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To clarify, the people working by staring at computers are also seen as a cost to be repressed and not a service to be rewarded. Supply and demand has made the

To clarify, the people working by staring at computers are also seen as a cost to be repressed and not a service to be rewarded. Supply and demand has made the cost resistant to repression up til now, but the economic system is hard at work finding out how to change that. One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor costs going down.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pm90 8y ago
> One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor costs going down. This has been discussed in great detail, especially here on HN. The consensus seems to be that even if you increase the supply by a lot, the nature of Software Engineering, its inherent complexity will restrict the supply of the highly skilled workers. This theory seems to have held out in the Indian/Chinese labor markets; but its possible there are other systemic reason for that. Meanwhile the demand for Technology skills keeps increasing rapidly. Perhaps in the next economic bust there will be a much-delayed correction. The future does look pretty rosy for Software Engineers at the present time.
- intended 8y ago
  A critical aspect of that is the distribution of engineering skill is bimodal, if not multi modal. People want a lot of top end coders. The lower and middle, far less so. Lumping all comp sci labor into one skill and ability bracket prevents nuanced understanding.
kwoff 8y ago
I also wonder if, in some ways, devops (I mean the "idea", not the engineers themselves) could be commoditizing IT people (not implying there's some conspiracy), blurring the distinction between devs and sysadmins in particular.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  Well you could say the same about the entirety of "the cloud" ... no need to pay a team of sysadmins to manage, deploy, and maintain a data center, when you can easily provision a VM in seconds, or even better, use a SaaS offering so you don't even have to worry about applying patches and stuff ;)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pm90 8y ago

> One might even go so far as to postulate if the IT industries push to get more people into IT is so that labor supply goes up leading to labor costs going down. This has been discussed in great detail, especially here on HN. The consensus seems to be that even if you increase the supply by a lot, the nature of Software Engineering, its inherent complexity will restrict the supply of the highly skilled workers. This theory seems to have held out in the Indian/Chinese labor markets; but its possible there are other systemic reason for that. Meanwhile the demand for Technology skills keeps increasing rapidly. Perhaps in the next economic bust there will be a much-delayed correction. The future does look pretty rosy for Software Engineers at the present time.

intended 8y ago
A critical aspect of that is the distribution of engineering skill is bimodal, if not multi modal. People want a lot of top end coders. The lower and middle, far less so. Lumping all comp sci labor into one skill and ability bracket prevents nuanced understanding.

kwoff 8y ago

I also wonder if, in some ways, devops (I mean the "idea", not the engineers themselves) could be commoditizing IT people (not implying there's some conspiracy), blurring the distinction between devs and sysadmins in particular.

CodeCube 8y ago
Well you could say the same about the entirety of "the cloud" ... no need to pay a team of sysadmins to manage, deploy, and maintain a data center, when you can easily provision a VM in seconds, or even better, use a SaaS offering so you don't even have to worry about applying patches and stuff ;)