> When someone is grotesquely underpaid the bar is pretty low. Take median salary for example. In some places merely buying a home and having it appreciate over the course of one singular year is enough to replace an entire median salary (in that same place)
I don't necessarily agree that the bar is lower because you're paid less, because everyone feels like whatever they're paying you, regardless of whether they felt like they got a deal or not, is in exchange for the work they expect from you. When I hire a bike mechanic that charges less, I'm happy I'm paying less, but I naively still want my bike to work properly, and if they didn't match my expectation, I'm going to be unhappy with the service. Charging less doesn't necessarily change someone's expectation, but having junior in your title might give you more leeway.
> Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?
Being lucky, in the context I used it, meant that you've been able to successfully find a path of gradual and measurable or desirable evident skill advancement, perhaps with a few standout projects that prove you have those skills, and that people willing to pay you as a business operator (independent contractor or w/e, someone who has complete latitude to apply their apparent skills for money) will be compelled by (i.e I want you to make me a website because you seem to know your shit for x reason). Those projects aren't an every day thing, and you should try very hard to identify them and succeed at them, holding yourself to a higher standard than normal for your own sake.
For famous programmers, that was Doom, or hacking the PS2 or Jailbreaking the iPhone, or inventing the Masonry layout, or maybe the Boston Globe website, all things they may or may not have done while being just an employee, but that they can obviously point to and be like "I worked at ___ for 5 years and one of the cool projects was this thing where we figured out how to do responsive images before it was feasible for a major newpaper", but otherwise a ton of smaller projects that nobody's heard of. Hire me for something as a contractor and I'll apply my skills in a way that I think will solve your problem well, not the agency I no longer work for.
apologies if this comes off as a nitpick but when I read this
> I don't necessarily agree that the bar is lower because you're paid less
And then this
> I naively still want my bike to work properly
It reads like your conclusions are at odds with each other
Anyway I think we can wrap this one up just heading over to levels.fyi and comparing 2021/2022/2023 salaries for positions with 2024 salaries for the same positions.
Could you elaborate that last bit? I feel like I'm just not articulating my opinion as well as I could be, or you're identifying an error in my reasoning that I haven't caught.
Either way, I can see how those quotes seem at odds with each other, but the key word in the second is "naively". As in, I'm happy I got a good deal, but how well I expect the job to be done isn't tightly coupled to how much I'm paying for it, not often anyway. I as a software developer of an identical caliber to some other arbitrary person applying for the same job might ask for some amount less, but it doesn't mean I'll be expected to do any less than what they were hiring someone for.
If the person I got a deal on to fix my bike did a sufficiently terrible job, I might expand my budget, or I might attribute it to a careless person. I might expect similar results because I'm not hiring the dealership to do a repair, instead I'm hiring a smaller shop in a cheaper area, but ideally I still get an oil change.
None of this is categorically true of course, but it's just an attempt at articulating that everyone feels like whatever they're paying, it's enough to have the output be. I guess it's important that the work be categorically similar, like I'm not going to pay $40/hr for a junior boot camp dev and hope they'll design a data center for me.
I don't necessarily agree that the bar is lower because you're paid less, because everyone feels like whatever they're paying you, regardless of whether they felt like they got a deal or not, is in exchange for the work they expect from you. When I hire a bike mechanic that charges less, I'm happy I'm paying less, but I naively still want my bike to work properly, and if they didn't match my expectation, I'm going to be unhappy with the service. Charging less doesn't necessarily change someone's expectation, but having junior in your title might give you more leeway.
> Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?
Being lucky, in the context I used it, meant that you've been able to successfully find a path of gradual and measurable or desirable evident skill advancement, perhaps with a few standout projects that prove you have those skills, and that people willing to pay you as a business operator (independent contractor or w/e, someone who has complete latitude to apply their apparent skills for money) will be compelled by (i.e I want you to make me a website because you seem to know your shit for x reason). Those projects aren't an every day thing, and you should try very hard to identify them and succeed at them, holding yourself to a higher standard than normal for your own sake.
For famous programmers, that was Doom, or hacking the PS2 or Jailbreaking the iPhone, or inventing the Masonry layout, or maybe the Boston Globe website, all things they may or may not have done while being just an employee, but that they can obviously point to and be like "I worked at ___ for 5 years and one of the cool projects was this thing where we figured out how to do responsive images before it was feasible for a major newpaper", but otherwise a ton of smaller projects that nobody's heard of. Hire me for something as a contractor and I'll apply my skills in a way that I think will solve your problem well, not the agency I no longer work for.