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 <i>idea</i> seriously? [1]<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[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.<p>[2] median personal income in the U.S. is about $30k/yr.<p>[3] <a href="https://www.hackerschool.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hackerschool.com/</a>