As someone who has been coding for a while, I must say I'm jealous of my MBA friends. Some of them were programmers but their careers just shot up after those 2 years. The older I get, the more it feels like programming is really an entry level job. Sure, you'll have rock star architects/distinguished engineers who get to have great careers (mostly due to right timing) but that's a very small percentage.

This is a reality that most do not want to accept. Is it just? Probably not.

I've often viewed this as Thinkers vs. Workers. Society places a high value on Thinkers, those who make decisions, strategize, make connections, build relationships, etc. Those who fall in this camp are doctors, lawyers, consultants, CEOs, etc. The Workers -- programmers, engineers, designers -- are often fungible. They are in a competitive market of manual laborers that has driven down the price of labor to levels that, for many, increase the opportunity cost of learning the tech yourself. Over time, Thinkers accumulate social capital that can be leveraged to gain benefits, both related and unrelated to their profession -- e.g. a doctor being given preferential treatment by a restaurant host. Workers accumulate labor capital; they're more efficient at their work, can develop more creative solutions. But put a 50yr old coder up against a 50yr old lawyer/doctor/banker and the latter will be given more praise, more money, more influence 9 times out of 10.

Even Workers eventually outsource their labor once they're in a position to become a Thinker. Few successful startup CEOs and execs are actually coding themselves. Their roles shift to strategy, operations, so on and and so forth, for that's where they're valued and will be rewarded the most.

And getting a graduate degree is often the ticket to be considered a Thinker, whether MD, MBA, JD, PhD.

That's the game, whether you like it or not, and it certainly won't be changing anytime soon. If money is a priority, becoming a Thinker might be in your best interest.

>>>> Their roles shift to strategy, operations, so on and and so forth, for that's where they're valued and will be rewarded the most.

Those are the roles where you can't trust anybody to do them for you without fleecing you. Even MBA's are loath to fully entrust those roles to other MBA's. The top management of our company has an elaborate review process for strategy and operations, and no high level review process for coding.

My upvote wasn't enough: Your comment summarizes simple but important career and life insight that most people have to learn the hard way; I wish more people would read it.

There's certainly economic truth in this position. But putting doctors and CEOs in the same category seems a bit off to me. Certainly, CEOs and consultants aren't stupid, but it seems that there are other skills in play as well, some of which can be expressed in words with both positive and negative connotations. Being a "thinker" isn't sufficient to be a CEO.

If you head over to wallstreetoasis, you'll hear a few of them comment on how software engineers have it made. Grass is always greener on the other side and what not. There's a lot of not so nice things about being in finance, like the work conditions and hours. You have to pay your dues and work like a dog for quite a bit. Outside of high finance, you can go work for F500s, but then you take a significant pay cut. The last option is strategy consulting, which has often been described as more miserable than investment banking due to the travel and the fact that hours never really go down even as you rise up.

Also, the median total compensation is $181,500 USD for an MBA graduate of arguably the best business school in the country. They have a median of four years of work; Assuming they started at 22, and the MBA took two years, they're 28 when receiving this compensation. Unless they have corporate sponsorship, they've also paid around $185,000 for that degree, most likely in loans which will increase the cost. I wonder if a software engineer of similar caliber (smart, dedicated and possessing competent social skills to get into GSB) could pull off a similar compensation at 28 and how his life time earnings would compare. I'd be willing to wager the difference isn't that drastic; if it isn't, it's probably better to just pick the path where the work suits you better.

I think a good grasp of programming combined with being business-savvy and being able to communicate confidently with people can get you pretty far monetarily if you seize the right opportunities; its a useful skill that has the potential to create significant revenue/cut losses for businesses. It seems like some people manage to become well off by becoming consultants and doing just that, but I'm just speaking from second-hand information.

If you're the kind of person who actually enjoys screwing around with spreadsheets all day long, maybe.

If you'd rather work as a Roman galley slave, maybe not.

No money is worth doing a job that you hate.

Note that my advice would be the same to those who are contemplating becoming programmers.

If you don't actually enjoy writing code, no amount of money is worth it.

The interesting thing about doing spreadsheets or writing code is that, at their fundamental level, they are very similar.

No, not professional ones. Doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants, law enforcement, lawyers etc... all gets better with age.

And what do all of those have in common? Strong unions, or legally-sanctioned licensing boards.

But if it were true that there is such a vast programmer productivity/competence variance (you know, "10X"), there should be a lot more room for distinguished engineers or whatever you want to call them. Sure, if you assume a leadership hierarchy then the top is always going to be narrow. But do distinguished engineers (or whatever the best term is) have to necessarily have large hierarchy of less experienced programmers beneath them?

Or maybe "10X" is true, but it isn't realized due to whatever non-technical reasons (political, etc.)?

It depends on the work mix. I know at my current job, I am MUCH more effective at writing actual new code than the offshore team (for one thing, I actually like doing it, whereas they seem to put it off for days in favor of other make-work activity the company generates).

OTOH, I'm no better at filling out random paperwork than they are, maybe even less effective, since they will readily gamble that a sketchy answer in a form won't bounce back for clarification.

So, if there is a lot of low level busy work, you might as well hire entry level workers. Just don't let them build stuff that perpetuates more busy-work, or it can become a tough pit to climb out of ... and now I'm off on a tangent.

10x is IMO a bit of a myth. But even if we assume it is not, it can't be measured which is why it is difficult to reward

10x is arguable. But the 1000x programmer (who is as good as a team of 1000) definitely doesn't exist. IMO.

10x or 100x or whatever is probably only true along a certain dimension. I don't doubt that there are programmers who are both 10x and 100x above the median at writing a high performance journaling filesystems, or fast, stable, multidimensional PDE solvers for example. But If you average it out over every conceivable programming task you probably won't find many 10x programmers.

The other aspect is that just being good and fast doesn't make you money. You have to be good and fast at solving the right problem in the right way and then convince people to give you lots of money for that solution. If you can't do those last bits, you'll always end up working for someone earning more than you, no matter how good you are.

Hmm. But there does exist programmers who you could found a company built around that person. But it would be fair to argue that they are a thinker,

> But even if we assume it is not, it can't be measured which is why it is difficult to reward

But isn't it more measurable than what an MBA in a senior/executive position does? If being part of writing a large software system is complex and hard to get right, and hard to measure progress on (technical debt v.s. features, for example), I can't imagine that running or managing a system of people - which are much less predictable than system components - is less complex, and in turn easier to measure when you factor in all external factors and things that an executive can't really do anything about (even though he might be responsible for it on paper).

But I don't really know anything about the management world.

"If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." -- Marc Anthony

:)

"if you do what you love, AND What you do is valued by others who give you a decent pay you can live with, then..."

Can I ask which fields are your MBA friends making way more outside of tech?