This article is in ruan yifeng teacher of science and technology lovers weekly: the 94 to see, think will give us some enlightenment, so translation incidentally practice. English level is limited, if there are mistakes, please correct.

The body of the

The original address: www.jefftk.com/p/programme…

Preamble: We don’t understand why programmers are paid so much. If you happen to be a programmer, believe that this is likely to be temporary, so it’s worth making a clear plan for the future, since you can easily get fired and won’t be able to find a similarly high-paying job.

Considering how much it takes to be a programmer, programmers can be very well paid. Here’s how Dan Luu compares to other high-paying jobs

If you want to be a lawyer, then you need to gain a high reputation and get into a prestigious school, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you still have to get a better reputation, get better grades and get into a top company. However, to avoid being kicked out, you still need to strain your nerves, which requires you to sacrifice personal time. The same goes for consulting and investment banking. Pay is proportional to the amount of sacrifice you make. (Investment banking, for example, makes more money than lawyers, but also puts in longer hours)

In terms of sacrificing personal time, medicine seems to do better. Because there are barriers and restrictions to entry in the medical field. But the combination of medical school and residency can still be brutal compared to working at Facebook and Google.

My sister is now a two-year resident, and for me it’s “very cruel…” It’s an understatement to put on her. She works about 80 hours a week, usually at night, helping people with personal and painful problems that are hard to forget after work. And that’s after four years of medical school, and it takes another year to actually make a doctor’s salary. And when I compare that to when I started coding after college and made more money working 40 hours a week off standby, I’m embarrassed.

But what makes me nervous is that we don’t really understand why programmers are paid so much, and why it will continue to be so.

There’s a lot of speculation about this:

  • Requirements: As software takes the world by storm, programmers have far more to do than the average person.
  • Supply: It’s hard to train a programmer, there are fewer qualified people than expected, and training programs don’t work as well as expected.
  • Startups: Big companies have to compete with programmers who leave to start startups, which is hard to do in other industries.
  • Cutting edge: This field is relatively cutting edge, and the new field will bring higher profits and salaries, or perhaps the competition mechanism is not mature?
  • Others: I’m curious what others think, leave a comment!

While things are good right now, and the market seems to have gotten better since Dan’s 2015 article, things can change. Given how little we know about this, and how many futures there are, I think we should be prepared for the worst: not something that is certain to happen, not something that will happen in a certain time frame in the future, but something that has a high probability of happening.

Specifically, I recommend cutting back on your daily expenses and saving most of your income. Cutting costs is far more painful than maintaining them, but the longer you save, the better off you’ll be. If you take this approach and don’t fail, you’ll be in a good position to either retire early or support something you enjoy.

If getting laid off and not being able to find a similarly high-paying job is a disaster, figure out what changes you need to make to avoid it.

(This article isn’t specifically about programming, but I think it’s more likely to happen in programming than in other mature fields.)

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