By "we don't understand", you mean "I don't understand". There is no great mystery; programmers are paid as well as they are because of the amazing efficiency improvements their employers get by automating work. If you think about how much money you make your employer (or even better, talk to your company CEO or someone close enough), you'll see that in fact, programmers could be paid a lot more if they were aware of their impact.
Whether it's "fair" or not is irrelevant - you can accomplish a lot with little effort, and that's it. If you think salary should depend on effort and not impact, your employers will be more than happy to let you believe that and pocket the difference. And I'm not writing this to change your mind, but to try to mitigate further spreading of this "we are paid more than we deserve" mindset/myth. Please go to daedtech.com and start reading; you may or may not agree with everything, but you definitely need to be exposed to these ideas, they will help guide your career.
Finally, of course you should be saving some money, but don't live like a monk if you don't have to. Just be ready to adjust if something happens.
Summary: we don't understand why programmers are paid so well. If you're a programmer, there's enough of a chance that this is temporary that it's worth explicitly planning for a future in which you're laid off and unable to find similarly high-paying work.
Programmers are paid surprisingly well given how much work it is to become one. Here's Dan Luu comparing it to other high-paid careers:
My sister is currently a second-year medical resident, and "incredibly brutal compared..." feels like a understatement to me. She works 80hr weeks, often nights, helping people with deeply personal and painful issues that are hard to leave behind when you go home. This is after four years in medical school, with still at least a year to go before starting to earn doctor-level money. When I compare it to how I started programming right out of college, making more money for 40hr weeks and no on-call, I feel embarrassed.
What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well, and especially why this has persisted. People have a bunch of guesses:
Things are pretty good now, and seem to have gotten even better since Dan's 2015 post, but something could change. Given how poorly we understand this, and the wide range of ways the future might be different, I think we should treat collapse as a real possibility: not something that will definitely happen, or that's going to happen on any certain timescale, but something likely enough prepare against.Demand: as software eats the world there are far more profitable things for programmers to do than people to do them.
Supply: it's hard to train people to be programmers, fewer people are suited for it than expected, and bootcamps haven't worked out as well as we'd hoped.
Startups: big companies need to compete with programmers choosing to go off and start companies, which is harder to do in many fields.
Novelty: the field is relatively new, and something about new fields leads to higher profits and higher pay, maybe via competition not being mature yet?
Something else: I'd be curious if people have other thoughts—leave comments!
Specifically, I'd recommend living on a small portion of your income and saving a multiple of your living expenses. It's far more painful to cut expenses back than it is to keep them from growing, and the more years of expenses you have saved the better a position you'll be in. If you take this approach and there's no bust, you're still in a good place: you can retire early or support things you believe in.
If being laid off and unable to find similarly high-paying work would be a disaster, figure out what you need to change so that it wouldn't be.
(This isn't really specific to programming, but I think the chances of a bust are higher in programming than in more mature fields.)
Comment via: facebook