From your other replies here you sound a bit burned out. 220 is easily within the reach of devops people in the modern software industry, and certainly not just at the big-name tech companies. But you do have to work for _some_ kind of decently-funded company if you want it as a salary rather than doing your own thing (consulting etc).
Not with that attitude. If you are healthy, have people skills, and are capable of learning new things regularly then you can generally make as much as you want in this industry.
As a Sysadmin/DevOps engineer, I am expected to be an expert in some new paradigm every 2 years which I have done consistently for 25 years. Working hard and doing solid, consistent, useful work isn't enough to break through a salary ceiling.
Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.
I have a software engineering, sysadmin, and security background with 20 years of experience and I turn down opportunities of 250k+ frequently as I run my own company now which affords me more control of my time.
I have no degree and am no influencer or genius. I just never stop learning so I can be the one bringing new ideas to the meeting.
Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped.
I am no workaholic, averaging 35h weeks, but I try to learn a new skillset every month or so. If there is a gap I identify at an employer or client that will make me learn a new programming language, infra stack, or new vulnerability discovery technique, my hand always goes up first.
People are willing to pay more to those willing to run ahead into the dark and document a path for everyone else once they figure it out.
I know others who are more do-what-they-are-asked personalities, who work a lot more hours, but being simply experienced and reliable has earned them 50k+/year bumps every time they change jobs with good referrals and open source projects people can reference.
"Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped.
"
You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.
You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.
I read it. It just read to me like you do not like having to constantly learn new things.
I do not need to be an expert at something new every month. I just have to learn enough to unblock high-value efforts no one else wants to take on. The problems that come up more often I get better at solving faster over time.
Not all skills are even work related, but just challenging myself. Last month I learned to solve a Rubiks cube in spare time. I will not break any records and am not an expert, but I can solve it in a minute which is good enough. I move on to the next skill.
I am not an expert at anything, but I have spent months doing a bit of everything at one point or another. I tend to identify risks most others miss from having breadth-first experience in how entire stacks fit together from kernel system calls to network packets to end user frontend javascript.
I ended up pivoting to full time security engineering several years ago as a result.
Security is in a lot more demand than devops/sysadmin these days but all sysadmins have experience in security. Something to consider.
Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.
I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.
Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.
A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk.
Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now.
Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)
> Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems
Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.
You seldom want to become an expert in a single technology. It's doable, but you're putting all your eggs in the same basket. What if the technology becomes irrelevant in 5-10 years?
Get good enough to be proficient and become a broad generalist. This is a much better route imo.
I'd never say this on Reddit, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but you're hanging out in Programmer Heaven right now, for fun, in your spare time. ANYONE hanging out here CAN definitely make a fat living in the SF Bay Area. Go out there and get rich!!! The only things I want to see you complaining about are interview loops, followed by the fact that you can barely afford a house on your $300k/year total compensation
Yes, you're right. After 25 years of mostly being treated like shit by start-ups with an average weekly work rate of 60 hours, my attitude is probably kind of bad.
Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year?
Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.
This is all a "you" problem. You have made the choice to work in shitty startups, you have made the choice to work 60 hours per week, and you have made the choice to accept jobs that would pay you below market rate.
Being a bitter old man is not the attitude problem mentioned here, being someone that refuses to see that their unsatisfactory situation is 100% due to their own actions (or rather, lack of action) is your attitude problem.
Hey man, sorry people are crapping on you here. It's an unfair world full of selfish pricks and jerkoffs who'll screw you over given half a chance, while telling themselves they're making the world a better place in the process
BUT you have the technical skills to leverage yourself into a favored position, and I'm confident you can do so if you reset your outlook and your approach. Nobody's going to pay you $300k because you deserve $300k, they're going to pay it because they're making $1M in revenue.
I used to be called sysadmin, then I was DevOps, and now I'm SRE. They're all the same thing. Search for Senior SRE on Google, and you'll quickly find jobs that pay more than $220k.
People can't just make as much as they want. There's always competition and other constraining factors. It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.
> It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.
If one's primary objective is to maximize income/money/wealth, then you should be prepared to be more flexible with the kind of work you do. There are many careers that pay more than my chosen career, but I am not interested in that work. Hell, it even applies within an industry. There are some companies in tech that have to pay a lot more to attract talent than other companies, because of their reputation, their culture, etc. You can choose to work there to make more money but it does not mean that other companies with better working conditions and more appealing products etc. should automatically match comp. Put differently, there can be many reasons why people choose one job, or career, over another.
