| > If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone. Continuing with the example from the article: law and medicine are also hard. Try teaching those to the same set of people. > Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Programmers are not at all unique in their need to understand significant domain knowledge. Essentially every knowledge-based field, including those with licensing barriers to entry, also have this requirement (and arguably to a greater extent). > And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008. Lawyers and doctors must also keep current with their field and the industry in general. If anything, the degree to which they must keep up with their respective fields seems to be a difference of degree when compared to software developers, not of category. I don’t think any of this difficulty is the reason why programming enjoys high salaries, because (circling back to the article’s thesis), it isn’t distinct from other fields with higher barriers to entry in that respect. |
Law and medicine also trend towards bimodal compensation.
There is an enourmous earnings difference between the top echelon of lawyers and all the other lawyers.
Same thing for specialist surgeons.