Is the programmer worth so much?

The documentary "Shoro's Dream" (Jiro Dreams's sushi,2011) had a very bull scene----The world's most famous sushi chef turned to his son (going to open his own restaurant) and said, "You're homeless." In the face of this, when you think about it, you will find that the father's words are not too harsh or frustrating, in fact, this is the best way for a person who is going to start a new journey.

Last October I quit my job and became a freelance writer. Writing only earned 900 dollars, but my latest work, a file on Douglas Hofstadter, has attracted two of American magazines. I got a reward of about 10,000 to 20,000 dollars, and finally I was able to get on my own. (Translator Note: Douglas Hofstadter, Chinese name Hofstadter, the author of the "set of different Walls" which matrix67 strongly recommended in the blog. This "set of different Walls" is an odd book, Stackover on the list of required readings on the programming beginner.

My plan was to sell the file and continue to write something like that. I will be greeted by a desultory mental life. I would find a topic of my own particular curiosity and deal with it all day long, until I had discovered every aspect of it. Next I would sit in a corner of the room, tapping the finished product with both depth and acrimony, and no other documentary writer would touch the subject----because I had written it dead and killed it thoroughly.

My new life began in a Monday. I'm a night cat, but somewhere I've read that writers work best in the morning. So I decided to get up early, make some coffee, and then open my laptop.

In 1958, when he was asked what intellectual training he needed for a person who wanted to be a writer, he said: "He should walk around and experience life in a crowd, because he will find writing is extremely difficult." Then he should be beaten with no mercy, forcing himself to do his best to write for the rest of his life. So he could at least start making up stories with these experiences. (Translator note: Hemingway's classmates sounded like a B-man, and suggested a look at the film "Hemingway and Gellhorn" by Cliff Owen and Nicholkidman last year).

Writing is a mental torment----It's hard to say that something is worth saying; it's hard to tell the story to attract the reader; it's hard to think that it sounds good; it's hard to know if the changes you make are good or bad. In short, difficult to make people miserable, the process is long also painful. It's the pain that scares you, but somehow it makes you feel fun.

I had been writing that article about Hofstadter until the afternoon of Thursday. That night I accidentally received an email that was an invitation to work that offered the following conditions: annual salary of 150,000 dollars, 10,000 dollar contract bonuses, options, a free gym membership, excellent medical and dental benefits, a new mobile phone, free Chinese food and dinner for the weekday. You can come back to the company at 11 o ' clock in the morning. Flexible work hours can sometimes be in the evening. No working pressure. I will have a lot of autonomy and be in a big position. My colleagues are very old, smart and interesting. (Translator's note: All evils of capitalism!) ）

So I put my adventure plan in abeyance.

I can say that I am fooling around in college. I look at what I want, and then patch it up on my computer, I do some small sites just for fun, I sleep late, and often skip classes, although sometimes I feel like Will Hunting, but basically I am irresponsible Lord. I can go today just because of a foreign miracle, when I graduated in 2009, my GPA was 2.9, entered a notorious job market, finally I did not fall to the----Brooklyn called gnawing old. In fact, I am the most sought-after person in the world. (Translator Note: Would hunting is the protagonist in the "Soul Catcher" starring Damon and screenwriter, speaking of a mathematical genius that won the Oscar for Best screenplay.) ）

I said it was a foreign miracle. The site was suddenly turned into a lucrative craft.

"For a coal digger, can you say he didn't work hard enough for you?" Why can you take more than n times the money? "

I'm a web developer and I don't have a little time to do what I want to do. I'll tell you one thing that sounds crazy: I had a friend who had studied law school for two years and decided to start programming. Two months later, he entered a hacker school in New York, and three months later worked as an intern at a consulting firm that helped create a website at a new company. After three months of internship, in total, he got a full time job with a monthly salary of 8w knife in June.

I don't think it's easy to find a good job. I'm always afraid of losing my job like my sister. My sister graduated from high school and went to the University of Chicago to study, but her best job was to translate the airline menu. She has a very smart and sharp head, but she has no expertise. Now her job is to do the front desk for the hotel.

