Author here! I'm not arguing that software engineers should necessarily be paid in proportion to the end economic result of their employment. Although that's an interesting point for another article perhaps! Rather simply that companies tend to undervalue domain specific knowledge and forget how costly and time consuming it is to hire and retrain new team members. This should be taken into account when considering compensation structures to retain your top talent when considering the open market is always available to them.
Consider the question of "could you get into a bidding war with Apple or Netflix for a tenured developer?" Is there a point where another company can pay more than the economic product of the developer at the original company?
Yes, hiring and training is expensive... and the loss of domain knowledge is costly too.
There are a lot of places that aren't making that much money to be able to get to "market rate".
I'd also like to put forth that the idea of a market rate for developers across all industries is one of the things making it hard to find developers. There are more than a few new grads out there that are discounting any job that pays less than $100k/y because they believe that the market rate is that and anything less is being underpaid regardless of industry, company maturity, or locale.
Similarly, there are plenty of companies here in the Midwest who think it's ok to pay devs 50k/yr, and I want to say in the strongest possible terms fuck that. Employers who won't pay an equitable wage for devs don't deserve to hire them.
I made about $50k/y at a two different midwestern companies. I was getting paid about 2x the per capita income. I was able to buy a house with a double lot with a nice fenced lawn for $60k (no typo there, yes, $60k).
I was reasonably paid for the area. Sure, I could have been making more if I was to go to a different company (challenging in '09). I'm making more now for a different employer in the midwest.
The thing is that there are companies that don't make $100k/y revenue for the work that the devs do. There are also devs who are willing to work for $50k/y in the rural midwest (which is better than other jobs in the area pay).
To assume that those devs should be paid the same as one in SF would have ultimately meant a loss of jobs in the area as the business wouldn't be able to afford to do that.
There are plenty of places that are not the mid west that are paying more.
I'm not really sure that equitable is the right term to use here. $50k a year may very well be in line with what everyone else at a hypothetical midwestern company is making.
I think it's always important to keep in mind that current developer salaries are the result of a constrained market and not because we innately deserve it or something. Yes it is a high-skill job, but there are plenty of high-skill jobs out there that pay much less.
I spent the first twenty years of my career as a public school teacher, and the last four as a software engineer.
Most of the teachers I knew worked _literally_ twice as hard as the average software engineer I know now, even though they're paid one third as much.
And finding good teachers is just as difficult as finding good ICs. I think the ONLY difference is that it is possible for a lot more people to teach badly than to code badly. And of course that society has decided that teachers aren't worth paying very much.
Author here! My intention with "domain knowledge" point is mostly about all the non-coding stuff. Things like how your company functions, who to talk to about different issues, deep product knowledge and understanding the customers. I actually think transferrable skills grow as well, usually more on the technical side but also on the soft skills side in a generic way. I think the non-transferrable stuff is somewhat unavoidable because of the nature of products, domains, and organizations being meaningfully different.
I'm looking forward to seeing the follow up post on what sorts of ranges this philosophy turns into. Most companies that I have seen post their bands massively underpay people.
I think that from the optic of someone who is not a physicist (like myself!) it's natural to think "hey... we can't actually know that it's dark matter vs some other unexplained way that gravity works". And in fact there are many physicists working on trying to figure that out, but there is actually a ton of evidence that what we're seeing is in fact particles, and most physicists consider it to be the most likely current theory. I don't think anyone in the physics community treats anything about dark matter as a given either (or hawking radation for that matter). In fact part of being a true scientist is keeping an open mind.
I actually did a school project that was very similar for a compilers class! It was also Hindley-Minler in Ocaml and we tried to basically stuff any random features of a programming language we could into one language, and just compile it to java (because you can do anything with java).
