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Or if you'd find it in previous industries that have had a huge influx of VC-like investors funding companies with the hope they'll at some point in the future be profitable.
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The difference is animation is part of the entertainment industry and software engineering is part of every industry. I don't really think it will ever be like animators are today, but I wouldn't be surprised if wages fall.
Well I think there's an oversupply of CS engineers, not of animators
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Yes and no. Excellent developers deliver excellent products, like with the Cybertruck example. I wouldn't buy one either, but it appears to be well crafted. Stellar developers are one step better. Yes, they too delivery excellent products, but they also produce things of value that nobody asked for. Business examples include Teflon, Postit Notes, antibiotics, linux, git, and much more. The US Army changed leadership…
Teflon and Antibiotics were scientific discoveries just through a pursuit of curiosity and applying the scientific method. Not sure these scientists who discovered them fit in your developer example… totally different contexts.
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.” Really grateful that the opportunities I've been given weren't predicated on knowing things completely irrelevant to my job. I have spent exactly zero time solving LeetCode problems in my career (beyond algorithm stuff in college…
It's perfectly possible to have a successful SWE career without touching Leetcode-style questions. It's just that most of those jobs don't pay well.
However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been.
This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.
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Excellent points. You've perfectly described the brutal, interest-rate-driven VC cycle -- capital floods in, risk gets mispriced, and the market eventually corrects with Darwinian force. That's the "blunt instrument" in action. Meanwhile in China, the approach is fundamentally different. Capital isn't just cheap; it's strategically directed by the state with goals beyond financial return. The aim is "new quality prod…
Another factor is that dictatorships don't suffer from the push-pull effect of election cycles, especially magnified in a two party state. Such polarization wastes a lot of energy and thus is an impediment to progress. But of course there is that small price to pay.
Authoritarianism doesn't emerge for its own sake—it emerges when a population is politically engaged enough to threaten state control. China has a long history of mass mobilization and popular unrest: peasant rebellions, labor strikes, and yes, the events of 1989. This creates pressure for centralized authority. The United States, by contrast, has an unusually passive citizenry—low voter turnout, widespread political disengagement, and a culture that channels grievances into consumption rather than collective action. American "freedom" has been cheap to maintain because it's rarely exercised.
But when Americans do resist, what happens?
Consider Alex Pretti and Tank Man. Tank Man stood before a column of tanks and was not fired upon in that iconic moment. Alex Pretti stood with a phone, intervened nonviolently to protect a woman who had been shoved to the ground, and was shot ten times by federal agents while surrounded and pinned. One government showed restraint in its most infamous moment of confrontation; the other did not.
But the deeper contrast is in the aftermath. The Chinese government never claimed Tank Man attacked the tanks. The US administration, by contrast, immediately constructed an elaborate counter-narrative—claiming Pretti "attacked" officers and committed "domestic terrorism"—directly contradicted by multiple verified videos showing him holding a phone with his hand raised. The ugliness isn't just in the violence; it's in the brazen dishonesty that follows.
And this is not an isolated data point. Consider the broader picture: the US incarcerates more people per capita than any nation on Earth—2.3 million people, disproportionately poor and non-white, warehoused in a system that functions as social control while calling itself justice. Tiananmen was a visible atrocity. American incarceration is a slow, normalized one. Compare the casualties of a single crackdown to the bodies ground through American courts and prisons year after year, and ask which system has produced more human suffering.
Then add the architecture being built around it: the constitutional dead zone within 100 miles of any border, where Fourth Amendment protections evaporate. Masked federal agents operating in cities whose elected officials cannot stop them. Surveillance contracts expanding the state's reach into private life. A president willing to undermine the Federal Reserve for short-term political gain.
Meanwhile, China maintains tighter monetary policy, invests heavily in infrastructure and foundational technology, and takes a longer view of economic development. One can criticize its system on many grounds—but the American narrative of authoritarian dysfunction versus democratic flourishing looks increasingly like projection.
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What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against? Because the hospitals those practices want to associate with say "we're on Epic and expect you to be as well"? Wife in healthcare management...overhear this conversation once or twice a we…
Also the nurses in the floor learn the system and many are not great at adapting to different interfaces. Travel nurses who come in and only worked with GE or Cerner and now having to use Epic causes all kinds of issues. Also from what I’ve seen is big city hospitals use a mix of all three. Which I believe actually creates an opening as it shows a willingness to use different walled gardens. However I think there are…
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The research hospital in my neighborhood has a whole biomedical engineering dept and regularly tries out new medical technology on me. They consistently try non-standard approaches if they feel like it can improve the standard of care since their commercialization team can make more money. They can also iterate faster and deliver better outcomes. I'm guessing either EHR software is uncompetitive or nobody has tried i…
Trying to improve medicine has a different upside and different calculation than making software less annoying.
I don't think this is bureaucratic maliciousness to kill innovative EHRs. My guess is it's a really hard and boring problem to solve due to the integration work which makes it hard to break the network effects.
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I will avoid getting into a “who understands economics better” debate. But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning. By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations…
What's the cost of a programmer-quality laptop, with two large monitors, plus licenses for all the software that they need? That's 2-3K. Does anyone know what the typical tool cost is for a factory worker? (And the tool cost for a factory worker can be zero if you're hiring for a second shift - they would use the same tools as the first shift, just at different times. In contrast, I don't think there are very many pl…
It's probably lower. Apart from safety gear like helmets and gloves, everything else is most likely reused across shifts or shared across workers simultaneously (think industrial machines).
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VAT doesn't exist in the US (and sales tax, which we do have, is more like 5-10% of sale cost), so are you talking about something specific to tech companies in Germany or the UK or something? Not that everything has to be about the US, but it's weird to make a claim about the tech market as a whole that doesn't apply to its biggest single region.
Yep, I've used the € sign for a reason, to make sure people won't get confused. The article goes into considerable detail about the EU tech industry. My comment relates to that context. I also want to note, that EPP isn't the correct term here. For US, EPP would mean Manufacturer Employee Purchase Programs for New Products with a discount. Like, if you work for HP, you can purchase a product it manufactures at a disc…
>The article goes into considerable detail about the EU tech industry. My comment relates to that context.
You know what, that's entirely fair. And I'll also note that American companies can claim depreciation to offset corporate income taxes, so there's some parity there, it's just s different mechanism.
This is just scarcity based economics failing us in the ways that it has been for decades now. The only thing that stands out about tech is that from 2010 to 2020 it seemed to be withstanding the rot.
Since the world has finite goods and everyone wants more, I'm not sure what kind of economy besides "scarcity-based" you expect to find.
Nowadays most of our efforts are in pursuit of contradictory goals. Creating an AI god, going to Mars, ethnic cleansing projects... these aren't things we unanimously want more of, they're one of two alternatives that some of us want to achieve and the others want to prevent. The logic of scarcity is a poor mediator for such things.
We don't have to dispense with scarcity entirely in order to stop using it as a proxy for decision making about outcomes that have nothing to do with scarcity.