I remember one time when she asked dad at dinner that he was a big shot in a company: "You always talk about the value of hard work." But for people who work in coal mines, don't you say he doesn't work as hard as you? Then why do you get so much more than that man's salary? '

I used to think this was a very naïve question.

In 1999, a tax-free internet could burn 1 million of dollars a year, of which 20,000 dollars was a Super Bowl ad. It has a Web site with the same name that can only provide a bad user experience, only the company can be popular. Investors will chase the rise in share prices, which will further inflate prices, attract more investors, and breed a textbook called "Speculative Bubbles" (as the child in the emperor's New clothes) triggers a time when everyone realizes that it is not a promised land.

This nonsense won't happen again. It's not that the Internet is no longer important, it's not that investors are less "irrational erections," but it's cheaper to start a business. Today's internet start-ups have virtually no fixed-asset costs. There is no need to invest in broadband infrastructure because it already exists there. There is no need to buy TV commercials to gain market share because you can grow organically through search (Google) and social networking (Facebook). A "cloud" Web server, like almost all other services that a virtual company might need-such as credit card processing, automatic phone support, mass mail delivery-can be paid on demand on a fixed Moore's law price.

You can see why I'm in such a good state. In this special gold rush, I'm a shovel.

The cost of figuring out whether a start-up can actually succeed is not hundreds of millions of dollars – but hundreds of thousands of dollars. It costs a few notebooks and pays the founders to try their project. A 100 million dollar venture capital pool, if not a start-up that invests in 5 or 10 years, can drop 1000 small pilot projects, most of which will fail, but one will be worth 1 billion dollars.

So the frenzy will go on.

You can see why I have such a good state. In this special Gold Rush era, I was a shovel. Our web Developer is a limited reagent for each start-up trial, and we are a prerequisite because we are the only ones who know how to make the app idea concrete to the actual work software. In fact, in Silicon Valley, we are the essence of these small companies, and the value of an income-free start-up is said to be equal to the exact number of developers in their workforce. The rule of thumb says it's worth 1 million dollars each.

This makes most people not need to run around (looking for a job). One Bloomberg friend told me that they had failed to meet the recruitment targets of 200 technicians per quarter in New York. I received at least two times a week from headhunters who tried to dig me out of my current job. If I say I am actively looking for a job, I will become a local celebrity in a sense, and my schedule is full of coffee, meetings and visits from startups trying to attract me.

It seems that the basic structure of the industry in the global economy is designed for my benefit. Because developers are the most important asset for start-ups – if not the only asset – startups compete by creating a better working environment for developers. Just a few weeks ago, a MTV2 crew went to my office to shoot a series of not-bad-work episodes in the program. Cash bonuses, raises, stock options and gifts are the norm. I used to work in a place where there is a special email address where you can send a mail application for something free-a 300-dollar keyboard, a 900-dollar chair, organic maple syrup, and so on. I also have a job that doesn't offer beer. But the working hours are flexible and have plenty of vacation time. The bad things will soon be forgotten. Your question will be taken into full consideration. Your thoughts are seen as important. In short, you are concerned.

You can imagine the impact on self-awareness, being treated with yin and being called "indispensable", and in general, treating you as a pretty girl within miles. Even when many of your peers are out of work. When most people are at work, there is a danger of impending, a choking sense of urgency. is so highly rated, feel bright, calmly, as if you can not make mistakes. I know I have a good job guarantee in any big city. It's hard for you not to let such things have spiritual influence. I mean it's sure of you; it makes your self-confidence swell. Sometimes I tell myself such a story that when other people are partying or reading happily, I sit in a room and struggle-I try to learn these tiny technical questions and now I get paid.

When you start to believe that kind of story, some of the most dramatic things can happen. In my current job I have seen a lot of my CV, and I've thrown away all those that are not programmers. I do this many times a day, so that I have a simple association in my mind: if you are not a technician, you have no value.

