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This saturation of demand for software talent has been predicted for literally decades. In 1992, Ed Yourdon published “Decline and Fall of the American Programm
by dougabug 4y ago
This saturation of demand for software talent has been predicted for literally decades. In 1992, Ed Yourdon published “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” only to reverse himself four years later with the publication of “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”
If anything, the rate at which capable software professionals can create value has dramatically increased over time. Software is not a zero sum game, cumulative advances make it possible to solve an expanding frontier of problems with increasingly effective and efficient solutions.
- est31 4y agoFrontier is a good term because just as the US frontier age eventually ended, the software frontier expansion is also eventually going to stop.
- dougabug 4y agoI don’t mean frontier as in “the American Western Frontier.” I meant frontier as in, “the frontiers of human knowledge.” It’s not clear to me that the latter is limited in the way that the former is. Creation of knowledge products both facilitates the further production of new knowledge products and expands the scope of new knowledge products which can be created. This process is like a chain reaction where the potential energy unleashed may ultimately exceed any practical scale modern economics has meaningfully considered. Software costs almost nothing to deploy, even on a global scale, versus its potential value delivered; and it can be created or improved with almost no additional consumption of resources vs (the programmer) simply existing.