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Well, what regulates the amount of available spots in professional football? Why can't people create additional teams and play exciting matches that draw paying

Well, what regulates the amount of available spots in professional football? Why can't people create additional teams and play exciting matches that draw paying audiences? Is the bottleneck that spectator attention is already maxed out? But yes, the analogy is faulty if the bottleneck in football is the availability of the spots, because in programming the bottleneck is rather the availability of good enough new hires. We may be around the point where CS programmes have grown so much over the years that the marginal additional student may not have that good potential any more (out of a combination of motivation and talent). But a potential reserve talent to tap into could be women, but attracting them to programming has been an uphill battle and is a can-of-worms topic why.

pjc50 6y ago
> what regulates the amount of available spots in professional football? You're only allowed 11 people on the pitch per side. Believe me, if it were possible to replace Ronaldo with a thousand less-skilled players paid a fraction of his wages, somebody would have tried it. You could even suggest hiring them for fractions of a match on an internet employment brokerage platform. Footballr.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Okay, I agree it's not a perfect analogy but the football:golf = programming:law still holds I think. But I do agree that spectator sports are more winner-takes-all than programming jobs.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    To be clear - I agree that programming is hard (or else I'm REALLY stupid), but comparing programming ability to athletic ability always seemed wrong because the world needs WAY more programmers than it needs athletes. I'd guess that there are more professional programmers in the world than professional athletes of any kind. If the "market" for athletes were as broad as the market for programmers, you'd see a lot more comparatively mediocre athletes making a comfortable living at it.
watwut 6y ago
> Why can't people create additional teams and play exciting matches that draw paying audiences? Is the bottleneck that spectator attention is already maxed out? People do create additional teams and play exciting for them matches. That is how amateur leagues work. People create whole additional sports and compete among themselves in them. The spectator attention is really maxed out, because spectating sport is massively social thing. People do it because of excitement of who win, but massive part of it all is being part of culture, having common topic with friends, feeling like member of big fan club etc.
dale_glass 6y ago
I'd say what regulates it is that the quality bar is so high, that the low level is just not exciting. We've become accustomed to the high quality, and now expect the extreme performance and wild stunts the pros manage to pull off. The same happened with other artistic endeavors. Few people these days really want to see an amateur sing or play an instrument. We have so much high quality music that doing it "okay" doesn't really cut it anymore. Before an okay player/singer might have added to a party. Today, most of the audience will be just waiting for it to end and for somebody to put on some decent, commercial music.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Isn't this happening in programming too? Just like anyone can play Ed Sheeran on their wedding and pay one guy to handle the equipment, companies can buy (or download for free) lots of plumbing tools and frameworks made by the few star companies. It's not like the n+1th website needs professional programmers. For tons of (otherwise offline) businesses tweaking a WordPress site is more than enough. And just like you can watch Ronaldo on TV from half way around the world instead of watching your town's crappy teams, you can also use Google and Microsoft software and services instead of hiring someone from your town. Even very custom software needs fewer and fewer people due to existing tooling. So the bar is going higher and higher in programming too.
  - dale_glass 6y ago
    I don't think it's quite the same. I'm saying sports, arts and music got to such heights, that an ordinary person can consume nothing but the best 0.1%. This in turn means the demand for the rest has plummeted, and being the guy who can play guitar "okay" doesn't really excite anybody anymore. There's a market at the very high end, and nobody wants to pay a cent for anything below that. Programming is going the opposite way, if anything. There's lots and lots of programming grunt work that just needs to be done by somebody and doesn't take any particular skill. There's rather less need for wizards able to squeeze every possible bit of functionality into 64K, because at this point resources are cheap. At this point a programmer can get by with being moderately competent and doing little other than gluing frameworks together. Things like music are the opposite. Mere competence is nowhere near enough.

pjc50 6y ago

> what regulates the amount of available spots in professional football? You're only allowed 11 people on the pitch per side. Believe me, if it were possible to replace Ronaldo with a thousand less-skilled players paid a fraction of his wages, somebody would have tried it. You could even suggest hiring them for fractions of a match on an internet employment brokerage platform. Footballr.

bonoboTP 6y ago
Okay, I agree it's not a perfect analogy but the football:golf = programming:law still holds I think. But I do agree that spectator sports are more winner-takes-all than programming jobs.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  To be clear - I agree that programming is hard (or else I'm REALLY stupid), but comparing programming ability to athletic ability always seemed wrong because the world needs WAY more programmers than it needs athletes. I'd guess that there are more professional programmers in the world than professional athletes of any kind. If the "market" for athletes were as broad as the market for programmers, you'd see a lot more comparatively mediocre athletes making a comfortable living at it.

watwut 6y ago

> Why can't people create additional teams and play exciting matches that draw paying audiences? Is the bottleneck that spectator attention is already maxed out? People do create additional teams and play exciting for them matches. That is how amateur leagues work. People create whole additional sports and compete among themselves in them. The spectator attention is really maxed out, because spectating sport is massively social thing. People do it because of excitement of who win, but massive part of it all is being part of culture, having common topic with friends, feeling like member of big fan club etc.

dale_glass 6y ago

I'd say what regulates it is that the quality bar is so high, that the low level is just not exciting. We've become accustomed to the high quality, and now expect the extreme performance and wild stunts the pros manage to pull off. The same happened with other artistic endeavors. Few people these days really want to see an amateur sing or play an instrument. We have so much high quality music that doing it "okay" doesn't really cut it anymore. Before an okay player/singer might have added to a party. Today, most of the audience will be just waiting for it to end and for somebody to put on some decent, commercial music.

bonoboTP 6y ago
Isn't this happening in programming too? Just like anyone can play Ed Sheeran on their wedding and pay one guy to handle the equipment, companies can buy (or download for free) lots of plumbing tools and frameworks made by the few star companies. It's not like the n+1th website needs professional programmers. For tons of (otherwise offline) businesses tweaking a WordPress site is more than enough. And just like you can watch Ronaldo on TV from half way around the world instead of watching your town's crappy teams, you can also use Google and Microsoft software and services instead of hiring someone from your town. Even very custom software needs fewer and fewer people due to existing tooling. So the bar is going higher and higher in programming too.
- dale_glass 6y ago
  I don't think it's quite the same. I'm saying sports, arts and music got to such heights, that an ordinary person can consume nothing but the best 0.1%. This in turn means the demand for the rest has plummeted, and being the guy who can play guitar "okay" doesn't really excite anybody anymore. There's a market at the very high end, and nobody wants to pay a cent for anything below that. Programming is going the opposite way, if anything. There's lots and lots of programming grunt work that just needs to be done by somebody and doesn't take any particular skill. There's rather less need for wizards able to squeeze every possible bit of functionality into 64K, because at this point resources are cheap. At this point a programmer can get by with being moderately competent and doing little other than gluing frameworks together. Things like music are the opposite. Mere competence is nowhere near enough.