The wage paid to programmers is a function of supply and demand just like everything else in the market. Investment bankers and programmers earn more than your

The wage paid to programmers is a function of supply and demand just like everything else in the market. Investment bankers and programmers earn more than your typical American because the supply of bankers and top-level programmers is much tighter. Goldman Sachs and KKR hire from Wharton or HBS, and Google hires grads from CMU or Stanford. Whether they should or shouldn’t restrict their hiring practices is another matter, but their insistence on hiring only the “elite” causes salaries in those fields to skyrocket. Welders and electricians make more money than say a landscaper because you need more training, certifications, exams, and experience to do the job, greatly reducing the pool of available labor. If you want programmers to get paid less, make it easier to become a programmer and get Google to hire more broadly. That’s perhaps why bootcamps and code camps are looked down upon by existing programmers — not just the belief in the superiority of a traditional 4 year computer science education (whether founded or not), but also a realization that if these things catch on they might be paying us all less in the future.