Developers are the autoworkers of our generation

As usual for HN, all of the most upvoted replies disagree with the article. Let me play devil's advocate and not disagree. Sure, the analogy isn't perfect, but what happens if we take the idea seriously? [1]

Isn't it amazing, the lack of sacrifice necessary to make fat stacks of cash writing software? Even when law school was thought of as a golden ticket, it was a lottery, and to win, you had to sacrifice your personal life for a decade before you made partner. And those hours looked relaxing, compared to medicine and investment banking. Back when auto jobs were a sure thing, they were also sure to use up your body by the time you could retire, and that's if you were lucky enough to avoid a career ending (not to mention crippling) injury.

I just met a kid who graduated with a BA in philosophy who was offered 4x the median U.S. income [2] at a software company. A prop trading firm offered him 50% more, and the software company matched the offer. One reason he turned down the offer at the prop trading firm is because people there regularly worked 50+ hours a week.

The most upvoted article on HN from a couple weeks ago was full of comments debating whether 20% time is really 120% time, at a company where mid-level ("senior") engineers can have total compensation that's something like 8x the median income in the U.S. And was outrage! Outrage!

Last year, coursera ran a course on deep learning from one of the guys who's widely credited with inventing deep learning. The pre-requisites were some basic programming, and, either, google + wikiepdia, or a basics of machine learning course, like the one that's offered on coursera regularly. After taking the course, you'd have enough understanding of deep learning to reproduce papers published that year, on the state of the art in machine learning.

Never have we had a privileged class that's so easy to enter. It's genuinely surprising that this is the case. You don't have to be born into the aristocracy. There's no licensing body limiting the number of developers, and no hazing process that makes requires giving up the best years of your life. The knowledge is available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, and those are cheaper than they've ever been in human history. You might say that there's just not enough "smart" people in software, but, that's part of what's surprising.

Why do so many people who want a career involving intellectual curiosity study philosophy or mechanical engineering, when CS also gives you interesting problems, and happens to pay much better? Why don't people switch? Unlike with ME, CE, etc., you don't have to take the PE and get all sorts of licensing to find work. You just need to be able to pass some interviews. I met folks at Hacker School [3] who switched from econ, ME, OR, and other quantitative fields to CS, because you have more freedom to pursue ideas, can do more without being part of a huge team that makes you a tiny cog in a giant machine. And, by the way, it pays twice as well. But, it's still not common to see people switch.

What's the barrier to entry that's keeping us from being flooded with supply? I'm told that CS enrollments are now at record highs, past even the numbers we saw during the dotcom era; perhaps the answer is that there is no barrier, and we're about to get flooded with supply.

[1] In his notes, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Rawls talks about how his students eagerly come up with clever refute the propositions of great thinkers. He takes the opposite approach. It's been a long time since I've read this, so I'm very loosely paraphrasing, but it's something like, if you disagree with someone who's clearly very smart, maybe it's worth taking the time to figure out why they hold their opinions rather than just dismissing them.

[2] median personal income in the U.S. is about $30k/yr.

[3] https://www.hackerschool.com/

And this also means that developers in this case are evolving, we are technologists. Which is more like the car designers. And these guys are still around and getting payed a lot, and probably will be for a long time, designing spaceships. Software engineering, which also requires original thought, also will never disappear. So I would say the original authors analogy is dead wrong.

> When the most frequent complaint you hear is “I wish recruiters would stop spamming me with six-figure job offers,” life’s gotten pretty good.

As other have said many times here, a six figure job in some places is just enough to possibly be compared to a middle class lifestyle elsewhere in the U.S. Go look at the database of BART salaries, and as big as their pay appears, these guys went on strike.

> WordPress does in fifteen minutes what once kept a freelancer busy for two months.

And yet, you can still easily spend two months plus on a Wordpress project. Compare what people were building then compared to what people are building now. The great thing about web development is that we can continually move up the value chain. As some components get easier, that frees us up to work on something else, always pushing the boundaries outward. As those boundaries move, we are probably creating more work to do, not less.

> Maybe you don’t think a total n00b can walk out of a nine-week training program and do your job.

That noob better learn how to learn on his / her own. Really, who learns how to be a developer from a school? I don't have a computer science background, but does a computer science degree even teach this stuff? The bottom line is that it's a relentless grind to continue to learn and build on that knowledge. Not everyone has the drive to do that. It's far easier to pay for someone to feed you knowledge and pretend that you are getting somewhere.

> To upset the labor market, one of two things needs to happen: an increase in supply, or a decrease in demand.

I don't see supply outstripping demand happening anytime soon, if ever. I have been waiting for the hordes to come for years, but this hasn't happened. I would think it would have happened by now. And demand doesn't sit still either. As other markets emerge, they eat up their local talent.Sure, this local talent may work for far less than their U.S. equivalents, but for how long? When you have cost of living in certain regions of developing nations ratcheting up to be as high as any U.S. city and companies like Alibaba hitting huge numbers, then developers in these regions will get paid. They just have a bit of catching up to do, that's why we call them "developing."

> No profession stays on top forever… just ask your recently graduated lawyer friends.

Isn't that a crazy comparison though? This article mentions how low the friction is for getting into development, and then makes this comparison with a profession with a relatively huge friction. The development industry looks nothing like law. Part of the problem there is that the law profession built walls up that technology is tearing down. The development industry has no walls.

How does personal sacrifice correlate with market price for your skills? Maybe it's progress when someone with a liberal arts degree (and presumably some programming experience) can get competing developer job offers based on his skills.

I agree with your sentiment about the most-upvoted posts but I don't see this as a counterargument.

While that's true for the autoworker example, it's not true for the lawyer example: The best lawyers produced much more than the normal lawyers. I would put programmers roughly on par with the law industry, not with the auto industry.