Are coders worth it?

Holy moses that was a long article. I couldn't get to the end to see if the punchline was different than, "Yes, we get paid for hard work, but we also get paid for having rare skills. Some think it's fair, some don't. The folks doing the paying seem to think it's reasonable, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it."

That's a reasonable summary however the comments that will fill this thread will inevitably focus on the "developer == plumber" analogy.

Very well written article, I always enjoy reading stuff from the intersection of writers and coders. What I found startling was how different my experience has been to that of the author's at the start of the article.

I've put up with some horrific jobs paying miserable money in some of the most uninspiring industrial parks you could imagine. I've taken work in dingy Victorian offices so cold that I've had to program through thick gloves. I've accepted commutes taking up to three hours and incorporating four different kinds of transport. More than once I've spent 18 hours on Saturday and Sunday circulating my CV to every job opening and recruiter even slightly relevant to web development.

Reverse interviews? People clamouring to have coffee with me? Beer constantly close to hand?? These are unheard of things. Conditions are definitely better for me now but my skills certainly don't mark me out as a celebrity. Maybe the financial bubble of the dot-com era has been replaced by a cultural bubble, one that I'm definitely not part of.

I think the real issue is that there's people with lots of money that are willing to fund a lot of different companies in the hope of stumbling across the next facebook. Result? A whole host of well funded but ultimately useless apps and websites. Meanwhile, the people who can make these websites are making lots of money.

It's probably a bubble to some extent. Eventually, if the return from all these web apps is less than the money spent on them, the money will dry up. (I'd imagine that this will be the case - most of the value of the most-recent crop of high-value tech startups seems to be based on hype and even bigger companies buying them, rather than profitability or revenues). In the mean time, there's still people queuing up to fund things they don't understand. The biggest thing to remember about bubbles is that they always seem to keep growing far longer than any sensible person would expect. Will the money run out eventually? Probably.

I often worry that my job is, well, not that hard. The thing is, if it were as easy as it seems, more people would be doing it - or it would be automated - and either way the price will drop pretty soon.

So either what we do really is that hard, and worth that much, or there's a crash coming.