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In my view, trying to analyze the "value" generated by computer programming, independent of its price, is likely to venture into voodoo economics. Equating pric
by analog31 5y ago
In my view, trying to analyze the "value" generated by computer programming, independent of its price, is likely to venture into voodoo economics. Equating price and value is not unproblematic, but everything else is more problematic.
Whenever someone mentions a labor shortage, some smart-ass (such as me) asks if wages are rising. Granted at this time there could be alternatives to wages, such as the ability to demand better working conditions. "I will never go back to the office" could be an example, that I am not seeing in other professions.
I'm skeptical that computer programming is a magical fountain of value. Programming is expensive, and it could be a net asset or a liability to any business that engages in it. We've all read about expensive software projects that ended in utter failure. There are also subtle forms of failure such as the introduction of new software making workers less productive, often attributed to "enterprise" software.
Another form of failure is when the software department within a business begins to engage in rent-seeking behavior, and drags down the whole business or makes it prohibitive to innovate in non-software areas. And rent-seeking could describe the business of selling incremental updates that consume training time on the user side.
Discussions on HN, and the many blogs and books about managing software projects, indicate that software is like most regular business, in that the value comes from selling something for marginally more than it cost to make.
Granted, this isn't unique to computer programming.
On the flip side, the lack of a gatekeeper for deciding who can program means that the number of people engaged in programming is unknown, and possibly quite elastic. "Shadow IT" is an industry unto itself. For instance, I am not employed as a software developer, yet I probably spend 50% of my non-meeting hours doing programming in support of my own work.