We are people with magical powers. Every programmer knows that the code is cool, and when we fill the screen with colorful "spells", our eyes open wide. "Programmers," the late Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, "must be able to consider the hierarchical structure of the concept, which is much deeper than the previous mind had to face." "We like the idea of that. We like to think about those because we can write code and we can have an unprecedented impact on the world. We will decide what 15 million people will see after clicking on a link. Our laptops are getting hotter after we send out an electronic command.

No one told us it was wrong to think so. In fact, they have reinforced the impulse to think so. They expressed admiration for our leading the trend.

When you think about the prospects of the future and the code when I won't code, the harvest does seem to be: join my ranks! Try to take part in New York's Codecademy (an education company, paying particular attention to the best learning experience), or go to hacker School, a hacker school in New York, and swear to yourself to learn to write code, like Michael Bloomberg Done in the 2012.

But that should not be a harvest.

When I became a CTO for an American company, I was only 21 years old. At that time, I thought of my father, who became the youngest corporate executive in the country, the CFO, when he was 28 years old. The only difference is that he was more than 20 years old. The company that helped operate was Hades (Hardee ' s), a fast-food chain with more than 1000 outlets, and the company I was helping to manage was a web start-up. All the things we do in our three-year operation are just about spending the $350,000 of others. Dad's company makes hamburgers, and my company eats these hamburgers.

I have a friend who is a mechanical engineer. He used to make aircraft engines for General Electric, and now he is trying to develop an intelligent medicine bottle for AIDS and cancer patients to improve dose compliance. He works in an office space that is shared with dozens of internet companies in a start-up "incubator box". He has no great patience with them. "I'm fucking fed up with it," he told me, "All they talk about is color."

Web startups are like game companies. The relationship between them and the real company is like the cute little fake baking station and the kitchen.

Look at Doormates, a failed start-up founded in 2011, founded by two newly graduated students from Columbia University, whose mission is to allow users to "help buildings join or create private networks accessible only to residents of buildings". They also raised 350000 of dollars for this. Do you want to know if someone asked, "Do you really want to talk to a stranger who lives in the same building?" Is it better to solve the problem through a plate of sandwiches? (the founder has moved to the "nanny nearby" project, an iphone app that marks the location of all New York's genial nannies.) ）

Many of the companies in operation are just not very motivated. "The problem with the advertising model is that it makes people think narrow, one-sided," Alexis Madrigal wrote in a paper on start-ups in last year's Atlantic Monthly. "Let four college students stay in a room, give them pizza, and watch what they can create something their friends like." Wow! That's great! But you know what? They try not to let the product look like something that the same level of young people have organized in other ways, their products are cheap, fun, and have the power to change the world, like creating a variant of beer pong. Beer pong is also known in some parts of the United States as Beirut, the most popular drinking game in American universities.

Clones are popular, just as popular as those that help you find nearby bars and hotels. There's a dozen very different dating apps--like Tinder (Fuse), an iphone app, and if you like, just stroke a picture of a potential match, and if you don't like it, turn left, or coffee Meets bagel (coffee on a bagel), For a lower-level "let's have a cup of coffee," users give you a matching data every day. Sidetour's technical team is run by a former colleague who allows you to buy small "experiences" in the city, such as dinner with a monk. Just yesterday, a developer friend who wanted to start his own business recently shared with me his latest thought: An app that shows you nearby ATM.

The most successful startups, at least if you're measured in numbers--13.5 million dollars of Snapchat (a snapshot of conversation), 30 million dollars of vine (vines), The 1 billion dollar Instagram (a picture-sharing app) (Each of these lucky people indirectly brings in 100 low-income imitators)--they seem like a new way to share photos with teenagers.

When I go to the supermarket, I sometimes wonder how much of this infrastructure and unique stuff has turned me into the problem of finding my own food in the wild and walking in a room with a basket. So much wisdom and sweat disappears in the process of letting these things get to my hands. This is my food: Other people's work is clearly supporting me, what do I do in return?

We call ourselves Web developers, software engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, innovators. We celebrate, we capture a lot of wealth, attention, talent. We are the center of the whirlpool, like Wall Street for the mature college graduates. But we're not making self-driving cars. We are not making smart pill bottles. The fact that most of the things we're doing is putting boxes (boxes) on a page. Users put text and pictures in a box; we put those things in the database, and then they go into another box.

