[staticint]

> Most students of history in high school won't be historians; most students of literature won't write great novels or screenplays; and so on.

But by the same token, the economic effects are quite apparent. It takes a very special individual to rise above the pack in history and literature to turn that into a successful career. For most, with so much competition, it will never be more than a hobby. Anecdotally, I have a couple of friends who are published authors and I would be surprised if they are ever able to recoup the cost of the time they put into it, let alone sustain their costs of living.

Programmers are fortunate right now that the skill is relatively rare amongst the general population and when demand exceeds supply, prices rise. The concern isn't so much with everyone being a programmer, it is that only a few will be able to make money at it when the supply starts to exceed the demand, much like careers in history and literature today.

[otakucode]

You can already see this happening a bit in the online freelancer marketplaces. It is, apparently, easy to find people to write code for $1 or less per hour. I have doubts about what kind of quality one might get for that price, but the project listings I see, regardless of how low the offered price is, always have dozens of proposals.

[ethbro]

> The concern isn't so much with everyone being a programmer, it is that only a few will be able to make money at it when the supply starts to exceed the demand, much like careers in history and literature today.

I thought a lot about this when I got my first job with a BS and was making more (inflation-adjusted) than my mother with an MS ever made teaching elementary school.

Why do programmers make so much money, relatively speaking?

And the answer is that supply and demand of qualified workers in a specialization is only part of what defines your income range. The other, usually dominant, component is "What is the real value of my work product?"

A teacher's real value is the teaching they've provided to X students. In a physical setting, X has a ceiling. But say, ceteris paribus, we compare to an online teacher who can teach Y students, where Y>X.

The online teacher's employer can afford to pay him or her more, because they have created more real value ($value/student * greater number of students). Even if the work they do is no different.

The miracle of computing systems is that they leverage output. "Do" a calculation once, and you can repeat it as many times as you want.

So, accepting that computers increase productivity generally speaking, what do you think the real value created by the people who can program the things that leverage a worker's value is?

In essence, we get a piece of the following pie: total_created_value = ((existing_worker_value * improvement_multiplier) - existing_worker_value) * number_of_affected_workers

Where workers can be actual people or just systems

But the key is that our value scales with number_of_affected_workers, with limited additional effort on our parts. So if we can make an improvement for 1,000 people, there's always going to be a decent living in that -- because the consumer can afford to pay for the work. They may choose to save that money themselves, but in my experience people are willing to pay to get better product (more reliable, on time, more features, etc etc).