Quote from sle:
There are doctors (top "crust"), physician assistants and various people with masters degrees that sort-of make medicine happen, nurses, paramedics etc. All of them are "medical professionals", but not all of them are making 200k a year. Similarly, when someone is called a programmer, it can be a dude that writes in Excel/VBA or writes kernel-level functionality for the operating systems. Consistent with their skill, one would be making 50k at an insurance company and the other would be making 250k at Microsoft. While both of them would probably have to stay current on the trends, the first one is in essence a nurse and the second one is an MD.
PS. In finance, the key thing that gets IT people paid is domain knowledge - it's more important to know stuff about the business then know how to optimize the last bit out of a linked list.
All true. The diff is that in programming the middle level guy has to constantly keep on top of technological changes or he's a goner. Not so much if you're a nurse. Taking that as an analogy, once you've learned all the stuff that will get you a degree as a nurse, the lion's share of the rest is on the job stuff you'll learn with experience. Obviously there will have to be time spent on keeping up, but it's not like the skill for putting an IV in an arm changes from one year to the next.
For a programmer, there's the on the job experience after he gets his degree, but then on top of that he has to constantly keep up with changes in a multiplicity of things: at minimum, at least one computer programming language and one database language. More than likely, he'll learn a new one in a couple of years, from scratch.
The learning is a constant thing. I wound up learning somewhere around 10 or so different languages for doing different things during my career, dealt with at least four or five OS's, and a few different database languages. That's on top of learning the business, as you point out. And of course as you went from one business to the next you had to learn the next one there too.
See what I mean? It's a constant thing, far more comparable to a doctor than a nurse. The changes encompass technology, but then if in the middle you move from being employed by a store to being employed by a bank you have a completely new set of business requirements you have to learn on top of keeping up with your skills. And you're supposed to do all that while maybe making a bit more than a cop.
I'm married to a doctor. I was on 24 hour call, and doing all the keeping up I list above, and making less than my wife at one point. That was when I took inventory and said screw this. I'm not alone.
