Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?

Well, a programmer can - in a matter of hours, or at most days/weeks - assemble a factory performing the work of 10,000 full-time highly trained workers (actually more, we're talking billions of operations per second), at a total direct cost of a couple of coffees and use of a device costing few hundred dollars new, and then fully own all rights to the factory, and operate it full-time for about the cost of a normal person's phone bill per month (server instances). So the question isn't why there are millions of high-paying jobs to do so for someone else with the resulting rights and ownership by someone else:

the question is why anyone takes any of these jobs. why not build your own damn factory. It's usually only because you lack some of the skills (design, business development, marketing, choosing what to produce, etc).

so, team up with a cofounder. hence: hacker news. well, there is one downside here. the programmers who work here would never team up with a designer who knows just what to build. instead they both get hired by someone who does. the designer gets hired at a low rate, then the programmer gets hired at a high rate, just because the person hiring the two knows what is needed to get the factory producing something people will pay for: but the programmer (readers on this very article right here at hacker news), doesn't.

so yeah there are millions of jobs for you to build value for others, but it's just because you're not quite wise enough enough not to need these jobs.

(among other things, i'm such a designer. split a company 60/40 with me? No, you would not. But work for 1.5 my wage at the same company, so that neither of us gets to reap the benefits. yes you would.)

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this post is tagged #creative and written from that perspective.

To the pedant brigade: ease up. It's "little to now education" compared to medicine or law, where you have to toil in years in a very rigid pipeline of exams, internships and certifications. There's plenty of learning in programming, but you can do with little education.

The effects on the cost of living would be harder to predict, I believe. Because even if you have less wealthy individuals, if they are more of them, they will still drive prices up.

Perhps, for say land or houses, people will still pay the same price or more per square meter. But they will get by with less area.

The point is you don't need to disrupt that culture. That culture is in fact what would permit the idea to work. There are badly paid good programmers already in China and elsewhere.

If you can manage to produce quality work and convince people to hire you consistently (big if, I know) in the high paying market, you can leverage the existing programming population oferring wages a lot higher.

I think one of the problems with software engineering is that [almost] no one knows anything about it.

I've been a working programmer [or software engineer if I've just met you at a party and I think you're cute] for long enough to work on >5 multi-billion dollar projects. Of these, one was delivered on time and according to spec. That company went down the toilet within four years.

I've read fairly widely in the software engineering literature starting with Weinberg and Brooks in university, and chasing my share of papers, 'blogs and web pages since then. One of the most positive things that has happened to the field is the recent discovery that the only thing at the end of the methodology rainbow would appear to be consultants [wearing suits with slits for the dorsal fins [h.t. Mr Stross]] and stacks of unread Learn Florble-Oriented Development in 21 days.

I know I can build complex systems. I know I can sometimes build simple systems [much much harder.] I don't know how to reliably schedule a project to build a new thing. I think anyone who thinks they do know this is delusional or lying.

And in the end, I think it probably doesn't matter. The truth of the software engineering crisis, is that it never existed. And it's possible that software engineering never existed either. We program. We do it because we like it and it pays. The folks who do it only because it pays usually end up in management fucking things up by assuming they can motivate people always and only with money.

[oh, on a tangent I've also been a manager. I wasn't all that good at it. The team I managed delivered good stuff, some of it on schedule, but the company still went belly-up. And I learned that I don't enjoy management, and would rather have less money and more fun - take from that what you will]