So why aren't there more people for these highly compensated jobs?
I remember seeing someone say 'Running is free, but not everyone can be Usain Bolt'.
A bit elitist to be sure, but being a good developer requires a certain type of thinking that simply isn't common in the general population.
Access to quality, free information isn’t enough, sadly. The average person the world over isn’t in a position to make the jump due to economic factors over intellectual limits.
Mostly correct, with one objection: time is also a necessary resource to become a software developer. Some people who may have the talent do not get the opportunity to learn simply by having to keep a full-time job (or two) since they were 18 (and getting a shitty education before that). Most of us have enough free time to learn things (otherwise we would not have enough time to discuss on HN), but it is not universally true.
That said, although giving everyone a realistic opportunity to become a software developer would be fair to the unlucky individuals, I do not assume that it would change the balance in general.
First off, what a terrible system. Why would we want to support that. Second off, this clearly isn't happening when you look at those taking in 8+ figures.
Until then, it will be like democracy. The worst system, except for all the others.
There's a continuous spectrum of things you can do, not discrete, and definitely not binary. So my suggestion is, and I'm far from being alone, is reign in the plutocrats. No one cares about them while the average person's life is getting better, but boy do we care when that stops happening. Especially when we see their lives continue to get better while the quality of our lives decrease.
>Government regulation matters because we want high competition. There's ways to have supply and demand price determinations without them being wildly out of control and without plutocrats.
is mutually exclusive to
>we pay people the lowest amount we can that is enough to keep them from going to another job.
This system is the same as shopping at a store that sells you the same goods at a lower price than another store. I do not see what this has to do with a “plutocrat”. Buyers have been buying goods and services at the lowest prices they can find for at least thousands of years.
Governments often set floors for wages. In fact, this is called the minimum wage.
> This system is the same as shopping at a store that sells you the same goods at a lower price than another store.
That's how it works in a perfect world, but not how it works in reality. In a perfect world monopolies wouldn't be an issue. The reason they are an issue is that with a monopoly it is very easy to manipulate the market that you control. The reason we generally break up monopolies is because they are actively manipulating said market and stiffing innovation. We tend to not go after monopolies that aren't doing this.
> I do not see what this has to do with a “plutocrat”.
A plutocrat is someone who's power is derived from wealth. A plutocracy is a form of government where that power, derived from wealth, is instrumental to political power. You may think that this is universal to all governmental systems, but it isn't. Often we see the reverse (wealth derived from political power vs political power derived from wealth).
Anti-trust laws, IP laws, the SEC, etc are all designed to prevent this from happening. I think the problem you're running into is that you're taking perfect models (spherical cow in a vacuum) and assuming that they work identically in the real world. This is naive just as it is naive to assume a spherical cow in a vacuum falls out of a plane at the same rate as a living cow. There's an approximation and you can get some useful planning from the simple model, but it is going to have significant errors in the real world experiment.
What it comes down to is a lack of sufficient complexity and nuance in the model you're using. An econ 101 course or even a B.A. in economics will not be enough to sufficiently understand the economy in high detail. It is really easy to overestimate the utility of our knowledge and mental models because we tend to not measure likelihood of events based on random samples but instead have a large selection bias (getting random samples is also quite difficult).
>we pay people the lowest amount we can that is enough to keep them from going to another job.
Minimum wages, labor laws, safety standards, anti trust laws, and all of that can exist, but I am still going to expect buyers to pay the least a seller is willing to accept. And conversely, a seller is going to demand the most a buyer is willing to pay.
What you're not getting is that this is theory, but not the world in practice.
Start using supply and demand to determine the price of money. Supply and demand elsewhere is a sham if you set ceilings and floors on the interest rate.
In CS, you trade social skills and social value to escape the worst of capital exploitation. Go to a bar, tell someone you make 300K, and watch their face the moment you mention to tech worker part.
Where and how you got your money matters. People don't respect us computer touchers.
> go to a bar, tell someone you make 300K
you must be having way different bar conversations than I've ever had - maybe they just don't like you as a person lol
Those darned smelly CS grads with their non-matching clothes, if not for them more women would be in CS!
for example you've got lots of people who would fall under the umbrella of software development that mostly just do web design and WordPress, they're about the least engineer-type people you can have.
You're describing many of those who are what we would call "non-normative", if you will. aspergers, autism, and the like. Yes, it's statistically understood those who choose this career are more likely to fall into that category.
So what's really being said here is that women are being chased out of well paying STEM field because they're too judgemental to deal with those who are non-normative.
Is that really the fault of men, or maybe we should blame these self-same non-normative folks?
----
Can you imagine if someone were to claim the reason so many men choose not to go into nursing is because of the smell that happens roughly once/month?
Think about why one is acceptable and the other is not.
IME doing this, many are happy with no regrets, but all have truly horrific stories to tell.
Unless the situation is different for women in law, or women in medicine, it still does not explain the lack of women in CS.
Sometimes I think the same. Like I can get $2k per month sitting in the office meanwhile road worker will wake up at 3AM, work 12 hours in rain and winter, trading his health for $300 per month.
Anyway I avoid mentioning my profession unless asked directly. It's not a question of respect, but rather question of envy which i don't like to be target of.
When I had TV appearances they were calling me "Pulli Traeger" (wearing casual outfit). In publicity you are respected how you look, not what you can. Experts are frequently looked down, as they rarely can express themselves to a TV audience. On smaller private TV it was fine though.
Also upper management in Europe used to disrespect us as overpaid "coders" or code monkeys.
There is a natural ceiling of the number of SWEs due to aptitude for programming. Some people simply don't have the grit, tenacity, persistence, or even intelligence for being able to learn to program, much less do it in a professional environment.
I've taught many people and of those, perhaps 80% just can't handle it. They see the money, start trying to learn programming, and they give up after a few lessons because they couldn't understand for-loops for example, or they just get bored and conclude it's not worth the effort. I've seen this firsthand.
Like you said, we don't pay people based on how hard they work. However, we also don't pay people based on how much value they create... we pay people the lowest amount we can that is enough to keep them from going to another job. The value they create just sets a ceiling on the wages (you can't pay someone more than the value they create or you will soon go out of business)
So there are two possibilities as I see it... either there are simply so many possible business opportunities that the number of developer jobs is practically infinite (new jobs are created as soon as a new developer is ready), or there is something that limits the number of new developers.
I think it is a bit of both. I think there are fewer people who have the capability to be developers than we like to admit, and there are a lot more possible jobs than we have currently.