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Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

by firstfewshells on 12/27/22, 8:45 PM with 122 comments

• by syntaxing on 12/27/22, 9:58 PM

  Mech E here. The reality we’re paid less is because it’s harder to make a profit (but to be fair, MechE in tech get paid well still). Making good margins is really hard. You have one shot to do anything. Worse of all, anyone can take apart your design, reverse engineer and sell your product by 20% less because they don’t have to worry about recovering R&D. Most Americans won’t even bat an eye, they’ll just buy whatever works and is cheap and affordable to them.

• by c7DJTLrn on 12/27/22, 10:29 PM

  Hats off to just... non-engineers in general. Some of the most important people in society like nurses, teachers, and drivers get paid absolutely terribly and are being forced to fight tooth and nail just to get a pay rise that matches inflation. We tap keys on a keyboard and drink coffee in air conditioned offices (or at home) and get paid stupid amounts.

• by analog31 on 12/27/22, 11:53 PM

  In my view, it comes down to two things. First is that while programming seems easy to those of us who can do it, it's actually prohibitively hard for most people to learn -- for reasons that we don't understand. Thus, demand can't be satisfied by "just" training more people.

  Software can market itself through its aesthetic and cultural appeal, thus attracting disproportionate interest from managers and investors. A new project can produce a beautiful demo with no underlying functionality.

  I'm not sure there's a clear rational relationship between the cost of software development and the value it produces. I've read The Mythical Man Month.

  One problem with traditional engineering is that we don't have the tools to make ourselves maximally efficient, such as JIRA and Scrum. The reality of getting things physically made and tested adds some slack to our work flow. Personally I prefer that, coming from the "hardware" side. My friends who are programmers at my age work a lot harder than I do, and many are burnt out. I have the luxury of using programming as a tool without anybody managing how I do it.

• by AYBABTME on 12/27/22, 10:35 PM

  The reason software engineers make more money than other engineers is quite simple. Software scales a lot better than hardware, so a lot more money can be made with it. Thus more business are built on it, thus demand for those who can build software, thus higher pay.

  That software engineers be pampered or not is a result of demand being high for the skills. In the long term, it's not a matter of industry culture (as this wouldn't survive financial pressure under stress) but really a simple result of relative rarity in the face of excessive demand.

• by dougSF70 on 12/27/22, 9:39 PM

  Yes, but. Most real world engineers could also be software engineers too. I studied Mechanical Engineering and had to learn Fortran and Pascal as part of my undergrad. What I find strange is that some of the best software engineers are not as strong at Math as you would expect. Of course there are exceptions (and no doubt they are all here on HN!). So while real world engineers can cross the divide to become software engineers, the reverse is not the case in a lot of instances.

• by shagymoe on 12/27/22, 9:59 PM

  I'm so glad I failed the "Professional Engineer" qualification test just after I graduated. I had the worst cold/sinus infection of my life, barely maintaining consciousness during the test and losing consciousness between sections. I failed by one point with a 74%.

  Had I passed, I would have likely been stuck in mechanical engineering for life due to salary lock-in. Instead, I got an average job, learned systems admin and development on my own time and was able to transition to a sys admin position after only 2 years as an ME.

  I continued learning development and made a career as a software engineer which was an infinitely happier path for me.

• by Existenceblinks on 12/27/22, 10:11 PM

  Yeah, most of them have, in my country, called Licensed for Professional Practice while software engineers don't. If developers were to stay comply with standard quality, we would get license cancelled very fast. For example, look at how frontends don't like to talk about engineering metrics like memory / size / perf etc, it's as if this is literally a fashion industry.

• by s5300 on 12/27/22, 9:50 PM

  Going mechanical engineering in the U.S. is such an incredibly poor ROI at this point, it’s ridiculous. My observations have led me to believe MBAs presume everything can be outsourced to India or Soviet satellites.

  Unsure of where that’s going to lead us, but I know a lot of salty MechE’s who genuinely wanted to be MechE’s for whatever reasons they had, but just can’t pass up the salary increase to be had in… other lines of work - including being a simple handyman plumber.

• by badrabbit on 12/28/22, 12:56 AM

  Not a software engineer myself but I fully disagree with you OP. People get paid for how hard it is to replace them and how much they are needed not for the hard or more tangible work they do.