It is unreasonable to lament that your chosen work does not pay as much as another job, and more unreasonable to expect all jobs to pay similarly.
I don't see the part where all jobs are supposed to pay similarly. I think it's fair to bring up pay differences or that your employer is paying you less. That's how people become aware and get better comp. Staying quiet benefits the employer. Hell, it might even be a good reality check for some people on here who think there are enough high paying jobs for everyone (like all the kids thinking they'll be rockstars or play pro sports) that's not how stats, economics, and competitive markets work.
My place has a large shipyard and as story I got told is that good welder lands there with a private jet, do their welding then fly to the next place. I am guessing good welders have a niche market as well.
Great story, because it demonstrates what people often fail to think about in salary: your hypothetical maximum salary is bounded by the amount of value you add to the finished product.
If you're a key component (welder) in a high priced product (ship), the builder can compensate you $$$$ and still win. So they do.
You can temporarily have unreasonably high pay (higher than value added), but eventually the market will figure it out. The only way to make outsized returns your entire career is to find a supply-limited, high-value-add niche.
> My understanding is that it's dangerous and few want to do it.
Yeah this is the part everyone is ignoring in the conversation. Many highly compensated physical labor jobs are highly compensated because of the associated risk. While being a developer (with exceptions) doesn't expose you to any physical risk.
Funny, this is my plan to get out of tech. I've been welding bicycle frames for five years (cumulative, over maybe a 10 year period). I'll probably leave tech for good at the end of the year and start a boutique bike frame company.
A decade later I sold a company and spent 3 months in Portland at https://bikeschool.com/. I took pretty much all of their classes. (Their wheel building seminar was fantastic, btw). Sadly they no longer teach welding, but the classes were fantastic. In each class you sized, laid out, machined and welded a bike. Started with lugged chromoly brazing, then chromoly fillet brazing, then chromoly tig, aluminum tin and finally titanium tig.
Unfortunately there are no bike schools in the world which have as comprehensive as a program as bikeschool did. I think they lost most of their teachers during Covid. Hoping they recover.
I ended up bringing 5 frames with me on the train home from PDX to Oakland. Over the next year I built another 15 frames for friends, then started a business building and selling custom, very durable bikes to overweight techies. It was great fun, we used to host weekend 25, 50 and 100 mile rides, nobody under 200lbs allowed. I lost $300 on every bike I made, but it was worth it.
Long story short: Go buy a couple of the cheapest throw-away bicycle frames you can. Get a brazing setup, then spend a few weeks cutting them up and learning how to join tubes solidly. Everything else is easy after that.
What is the qualify of life at work like for a crane operator? Do their mistakes cost immediate loss of life, possibly even for themself? Do they work evenings, nights, and weekends? Can they work from home, or move to a new country at a whim?
Exactly this. So many software engineers think it's an easy life in the trades or in the physical work. It pops up on here all the time, self-loathing SWEs come on in and say how terrible their manager is and how oppressive agile is. I'll be a crane operator!, they say. They make 220k! some guy told me that!
Then you tell them the realities of working in a trade. They have no seniority and get night turn. Then you tell them to make that money you need atleast 20+ hours of overtime a week. Oh, and if there's a union, you aren't getting that OT because someone with more seniority is getting it first. Then you tell them they'll be lifting and moving objects and their knees will be in significant pain by the time their 40. They'll be working in un-air conditioned facilities. That alone will eliminate most of them.
The fact is too these outliers always pop up on here. "I know a plumber that makes xxx,xxx!!!" but those are few and far between, many are business owners. The numbers don't lie. The median annual wage is 62,240 for crane operators. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes537021.htm
I was at a site after a crane collapsed seriously injuring 3 people including one guy who took a cable to the face and, as far as I know, never regained use of his eye. The crane operator survived without injury. He’s probably still making picks despite being a proximate cause for 3 of his friends’ permanent life altering injuries. So in a sense they do have crushing expectations placed on them, except these expectations actually crush someone to death sometimes.
