In order to be a developer you have to: - Be willing to sit in a chair for 8-12 hours a day, staring at characters on a screen, paying attention to tiny detail

In order to be a developer you have to: - Be willing to sit in a chair for 8-12 hours a day, staring at characters on a screen, paying attention to tiny details that would drive many non-devs mad, and work in deeply-focused, high-concentration mode - Be willing to keep with the latest technology trends on your time and often on your own dime. For many people this means essentially jettisoning the idea of a healthy social life - Have the financial resources, talent, and drive to get through challenging academic material for 4-8 years at a university or spend all your free time teaching yourself everything you need to know, which can even harder, meaning again, no healthy social life - Live in an area with an incredibly high cost of living that only gets higher each year (occasional pullbacks notwithstanding.) This can mean spending 30, 40, even 50% or your income every month just on rent or living with a gaggle of roommates through your twenties, thirties, even forties. - Be part of an industry that, despite fierce competition for talent, will decline to hire qualified candidates on that basis of age, perceived "poor culture fit," having attended a "bad/wrong" school (or no school) Devs are also value multipliers; they're worth more than some marginal value. When you hire a dev, you're hire them to bring in 2,3,5,10 times what you're paying them in value, not 120k so that they can bring in 130. The fact that devs are paid high salaries is good and makes perfect sense. It's part of the reason doctors are paid so much (and if we were really fair, currently underpaid professions that are similarly demanding would be paid far more than they are now.) Now, the "this hurts startups" issue is something to be concerned about, but not at the expense of workers. What can be done here? - Get used to needing more VC money. Adjust expectations - Figure out ways to make startups cheaper (#1 on the list should be massive housebuilding. If rents were 1/3 of what they are, we would likely not be even reading this article. Right now all that would-be "extra" money gets directly funneled into the pockets of landlords. Tech bigwigs should be pouring massive resources / clout into changing this. Density, public housing to take pressure off the low end, all of it: https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent-crisis-or-the-rent-is-still-too-damn-high-edb13ca853cc https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/fixing-the-nyc-rent-crisi...) - Get used to having fewer, but better capitalized startups