Am I the only who thinks that "90% of American parents want their kids to be computer scientists" is rather unsettling?
The market is currently full of people who are in for the money and will continue to be. It will be filled with people until supply meets demand. That the salaries will drop significantly is a natural result of this.
We had this pork cycle for teachers, doctors and other highly trained people. No one is benefitting from too many people who drive the prices down (although I'm not gonna say something as an employer, companies are happy about it - the profit margin will shrink but this can be compensated for using scaling). Those that are in for the money will leave (or continue to suffer in an unfulfilling job) and those that have passion can't sustain themselves (we can see this trend in indie game development today).
I agree it is unsettling, and I'm one of those ones who studied computer science for no other reason than the American "follow your dreams" meme. There weren't a lot of kids in my CS department at school, and they definitely weren't the business school follow the money types. We have had quite a few applicants lately who can't program their way out of a wet paper bag, but we have also had quite a few very qualified ones who were rejected simply because there weren't enough open positions.
It's generally a challenging job despite the myths, and programmers seem to be good at making things worse and more complicated for themselves, thus requiring more resources (programmers) to fix things. Also, the field is becoming deep enough that there are all types of specialties. Right now, AI and cryptography specialists can probably command high salaries, while your jack-of-all-trades guys are becoming a dime a dozen
Maybe it makes sense to encourage your kids to go into blue collar jobs. In a future teeming with code monkeys, plumbers and electricians are going to be highly valuable.
As for the current career programmers, maybe we should unionize before our jobs are being taken by kids coming out of 2 week bootcamps (who have been taking programming classes since kindergarten).
In a future teeming with code monkeys, plumbers and electricians are going to be highly valuable.
As a person who repaired quite a few toilets in their life
As for the current career programmers, maybe we should unionize before our jobs are being taken by kids coming out of 2 week bootcamps (who have been taking programming classes since kindergarten).
I've seen such people(well, they started learning in primary school, not in kindergarten, but nevertheless) and two things stand in the way of this scenario:
1. Barely anybody likes this line of work. I've had people who would really use some extra cash outright refuse to learn our trade because they found it boring. Apparently Our unique skill in the job market is an immunity to boredom.
2. There's more to this job than programming. There's also working in teams which, despite the focus of pretty much every western education system on this, is something that people seem to learn only after a good few years of full-time work.
Also people fresh out of college/bootcamps tend to fall for the typical "nerd traps" like trying to build beautiful abstractions where there is no time nor need for that.
> Apparently Our unique skill in the job market is an immunity to boredom.
This is about right IMO. Most of the work is seriously boring. I was in meetings talking with software developers about API interfaces of legacy systems (with monologues about the intriguing question: "Why is the <insert stupid decision> a thing we have to stick with?" - answer is always backwards support, btw) and I couldn't understand why are they sitting here and why do they think their life is well spent doing that? Anything is better - and they earn €3500-4500/month, so it isn't even that much for their 5-10 y/o careers.
Everything is better than this. I love programming, I've started when I was 10-11y/o, but I hate most things in the software industry. I love to program my own little tools, but I've become so fast building CRUD applications and apps that I have 200-300% efficiency (and thus a very high hourly rate) but I'm simultaneously so seriously bored that I have a hard time focussing on work because it's always the same.
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> I've seen such people
Me too: I've seen a kid (maybe 15-16) that has no A-level and dropped out of the 9th grade to work in a startup. Without any shares. I think he makes €10/hour maximum. I was 2 years older than him at that time and worked as a freelancer and had much more experience. Even 2 years earlier I had more skill than him. And I would never have considered to drop out of school back then because it's hilariously naïve. I can't understand how the startup could support it without any moral conflicts. Exploiting 15y/o and encouraging them to drop out is something I don't want to be involved in. But I guess this will happen a lot more in the next few years which is sad.
> Maybe it makes sense to encourage your kids to go into blue collar jobs.
Yeah, don't expect anything like a developer salary. Not even half of it.
My grandfather and my uncle have a blue collar company. They're operating with a 10% profit margin - sounds good, right? Wrong - if one of their employees is sick, they get into money problems really quick. Normally every employee needs to earn the company 2-3x of his salary to compensate for random events. They can't do that because the market doesn't allow them to - other people would do it for less than them and the quality is the same. Supply and demand will eventually lead to diminishing returns in all sectors. And if plumbing is too damn expensive, we have better incentives to automate the whole job.
I believe widespread employment as programmers is the only possible way for the US economy to have a large middle class in the coming decades. Unionized manufacturing ain't coming back.
Sorry to disappoint you, but there won't be a large middle class in industrial nations. It will be gig-based and there will be a big group of people working hard who get nothing and a small group of people who are extremely wealthy and disconnected.
You don't like Fiverr? Imagine that our whole job market runs like this in the future. The profit margin will be extremely small.
You need a website or a logo? Create a Fiverr task. You think you're a better developer or designer than those Fiverr guys? Then wait a few years and you will see that the performance and quality will improve drastically because workers get desperate when the pork cycle hits them.
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I'm not dreaming this up - this is already happening! And even employees are used like replaceable commodities e.g. big agencies have so many applicants that they say to their employees: "if you don't work hard for that shitty pay, you will be replaced immediately" - the agencies are clear about that and demonstrate their power. It's soul-crushing and I've seen great designers who get exploited in those power dynamics.
I think I will head to this [1] again to celebrate our insignificance in the whole scheme. Due to the very likely assumption that the thing that contains the universe (and also is the universe) is not bound to time and quantum effects lead to every possible reality (because it has infinity at its disposal) this is just one of those reincarnations where the human nature gets in the way of social equality.
I'm certain that the phenomenon of a widespread middle class is bizarre in the grand scheme of things. Exponential functions don't generally have a bulge in the middle of the curve. We had one for a few decades and may yet again for another few. In the long run, it's quite unlikely that capitalism can sustain an exponential curve of wealth yet have a bulge in the "middle class" section.
Is there strong evidence that this will happen anytime soon? I've heard many arguments that claim this wouldn't happen anytime soon, particularly because of the level of difficulty and the required determination.
I don't know the situation in the US, but here in Germany the companies always say "Oh no, we don't have enough computer scientists" and continue to pay low salaries. Many people thought that CS grads were needed and chose it, but they earn average salaries and sometimes even have to fight for the good seats.
Our definition of skill shortage is that there are only 3 applicants for one open position. This means a skill shortage doesn't mean there's no one. It means that there are 3 people hoping for the job, but the companies would love to see as many as they can so they can push the salaries down.
> particularly because of the level of difficulty and the required determination
Maybe my imagination is limited, but I think there's a finite set of things we need until it gets exponentially harder to make big leaps (all industrial nations suffer from this phenomenon in advanced sectors) - basically the law of diminishing marginal returns [1]. And we will continue to improve the developer experience so it gets easier to build computer programs.
This is exactly what they're doing. I think it's irresponsible to manipulate the youth and telling them that everyone should be a programmer. The companies won't feel responsible for all the jobless or unhappy people they've created through lobbying and will blame politics. Man, I seriously hope I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.
The market is currently full of people who are in for the money and will continue to be. It will be filled with people until supply meets demand. That the salaries will drop significantly is a natural result of this.
We had this pork cycle for teachers, doctors and other highly trained people. No one is benefitting from too many people who drive the prices down (although I'm not gonna say something as an employer, companies are happy about it - the profit margin will shrink but this can be compensated for using scaling). Those that are in for the money will leave (or continue to suffer in an unfulfilling job) and those that have passion can't sustain themselves (we can see this trend in indie game development today).