earlier times, when economic policies were based on data and the overall good of the country, instead of ideology.

I'm not sure if I would have classified broadband as a "right" (it seems to cheapen other rights, IMO). But faced with industries that often create natural monopolies or oligopolies (telecom is the textbook example) regulation with the goal of universal service can have good effects.
Networking is a good strategy, but you have to temper it with interviewing and portfolios or it can turn into nepotism and a mushroom cloud of bad hires.

Hackathons and design contests like topcoder.com are great for employers but really bad for contestants, most of whom are left with nothing.

http://codeanthem.com might turn into something of an inverted marketplace where employers can compete for the attention of good programmers. (I'm not associated with codeanthem.com)
Irrespective of whether you believe governments should play a role, this is the wrong comparison to make. Governments don't provide the cars, they provide the roads.

Similarly Finland's government isn't proposing giving everyone computers - they want to make sure everyone has access to the infrastructure.
As an added bonus I believe there is a fine to the company for each charge back. I'm not entirely true if this is correct, or if its only partially correct however even the thought makes me smile when I think about how frustrated the company had just made me feel.
I'd take DBA if that would be the last job I ever had (leading to retirement). Otherwise it might be a career killer.

I'd take Google job if I'm fresh out of college for the sake of experience so I can get better position, salary, and wide-range of opportunities in the future.

But check this out: if there's a better place than Google and they pay better, do you not expecting Google's employees to jump ship? (for example, Facebook pays more or Facebook has a good potential to make yourself to become a millionaire)

These 3 examples are strategy to position yourself for a better future. A better future usually involves better position and/or compensation. Sometime it's not about money, but it's about power. Power to tell fellow developers that they're not that good so they have to do TDD, code-review, and help QA to test their own shit.

Yes, it's not _entirely_ about money, but at the end of the day, mostly it is about money, especially for people who can accept other negatives.
Read Laura Berk. She is an awesome researcher in child development.
Well, you'll have to offer them equivalent worth to what they're making. I left a high-paying job at a company that didn't appreciate its geeks to go to a lower-paying job whose entire staff (except for three project managers and the accountant) were geeks. The founder started the company doing websites in Perl in the 90's, and grew it into a small-scale hosting/app dev company. It's still private, it's still owned by the two original partners, and they still work their asses off every day at the company. The result is an environment that is not only geek-friendly, but geek-run.

Did I miss the large paycheques? Sure. Did I miss the stress? Or people breathing down my neck for results, a week after they said they'd get me the information I needed but never did? Or being denied my vacation pay because my previous management-approved sick days (most of which I spent working from home) were suddenly 'excessive'? I didn't miss that at all.

It isn't about offering people a better salary, it's about offering people a better package. If you only offer $60k to someone who's making $70k, but give them 4 weeks paid vacation, let them work from home three days a week, and let them expense their cellphone data plans and home internet, they'll be more interested.

Especially once you interview someone, you can sometimes figure out what kind of perks will most appeal to them. Mac fanboy? Offer to buy them a new iPhone on launch day every time one is released. You've just gone from $60k to $60.7k, but the employee is going to appreciate it a lot more, since he'll never have to budget for it again.

Does he like to travel? Offer up extra paid vacation, and then add to that $3000 of 'travel expenses' per year, for personal use. That's usually enough to fly two people anywhere in the world, return, so he and his girlfriend can take a nice long trip to Europe after you ship version 1.05 and everyone's ready to unwind. The idea that he won't have to budget for it - that he can just suddenly decide to go to Laos or Mumbai or Morocco, even if his bank account is on empty - will be appealing. It's like a 'get out of town free' card.

Tell all your employees you'll pay an accountant to do their taxes for them. It's a huge hassle for most people, and if you take that away tax season gets far less stressful.

So many programming jobs I've seen offer high salaries, but with minimal benefits. You get a stock health package, minimal vacation, and MAYBE you get to expense PART of your phone bill, if you're an admin on call. Take away all the junk that people don't want to worry about and let them focus on being geeks.

It's hard to offer this sort of thing in a job posting, but if you can lure the good people in to an interview, this is how you get them on board.
Funny how we preach "failing fast" in our startups, but we jump all over Microsoft for internalizing this concept.

