Comment by dandotway
4 years ago
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[1] states that in any bureaucratic organization
there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many
of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some
agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective
farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples
are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of
education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff,
etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep
control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
within the organization.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...
Related: Machiavelli.
I like to term the Second class that generally predominates in large enterprises, normally termed "middle management", the "Middle Management Machiavellis" for whom life is nothing but budget boundary assault/defense, and the assassin's game of angling for promotions.
I am thankful programming jobs paid pretty well such that it was roughly equivalent to several levels up the ladder in other professions without nearly the same soul-crushing view into the venality of mankind.
But this, I think, is a temporary thing. I look at the shockingly low salaries of ACTUAL ENGINEERS that went to ACTUAL ENGINEERING SCHOOL like chemical engineering, nuclear engineering, civil engineering, and they make much less than programmers.
Re: salaries of non-software engineers.
The thing that’s hard to intuit is that salary isn’t a reflection of the difficulty or importance of your job. It’s a reflection of economics. The skill set of a software engineer enables a better business model than that of a civil engineer. These superior economics get reflected in better salaries, even if the two people are equally skilled in their respective fields.
A construction company will need to spend cash on machines, permitting, raw materials, labor, and more to earn money. A software business needs to pay for compute and labor.