[Lavery]

Just an observation on your comparison here, I think you'll find that the realities of the legal and medical profession are radically different from one another. Medical school limits supply because the salaries (and therefore, quantity) of medical residents are paid by the US government, and so the number of medical schools and graduates remains fairly static year to year. Law school famously has no such restriction, and so the number of law schools in the US has exploded in the last 20 years, and the outcomes for the average law school graduate have worsened dramatically.

It's reasonable to assume software development will follow the legal path (or similarly, of business grads who aspire to careers in finance) over time: a few graduates of elite universities, with some combination of greater ability or prestige-signalling degrees, will land elite jobs at global firms making six figures directly out of school, while most earn a small fraction of that elsewhere. In the late '00s / early '10s you had a confluence of events--the settlement of anti-competitive hiring case against the major industry names, a boom in revenue for tech companies, quantitative easing causing a global hunt for yield and explosion in VC, and other factors--leading to a scenario where in the span of a year or two, tech jobs went from "not on most college kids' radars" to realization that this was a well-compensated career. In 07, my top 30 university nearly shuttered its CS department, which would be unthinkable now. That kind of rapid change causes a shortage. It won't last forever.

[apendleton]

The outcomes are only bad for lawyers because they all graduate with mountains of debt and get totally shafted if they can't get a super-high-paying job to cover that expense, and those high-paying jobs are in short supply. In some sense, though, society as a whole would be better off if there were more lawyers, and more of them were able to work for less money: poor tenants would be able to afford counsel in landlord/tenant disputes to fight unjust evictions, people wouldn't be stuck in failed marriages for want of being able to afford the legal costs of a divorce, etc., etc. All sorts of people could benefit from legal services they can't afford, and you'd think that market forces, with the increased supply, would drive down cost. It hasn't, though, because debt loads create an artificial floor.

I think exploring more of the possible solution space for how to train and pay tech folks has all sorts of potential for society as there are definitely parallels there in terms of the potential social utility of making technical labor more abundant and less expensive. Obviously there's a downside for people who work in tech and keep wanting to make fuck-you money, but so it goes.

[blobwalker]

Once CS became the hot thing to get a degree in, the impact was almost immediate. And based on my experience, it happened a decade earlier than you think.

In the early 90s, universities threw students straight into data structures and algorithms in LISP and expected fully half of them to drop out first year. By the early 2000s, the market was already full of useless grads. I was always on the east coast, but near as I could tell from the refugees I interviewed after the dot bomb, SV had been hiring anyone who could type as a senior developer, and the market just kept going downhill from then on. The schools must already have been complicit in it, because I had employees with degrees who didn’t even recognize the names of basic algorithms and data structures when the need for them arose. Now I see intro curriculum from serious schools that’s just a few loops in python or even visual programming in a browser. Less serious CS schools seem to be little more than job training programs. And of course, like this post shows, tens of thousands of coders who really have just completed a job training program are flooding the market.

When I started working, every programmer I worked with was at least competent. If they weren’t, they just didn’t have a job. There wasn’t such a desperate need for people and it wasn’t hard to find someone competent. Now I assume that someone’s code can’t be trusted until I see evidence to the contrary. I used to bring people straight in for in-person interviews or do a really quick phone screen. Then I started doing much deeper questions on phone screens. Now I have to start with a coding test, because 95+% of candidates cannot write simple programs in their language of choice, even though they’ve got a fancy degree and they sound like an expert on the phone, because they’ve been trained for that... but apparently they have not been trained to actually create software from scratch. One company I worked for had a well researched candidate screening program and was talking about spinning it off as a service by the mid-2000s. Now extensive screening is universal and there are multiple companies that you can outsource it to.

There’s no shortage of developers on the market, but there’s a real shortage of good ones. If you’re right and that shortage ends at some point, there’s going to be a sea of unemployed, unqualified coders who need job retraining or something. But I don’t see the shortage ending unless the pipeline starts spitting out more well qualified people.

[wbl]

The residency shortage is a result of AMA lobbying as are the restrictions on foreign doctors practicing.

[nazgul17]

I am not sure an engineering discipline would go as bad as law: in law, the people you know and the calibre of your University have a larger impact on your chances, while in engineering your abilities aree a greater component. Or so I like to think.

[psadri]

Thanks for pointing that out. So yes, it seems the legal profession is a cautionary tale.