Looking at the data summarized in [1], the compensation for 5 people was 20% of total expenses in 2022 while "Other Salaries and Wages" was 70%. Annual contributions of $3.5M is pretty robust. Comparing with, for example, Girls Who Code (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/300...), the compensation does not seem to be excessive.
As another person commented this may be a case of spreading the org too thin. Couldn't they have pivoted with just a focus on the US rather than 147 countries and not shut the whole thing down?
> But a better question might be what should comp look like for non-profits?
I've looked into this a bit. The true answer is extremely unclear.
General public has a mentality that if you work at a non-profit you should give everything to the cause including your salary.
This only gets the most loyal people to the cause, but just because you're loyal and willing to work a lot doesn't mean you're effective. What about those people who are actually effective but demand a higher salary? And honestly speaking, they deserve it.
So if you're unwilling to compensate at a level even close to industry your talent pool shrinks really fast, and many times, smaller than those who are effective.
Well, clearly the leaders at Women Who Code were not effective despite fairly high comp, otherwise rhey wouldnt be closing.
I get the talent pool shrinks. I still believe that you should be able to find an intersection between the subsets.
I don't think giving up salary entirely is the right move, but it does seem a bit hypocritical for almost your entire org to be volunteers then shut down the entire org because you don't have options but still collect your salary. I don't have any details on the specifics but I find it hard to believe that the org can't make some adjustments (unless leadership dug a deep hole) and that none of the volunteers already in the org couldn't be trained to fill the role. We're talking about a non-profit, not a Fortune 500 company. It's like selling girl scout cookies rather than used cars - it's much easier to get donations than real selling.
One model could be to run the non-profit as an informal coop. First spend all money on all non-salary expenses. Then divide the remaining Revenue-Expenses according to some sharing formula. So, the executive can be paid a lot, but they will have to raise money for it.
Take the point of view of the marginal corporate or family foundation donor in that structure.
“What will my $1M go towards?” The answer won’t be “a million dollars more programming [what the charity is setup to do]” but instead “a million more dollars for the executive team”.
Compensation for charity execs is necessary and proper. What matters is how much funding can go to the charitable program work in the end.
The interesting part as far as the salaries they are not obscene. Many of the people who started learning at women who code could easily be making more than the CEO by now.
Individually, they're not obscene - but they are leaders of many, many organizations at the same time. If they make an income from each of these positions, I think it would add up pretty fast.
For example, according to her linkedin, the CEO of WWC is also the Strategic Advisor of a banking company, an Advisory Board Member of 3 organizations including a university, and a Principal (?) of some LLC. Simultaneously.
Are you thinking of the board of directors? It looks like the C-level officers at that non-profit are the ones taking a salary, the board members all get $0.
It's common for members of the board to serve in similar capacities in other organizations, but not very common for the C-suite to do it, though of course it does happen.
That seems ridiculous. All while ICs are getting fired for having 2 jobs and making squat at either. I find it hard to believe that someone can hold so many positions and actually provide meaningful value to any of them.
Those board positions are likely high single digit hours per month commitments. Binge watching a Netflix show level time commitment so not exactly comparable to over-employment.
> His companies are doing fine and he's still super rich.
Tesla sales are down a lot , even as they give up margin to lower price in an effort to boost sales.
Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.
Down from super high is still high. Still profitable company with an incredibly high market cap.
> Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
Twitter's market cap hasn't change much. The perception of it losing value and being in trouble has a lot more to do with people's personal feeling (ironically expressed on X), rather than economics. It wasn't profitable when he bought it and it's not profitable now. It's still worth roughly what he bought it for.
> SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
By your own admission, profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable. Governments are the least risky clients there are.
> The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.
That he spends relatively little money on, hardly worth mentioning, either positive or negative.
> Still profitable company with an incredibly high market cap
A market cap that has more than halved in the last year. And market cap isn’t everything. Plummeting sales amid higher competition, layoffs, etc don’t paint a great picture.
> Twitter's market cap hasn't change much
Since what time period? Since after he shaved 70% of it off? [1]. It wasn’t and still isn’t profitable, yes, but it now has a far higher debt load and a drop in advertising revenues which make it worth less.
> profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable.
Oh I said rarely and barely profitable. That doesn’t imply much profit, nor potential. It has promise, yes, but clear profits… no. Sorry for the confusion. They turned a profit only for one quarter. The structural risks are due to government subsidies that can (and are) being pulled from SpaceX. Starlink has been a huge boom to its revenue, but those subsidies were part of that. His errant behavior could jeopardize additional contracts (eg his drug use).
> hardly worth mentioning
The trail of headline worthy businesses are worth mentioning because they add to his allure and image. That they have little business potential, amount to trivial cost to him, and are for vanity, makes them meaningless.
SpaceX wanted more subsidies ($900M) to build starlink. They wanted ISP subsidies to reach "last mile" customers. The reason given for the subsidy rejection: SpaceX over-promised, under-delivered (an Elon theme).
Generally, Tesla built its sales on the EV subsidy, Solar City is based on Solar Installation subsidies. Starlink was going to be subsidy-driven. Most of the factories/land for Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity were based on where the government would provide tax credits or other subsidies.
As Elon gets more politically active (and controversial) his ability to attract politicians for publicity will be scrutinized and harder to come by. Especially if he under-delivers on commitments.
You can't pull something you never gave. If you understand the RDOF bid and how Telco subsidies work you'll understand there's nothing political and talk about under delivering don't make sense because the time of the test is in the future
Tesla and Twitter are not doing fine. He's trying to get Tesla to agree to his original compensation bonus that was rejected by the Delaware courts. But that bonus was for bringing the valuation over $650 billion. The valuation has now dropped to under 500 billion
Musk's performance award included 12 tranches of stock options that were unlocked at $50b intervals from $100b to $650b of market cap, with a few other requirements. At Tesla's current price, 8 of the 12 tranches would still be unlocked.
