"I don't think it's so much a cultural thing as the high intellectual capabilities required for high paying knowledge jobs. Coding, for example, is just too hard for a huge segment of the population, regardless of how much training they get."

Maybe but it doesn't matter that much. If some breakthrough in education made it easy for 60% of the population to become good quality coders, it would lower the wages of existing programmers, somewhat increase the pool of working programmers but not give that 60% good jobs.

The type of coding done at Uber, for example, is specifically valuable because it replaces the lower paid labor of other people. We can't all have jobs automating each other out of jobs, now can we?

I work on developer tools, with the explicit long-term goal to automate developers out of their job, and we need all hands we can get :)

1) Developer tools don't really eliminate jobs, not any time soon, not in way a robot can entirely eliminate a line welder position or a self-driving car could eliminate a taxi driver position.

2) Sure, you need all the hands you can get in the current market. Still, you wouldn't hire a ten thousand new developers tomorrow even if ten thousand people as competent as your most competent lead developers showed up on your doorstep tomorrow.

The current market is precisely that there's so much low-hanging fruit in automating a developer job that we aren't going to entirely eliminate developer jobs any time soon; and hence why any new pair of hands helps.

The tech companies in SV told the Obama administration that if they gave a million more H1Bs to engineers, they'd hire them all. And plenty of them put resources on improving developer tools.

TIL that the React ecosystem is a conspiracy against the poor.

You realise that something can have bad outcomes for a given group without anyone intentionally seeking those outcomes, yes?

Yes, it was a joke.

It's interesting really. Systems that give you more flexibility and power might make good engineers more productive, while making many more mediocre engineers less productive. Of course, the former largely drive these innovations.

I've been out of web dev for a while now, but React's one way state to UI concept actually seems like an amazing simplification.

>> you need to make these jobs easier and accessible to more people, thus paying less but employing more.

Wouldn't a greater number of coders with lower abilities not work very well? Today's 10x programmers would become 20x or 50x