[railsgirls112]

> A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc.

Your point isn't necessarily wrong, but it's worth pointing out how that came to be. Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence. And this is only a development of the last 80 years or so. This probably calls for a reframing of how we think about individual economic value, at least in a distributive sense.

[chii]

> they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence.

any this opportunity was available to "everyone" in society. its just that only some chose to take it early on, and reaped the proportionate reward to having taken it on early (not knowing that it would lead to this end result). Now that it is known that tech is high pay, people now naively claim that it's unfair, and that the tech jobs should "pay" for this inequality of outcome.

[lotsofpulp]

>any this opportunity was available to "everyone" in society.

What does "everyone" mean?

[chii]

i meant by "everyone" as in there's no special privileged class of people that were allowed to become techies. Of course, not everyone can afford a college education, but in general, back in 2004, right after the big crash, the openings were available, the opportunities existed then. It just looks risky back then, because tech just crashed. However, if you weren't willing to take on risk, you cannot blame that the outcome for those who take on risk gets more.

[willis936]

Privileged classes can afford to take on risk because if they fail then they still have decent prospects.

[jjcon]

> Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence. And this is only a development of the last 80 years or so

I’m not really sure how this fits with the discussion. Literally everything builds on something that came before, software isn’t particularly unique that regard. This also doesn’t change the fact that one person can provide far more value than another.