Good for them for consolidating, but it honestly amazes me that the project even got this far.
Upvote for satire!
How Microsoft killed the Kin
..and yet you aren't attracting the people you want.

Hmmmm.
For starters, you could give us a link.
Firmware Auto-Updates for GridSpy
Of course we are. We just need more :)
The examples you gave are edge cases and exceptions -- relatively very rare situations. Most programming work is hum-drum, with errors being no big deal, and easily and cheaply caught and caught early. I was comparing cases "in the main" between these 3 professions. Also, by pointing out the cases that you did, you actually increased the strength of the point I was making: these 3 professions are very different and one cannot reliably draw conclusions based on similarities.

Agree programming has less barriers to entry. But the barriers to entry for doctors and lawyers are not imaginary. They're real. Are they arbitrary and "made up" via government rules? Of course, and perhaps that's what you meant. But they are real. If you willfully ignore or bypass them you will suffer real consequences to your person including fines and imprisonment.
You're right. I understand and agree with your point.

Thanks
Is anyone using Java on GAE? I love Java in general but for web dev I never found a great framework. Was considering learning Python/Django. However, the one thing about Java is that I might be able to go with Scala and/or Clojure at some point.
Doctors, dentists, and lawyers have legislated their jobs so that they can maintain monopoly through their guilds and licenses. That's why they can charge such a high rate. If programmers can get non-licensed programmers writing code go to jail, their rate would go up, too.
Misguided web accessibility: access keys
Stop suicidal thoughts | Help depressed
When Papers Quit Calling Waterboarding 'Torture'
Why don't you pay 200K for the positions and see what happen?
Looks like someone else's been playing too much Rez too.
I've read the studies you mention and I think you misunderstand the point being made. If you incentivize work such that "Bonus X is dependent on doing Y", you get worse quality creative work. If you pay a person ahead of time such that they don't have to think about any rewards while they're working, they perform better creative work. Offering a higher salary would more likely be the proper motivation for creative work.
Looks like they already do cover the midwest pretty well - they just don't do 14+ hour routes. Probably since you have to switch out the drivers (and a lot of passengers would spring for the plane at that distance).
That was retard management at its worst.
Most companies that try to do something about accessibility seem eager just to find a checklist they can go through. If access keys somehow turned up there, then they go into the website!
I work in a pretty unsexy field (MySpace apps), and there's no amount of money I could pay to my researcher friends to drop their computer graphics projects and work for me instead.
And on the flip side I've seen a lot of arrogant people on the hiring side who think a given applicant is way out of their league -- but the applicant isn't. It's just that the hiring side folks have preconceived notions, stereotypes and "goggles" distorting their judgment. So, it works both ways.
Office Space... to keep me in line and remind me that, if I don't buck up, that's where I'll end up (having to worry about putting new cover sheets on TPS reports to please 8 different bosses).
It is a very strange middle child between WinMo 6.5 and Windows Phone 7. Who knows who thought it would've been a good idea...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476110 - original, sans blog spam.
Advertising. Almost all magazines roughly bring in enough to cover printing and distribution from the cost to readers. Since they keep the price that low, they get more readers, and thus more ad revenue.

This issue had 2 full-page ads and a half-page ad, by my count. According to the rate card (PDF: http://hackermonthly.com/ratecard) that's $1300 worth of ads (though there's an "introductory advertising offer" that they probably all got). That's pretty good given how early-stage the thing is.
"unlikely to find a higher compensation anywhere other than choosing to start your own business."

Which is exactly what I did. Freelance contract programming pays the bills (and is quite enjoyable) and I'm bootstrapping a startup on the side. It's not so much for the compensation as the challenge of something new and the independence to make my own decisions.

So at least in my case, it's not your fault. You can put the most attractive job offer out there and I won't bite. I'm wondering if there are a lot of programmers like me. That would certainly reduce the supply.
Well how about the other side...how do employers take mediocre to crappy programmers and teach them to shine?
and I don't think everything a doctor or lawyer does is then thoroughly tested.

And if you fail to meet the high barriers to entry for doctors and lawyers, the likelihood that you'll make disastrous errors is pretty high.