I guess I should have worded ir differently. My problem is that responsibilities are not well defined, expectations are vague and fluid, and this basically makes it impossible to know if you're doing well or not. The requirements of the crane job are much more clear and don't have the same oppressive outcomes. And yes, software bugs can still ruin people's lives or kill them too.
"Rail employees are provided with significant time off. Generally, train crew employees have over three to four weeks of paid vacation and over 10 personal leave days. Depending on craft and seniority, these numbers can extend to five weeks of vacation in addition to 14 paid holidays and/or paid leave days,” BNSF told CNBC. “The number of Personal Leave Days was increased by 25% this year which makes it easier for employees to take time off.”
"A crucial issue in the dispute is a points-based attendance policy adopted by some of the largest carriers earlier this year. Those policies penalize workers, up to termination, for going to routine doctor’s visits or attending to family emergencies. Conductors and engineers say that they can be on call for 14 consecutive days without a break and that they do not receive a single sick day, paid or unpaid.
“All we’re asking is folks to be able to go to routine doctor’s visits without pay, but they have refused to accept our proposals,” Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) said before the deal was struck. “The average American would not know that we get fired for going to the doctor. This one thing has our members most enraged. We have guys who were punished for taking time off for a heart attack and covid. It’s inhumane.”"
So how do they get around federal FMLA requirements to fire people over the medical time?
Sign me up! A friend of a friend was a diesel electric mechanic making $85k starting 14 years ago, and no college cost. It took me 8 or more years and a masters to hit that comp as a dev. My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.
FMLA is not a get out of jail free card. You don't get paid, it has strict requirements, and has an approval process.
Ahh yes the famous friend that "makes all this money". Go ahead, sign up. No one is stopping you. "I know a guy who made billions in crypto!" Yea, we all do.
People lie like crazy about wages. The numbers don't.
> My company manages some of the rail road 401ks and they are highly compensated. And they're unionized, unlike devs, which I see as a plus.
Sure. Overtime pay is a great. Being away from family all the time, working odd hours, yea, if you can handle it, go for it, it can be rewarding for a certain type of person. But remember - OT goes by seniority in the union.
For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc. But if you don't want that, go ahead. Some people do better in those jobs.
That's diesel service. It's half of being a diesel electric mechanic. Of course that number is lower because of all the regular diesel mechanics dragging it down.
"For me? I'll be paid more, for way less hours, with way more benefits, remote work, etc."
Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.
Feel free to provide another source other than your mythical friend. If it is that high, then there aren't many jobs there.
I grew up in a blue collar household. My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.) He worked his life away to provide a better life for me. It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis.
The work is hard, the pay isn't as good. It takes way more hours for equivalent wages. You're location locked. And it taxes your body. It's not about being better. But for most, the numbers don't lie. The facts are the facts.
> Go ahead, lord over us how much better you are. I'll live in the real world where the median dev salary is $110k, the work is boring, the company screws you over, and the boss is an asshole.
Haha if you think there aren't bad bosses in the trades...well, honestly, just shows me where you're at in your life.
Good luck! It may be the best move you can make. Lots of people have found success there, you can too. I remember when I was less mature, I always thought grass was greener. Turns out, it isn't always. Go figure it out for you.
"if you think there aren't bad bosses in the trades"
I never said that.
"My grandfather died of cancer he got from working in a steel mill, my dad has bad knees from working as a laborer (now an electrician.)"
Yeah, you can get diseases working in an office, or higher risk of cardiovascular events and cancers from being sedentary.
"He worked his life away to provide a better life for me."
Sounds emotional and possibly a source of bias being that you don't want cognitive dissonance if the life really isn't any better.
"It's not about being "better." or elitism - It's just simple - cost/benefit analysis."
Yet I see none of that here.
"I remember when I was less mature,"
Thanks, really love all the backhanded insults and belittling. I bet I'm older than you (neither of us is mature based on this exchange). It's pretty shitty of you to assume my current salary is over $90k. Plenty of trades can earn that or more and not be sedentary.
It seems like you just want to argue. You seem frustrated and deeply unhappy with your current job. I was that way, for times, too, so I get it.
You need to focus on what makes you happy. I don't want to dissuade you. But think long and hard about the change. Grass isn't always greener. But it can be. It may work out, it may not. The point is, it isn't a slam dunk.