  There is nothing pampered about WFH or Rust vs Go. I feel like you are despising software engineers to make others look better? It is not a competition and you can praise others without putting down software engineers.

  Would you feel better if software engineers got paid a lot less as office wage slaves?

  Truth is, those fields get paid less (not always btw) because there are too many people in them vs the demand. Learning software enginetring is very hard and unpleasant for most people. Most people don't want to be stuck in frony of a computer working om intangible code either and that's why you get paid more.

  I try to get relatives to get in tech but they simply don't want to and do other things, which is fine. But it is unfair to say people who don't want to work in better paying fields (and stabilize the pay) should get paid more despite thr crowding in their field. You can still appreciate them for taking on lesser paying jobs that have more value to society and you shouldn't stop there, everyone from janitors to contractors add a lot lf societal value.

• by khaledh on 12/27/22, 9:58 PM

  Thanks and hats off to all people doing useful work everywhere. From store clerks to firefighters, from office administrators to CEOs of companies providing useful products/services at a large scale. We need each other.

  On the topic of engineering specifically, yes engineers build reliable complex systems that make the world livable. Software engineers also build the invisible bits that runs the digital infrastructure of the world. Everyone counts.

• by spicybright on 12/27/22, 10:31 PM

  Over the past few years, I've been taking driving very seriously in terms of skill development and practice.

  One ritual I've started doing is thanking my car after every drive.

  For the privilege I'm afforded by being able to drive freely unlike most of the world.

  For the car itself for holding up so reliably.

  And for the hundred+ years of engineering man hours and passion given to get where we are today.

  In any population of drivers, the effort put in saves (literally) countless lives every day. And while things like sturdy bridges and the reliability of tall buildings are obviously important, driving involves flinging your fragile body extremely fast (in comparison to normal movement) while fighting tooth and nail against physics to perform as you want.

  It keeps me humble and, as a bonus, makes me care for my car more through maintenance and cleanliness.

• by Yujf on 12/27/22, 9:40 PM

  Historically a lot of progress was made in these areas and what they are able to do is amazing, but I dissagree that it is necessarily harder today.

  Many engineers in all disciplines do things that are relatively easy and some of them also do novel things that are hard.

  I don't think that is different in software.

• by barbazoo on 12/27/22, 9:50 PM

  Let's pay respect in ways other than money too. Money isn't everything and the goal isn't to have everybody ranked by income as a proxy for how useful or how much "worth" they are.

• by simne on 12/30/22, 10:26 PM

  Thank You for warm words, I'm electronics dev by first education.

  But, I must admit, in modern tech, each day larger share get software.

  For example, because of sanctions, Russians have troubles in buy industrial chips for automobiles, and their govt decided, to accept manufacture new autos without modern safety systems - no airbags, no abs, no esc, etc.

  Military jet planes are now micro datacenters, for example, F-35 just have few racks with triple redundant computers, because they are nearly impossible to fly without software; similar thing with Russian Su-27 and all their relatives (Su-33, Su-35) - to be more maneuverable, they designed to be extremely unstable, so software constantly correct their air-dynamic configuration, also their air-dynamic configuration automatically change with speed change.

  If You prefer numbers, from ~ F-16, about half cost of military jet plane is software.

• by Waterluvian on 12/27/22, 9:39 PM

  Indeed! Programming pre-hardware is not a time of my career I want to repeat. I’m no Lovelace— I need to see my code run to know it’s correct.

• by dieselgate on 12/27/22, 8:49 PM

  Everything was built on the shoulders of giants

• by gloosx on 12/28/22, 7:04 AM

  >"real world" engineers need to be paid way more

  Why so? Sounds silly to me as a soft engineer, cause software dev is:

  1. A lot of the time – connected to the "real world" engineering, so it is just as real, modern real world and civil engineering can't function without software.

  2. A lot more abstract, so we literally build whole factories in our brains, sometimes just one or two of us while real factories are built by hundreds of men

  3. Well, a modern-day thing existing for less than a century, where real-world engineering in accumulating knowledge for centuries, essentially turning soft.

