Or their knowledge and real skills don't get used because we've decided they are better exploited as servants for overpaid paper pushers, like us programmers, who can't bother to even move themselves to a restaurant.
I have no doubt there are some people here who have skills so hard to find that it can overcome in inherent power asymmetry between employers and workers, but that isn't true for most workers, or even most tech workers.
However much we want to cling to the mythos left over from the days when just knowing HTML and a bit of JS meant you were a rock star coder guaranteed a life of endless riches, that's just not the world we live in and no amount of 10xing harder is going to stop companies from suppressing our wages and benefits while they increasingly outsource and wait for the AI that will absolutely replace most of us entirely or turn us into little more than QA for AI output.
If outsourcing suddenly produced high quality issue free software for cheap tomorrow then we'd all be just as screwed despite having such great skills.
Another angle to what you're describing is that a huge percentage of programmers' jobs serve to eliminate other jobs. That's been the case for newer technologies since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution.
That said, the long term effect hasn't been to reduce jobs. Ultimately, not paying someone to do X ends up also creating jobs by freeing up money to pay someone to do Y.
Obviously that's small solace for someone who lost their job and isn't finding a new one. But we can frame the story in different ways that allow us to find different places to place the blame, and different ways to find alternative solutions. I personally don't like blaming technology because that implies that the best solution is to slow or halt the development of any technology that automates or eliminates the need for things that could be done by humans. As a human who enjoys eating out at restaurants and having access to high-quality medical care, and does not enjoy mowing wheat with a scythe and re-thatching his own roof, I'm not fond of that framing. As someone who dislikes memes that assume that learning is something that ends in your 20s, or that the world is teeming with people who have 6 years' experience in 3 year old technologies, I'm much more interested in looking for framings that look to improve everyone's access to new jobs instead of trying to preserve the old ones.
This is the coup de grâce from all the big tech corps: the commoditization of their most expensive recurring cost, the cost of skilled labor.
This is the reason for the strong push for programming in early education in the past few years, with companies like Apple and Google setting up education camps and code literacy programs for kids. This is the purpose for pounding home the message "anyone can code!" over and over again. Its been happening in many countries world-wide, not just the US.
Along with the boom in coding bootcamps and open courses online, they hope to dilute the skilled labor pool to such an extent that programmers will no longer have any negotiating power and salaries can start to decline.
The big tech companies only do what is in their own self interest. This is not to say that there won't be people benefiting from this as a second order effect. People without other prospects of employment (either because of location or circumstance) will have a chance to earn a good living and escape poverty or upgrade their social class. But this will come at the expense of practitioners already heavily invested in the industry.
Massive salaries for programmers won’t last forever. Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up.
Eventually, large corporations will feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market, and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation. It’s no different from millennials resenting boomers for burning economic bridges behind them with outsourcing and so on just to save a few dollars on costs and pull in higher wages for themselves.
VC funded, exit strategy focussed, zero profit producing, unsustainable startups are not the only companies that have tech needs.
As has been said, skilled workers will find work elsewhere.
Overpaid junior developers who are more adept at rattling of the latest hipster buzzwords, and subsequently rewriting the same 100 line program over and over, than actually writing maintainable code, may find the unlimited flow of snacks is about to end.
can't wait until they're good enough to screw up complex tasks in subtle ways after undercutting the pay of junior developers such that no one is studying how to program computers anymore
Programming is one of those things some people just don't have the knack for, and no matter how long they stay with it and how hard they try they'll never be more than barely productive. The industry is already full of those kinds of people shuffling from one three month contracting gig to another.
We're not going to retrain blue collar workers to do IT as it's done now, and the factory model doesn't work - consulting companies have been trying to do this for decades with no success (well, aside from billing a whole lot of hours).
If we want to deal with high unemployment on the lower rungs of the job ladder we need to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. Any small gains we try to make by bringing people up the ladder will be washed away in short order.
This enables everyone to be great programmers like how easily available power tools enables everyone to be a great carpenter and general craftsman.
You’ll get a lot of shitty stuff and the profession will get hollowed out losing attraction of the smart people. We’ll be left with low-quality, disposable bullshit while wondering where all the programmers went.
If more people knew how to program wages for programmers would drop and you could hire more of them. I wouldn't mind having 2-3 more programmers right now.
Even if you're right that no new businesses would be created by educating people which is ridiculous, we would employ more people because they would be cheaper.
Also if wages drop for a career it is less risky to start your own business because the potential wages lost are reduced.
I mean, just about every industry is short on qualified people as their salary approaches $0.
I've been seeing this trend first hand. That's why I am learning how to code. The fact is that the jobs that provide a living wage today are based on knowledge. So you can retrain yourself, or you can be left behind.
Programmers have been destroying programmer jobs since those jobs exist. Up to now it has meant we have enough productivity for going into more markets, but that will not last forever.
There's no doubt that some programmer's jobs will start to disappear. Think about how many web devs/ html jockeys are no longer needed because word press or 100 other web publishing platforms are easy enough for non pgmrs to use. How long will a million programmers write custom software instead of just packaging apps? Today, places like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon have a lot of programmers writing custom apps. And lots of other companies - eventually I think we'll need fewer of them. Maybe as a software engineer, I could be retrained to do genetic engineering or dna analysis. But it's a lot easier for me than the guy making hamburgers at McDonalds.
I don't want anyone to lose their job, but this change of reduced labor based work is inevitable. Economic forces are hard to overcome. Just like coal has been wiped out by cheap natural gas - it wasn't a conspiracy.
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