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This is the coup de grâce from all the big tech corps: the commoditization of their most expensive recurring cost, the cost of skilled labor. This is the reaso

This is the coup de grâce from all the big tech corps: the commoditization of their most expensive recurring cost, the cost of skilled labor. This is the reason for the strong push for programming in early education in the past few years, with companies like Apple and Google setting up education camps and code literacy programs for kids. This is the purpose for pounding home the message "anyone can code!" over and over again. Its been happening in many countries world-wide, not just the US. Along with the boom in coding bootcamps and open courses online, they hope to dilute the skilled labor pool to such an extent that programmers will no longer have any negotiating power and salaries can start to decline. The big tech companies only do what is in their own self interest. This is not to say that there won't be people benefiting from this as a second order effect. People without other prospects of employment (either because of location or circumstance) will have a chance to earn a good living and escape poverty or upgrade their social class. But this will come at the expense of practitioners already heavily invested in the industry.

citrus_maxima 7y ago
You're definitely reading too much into this. We learn algebra and calculus, how many actually go on to become mathematicians and dilute the field of mathematics? Physics? Biology? You teach kids coding because we are surrounded by computers. No more, no less.
scarface74 7y ago
I keep seeing the “push for coding in early education” like it’s a new thing. I had a programming course in 1988 in 8th grade and my senior year in high school. They were both AppleSoft Basic courses.
- alehul 7y ago
  I think the "push for coding in early education" is a very recent development, particularly in America, for those in poorer areas or minority groups. Anecdotal but I'm currently in my early 20s, from one of those areas, and I didn't know that schools existed where you could learn coding before college.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Seeing that I am a minority and went to a predominantly Black public school in the South, I don’t think that’s the case.
    - alehul 7y ago
      That’s amazing, and awesome to hear! Both our anecdotes can be true. :) I was in Massachusetts, which you’d expect to be pretty good about this stuff at the time.
- jstarfish 7y ago
  > I keep seeing the “push for coding in early education” like it’s a new thing. After your generation public schools started dropping all of the useful labor-skills courses. No woodworking shop, no auto repair, nothing was taught anymore that could result in a splinter or a finger-chopping. The extent of my public-school coding education started and ended with cheating my way through math by programming a TI-82.
guiomie 7y ago
The parent post sounds borderline conspiracy theory. Working in big tech, I see a lot of volunteer opportunities to promote STEM among the youth because it's obvious that those CS jobs provide good salary and great living conditions, and people wanna share their passion. What I haven't seen are internal memo, OKRs or shareholder messages stipulating a strategy to commodize CS to reduce labor costs.
- lalos 7y ago
  1. Salaries are reported to Wall St 2. Profits go up, stock goes up. Costs go down, profits go up. 3. Wall St and investors want higher profits 4. Salaries depend on supply and demand. Demand is high and supply is stagnant then cost goes up. 5. Companies push for increasing supply of workers. It's economics and business not a conspiracy theory. Doesn't Apple apply the same logic for all the components to make an iPhone? Even going as far as doing their own chips to have a hand in increasing supply. This is the same Apple (along with Google and the rest) involved in this lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- kemiller2002 7y ago
  Actually, I heard the founder of Coder Dojo talk (Bill Liao) as to why he started it, and this is exactly what he said.
- harlanji 7y ago
  I've been a professional programmer since age 15, now age 34 and homeless in San Francisco/Mountain View, unemployed and seeking in tech for 2 years, salary cuts and decreased respect and more training my replacements at each stop since 2015. Teaching "opportunities" are everywhere, but I prefer to wait tables and do independent software research in lack of a suitable paid position in software development. OKRs to reduce labor costs are an interesting concept, though. What forms of results would you be looking for? I've never worked under a productive OKR or KPI system, so the more detail in your thought process the better.
Despegar 7y ago
The Apple brand since the launch of the Mac in 1984 has been "the computer for the rest of us". That has always rubbed a certain kind of tech person the wrong way and it still does to this day. The democratization of computers and technology necessarily means more people using and making them. No doubt you'd be making a lot more money if you were one of the few in the computer priesthood. It may be bad for those people specifically, but that doesn't mean it's bad overall.
rockinghigh 7y ago
> coup de gras Gras means fat in French. You probably mean coup de grâce.
- tepidandroid 7y ago
  Edited, thanks.
iamcurious 7y ago
I'm not so sure. Programmers have been automatizing every job including programming itself for ever and, so far, it only created more demand for programming. Maybe lots more programmers means we can attempt things that are not possible now and actually means the old programmers will earn as much as ever.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> a chance to earn a good living Well, that’s not the goal here, either. The goal is to turn coding into 21st-century factory assembly work: a miserable grind that people do for subsistence wages when they have literally nowhere else to turn, all while making sure that there is nowhere else to turn. I cringe at the cheerleading that HN does when people discount the value of a four-year-degree; if a four-year-degree isn’t “necessary” then by extension, it’s effectively useless. Of course - one of two things is true: coding is actually not that complex and most anybody can just “pick it up” and become effective without much in the way of formal training or education, or it does take years of a combination of practice and study to do correctly. If the former, then it doesn’t much matter what I think - if the latter, then it doesn’t much matter what Tim Cook says (at least out loud regardless of what he actually thinks).
ThrustVectoring 7y ago
There's fundamental reasons why programmer compensation is high. It's hard to replace the work of one good programmer with many mediocre ones, and measuring the amount of programmer output is difficult. These factors lead to tournament-style compensation. Instead of paying workers in proportion to their output, rank-order them and have a compensation bump on promotion that is large enough to incentivize efforts to compete for it. If workers are risk-neutral, this is as efficient of a way to compensate as piece work is, and has the additional benefit of only requiring employers to rank-order their employees, rather than generate an objective measure of their productivity. Professional sports is the best example of this phenomenon - no matter how many applicants a team gets, they can only have five players on the court at one time. NBA player salaries are not materially threatened by additional entrants. Instead, the additional competition largely gets channeled into making it harder to remain an NBA player.
- tepidandroid 7y ago
  This makes a lot of sense, which is probably the reason why Microsoft has implemented such a system in the past. Unfortunately, it does have the unfortunate tendency of creating toxic workplaces, which hampers productivity.
  - ThrustVectoring 7y ago
    Explicit stack-ranking is the myopic version of this - I'm more talking about the pretty standard "if you distinguish yourself at work you can get a promotion with an associated pay increase" that goes on at pretty much every company. It's not called a rank ordering, but there's only so much room for employees to distinguish themselves, so in practice it's roughly the same for those above the cutoff.
beat 7y ago
We are a long way from diluting the IT labor pool to the point where it systematically depresses wages. Assuming some sort of relationship between potential talent as a programmer and natural attraction to programming, then programming is already tilted toward the talented. Trying to recruit more programmers with early-education programming is going to add more mediocre/bad programmers than good ones. And you need the good ones. Work that can be done by mediocre programmers will eventually be replaced by software doing what they used to do - software written by the more talented programmers. And the supply of good programmers is necessarily limited.

