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> Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid. It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't s

> Part of the myth is that it is skill, not health risks, that should be well paid. It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. It's easy in comparison to have more people who can do dangerous jobs: you just need more children and wait 20 years. For management and similar roles, I agree somewhat (it's much harder to pinpoint the skills required, and they often have less direct influence in the success of the company/project), but for the actual jobs, like software development and engineering? Yeah, they are high skill. > Remuneration, price of different types of labor, also depends on cultural factors. I don't think so. Unless you include religion and royalty where you can't just get into some career, the ones that are easy, low-risk and high-pay/high-power will always be attractive and you will be able to predict movements pretty well with market models.

cameronbrown 6y ago
> It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. Is it? We work in one of the few industries where self-taught may actually be the norm (or at least, a significant minority).
- luckylion 6y ago
  I believe the self-taught (which is hard to define, as most are still learning by reading and imitating, it's not like people are completely removed from the world and suddenly walk out of the woods as a software developer) are pretty much here because it's so hard. If it was easier to scale the number of developers up, the people who took up programming as a hobby and then (often accidentally) transitioned into doing it for money would still be hobbyists. They're being recruited because we can't fill the seats with formally trained people. I am an autodidact, and I'm clearly worse than actual CS people in the CS stuff, but that's not a problem for me, because we're in an industry where we lump together people who work on hard problems and people who basically translate requirements into business logic code. The CS people could do my job, I couldn't do theirs (there are some autodidacts that could, but they are a tiny minority imho), and for most intents and purposes, it doesn't matter, because most requirements don't require high level computer science, they require python, php, javascript and css etc.

cameronbrown 6y ago

> It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. Is it? We work in one of the few industries where self-taught may actually be the norm (or at least, a significant minority).

luckylion 6y ago
I believe the self-taught (which is hard to define, as most are still learning by reading and imitating, it's not like people are completely removed from the world and suddenly walk out of the woods as a software developer) are pretty much here because it's so hard. If it was easier to scale the number of developers up, the people who took up programming as a hobby and then (often accidentally) transitioned into doing it for money would still be hobbyists. They're being recruited because we can't fill the seats with formally trained people. I am an autodidact, and I'm clearly worse than actual CS people in the CS stuff, but that's not a problem for me, because we're in an industry where we lump together people who work on hard problems and people who basically translate requirements into business logic code. The CS people could do my job, I couldn't do theirs (there are some autodidacts that could, but they are a tiny minority imho), and for most intents and purposes, it doesn't matter, because most requirements don't require high level computer science, they require python, php, javascript and css etc.