[pjc50]

I do think the high level of autodidacts makes it very different from anything else. It doesn't feel like a "trade", those involve building things with your hands. It's perhaps more similar to a "profession", like the much older ones of lawyers and doctors, but it hasn't developed the professional organization structure to go with it.

Disintermediation also makes a difference. It's possible - very unlikely for any one person, but possible, and keeps happening - to just bootstrap a product out of pure labour and very little capital. At which point they get to keep a lot of the returns. It doesn't at all fit a nineteenth-century economic model, so you can't apply the M word.

The "10x" phenomenon also makes a difference. Whether it's real or not, I think enough programmers believe it's real and want to be part of the 10x and somehow get a 10x reward. This is the exact opposite of a factory line or mass farmworker situation.

(there's lots of interesting business anthropology research on piecework vs hourly rate work, I believe)