I‘m coding for almost 20 yrs now and used to think the same: „when will the bubble pop?“, then it was „how long can this go on?“ until I ended up with „ok, that’s weird, what the heck is keeping this bubble from popping?”
I was told throughout these two decades that I’ll be replaced by some offshore developer from India within the next 5 yrs max. It never even came close.
To me it was against common sense, to climb up so much the social ladder like I was fortunate enough to do, just by being exposed to programming.
Then, I saw a talk given by Uncle Bob where he spoke about the history of software development. It was interesting throughout (like that the rate of female programmers was almost 50% before the dawn of CS degrees), but he also touched the “bubble” issue briefly.
He turned my perma-bearishness into ongoing curiosity: That we’re not in a bubble but in an ongoing “software crisis”. A crisis existing basically since the invention of programming languages. The theory has it that here aren’t enough developers available and may never will be. Is it demand-side economics on steroids what’s behind it? I don’t know.
But what struck me maybe the most is that I’ve never even heard about this theory, and never did any of my much more experienced and better programming friends and colleagues. The fact they didn’t knew kind of underlines the theory: there is so much demand that there is simply no time nor need to even tinker with the history of our craft.