Which occurred primarily before he took over Twitter and ran it into the ground while at the same time tanking the goodwill people had for Tesla.
It really seems unlikely one human can split themselves between so many projects and keep all of them successful unless they dis-engage from a few and let those they hired run the show (mostly how he's behaved with SpaceX). If the person is like this they likely don't deserve the sort of compensation talked about in this article.
Before you reply about the obviously lower valuation over the last few years, take a look at some comparable companies: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
The economic realities of Musk's ventures does not align with what seems to be the zeitgeist opinion of him as a person.
Your first link doesn't show what you think it does, but there are quite a number of articles about Musk losing advertisers on Twitter (and even telling them to go f themselves).
That's all fine, opinionated stuff. I too cackle at the thought of Musk walking away from this whole ordeal with nothing. My post simply corrects the factual errors in the other guy's post.
Entirely true, in fact. I've read what Matt Levine wrote. I've also read the actual proxy statement from Tesla, which Matt Levine cites and links! You too can read it, here for example, in the summary on page 17: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
That just means the owner of a single-member LLC, or sometimes the largest stakeholder for a multi-member LLC. It's not an unusual title for an LLC.
From reading her LinkedIn, it sounds like she's doing consulting and advising under an LLC instead of as an unincorporated sole proprietor. Again, really nothing unusual there, especially for the leader of a nonprofit.
Can you be more clear about what you're hinting at here? Is it that the companies listed (SiriusXM, Boeing, Home Depot, VMWare, Draft Kings) don't have money to waste anymore because they're not doing well financially?
This seems like a sensitive topic - but taking gender out of it - I do think the "teach people to code" movement has shown to be riddled with issues of premise.
Coding is a trade. We don't have plumbing bootcamps. I understand the tech literacy angle, but placing people in $200k developer jobs is very far away from tech literacy.
"Programming" as a career is in an interesting position right now. Due to demand and the job itself, you can make a lot of money, work remotely, in a medium-low stress job, without interacting with the public, solving puzzles. That's the dream right? It really doesn't get any better than that for most people. The problem is that there are two types of people: those that enjoy coding, and those that don't. The people that enjoy coding are living the dream. I know I am. I mean I have it fucking good. All the benefits above, to the max.
The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience.
There are enough people that enjoy coding to tell everyone else "yeah this fucking rocks", and that certainly draws people in, but a lot of people will be disappointed with it.
This implies that all people who don't enjoy coding are also not very good at it, which doesn't match my experience.
There is a significant cohort of professional coders who enjoy the comfortable lifestyle who write very bad code. In fact, I'd venture to say there are far more of those than people who don't much enjoy the work but still do it well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
> well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
It's amazing how many people in tech can't imagine that the same people that can grind med school or IB or big4 accounting or white-shoe law somehow can't grind the same way in tech. Newsflash: the majority of people in FAANG are grinders not "passion coders".
Personally I hate this job but I'm very good at it and it was either law school with my 98% LSAT or tech. I picked tech because reading and writing briefs all day seemed somehow worse.
> It's easy to assume you're great especially working under "passion coders" who keep stuff afloat.
i work on compilers+hardware so that's the backdrop here.
here's a real hypothetical for you (ie it happened but i'm not going to use specifics): our internal proprietary compiler is spitting out incorrect atomics instructions that deadlock our internal proprietary multi-core DNN accelerator. this incorrect code is downstream of a big, lucrative, customer's (you know which one) LLM model.
now the question: is it the "passion coder" that will solve this or the grinder?
I didn’t mean to imply that, my entire post should be caveated with “on average”. There are certainly good programmers out there who don’t really enjoy it.
I enjoy programming and write bad code constantly. Sometimes it is decent, but I am rarely completely happy with the result.
Also in day-to-day work you don't really research the best solution for non-critical systems and instead implement the first solution that comes to mind. It will mostly never be touched once it is in production.
Over time seeing systems you implemented working is the largest reward for me. You have forgotten how they work anyway, so bad code is less of an issue then. And if you do look it up again, you might be angry about your stupid past self. Meh, at least it means you know better now.
> The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience.
IMO this is the natural mood of all industries. We don't seriously expect that accountants love doing tedious work over Excel? Telling people to fall in love with work is not a healthy attitude. Only a small subset of people in any profession can fall in love with work. Everyone else must make their lives outside of work.
I really hope this is true again later this year or next year but every junior developer I know has been unable to find any employment. From my network of people that have lost jobs over the last 6 months:
20+ years experience: found a job the same month
5 to 20 years experience: found a job within 4 months
0 to 5 years experience: have not been able to find an entry level position
Of course, this is anecdotal and my sample size is only my network. But I've also seen a lot of people sharing similar experiences here on HN, Reddit, and Blind.
One problem I see for junior developers is that there is so much more churn in tech nowadays. It's just about manageable for seniors who already know the basics to keep up, but as a junior it's hard to build good basics if you've already exhausted all your brainpower learning $JS_FRAMEWORK_OF_THE_DAY.
Seniors' resume-driven-development is (even if unintentionally) making it much harder for any newcomers to break into the field.
I see this sentiment all of the time and it just doesn't register. What new "frameworks" have you had to learn in the past 10 years beyond React, Typescript, and maybe next?
Sort of. There are relatively short-term training programs that open the doors to many trades, but they're usually followed by some kind of ongoing and often years-long apprenticeship process where further skills are gradually developed on the job with the support (nominally) of responsible mentors.
The issues with bootcamps in our industry was that there's not really a mature apprenticeship program to follow them up. Eight-week bootcampers who'd never seen a for loop before starting learn a few leetcode solutions and are invited into interviews alongside people with much more training and much more experience. And many parties, not the least of which being the leetcode-focused interviewers, are responsible for that dubious process taking shape.
