Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

Everything is code nowadays. Infrastructure as code, circuits as code, etc. Maybe the code we write will change overtime, but the practice of rigorously describing things in a formal language will never go away as long as people are doing intellectual work. What is intellectual work anyhow and is it not isomorphic in some respect to writing code? Isn't it about construction? Maybe the functional community, where they talk about equivalences between proofs and programs and amazing things of that sort, has a better grasp on what the future of programming and its rightful place in human endeavors is.

I view it more as a gold rush. Creating the future has never been more accessible and companies are in a terrible rush to find their 'plot' and start finding nuggets.

Software engineers are the people who can do the work and so demand go up. The returns (value) these ventures produce warrant continued competition in winning decent talent and the price gets pegged in some range for some region in some category / industry.

I dunno about a bubble, implying it will pop in some catastrophic way.

But will market forces correct the above average salary? I think so.

More young students than ever are learning to code, which is naturally going to increase the labor pool. The supply of software engineers is going to go up in the next 10-20 years (as will the demand, though! But I still think supply will outpace). This seems like it would mostly affect new hires, as some 15 year veteran is going to have valuable experience that (most) companies will always be willing to pay for.

It feels like finance to me. People who got there early made a killing. Then salaries, while still pretty high, fell considerably as everyone rushed there to get rich.

As a counterpoint to the author's comment on doctors (maybe not lawyers, still plenty of law students in the pipeline). It does appear that the number of people going after medical degrees is decreasing, so I would predict their salaries to jump considerably in the next 20 years.

And last, and a totally aside point, I have exactly one friend who skipped college and over the last 12 years worked his way up the electricians union and now runs his own small business doing residential electrical work. He's making more than most of our social circle. He doesn't know many people his age doing this type of work either, so as the old guard retires, he's going to charge whatever he wants.

A few thoughts:

- Just because a value is high and may very well go down, doesn't mean it's a bubble. FAANG are making real money from those workers, not just inflating an asset and selling it to other investors.

- Just because it doesn't involve long hours, doesn't mean it's not hard. A lot of my college colleagues really struggled, and many more didn't even get in. Don't discount natural ability - in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, even if seeing is effortless for him.

It would only be a bubble if there is some conceivable chain of events where suddenly companies would want less programming than what they currently pay for. That's just not going to happen barring a literal collapse of the internet. That said, average programmer compensation is inevitably going to go down as more and more programmers enter the workforce (though the high-end salaries are going to continue to go up, as exceptional programmers become rarer the more juniors enter the market).