Are coders worth it?

I think the point about code being cool is rather shortsighted: Code has only been cool to anything like mainstream youth for maybe five or ten years. In US high school as an exchange student in 1999, the computer science class/team/whatever most certainly wasn't "cool" - and this was on the tail of the .com boom. In high school in Denmark 99-02, I saw the first general recognition that while "being able to make websites" was probably a useful skill, it certainly wasn't cool. Of course, the view changed at university, but then we're pretty far down the selection-bias rabbit-hole.

Given those 15 years of experience, I am not very surprised that I am in short supply. But now that coding is beginning to be cool, I'd also not be surprised if not too many years from now, basic computer literacy at the end of secondary education (or even earlier) includes the ability to crank out basic RoR-style apps.

> This is a great reminder that the "just world" fallacy is just that, a fallacy.

Where do you see that? He specifically concludes that he's making the right (ie "just") amount of money for writing and coding, and that it's "just" that the CFO makes more money than the coal-miner because his skills are more specialised and in higher demand.

Virtue is not value.

Value is not virtue.

What you consider virtuous may produce no economic value. Or maybe it does. There's no rigid formula that connects them and the Just World Hypothesis is an illusion that traps fools and wisemen alike.

Attempts to browbeat the world out of "is" and into "ought" have been universal failures and I retain every confidence that it will be ever thus.

James Somers might find Hayek's writing to be a bit repetitive and languid; but he will find the ideas illuminating. It seems like his father tried, but failed, to make the insight really stick.

There has never been a Just World where Virtue = Value. No matter how badly we want it, there can't be. And trying to forcefully make one generally just makes it much worse.

It's particular to the New York startup scene. There is a lot of money sloshing around and startups have a different hiring strategy than in Silicon Valley. It's quick to hire, quick to fire. I've had six figure offers without even going through a real interview. This leads to a lot of churn. One place I worked at ran through three almost entirely different engineering teams in 18 months. It will be interesting to read if the author of this article still has the same job in the fall.

Silicon Valley is a bit different. There is usually a gauntlet of multi-day interviews even for the lowliest position at a startup nobody has heard of. It's even more of a gauntlet at the large, established companies. I've heard of someone doing 10 days of interviews at amazon.com, and they are a company most want to avoid. Companies are very afraid of hiring the wrong person.

As you have noted, most everywhere else the developer is made to feel lucky to work at a folding table in an unheated area next to the men's room.

People with lots of money have been disappointed by the performance of traditional investment vehicles for the past 5 years; meanwhile a lot of extra money has been put into the financial sector.

If you're a fund with $100 billion under management, dropping $2 billion into various venture funds is a reasonable part of the mix. Multiply that by the fact that several hundred funds, banks, trusts and companies collectively control trillions of dollars and these little 1 or 2 percent investments pump billions of dollars into tens of thousands of companies with collectively perhaps a few hundred thousand employees.

When every buyer is cashed up, prices for sellers rise.