  IMO all real engineering will eventually turn software and cloud, in decades it will be possible to design real-world production and logistic pipelines just with code and abstracted robotic resources, like in factorio

• by User23 on 12/27/22, 10:15 PM

  I’m personally a huge fan of indoor plumbing and electricity. Thanks plumbers and electricians!

• by _448 on 12/28/22, 12:12 AM

  Great work is done in any field. It is just that the tech companies have a massive reach and can achieve that very quickly with very less investment. This makes them scale and create lots of hype which brings in a lot of money. Now this is the playbook of silicon valley. But there are software companies and engineers who do some amazing work but do not use the silicon valley way of generating wealth (which is mostly on paper). We never come to know about those companies and software engineers.

  Any creation for positive impact on the world, whether engineering or humanities should be applauded and paid well. Unfortunately that rarely happens.

• by lordnacho on 12/27/22, 10:56 PM

  Just take a deep breath and appreciate what it would smell like if it weren't for sewage treatment engineers.

  So much of the world would be unlivable if it weren't for inventions of the past that are no longer considered interesting.

• by heavyset_go on 12/27/22, 9:53 PM

  People would probably die if I was an actual engineer, so I'm deeply appreciative that I can enjoy infrastructure and whatnot without having to worry about it crumbling above/beneath me.

• by AussieWog93 on 12/27/22, 11:25 PM

  Non software engineers? In other words, "engineers"? (I kid, sorta. :P)

• by Phiwise_ on 12/27/22, 9:44 PM

  Allow me to openly admit I wish I was cool enough to be a real-world engineer. Not that I'm anyone of significance, but I do think it's worth generally expressing more regularly.

• by cod1r on 12/27/22, 9:37 PM

  I've had these exact thoughts in my head XD. I agree that a lot of other jobs deserve higher pay but aren't given higher pay due to economical reasons.

• by markus_zhang on 12/28/22, 4:06 AM

  I hat off to many but not all of them. At least some engineers who work in government were linked with construction corruption in my city a few years ago.

• by xyzelement on 12/27/22, 10:01 PM

  Related - when I am on a long drive, I always marvel/comment: if this trip is hard to drive, imagine what a bitch it was to build this road?

• by amelius on 12/27/22, 10:38 PM

  The economic principle that causes this unfairness is simple: the closer you are to the end consumer, the more money you make.

• by gptadmirer on 12/27/22, 9:48 PM

  Software engineer here now currently doing hobby MCU and electronics engineering.

  Being raised in Asia, I learned college level math in highschool so math here is a piece of cake.

  Also I am happy to get downvoted! Yay!

• by MilStdJunkie on 12/27/22, 10:27 PM

  If you've seen Margin Call, you know the scene I'm thinking of right now. The "I Built a Bridge" scene.

  Beginning in the mid-70s something went horribly, horribly wrong with the way capital handles risk management, resulting in "real stuff" being undervalued by orders of magnitude, since it was by nature riskier. Hence that aforementuioned scene.

  Russian-style command economies failed in some part because they lacked mechanisms for borrowing money from the future. The American system is staring failure right in the face because of its inability to quantify what future value implies. I imagine future history books will look at the two systems in parallel, the latest chapter in the ongoing story of telluric states and the thalassocracies that separate them. With all the non-nuclear states huddled underneath in their shuddering quasi-sovereignty.

  This is probably the most flame-worthy thing I've ever said on HN, so go nuts.

• by charcircuit on 12/27/22, 9:53 PM

  Don't understate how complex modern software systems are.

• by eikenberry on 12/27/22, 10:07 PM

  Why compare those of us who write software with engineers? It makes more sense to compare us to say.. composers, poets or something. Writing software is an art form and has nothing in common with engineering other than some uncreative types trying to come up with a more official sounding name.

• by Rezwoodly on 12/27/22, 10:25 PM

  What a pukey post. We get paid more because our jobs are more difficult and generally make a bigger impact. You make me sick posting this.

• by benatkin on 12/27/22, 9:29 PM

  I agree - but one reason that it's nauseating to see so much celebration of software engineers ("pampered folks") is the freedom-destroying force that FAANG is. It doesn't have to be like it is with walled garden after walled garden. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/