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> But they’re solving a very real and important problem, and they’ll get better at it. Yes. The "very real and important problem" is not what we're supposed to

> But they’re solving a very real and important problem, and they’ll get better at it. Yes. The "very real and important problem" is not what we're supposed to think it is - diversity - but it is real nonetheless. The "very real and important problem" is that capital hates high labor costs, and needs to find a way to slow or stop the rise in developer salaries. All these articles about the terrible, terrible shortage of developers, about the importance of diversity in tech, about the necessity of lifting immigration restrictions, about how we need need need more developers in software engineering programs right now, about how actually screw it, just more developers in boot camps would be good enough - it's fundamentally not about any of those things, it's about how capital can control labor costs. It's about how to make software developers a) cheap b) plentiful and c) interchangeable. And now you understand why articles breathless about developer elitism and coding academies and articles that discuss ageism in tech are almost without exception disparate sets. Older developers ask (or are expected to ask) for more money. This is no surprise; this kind of behavior was well-known and documented even as far back as Adam Smith. But it is always disappointing to see how much of the apologia is supported by tech workers themselves. Or at best, we accept the framing of the problem and then argue about whether developers are actually elitist or not, and about whether people who graduate from code academies are good developers.

npsimons 11y ago
> But it is always disappointing to see how much of the apologia is supported by tech workers themselves. It's insane how quickly we forget history, even our own internal history, in this industry. Just as a small unrelated example, take the monopolistic cases of IBM, followed by Microsoft, followed by Apple. I've often wondered if it's a cost of the rapid pace of development of technological power, or just that the industry is still so (relatively) young.

npsimons 11y ago

> But it is always disappointing to see how much of the apologia is supported by tech workers themselves. It's insane how quickly we forget history, even our own internal history, in this industry. Just as a small unrelated example, take the monopolistic cases of IBM, followed by Microsoft, followed by Apple. I've often wondered if it's a cost of the rapid pace of development of technological power, or just that the industry is still so (relatively) young.