I really think our industry - and maybe culture at large - is plagued by a sort of anti-expertise philosophy at the moment. I’ve been learning the piano lately. In music it’s widely accepted that it takes years of practice to become skilled with an instrument. People talk about practice constantly. But it’s strange - nobody talks about that with programming. Instead we say “anyone can code!” “Just do some Python tutorials on YouTube!”. Nobody seems to want to talk about how much effort it takes to get good. We just don’t talk about practice like musicians do - and we should.
Dismissing the work it takes is harmful. We relegate practice problems (advent of code, toy projects) into some silly side thing that you would only do for fun. But it’s only through practice that we build expertise. And we systematically dismiss people who are really skilled, and burn the bridge to get that good ourselves. Nobody seems interested in the answer of how Jeff Dean or Carmack gained their skill. When we devalue expertise, we burn the ladder we would need to climb to get there ourselves.
I think we need to take seriously how hard it is to do good programming work. Algorithms, data structures, math, performance optimisation, distributed systems, graphics & shaders, large system design - any one of these skills takes years to properly master. Learning can be incredibly rewarding. But it doesn’t happen without work. We should talk about that work.
it takes years of practice to become skilled with an instrument
that may be true. but it doesn't take years before you can write code. sure, you don't know everything at the beginning, but you can apply what you learned as soon as you learned it, and you don't have to practice it over a long period before you can use it.
learning a music instrument takes comparatively more practice before you sound good. (unless it's a rhythm instrument. you can play a simple drum rhythm after your first lesson. you may take years to master drumming, just like to may take years to master programming, but you can be productive very early.
As a drummer who codes (or coder who drums), I feel qualified to comment on your analogy.
Firstly, you can be productive -very- quickly on other instruments too. Guitar and piano are both "good enough" even if you can only play 3 chords. You can then learn more as you go.
Secondly, being productive in coding from very early should be qualified with "for some definition of productive". Yes, you can write code, yes it meets the spec, but usually there's also an element of feedback in code review. Sometimes a lot of feedback.
I concur with the grand parent, we get -better- at coding with practice and experience. As long as you are getting feedback in some way.
The "practice" part might be in challenging your own solution. Rewrite it to go twice as fast. Or in half the code. Or not using that convenient language-provided data structure, or whatever.
For the record I'd describe myself as an "excellent" coder (in my field) but my drumming as "enthusiastic". Competent amateur maybe, but far from "professional".
i mostly agree, but having had piano and guitar lessons in school, and later having learned playing the irish drum on my own, i don't share that experience. maybe the teaching methods were wrong (i kind of felt the teacher expected everyone to just naturally pick up notes and play). i certainly wasn't able to just grip a chord and start playing it. that alone would have taken me hours of practice. so i never learned even just one chord on a guitar nor did i manage to get any useful sequence of notes out of a piano, whereas the drum i practically learned only from playing in live sessions, and not from practicing myself at home (although there was some of that too, but not much). all i needed was an ear for rhythm.
I think you hit the nail on the head with 2 parts of your story.
Firstly, playing with others is great fun, and a great way to learn and improve. Not to mention a good motivator. Like you, most of my improvement has been in that context.
When I was just starting out we had "bands" of beginners (guitar, piano, bass etc) and there was a sense of progress learning just one chord or riff etc.
So -how- you learn matters. Equally "starting young" is a common wisdom, but most of the people I play with now "started old". They started because -they- wanted to play, not because someone else wanted to play.
I think method also matters. In school we "learnt" recorder, but it started with "reading music". That's like explaining virtual methods in object orientated design to someone who can't write a for loop.
For both activities we learn better when it's fun.
... or a drone instrument, or an electronic instrument with a rich timbre and an accessible interface, or most idiophones, or a harmonica, (I could go on for a while)
:)
I think the OP's point was that you can't do cool things when you first start coding or even that you might have employable value early on in your journey, but that practice and experience do pay real dividends and that the field as a whole has lost some appreciation for the transformation that comes from it
i read OP more as you can't do anything until you practiced a certain amount, which i think is more like you won't likely get a job until then but not that you can't build something for yourself.
music does not get interesting until you can play in front of or with other people.
>> In music it’s widely accepted that it takes years of practice to become skilled with an instrument
Some of the music I listened to growing up, that I still listen to, was made by people who were complete neophytes with their instruments.
So I reject your premise, and I reject your attempt at gatekeeping.
>> I think we need to take seriously how hard it is to do good programming work. Algorithms, data structures, math, performance optimisation, distributed systems, graphics & shaders, large system design - any one of these skills takes years to properly master
If there are any programmer kids out there, don't listen to this stuff. I mean that seriously. This is just gatekeeping.
If you're a smart kid who wants to learn to code, you can do that, and you can be writing code in no time. If you're a smart kid who wants to play music, you can do that in no time.
Don't listen to the gatekeepers. They are compromised. They have conflicts of interest.
I'm not sure that saying a world of sophistication and capability opens up with practice, or that people have broadly lost sight of it, is the same as gatekeeping.
I was one of those kids you're calling out to and I'm glad I had the opportunity to just dig in, but I'm far better at what I do after decades of practice.
The same is true in each of the numerous other skills and crafts I've pursued in that time.
You can write code in no time, but you really are going to only become continually better at it if you embrace organized, reflective, and regular practice of some kind.
Speaking as another one of "those kids", I disagree. I became better by doing things, sure, but it was not in any sense an "organized and reflective" practice. It was... just doing things and reading about things because it was fun and interesting (and, eventually, because it paid). But not by deliberately exercising.
Regular, yeah, I'll give you that. Any skill gets better with practice.
You're 100% correct. So many stories of very successful musicians (metal guitarists, etc.) that have a knack for making music people like.
I view this thing as a "skill-reward" ratio. If you're a mediocre guitarist and your band has sold platinum records, you're a complete champion. You translated X mechanical skill to Y real-world impact and success.