citrus_maxima 7y ago

You're definitely reading too much into this. We learn algebra and calculus, how many actually go on to become mathematicians and dilute the field of mathematics? Physics? Biology? You teach kids coding because we are surrounded by computers. No more, no less.

scarface74 7y ago

I keep seeing the “push for coding in early education” like it’s a new thing. I had a programming course in 1988 in 8th grade and my senior year in high school. They were both AppleSoft Basic courses.

alehul 7y ago
I think the "push for coding in early education" is a very recent development, particularly in America, for those in poorer areas or minority groups. Anecdotal but I'm currently in my early 20s, from one of those areas, and I didn't know that schools existed where you could learn coding before college.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Seeing that I am a minority and went to a predominantly Black public school in the South, I don’t think that’s the case.
  - alehul 7y ago
    That’s amazing, and awesome to hear! Both our anecdotes can be true. :) I was in Massachusetts, which you’d expect to be pretty good about this stuff at the time.
jstarfish 7y ago
> I keep seeing the “push for coding in early education” like it’s a new thing. After your generation public schools started dropping all of the useful labor-skills courses. No woodworking shop, no auto repair, nothing was taught anymore that could result in a splinter or a finger-chopping. The extent of my public-school coding education started and ended with cheating my way through math by programming a TI-82.

guiomie 7y ago

The parent post sounds borderline conspiracy theory. Working in big tech, I see a lot of volunteer opportunities to promote STEM among the youth because it's obvious that those CS jobs provide good salary and great living conditions, and people wanna share their passion. What I haven't seen are internal memo, OKRs or shareholder messages stipulating a strategy to commodize CS to reduce labor costs.

