>> The most common response I’ve gotten to this post is that we should expect programmers to be well-paid because software is everywhere and there will be at le

>> The most common response I’ve gotten to this post is that we should expect programmers to be well-paid because software is everywhere and there will be at least as much software in the future. [...] Yet electrical engineering comp isn’t in the same league as programmer comp, [...] and there are more processors sold than ever before. > What drives the demand for engineers isn't the number of things sold, but rather the number of kinds of that thing. The variety of chips is still growing, but not proportionate to chips sold, because the numbers are mostly coming from the handful of chips used in servers and mobile devices. This. What matters here is not ubiquitousness of software, but rather it's bespoke nature. Every major corporation is employing thousands of developers (either in house or via some outsourcing arrangement) to write and maintain software according to the company's unique needs. This is the most important driver of demand for developers, and what differentiates us from other technical fields.