If you're a superb technical guitarist and nobody listens to your music, you have nothing to contribute.
People over focus on the minutiae and lose sight of the thing itself. Musicianship over music.
I’m sorry you hear my comment as championing gatekeeping. That’s not my point at all. I want to champion spending time to slowly get good at things. Celebrate all the people who didn’t put out a hit single the first time they picked up a guitar. I think we only get really good at programming if we put the time in for years. Of course I want more beginners programming. How else would they become experts? Years of practice happen one day at a time.
I was one of those kids you’re talking about, who learned programming on my own from about the age of 9. That was 30 years ago, and I’ve gotten a lot better at it since then. Sometimes I talk to people who have less experience than I do, and I’ve seen the life go out of peoples eyes when they think they aren’t as “talented” as I am. Hah! You see me now, but you don’t see the 30 years of work I’ve put in to get here!
I think this whole “neophytes can do anything” philosophy of yours is toxic, because people assume that if you’re good at programming, you were born good at programming. If they weren’t born like that, they feel inadequate and attack themselves.
You’re wrong. That’s not how it works. It’s great that someone can throw together a website in your first week of a bootcamp. Welcome to the starting line. Maybe that’s enough to start a successful business. But that’s not a sign you’re an expert yet. And thank goodness for that! As piano is teaching me all over again, watching yourself improve slowly over years of practice is a truly wonderful experience.
An expert at programming can make a website - sure. Or they can edit the code in their web browser. Or write their own webpack, or react. Or invent a new programming language and compile it to webassembly. Or write an http2 proxy to make their page go faster. Or 1000 other weird things. How cool is that!
Why on earth would you make expertise into a dirty word? Seriously - what’s wrong with people.
He’s not talking about “smart kids”. He’s talking about the dumb dumbs who are being told “learn to code by going to our boot camp and make six figures”. Expectations absolutely have to be managed.
Apprentice plumbers (1) get paid and (2) typically spend years as an apprentice, not weeks or months. This is for a career averaging $60-80k.
Contrast that with tech bootcamps that often approximate the cost of computer science degrees and promise (or intimate) that students will jump into six figure salaries.
>Apprentice plumbers (1) get paid and (2) typically spend years as an apprentice, not weeks or months. This is for a career averaging $60-80k.
Also important to note that if you get paid (a proper wage) while apprenticing, you're quite lucky already.
There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related to becoming a chef: You're going to start by washing dishes for months if not years and no you will not get paid beyond maybe minimum wage.
> Also important to note that if you get paid (a proper wage) while apprenticing, you're quite lucky already.
>There are plenty of occupations with apprenticeships where you do not get paid until you've got your foot firmly in the hallway past the door. For example, anything related
A good friend of mine was an apprentice union welder when we were younger. His hourly wage was quite good at that time, easily comparable to my tech wage with around the same experience. However, because of the union seniority, whenever there were work shortages, he was the first one cut. He'd regularly spend 1/4 to 1/3 of the year unemployed.
i don't believe that washing dishes is the start of a cooks apprentice ship. the story from a dishwasher to the owner of a restaurant is not the average career of a cook. as far as i know you can start in a cooking school and then begin working as a line cook, and work yourself up from there.
washing dishes is a minimum wage job for people without any training, and they are not learning to cook while washing dishes either.
Apprentice plumbers get paid because they do economically valuable work. As someone learning to code you're not doing anything valuable so you don't get paid.
The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't. An 80 IQ person can be a competent plumber but couldn't do well in most coding jobs.
"IQ-gated?" Please, let's not be so self congratulatory.
The plumber who works on my house is easily as smart as I am. A successful software engineering career has brought me financial independence but I'm not particularly brilliant. Most of the folks I've worked with in FAANG aren't either. We're just normal people making a living during a very lucky period for a specific type of nerd.
Most people who work in engineering and science tend to be more intelligent than those who work in blue-collar jobs. Exceptions do not invalidate this general trend. The fact that most tech job interviews are questions that are as close as possible to a live IQ-test further supports this premise. There is a premium on abstract reasoning that limits the number of people who can be successful software engineers, especially at places that pay a lot (FAANG, etc.) To ignore this fact is nice sounding but generally wishful thinking.
That is definitely not true. The trades are hard as shit and dealing with the "standards" vs reality situations that they deal with day in day out is exhausting just to read.
They are hard and there are many smart people working in the trades. I am not disagreeing with this premise. It is still difficult to outright deny the general intelligence gap between those who work in manual labor/trades jobs and those who work in STEM professions. Of course there are different types of intelligence.
You're using data from 1944, based on fixed-pay government jobs, to support a claim that private sector software engineering is well-paid, in 2024, due to "IQ gating." The irony is hard to miss.
1. it’s a good study because they gave the army intelligence test to everyone who came in, so little selection bias
2. a job doesn’t necessarily pay well just because it does require a high IQ. Scientists in a research lab, professorships, academic research all likely have more intelligent people on average yet don’t pay as well as software engineering.
3. The study still shows a routine and reliable difference in average IQ between those who work in manual jobs/trades and those who work in science/engineering
Software engineering in the US is well paid, yes, partially due to economic effects and impact of software in and of itself, but it is, especially in FAANG, a profession with a very high concentration of people near the higher end of normal and above in the IQ spectrum, which leads to implicit selection criteria regarding intellectual capacities in employment.
#2 actually undercuts your argument about "IQ gating". Pay for software engineers is the product of supply and demand, and the absurd salaries clearly have much more to do with the demand side of the equation because of explosive growth in tech; if it really had to do with supply due to "IQ gating", then research scientists, professors, etc would make more.
In any event there is more recent data (1992-4) that confirms that the differential is still present. This is maybe unpleasant to confront because it's self-congratulatory and has obvious class implications, but it's also pretty obviously true.