lalos 7y ago
1. Salaries are reported to Wall St 2. Profits go up, stock goes up. Costs go down, profits go up. 3. Wall St and investors want higher profits 4. Salaries depend on supply and demand. Demand is high and supply is stagnant then cost goes up. 5. Companies push for increasing supply of workers. It's economics and business not a conspiracy theory. Doesn't Apple apply the same logic for all the components to make an iPhone? Even going as far as doing their own chips to have a hand in increasing supply. This is the same Apple (along with Google and the rest) involved in this lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
kemiller2002 7y ago
Actually, I heard the founder of Coder Dojo talk (Bill Liao) as to why he started it, and this is exactly what he said.
harlanji 7y ago
I've been a professional programmer since age 15, now age 34 and homeless in San Francisco/Mountain View, unemployed and seeking in tech for 2 years, salary cuts and decreased respect and more training my replacements at each stop since 2015. Teaching "opportunities" are everywhere, but I prefer to wait tables and do independent software research in lack of a suitable paid position in software development. OKRs to reduce labor costs are an interesting concept, though. What forms of results would you be looking for? I've never worked under a productive OKR or KPI system, so the more detail in your thought process the better.

Despegar 7y ago

The Apple brand since the launch of the Mac in 1984 has been "the computer for the rest of us". That has always rubbed a certain kind of tech person the wrong way and it still does to this day. The democratization of computers and technology necessarily means more people using and making them. No doubt you'd be making a lot more money if you were one of the few in the computer priesthood. It may be bad for those people specifically, but that doesn't mean it's bad overall.

rockinghigh 7y ago

> coup de gras Gras means fat in French. You probably mean coup de grâce.

tepidandroid 7y ago
Edited, thanks.

iamcurious 7y ago

I'm not so sure. Programmers have been automatizing every job including programming itself for ever and, so far, it only created more demand for programming. Maybe lots more programmers means we can attempt things that are not possible now and actually means the old programmers will earn as much as ever.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> a chance to earn a good living Well, that’s not the goal here, either. The goal is to turn coding into 21st-century factory assembly work: a miserable grind that people do for subsistence wages when they have literally nowhere else to turn, all while making sure that there is nowhere else to turn. I cringe at the cheerleading that HN does when people discount the value of a four-year-degree; if a four-year-degree isn’t “necessary” then by extension, it’s effectively useless. Of course - one of two things is true: coding is actually not that complex and most anybody can just “pick it up” and become effective without much in the way of formal training or education, or it does take years of a combination of practice and study to do correctly. If the former, then it doesn’t much matter what I think - if the latter, then it doesn’t much matter what Tim Cook says (at least out loud regardless of what he actually thinks).

ThrustVectoring 7y ago

There's fundamental reasons why programmer compensation is high. It's hard to replace the work of one good programmer with many mediocre ones, and measuring the amount of programmer output is difficult. These factors lead to tournament-style compensation. Instead of paying workers in proportion to their output, rank-order them and have a compensation bump on promotion that is large enough to incentivize efforts to compete for it. If workers are risk-neutral, this is as efficient of a way to compensate as piece work is, and has the additional benefit of only requiring employers to rank-order their employees, rather than generate an objective measure of their productivity. Professional sports is the best example of this phenomenon - no matter how many applicants a team gets, they can only have five players on the court at one time. NBA player salaries are not materially threatened by additional entrants. Instead, the additional competition largely gets channeled into making it harder to remain an NBA player.

tepidandroid 7y ago
This makes a lot of sense, which is probably the reason why Microsoft has implemented such a system in the past. Unfortunately, it does have the unfortunate tendency of creating toxic workplaces, which hampers productivity.
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  Explicit stack-ranking is the myopic version of this - I'm more talking about the pretty standard "if you distinguish yourself at work you can get a promotion with an associated pay increase" that goes on at pretty much every company. It's not called a rank ordering, but there's only so much room for employees to distinguish themselves, so in practice it's roughly the same for those above the cutoff.

beat 7y ago

We are a long way from diluting the IT labor pool to the point where it systematically depresses wages. Assuming some sort of relationship between potential talent as a programmer and natural attraction to programming, then programming is already tilted toward the talented. Trying to recruit more programmers with early-education programming is going to add more mediocre/bad programmers than good ones. And you need the good ones. Work that can be done by mediocre programmers will eventually be replaced by software doing what they used to do - software written by the more talented programmers. And the supply of good programmers is necessarily limited.