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What a poorly written blog post. This is proto-apocalyptic in the same way that Zerohedge is. The author may not understand why the software industry has high c
by yowlingcat 7y ago
What a poorly written blog post. This is proto-apocalyptic in the same way that Zerohedge is. The author may not understand why the software industry has high compensation, but Wall Street does. High margins, low op-ex, data moats, often winner take all dynamics, broad applicability, capability of cannibalizing incumbent industries, ease of deploying investment capital...even accounting for the dot com bubble, technology is the product and acceleration of industrialization, which in and of itself produced some of the highest concentrations of wealth in history.
The industry is not immune to bubble effects nor to catastrophic meltdowns (WeWork was obviously a huge, recent cautionary tale and very likely not the last), but to pretend not to understand where the compensation comes from is either lazy, wilfully ignorant, or both.
- jefftk 7y agoNone of what you write explains why more people haven't switched into the field, bringing wages down. Other fields work high wages have far larger barriers to entry.
- yowlingcat 7y agoSo that's why this doesn't make sense to you. You're refusing to think like an investor, only like an employee. Comparing one field to another field from the perspective of a laborer is useless, because the job and career only exists in context of the business itself. Until you can talk about investibility, this will remain a mystery to you. You've unintentionally demonstrated the difference between a programmer and a product savvy software engineer. To try to end this on a bit more of a constructive note: think about the difference between the _firms_ that employ software engineers/marketers/salespeople and the _firms_ that employ highly paid folks in medicine and law. How do the unit economics breakdown? In what ways are certain aspects favorable and unfavorable to an investor?
- shishy 7y agoI'd always thought it was because the marginal cost of a developer is 0, right? That is, developers build software, then they go to work on the next thing while company can sell existing software. Each additional unit of software sale doesn't have a developer cost component (unlike for example, shoes, where the labor cost of the worker is factored into making each additional shoe). Is that close to what you're saying?
- hcho 7y agoWhat makes you think people haven't switched?
- tharne 7y agoI've seen a bunch of people switch into the field, realize that they HATE writing code and promptly leave the field. It's easy to forget on a site like this that very few people actually enjoy programming. You're translating human ideas and language into something a machine can understand. That's not most people's idea of a good time.