A person with an IQ of 80 is not going to pass that test. He might get a job as a gofer, cleaner, general dogsbody, and "dude who has to carry all the heavy shit" for a plumbing contractor, but that doesn't make him a plumber.
> The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't.
Uh, what? I was with you until that part. Coding pays so well because the operating costs are low and the returns/profits are enormous for companies. Tech companies are "cheap" in a way other companies can't be. IQ doesn't really have much to do with it. I know plumbers who are technically brilliant and I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence.
> Coding pays so well because the operating costs are low and the returns/profits are enormous for companies.
Unrelated. Coding pays well because of the tight labor supply compared to the demand. Companies NEVER direct excess value to labor. Extracting surplus value from labor is sorta the whole deal with capitalism.
> I know plumbers who are technically brilliant
Also not relevant. The argument is that it isn't necessary to be brilliant in order to be a competent plumber, not that it would actually preclude you.
> I know very well paid coders who regularly say things that make me question their intelligence.
Do you think that's actually a good measure of intelligence? How are you normalizing it against the population, people you don't work with, and/or plumbers generally?
The question to ask is, "taking a random sample of persons having 80 IQ, half of whom intend to pursue a career in software and half who intend to pursue a career in plumbing, what is the relative success rate (for some reasonable measure of 'success')?"
Perhaps it's the smart tradies that like a job where they can knock off at the end of the day, and not have to think about it at all until the next day?
And not be called in the middle of the night to fix broken stuff?
That last item might not apply so well to plumbers specifically ("my shitter broke!"), but it does to most other trades. :)
> The reason why coding pays so well is because it's IQ-gated in a way that plumbing isn't. An 80 IQ person can be a competent plumber but couldn't do well in most coding jobs.
Most of the work we do is mundane. Lets not be dishonest.
I feel people implicitly massively underestimate the capabilities of someone with an IQ of 80. 10 percent of the population has an IQ of around 80 or lower. Are 10 percent of the population really so fundamentally incapable of being even a plumber with extensive training?
I think you might be over-estimating the skills of the bottom 10% (or under-estimating the skills needed to be a plumber).
The US Army currently rejects applicants who score lower than 31 on the ASVAB (roughly 92 on the IQ scale, about 30th percentile). I’m pretty sure there are Army jobs that can be done with less need for intellect than that needed to be a plumber.
I don’t think that the lowest 10% of the population is generally capable of being a plumber. They are capable of doing some of the work done by plumbing companies, but the plumbing code is lengthy, in large part because people’s lives are literally at stake and the actual plumber (the license-holder) has to keep that straight in their head, apply the relevant parts to the varied job site requirements, turn blueprints into working plumbing systems, etc.
Plumbing is a lot more than remembering “shit flows downhill, don’t lick your fingers, Friday is payday.”
people are losing their jobs at a rapid rate now due to AI. People who can’t see the trends and think AI will simply stop improving, or that humans have some intractable capacity that no machine could ever replicate is very wishful thinking.
My opinion is also shared by a lot of intelligent researchers (like Hinton). Is he deluded, as you put it?
That's just it; the "bootcamp" label is marketing. Sibling comment touches on this: the industry intentionally sells more-or-less get-rich-quick schemes. Learn coding in 10-weeks and get hired into a six-figure job.
Maybe plumbing just has the advantage of time. Its lost any sexiness it once had, if ever. And plumbers make good money!
I also think coding is not very suitable for a lot of people. It’s tedious and boring. I notice at my company there are quite a few young people who simply aren’t cut out for this. They probably got into it because it’s a well paid career but they don’t have the patience for problem solving.
- Writing a screen saver on Window NT 4. Starting the screen-saver blue-screens the computer. Rebooting + loading Visual Studio takes several minutes. After several days of this, it turned out I forgot to zero out the structure you pass into every Win32 Create function.
- Was assigned to modify some old Fortran code (never claimed to know Fortran, just got the assignment) a long time ago. Got weird compile errors, couldn't figure it out, finally just started taking things out of the line until it worked. Found out it failed if I had a line of over 70 characters. What?! Turns out some of those old things of Fortran were still around...
- Spent a week tracking down why my C++ code was my crashing, due to a variable magically changing values. I was using Curl, and one of the calls requires a pointer to long and I passed a pointer to int, and the compiler didn't complain. Got so frustrated I ended up stepping through the assembly code to see what was happening (which is how I discovered it). Not fun. (Also, the constant recompiling and dockerizing desoldered the nvidia chip on my 2012 MBP, so this bug cost me a lot of money for a new laptop, too.)
- 3D meshing algorithm isn't working. Narrow it down to a small enough mesh to print out vertices before and after in a tractable quantity. Stare at changing outputs long enough to identify the problem.
- Emscripten WASM wants to load async, but exported global function uses the WASM to do work and should not have to know the details of how the WASM gets loaded. Coerce that into working for the browser. Also needs to work on Node 20 (limitation of 3rd party package) which doesn't have fetch(). But webpack for the browser happens to convert modules that use a module with dynamic import to dynamic modules themselves, even if the import is never called due to a platform check, which leads to 'import { func } from "..." resulting in func = undefined. Aargh.
That's not even counting the reverse-engineering of OS function requirements due to incomplete documentation, API functions due to almost no documentation, and problems due to causes you didn't even know existed.
Also maybe because of the persistent lies that you see in pictures and films. Do an image search for "coding team" or something. Nobody ever shows the scruffy guys in dark rooms struggling away at a difficult task for hours on end.
Plumbers (in the US at least) appear to have well established apprenticeship systems, often run by their local unions; I've seen advertisements in a major sports facility looking for people interested in working as plumbers/pipefitters.
Adding programming to your toolbox doesn't require a $15,000 bootcamp. The unwritten agreement to these things is that you pay $15k now to get a $100k job once you graduate. The reality is that that rarely happens.
