Caveat lector: I co-founded Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com http://devbootcamp.com), which might inform your response to my comment. I agree with you that

Caveat lector: I co-founded Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com http://devbootcamp.com), which might inform your response to my comment. I agree with you that, as far as I know, "Never have we had a privileged class that's so easy to enter." There is something qualitatively different about programming, though, than almost every other field. I have a hard time describing it, but the best I've been able to do is this: the output of the field is also the input to the field. The tools programmers use, for example, are built by other programmers. The same can't be said for auto-workers. Among other things this means if I get twice as good as a programmer I have the opportunity to increase my leverage super-linearly. There's a feedback mechanism at work that's not at work in many other fields, let alone fields that are so lucrative. I might put scientific and mathematical research in the same bucket, for example, but even writing doesn't fall into this category. When it comes to writing, the means of distribution are governed entirely by non-writerly things. Even the raw economics are different. We'll stop producing cars when the marginal profit is zero, but the marginal cost of software is zero-plus-epsilon. The world we're in is new and strange and although I'd usually be the last to say it, I'm not sure the same rules apply to software. Those are "famous last words," of course, but my point is that I don't think it's so easy to put it in one bucket or the other. It's sufficiently different from both I think we have to reserve judgement rather than prematurely pen The Story of Software™.