[ironlake]

>if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software.

Most mid-sized companies don't have the skills to manage and deploy software developers that can solve their problems. Those skills tend to be expensive, and the software project, historically, has a high chance of failure.

So, yeah, the high price of tech wages seems to be correct.

[ehnto]

I wouldn't mind pointing out that your argument is really just that talent is expensive. But my question is, what makes a software developer so much more special than a plumber, a mechanic or carpenter? You can teach yourself software on youtube, we aren't -that- special. There are dozens of highly skilled positions out there that don't get payed nearly as much.

The answer that I think is a hard pill for some to swallow, is that for a long time we have been the tool required by special kinds of high return business ventures, so we can command high wages. The same is true of remote miners in Australia, the difference is there is no use for a miner in the rest of the community so there is no loss since no one is competing for their wage anyway.

My argument is simply that the rest of the economy could really use software developers, but they are too expensive due to the distortions on commandable salary that the tech bubble has created. It would be nice if software developers returned from the high heavens and integrated their skills more readily with the greater community.

I am a software developer, and I understand the audience I am talking to is the very audience benefiting from the status quo. I don't expect it to be a popular view but I do hope people give it a thought. Think of ways your talent could help your community, and then that is what I am hoping to see more of.

[notdonspaulding]

What makes software developers "so much more special than <insert skilled tradesmen>" is that their output to the business is teaching a dumb-but-very-fast-and-cheap-and-capable machine how to do a previously-only-done-by-humans task. It turns out that's a very valuable thing for businesses to have. All those other trades are in "exploit" mode on the "Explore -> Expand -> Exploit" spectrum. There was a time when having a skilled carpenter was critical to building your company. But that time has largely passed. Most carpenters today are applying known solutions to known problems.

Another way of saying the same thing is that few businesses can see their revenue double by employing even the most skilled plumber. However, many businesses can see there revenue double (or their costs halved) by employing even a mediocre software developer.

So, I would agree it's true that we live in a special time in history where the translation of business needs to computer languages is being demanded at an ever higher and higher rate. But I would disagree with the framing of this phenomenon as a "tech bubble" or a "distortion on commandable salary".

    Employing a software developer IS expensive.  <- agree  
    Employing a software developer is TOO expensive <- disagree

Another way to look at the status quo is to see that the beauty of capitalism is that those areas that consumers see to be the most important areas to focus on having software developed ARE having software developed. Software developers are working on the most important projects they can be working on right now. However, the problems software developers are working on will change over time as:

    - Existing problems get solved.  
    - New, more important, problems emerge.  
    - More developers enter the market (bringing down the 
      cost of development).  
    - Consumer demands shift over time.

On that last point, I think it's interesting that the behemoths of software development are all seeing huge tectonic shifts in their industries occur. FB/Meta responding to Apple's/EU's/California's privacy enhancements. Google desperately trying to find a non-ads source of revenue, knowing that their cash cow could dry up in the not-too-distant future. Twitter being on the bleeding edge of discovery of "How much content moderation is too much?". Netflix figuring out it's tech moat wasn't as wide as it thought it was. Amazon...well, I'm not sure what tectonic shift is hitting Amazon yet, but it can't be far off.

How many of these companies will be around in 10 years in the same form that they are today? Ford has been making vehicles for over 100 years. What will give Meta, as an arbitrary example, that kind of staying power?

As those companies come and go over the next 10-20 years, I think your concern that "the rest of the economy could really use software developers" will be ameliorated. Maybe everyone's actually working on unimportant problems right now, and the wider economy has more important problems for us to solve, but the best and fastest way we've figured out how to discover that we've misallocated resources (whether human or any other kind) is to let everyone make their own decisions and realize the individual gain or loss of their decisions.

[ehnto]

I disagree. You can do software very simply, it's in an environment of excess that teams tend to over-complicate software and software deployment into complex monsters that are expensive to maintain. Small business software problems often lack the scale and public facing nature that causes problems for software infrastructure and increases it's complexity.

I speak from experience in executing some of these kinds of software projects, as I live in a market not influenced by the SV bubble. Our market has a bunch of bootstrapped software businesses too, because the economics of it are more favorable to that kind of enterprise and you're not competing with 200k+ wages. I'm talking about Australia as well, an expensive first world country.

[marcosdumay]

Most large-sized companies don't have those skill either.

In fact, going into some market and solving a problem with software is almost always done by people not used to work in development that go and write something by themselves.