If you are at all familiar with The Trades, you know that they have the apprenticeship system, which is a hell of a lot more intense than any bootcamp.
There are several specialty domains in software development that would benefit immensely from a true multi-year apprenticeship program. That said, people tend to gravitate toward software that doesn’t require that level of commitment to make good money quickly. I don’t know that we actually know how to do apprenticeship in software, culturally.
It is why we have chronic shortages of expertise in some software domains even though they are extremely well paid as specialties.
We're agreeing fwiw. Trades treated like trades are a value-add all around, but they take time, and they aren't necessarily sexy.
The teach people to code movement, for whatever reason, portrays itself as being something everyone can and should "break into" in 10 weeks.
edit: Just realized the conflation between "get hired as a software developer for six-figures" vs literally "make learning how to code accessible for all". The latter makes way more honest sense.
I wasn't disagreeing. It's sort of "apples and oranges."
I'm a big believer in the apprenticeship system, but I have found it to be profoundly unpopular, with software engineers (in the US), as can be noted by the reaction to my comment.
I consider my software engineering to be as much craft, as it is, vocation, and I had some good mentors.
Take an intro course of classroom/lecture, then sign on as a paid apprentice and continue your classroom-style education alongside the practical/on-the-job training until you’re fully licensed.
I'm addition to the classes and apprenticeships, there are "how to fix it" videos, articles, books etc.
Low income neighbourhoods used to have a higher use of the Hays manuals for car repair. (this is something I read long ago and and I don't know if the manuals are still being published.)
Very few who learned to change their own oil and filters went on to become car mechanics.
As the sibling comment mentions, the FSM will be a much better resource for this. It's worth having a Haynes or Chilton, since they're cheap and sometimes have different approaches, but the FSM is really the best source of truth (most of the time).
Yes. The way education makes big money is through job-placement, legal compliance (food safety, sexual harassment training etc) and promises of higher pay. Certifications, credentials, upskilling, the value proposition is you'll make more money at your job. It's not about learning.
This isn't a moral argument btw, i'm making sure of it because I used to be really into edtech [1]. There's no money in education, only its commercial outcomes. Education for learning is a public good.
bootcamps cannot deliver placement at scale because the premise is flawed. anyone and everyone cannot learn to be a professional coder in 10 weeks.
Anyway, so the coding bootcamps spread like wildfire because they implicitly or otherwise promise high paying careers that anyone can do, all over the internet, in 10 weeks, for a fraction of college tuition.
I agree that anything suggesting you'll get a high-paying job as a coder (or "SWE" to sound fancy) after a short bootcamp is misleading. I've seen those before. I really feel like a proper bachelor's comp-sci degree made a huge difference for me, even though I also had to self-teach a ton of stuff.
Not sure if Women who Code made any such promises. There are plenty of lower-paying coding jobs or jobs that involve coding as a useful skill, and a bootcamp can help with that. Or, maybe someone has the CS background but not the practical skills.
We should “gatekeep” more. Modern software is terrible. It’s slow, ugly, and full of security holes. Despite this programmers are paid ludicrous salaries. It really does seem like the majority of people don’t know how to program correctly and are making out like bandits.
I was a minor supporter, in honor of my mother, who got started with coding around 1950.
It's weird... when I was growing up, the only coders I knew were women -- my mother and a friend of mine whose mother was also some kind of programmer/data analyst. Later in life I was a little surprised to find the field was overwhelmingly dominated by men. I guess it's not surprising I found this wrong at an intuitive level.
I was surprised after meeting an analytics team (consisting of software engineers, data engineers, analysts) in my local state-run health system that all of them were women -- then I learned that so were most of the engineers throughout the organization and similar organizations in the area -- overwhelmingly women, older too. Not 20 or even 30 somethings, but people who graduated decades ago. I did some more poking around LinkedIn, looking at other state run services, like our local utility companies -- where again, most of the analysts and software engineers were older women.
I knew already that there was a huge divide in salary and culture between the highly paid software engineers at coastal startups + FAANG companies and all the folks that run critical infrastructure for state and local governments, health systems, and boring enterprise companies, but I wonder if the people in those roles tend to skew older and female too.
As an aside, I've heard coworkers at my previous coastal tech jobs express sentiments to the effect that the people described above who mostly work on Windows stacks aren't real engineers, or that there are good reasons for the vast pay disparities between these critical infrastructure folks and people working on Uber-but-for-clowns or whatever, and I think it's really silly.
I work on cutting edge stuff involving LLMs for big tech. I’m paid well. My work has essentially no real-world utility as I define it - materially improving something important for at least one person in the real world.
Engineers like the ones you describe have more positive impact on the world in one day than I have had in the several years that I’ve been doing this.
I often dream about leaving big tech entirely and working solely on legacy software in an overlooked but important domain.
> I knew already that there was a huge divide in salary and culture between the highly paid software engineers at coastal startups + FAANG companies and all the folks that run critical infrastructure for state and local governments, health systems, and boring enterprise companies
If gender differences in attitudes to risk are true (at least to some extent) then the difference is explainable, e.g. startups are high risk/reward hence attract males; government low risk/reward will attract females.
"Computer" was a job, not a thing, mostly women. My mom got me into computers at a young age as well. Showed me how to plug DIP chips into a motherboard very carefully, and install an extended memory manager so we could access them. 640k baby, yeah!
Hidden Figures is probably the most well known glimpse into why women knew how to code at the start. It was considered menial and pure task oriented to actually execute out the equation.
My first manager was a woman and I was the only male in the IT department where I was interning. I think it was mostly due to typing being dominated by women, and most of the workforce in that department was data entry.
I never quite got the point of WWC. In my observation, most women who're encouraging girls to get into coding are themselves into softer roles like product or project management, despite having the environment and ability to code.