Web development is more like plumbing than anything else, and people sitting in front of two of smooth displays will admit it

We are busy every day to maintain these boxes: we modify the color; we add a link to allow you to edit some text; We keep track of how much you scroll down the page; we allow you to log in with your Twitter account; We improve our search results; we fix a bug where uploaded images never stop.

Most of my work uses the Ruby on Rails tool. Ruby on Rails does work for web developers, just like a toilet-mounted robot who works as a plumber. (Web development is more like plumbing than anything else, and people sitting in front of two smooth displays will admit it.) It takes only a few hours to make the task that originally took months. One important thing to understand is that I'm just the user of this tool. I don't make it. I'm just reading the manual. But in fact, I am very sought-after in the job market, because I read these manuals very carefully. Because in general I am very diligent and patient with the manual. But that's all that stuff.

My friends and I, those who create websites--we are children! We are playing games with the tools that adults give us. We're not that mature, and there's a lot of flaws, and I'm talking about things like: von Neumann storage program architecture; transistor; large-scale fiber optic cable; UNIX operating system; sci-fi cloud computing platform; web browser; iPhone; open source movement; Ruby on Rails ; the programmer's stack Overflow question and answer website; and so on, and so on. I've been talking about code that my colleague, who is a little older than me, wrote me

This series of inventions is a miracle. But as I want to thank the people who have done this, I would also like to warn them: when you make writing and distributing software so easy, it is easy for me to do, you may be in the creation of flashy entrepreneurial spirit of a terrible tower of Babel.

Is there another internet bubble? When Nasdaq didn't go mad, it's hard to call it "bubbles" when no one loses their pension--in fact all people lose is time: pretending to be in the business, "sharing" and "liking" on unimportant forums, tapping stiff code and making easy money.

The only rigorous way to think about value is in dollar terms, through free exchange to reach the price standard. Such figures are hardly doubtful. If a price is "too low" or "too high", there is said to be a risk-free opportunity to make money. People tend to devour these opportunities. So the price of things tends to be higher than they expected, higher than the market can afford.

Did I write code that was paid too much? Am I not paying too little for my writing? No: In every case, I am paid exactly what I deserve.

It's like the question my sister asked about my father at dinner. There was an answer to that question--the answer I took down that night--that my father was able to earn more than the coal workers, because the skills needed to become a Fortune 500 company are scarce and demand more than the skills needed to become a coal worker. This combination of scarcity and demand has led to a rise in wages.

The answer sounded fair and reasonable, and it seemed to solve the problem. But we are not talking about the pork of the future, we are talking about real people, and what they do every day, and my seemingly naïve sister has a point of view, that really simple people, sleek, superficial people, value should be equal to the market out of price. The market clearing price Market-clearingprice refers to the price when the balance between supply and demand is realized in the market, that is the equilibrium price.

The price of text is almost equal to zero. The magazine I worked for has been published in magazines for 1.5. It's a big part of my life, it takes a lot of my free time, I rewrite the articles for the editors--I'm done, I'll go on, it's all about what they say--and it's all free. There is no venture capital for this; I don't want to recruit my recruiter; In the language of the writer I am nothing, and the average time to reply to a message is about 3.5 hours a week. I can put all my energy and talent into an article, or whatever I think I think, but it may still not be worth a penny.

So if I ignore my high level of challenge in writing and the respect for a writer-style life, it's not really something that someone wants me to do. The idea of Americans is clear, someone said: "Become a professional--fill your mind with the spirit of the times, fill the technology--we will give you generous conditions." "(Write-one ' s-own-ticket to open his own conditions)

I have no courage to refuse this. I have so far been unable to get rid of this cheap, parochial thing because I am worried. I'm a very mediocre programmer--but I still have a safe future. Not only that, I also have a table with a separate place. I woke up in the morning and knew I was going to create something that people needed. I know it's because of all the money they pay me.