It's worth pointing out that generating a lot of value (productivity) is not a guarantee that your wages will grow in proportion to that value. In fact, for the

It's worth pointing out that generating a lot of value (productivity) is not a guarantee that your wages will grow in proportion to that value. In fact, for the last 50 years, in most careers, wages have not tracked productivity. This is the "Productivity-Pay Gap." (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ ) While that gap has opened for most Americans, it looks like the average progammers' wages are right in line with productivity growth (maybe not Silicon Valley wages, but I think those are pretty disconnected from the rest of the country anyway). So the question is not, "why are programmers' wages so inflated?" but instead, "what depressed everyone else's wages and will programmers remain immune?" The "what" has been a noisy political argument in the last several years especially. Suspects include foreign competition, automation, changes in corporate management, lax antitrust enforcement, and the decline of unions. Foreign competition is an obvious and much-discussed threat. My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book) was the title of a real book in the wake of the dot-com crash. More recently that threat seems to have receded, if temporarily. Companies still employ offshore programmers where they can, but the consensus has emerged for now that some combination of language differences, cultural differences, quality of training, and the difficulty of coordinating across time zones holds them back from taking over the most complex tasks. I see this as a temporary reprieve. Foreign programmers' quality will improve, both sides will learn to cope with language and cultural differences, tools for remote work are rapidly improving, and perhaps most importantly, competitive companies are being founded outside the US. For those companies, there are no language, cultural, or timezone differences in hiring local talent. I don't see automation as a threat. Or rather, programmers' jobs have been "automated away" on a regular basis, but you still need programmers to operate the automation! Assemblers replace machine code, compiled languages replace assembly, higher-level languages replace lower-level languages, off-the-shelf frameworks and middleware replace starting from scratch... After each change, programmers are more productive and more valuable, not less. This is unlike manufacturing, where the worker who is replaced by a robot may never learn to program that robot. I don't see the last three (corporate management, antitrust, unions) as especially important changes but others may disagree. I certainly don't see any reason programmers should be immune, except that the above two factors give them a lot of leverage. Lax antitrust enforcement was obviously a factor when some of the big companies conspired to hold down wages, but again, it doesn't seem to be enough by itself to hold wages down. Programmers seem to have done okay without unions, but I do wonder what it would be like if programmers had a guild system the way physicians and lawyers do.