I know some very good programmers who are female, and none of them have ever mentioned being female. They just collaborate well and get stuff done. Anyone could learn from them.
On the other hand, our high school "girl in CS" poster child got into top colleges playing that angle before it was very common, and she didn't know how to code and didn't go into CS. IIRC her achievement was app GUI mockups, implemented by someone else in our class.
I've seen quite a few women coders like that and your description is consistent with my experience. Also you wont find them in WWC type avenues. Those avenues almost attract the types who like the idea of coding than the deed itself.
This is not specific to women/minority groups nor coding. It's closer to the typical "content creator"/media/influencer grift, just that these minority groups seem like a more fertile ground for this kind of person to break into than starting from scratch.
People who are good at a particular skill/craft just do it and call it a day. They don't have time to talk about the craft because all their time is spent doing the craft and making money.
People who are less good, or outright incapable of doing the craft instead try the content creation/influencer angle, where success is defined making it look like you are successful at the craft, regardless of whether you actually do it.
The odds of success in media-related roles such as content creation or "influencing" are so low that any craft will on average pay more, so if you are actually capable of doing a craft it makes more sense to do it than merely talk about it, therefore I highly suspect those who lean towards the talking angle do so because they can't actually succeed at the doing angle.
The craft can be coding/software engineering, AI, or even old-school trades like woodworking, electrical/plumbing/etc. As an example, there's a UK-based electrical contractor with a YouTube channel with quite high production value, expensive top-of-the-line tools, etc that is even selling courses/workshops about running an electrician business, and yet recently it turned out that their actual business was sinking and they had to lay people off - good on them to have the balls to admit it but it shows you the truth behind the whole operation.
In this day and age, are resources really that scarce? You can find literally anything on the web. Inspiration has to come from within you, just like discipline and motivation.
As for the community, even though Women Who Code is closing, there are plenty of others.
> Inspiration has to come from within you, just like discipline and motivation.
My experience tells me that this is quite a male way of looking at things. How many times have you heard "we need representation" from women, whether it be in films or board rooms or elsewhere. They're telling us something, role models matter more to them, for whatever reason. (In general, of course.)
If we could find out why some people need role models more then perhaps they could be helped to find that inspiration regardless of there being a role model available or not.
Innate differences in affinity for working with things vs people as an explanation for the difference in career choices between men and women, is a simpler explanation with more evidence behind it.
Yes! However it's in different places. There is a lot of talk about how we choose to represent men on screen, and what it means for the boys we raise. A lot of people have been cheering for less traditionally masculine characters. Some of my friends have been welcoming this sort of representation because it used to be so rare.
In the workplace? Some men would love to see the normalisation of male nurses, male kindergarten teachers and the like. Perhaps they're not as loud because these jobs don't command six figure salaries?
Are you talking about male feminists? They would seem to be the exception that proves the rule, especially as I made a distinction between males (who are largely masculine, by definition) and females (who aren't). Given that feminism - as much as the party line is that it's for everyone - is, certainly of late, solely for promoting women's interests without regard to or at the expense of men and boys. The notion that masculinity is toxic is not something that comes from men, after all.
Perhaps, given that there is a bimodal distribution of masculine and feminine traits across males and females, I could reformulate my statement and make it more precise: those that are of a more feminine expression of being might require or feel they require prior representation in order to give younger people in the same group the confidence to try for such a position. Males (in general, due to masculinity) do not, which is why they do not see the need for any representation (humans tend to think everyone thinks like them).
The real problem is in how both views could be reconciled - that of needing representation versus the more male view of acquiring position through competition (and thus implied competence). Hence, we have the DEI/affirmative action debate.
My own view is that competition should win over representation, but that everyone should be shown how they can compete effectively. Doesn't the history of sport - of competition - show us that every shape or skill can provide a competitive advantage in different contexts, so the key is to get a team to make those contexts arise more often and thus improve one's chances of winning?
In short, show girls how to compete and remove the need to patronise them as women. Maybe that's me being male, but I at once believe in merit and competition, and in women's ability to be effective in most roles (as I believe about men).
There is nothing in the link that you posted that demonstrates a direct causal link between NCIS and the increase in female applicants to forensic science programs? The closest thing to a claim is a handwavy "...inspired in part by..." with no substantiation whatsoever.
I've been jamming on Python & Django, and found that Django Girls has such excellent guides & tutorials - not just about web applications, but computer systems and programming in general.
Browse the site & check them out.
Has anyone experienced their events & workshops (example: "Install parties"). Sounds fun!
"This decision has not been made lightly. It only comes after careful consideration of all options and is due to factors that have materially impacted our funding sources - funds that were critical to continuing our programming and delivering on our mission. "
Resources are important, but this is a mission that so many people are so passionate about, that I'm very confused about this, especially with how sudden it appears. The WWC chapter organizers I know were blindsided by this.
I'm not sure how much funding they were getting from their partners, but one of the most tech focused on the list* was VMware who were recently acquired by Broadcom and have been going through a lot of cost cutting, perhaps this was one of the impacted areas?
* https://womenwhocode.com/about shows VMware, The Home Depot, DraftKings, Boeing, SiriusXM currently. Of those VMware is the biggest pure tech/coding company on that list (IMO).
This is pretty sad. I can never quite parse these kinds of corporate texts that sometimes speak vaguely. They mention a lack of funding and then “insurmountable challenges.” Were there other core issues or was it pretty much due to a lack of funding?
From what I've seen of orgs run by the current generation of activists they always spread themselves too thin trying to do everything. This has been an issue in all well funded ngos I've seen from local hacker spaces to Mozilla.
When you inevitably fail because you can't fix everything the activists leave and you're left with a ruin where there used to be a useful civic organization.
This also causes an issue of coherence for your funder/donors: If I donate to an organization that is focused on X that I support, but then later that organization starts spending 10% of it's time on Y which I don't support - then what?
