The content of the orignal post may be questionable, but I feel it was written in a way that would trigger a heated debate. For that, mission accomplished. There has been many wise comments, but they all choose to take a branch of the post to dig into. Not to blame them, as the question raised here is basically: The software industry has huge impact on human lives
but such impact has not been materialized in terms of
both cash and social status for its practicioners.
True or false?
And it boils down to too many things to talk about all at once. Maybe it would help to break them into sub-topics to make it easier to link the seemingly disconnected but insightful points posted here:1. Are lawyers and investment bankers overpaid? If they are overpaid, one can't say software engineers are underpaid by comparing to them. 2. So the software industry impacts lives, but is it all positive? Maybe society isn't that much better off with all this digitalization. There is a chance that the total value of the industry is being inflated. 3. Are we concerned that the median and average salaries of software engineers are too low (a), or are we concerned that the elite programmers are not being paid as high as top attorneys (b)? We can solve (a) by raising barriers to entry, much like in other elite fields, but is that a good thing to do? As for (b), elite programmers are now called startup founders. If entrepreneurship is made easier in the software industry, then things seem fair. 4. Now speaking of social status, I think programmers aren't cool because nerds aren't cool, not because they are paid less. Pick a programmer and an accountant with the same salary, and the accountant is more likely to shine in social outings. But if the whole industry raises its average salary, then yes, the social status of being a coder will increase. We are back to the question raised in (3a). 5. About political power, I think this is more of a problem with motivation. To be motivated enough to run for office, you have to be hungry for fame and power. However, it's a good point that the government could benefit from having more top engineers. See a related post: http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/08/22/linux-and-the-fina... 6. Is China really on the right track? |