Re:The STEM Crisis Is a Myth (2013)
by randomdata on Friday February 03, 2017 @04:13PM
(#13563369)
So how does this apply to developers? I remember in the 90s it was already considered the job to have if you want to make a lot of money. That's a good 20 years to prepare the workforce, at least (I start to become too young to have really paid attention to the job market before that).
I got my first full-time programming job soon after the dot-com bust and even at that time it paid better than the offers I'm seeing for new hires these days. And that's without even factoring in inflation. They are making quite a bit less than I was in real dollars.
By that definition I think it is very safe to say that there isn't any sign of a developer shortage. It is a high paying profession, for sure, but it always has been. It's not like it was a minimum wage job 10 years ago. It was still a six figure job even then.
I'd define a shortage by comparing short and long term movements in labor.
As in, if price goes way way up for certain positions, it takes a long time for labor to react and produce more supply. This is bad.
So in the short term, there is a shortage of developers, while labor catches up and tries to fulfill this demand.
To put it another way, imagine if workers could see the future, 10 years ago, and could know how high salaries for devs were going to be.
If workers were armed with this knowledge, a whole lot more of them would have chosen to go into tech.
The Ferrari example doesn't work, because if Ferrari 10 years ago, knew exactly how much demand was going to be, I don't think it would have changed their supply or price at all.
I am not sure of a better word for this "shortage", but I am thinking of any situation where expectations for the future do not match up with the reality of the future, in short term inelastic markets.
And the solution to this market information failure is to either get better information about the future or work towards making the market more elastic.