It's like when I buy stock in Acme which produces widgets, I don't want them starting up or acquiring a doodad business. If I wanted to invest in a doodad business I would do that directly.
No idea if that's the case with Women Who Code though.
Having sat on a board of a 501(c)(3) organization before, it does indeed sound like a collapse of funding for their operating model, which is unfortunate for such a worthy mission. I've always wondered how well US-based donation-funded organizations placed in such a situation would fare with the following pitch to their donors, and would like others who have sat on more such boards for most of their lives to help me understand why funding models are so aggressively donation-driven year-to-year such that it exposes them so much to economic headline risk: everyone is cognizant of the economic precarity facing us all, how about we ask for one last donation until the Federal Reserve declares we're out of the (next) recession, we'll go into hibernation if necessary (only filing paperwork to keep the organization alive on paper, with a static web presence, and responding to inquiries with unpaid volunteers), but we'll dollar cost average the donation funds into a broad market index fund as we go into this economic slowdown on a timetable you agree to, only perform a 2% Safe Withdrawal Rate, we'll survive through this together, and once we're officially out of the recession and a year past that, only then we'll go around shaking the tin can for donations again.
It's also entirely possible that they are victims of their own success. It's no longer that unusual to see highly-technical women in very senior positions.
I've been coding since 1983, and have watched the demographics of our industry change from almost exclusively white male, to a pretty diverse lot. Some of my favorite "go to" blogs and whatnot, are run by women. Their gender doesn't matter a whit to me. They are good nerds.
Broadening the base is always an advantage. You have a larger pool of talent, from which to draw, but it's also a lagging indicator. It takes a while for the culture to establish, and the educational system to start delivering qualified candidates.
There are very few instances when "lack of funding" is not a root cause/symptom/result - it's the most common hard stop anyway. When they openly state that they could not raise money, it's okay to take it at face value.
The macro environment is not lending itself well to organizations that are not profitable or have a lot of cash on hand (for non-profits). With the overall trend in layoffs in tech combined with the difficulty in hiring - I can 100% see this being a major problem to their overall numbers leading to hard truths about fundraising.
And if lack of funding, that raises the question of why a lack of funding now. Did a regular large donor pull out? Did they decide to stop fundraising, or fail at it?
AI? ChatGPT has seriously raised the baseline for what someone can achieve in coding without formal education, plus the software tooling has gotten easier. I remember when people would take classes to set up web backend/frontend boilerplate.
It's not at all sad the movement was clearly sexist. I specifically remember rejecting a funding request from them on the basis that one day I might have a son and he would be unwelcome to learn with the group.
That's how I read it. Should be unsurprising in this tech economic environment and if some Fed watchers are correct, within the next 4-6 quarters, when the tech malaise extends to the general economic environment. When the cycle comes back in 6-10 years (unless generative AI sparks another dotcom burst sooner) and if there is demand for developers across the spectrum of experience again like the past cycle, expect these organizations to appear again.
And by the way I have been coding 20+ years and currently work as a Software Architect. The tech environment can be deeply sexist and organizations dedicated to keeping women in tech help ensure that girls have role models for future jobs.
What form does this sexism take? Favoring men in interviews over women with same or better skills? Favoring men over women in promotion and compensation decisions?
Men dominate most full-time roles. They never needed help, even when most programming was done by women. In that early era men didn't face harassment, lower pay, or isolation when they took on the job. Yet today many women still report such trouble trying to break into coding.
> In that early era men didn't face harassment, lower pay, or isolation when they took on the job.
At least 2/3 of those are not blockers to female representation:
* Women getting paid less than men isn't something that stands up well to scrutiny [0]. I'd say for most jobs I've applied to the plan by the company was to pay women as much or more than me for equivalent work. And when people bring up statistics in online debates any gap favouring men is typically a statistical artefact.
* Isolation would barely be a factor if men saw a high-paid industry they could break in to. It'd be a very secure man who turned down a $10-20k pay raise because they wouldn't have enough community. In fact, judging by the HN vibe, most male programmers are unhappy that their job involves too much community and want more WFH jobs and isolated offices.
Harassment would be an issue though; it is a constant problem. Although I'm not really sure how to compare it to other industries, a good looking woman faces harassment risk pretty much everywhere.
"Men" means every man. Sure, many men who are in full time roles, like me, didn't need help. But some did. And many men without full time roles could have used help. Where is it? Oh, that's right, how could they possibly need help when all these other people with the same genitals didn't need it...
"insurmountable challenges." That rules out funding and community engagement, since both of those can be improved. The problem must have been systemic...
A lack of funding that the board does not see a viable avenue to correct in a timeframe relevant to continuing operations is an insurmountable challenge.
Were there any warning signs of this decision? I quick look at their blog[1] doesn't raise any red flags. Who knew about this? I'm sure the community would have kept them going if they had known. Is there more to the story?
Update: apparently there had been some notice that funding was tight, and local organizers had been asked to donate, but the degree of criticality was not made explicit.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, one of their large supporters was VMware[0], which was aquired by Broadcom at the end of last year. Although I'm skeptical that the loss of a single 'community partner' would cause the whole organization to fold. There are teirs above community which presumably donate more to enjoy title[1]
VMware donated A LOT of money to causes like this and they not only made it really easy to match employee contributions, but they also had "pledge drive" style events to raise as much money as possible.
This is a part of our culture that I'm really sad to see going away.
Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm aware that VMware used to donate to a lot of causes and now Broadcom doesn't (source: I also work there :)).
My point is that I'm surprised that the loss of a single sponsor would make-or-break an organization like this.
I say this as someone that supports their mission, formerly helped run an affiliated club (shoutout EMich WiCS!) and donates annually, or used to anyway.
Given the implied trend, and companies that the org highlights as partners[2], this outcome doesn't seem very surprising.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/464...
[2] https://womenwhocode.com/about#lc-heading-5
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