| No. I do not believe we are in a bubble. At least for skilled professions that keep learning, the likelihood is the reverse. As more layers of abstraction make it easier to produce business value, a smaller number of skilled professions will be able to generate more and more revenue with less time. Programming is different than doctors or lawyers. Programming in terms of value can scale. Doctors can only see a certain number of patients or perform a certain number of surgeries. A lawyer can only take a certain number of cases. They produce value based on their time in each of these tasks. That amount of value is somewhat fixed. However, a skilled software professional can complete one project that produces a large amount of business value, or the coder can develop a new product that generates a long-tail stream of revenue over time. For example, a coder that built the Google Ads Platform has helped generate a tremendous amount of revenue for Google, and that revenue keeps pouring in. The bubble is real, but for IT/SD professionals that tend to get complacent with their skills. Traditional IT is getting abstracted away entirely. SD is getting more and more complex as many more frameworks/knowledge is needed on a yearly basis to do modern software development. Building a simple monolith is no longer acceptable for many companies. One must learn modern distributed systems. The sad truth is that it will continue to take less and less resources to accomplish the same business goals in the future. One must stay on top of the latest technologies to climb on top of the coding pyramid. Luckily, this pyramid is starting to segment based on Front-End, Back-End, DevOps, etc. which means the truly skilled professions in those domains will rise to the top and command salaries much higher than currently seen. |