Programming has become one of the only paths towards a middle class life (as we've known middle class in the past). No one I know from college that doesn't work in IT makes enough money to be old-school middle class like I am.

...you must not know many people then. There's lots of opportunity for a middle class life in non-it-related professions. Something I found pretty shocking after I left the sv bubble.

Such as?

Marketing, sales, numerous supporting jobs in entertainment, skilled trades and engineering, (as many mentioned) white collar food industry jobs, logistics, accounting, statistics, mediation, community builders, I could go on and on. So many diffierent types of jobs, even when you exclude all the shitty ones that make the world a shittier place, like low-information political shills and propagandists, (tiny conservative talk radio shows and online communities do decently, moderate and liberal not so much) junk and junk food marketers.

I would imagine any engineer or someone who went through trade school. Maybe they don't make enough to be considered middle class?

Many trade school disciplines.

Is that a bad thing? I think we should celebrate the diversity of developers and perspectives that they bring.

Esoteric things are great but you'll never find that they reach critical mass in a way that's meaningful. I love ham radio but I don't think you'll ever see a day where everyone has a 2m transceiver in their car/house :).

Not necessarily a bad thing, as it makes programming more accessible to a more diverse range of people as you mentioned, whom may bring other kinds of benefits to the profession. But there is the drawback of a higher percentage of incompetent people. Can't have everything..

Is there any reason to measure by percentage? If, before, we had 100k competent programmers and 0 incompetent ones; and now we have 100k competent programmers and 1mm incompetent ones—we still have enough competent programmers to get all the stuff done. Some companies will bother to wade through 10 bad hires to find a good one, and so end up producing a stream of excellent products, just as existed before; other companies (that wouldn't have existed before) will take the leftovers, and produce bad products that everyone ignores in favor of the good ones.

It's sort of like the fiction market: adding bad books to a bookstore or library, does not decrease the number of good books available.

I guess you could make the argument that if the low-quality products are well-marketed, they might outcompete the high-quality products—so, as a competent developer, the existence of incompetent developers (and thus the existence of companies who can subsist off their talents) might be "stealing revenue" from you/your company?

> Is there any reason to measure by percentage?

It adds friction all over the place. It's more difficult for a company to find the competent programmers, more difficult to find good books among the dreck, more difficult to judge which product is excellent and which isn't (without significant effort, in some cases). Rating systems can (and will be) abused, and finding the needle is harder when the haystack is larger.

Looking at hiring, a company might have to spend considerably more effort sorting through the "bad" programmers. There will be false positives+negatives in their search. How much damage will be done to the "good" products and the productivity of the "good" programmers because someone was misjudged when they were hired? How many skilled and passionate but less marketing-savvy programmers end up working for the quantity-over-quality companies?

If we had cheap, fast, and reliable ways to actually gauge the quality/skill of media/people/whatever, then more options would always be good, even if they're of widely-varying quality. As it is, we don't, so the extra options are something of a mixed blessing.

I can't speak directly for the programmer market, but this exact thing happened when steam opened the floodgates with greenlight. i used to browse the catalog to find new games; now there's so much crap in there that it isn't worth the time.

In my mind, that's just an argument for curation. There's no reason you can't let developers have their cake (i.e. have something up on Steam) while consumers eat it too (i.e. have a default view of Steam that hides all the crap games.)

I mean, direct-linking to things from a product site is still a thing; and—due to Steam technically being a website—discovery by search-engines indexing the page is still a thing. But also, there's no reason there can't be things like "App Store channels" where you can subscribe to a given app reviewer's "view of the world" (i.e. a store scope containing only the stuff they like, and—with less weight—the stuff the people they follow like, recursively); and then browse those, or a front-page that's the union of those. You could even automatically generate such channels from existing app-review sites/Youtube channels/whatever.

How do you expand that to a bookstore or an employement market without functionally denying the existence of some books/people?

The problem is that you're increasing the workload on everyone who wants to use that market by forcing them to filter out more crap.

You could make the same argument about literacy, how it allows dumber/more sinful people to interpret the Bible in erroneous ways.

Yecch. The bible. Please don't bring the bible into this.

We're talking about programming, not hocus pocus.

Competency isn't just aptitude though, today's programmers have massive training advantages. I mean you could make the same argument about (say) football players but NFL champions from the 20's would struggle to keep up with today's top high school programs.