[bdcravens]

Very true. What % of developers are writing C++ however? I'd think it's a reasonable assumption that they're going down (and a cursory glance at Indeed shows this).

So some jobs will always pay well; the average salary should go down if the average skill need goes down however. (Ignoring for the moment that some lesser skilled development jobs actually pay better as a result of demand)

[guard-of-terra]

If we take ruby, you still have to know ruby, rails, js, jquery, sql, quite a few libs, html, css, be familiar with ie/webkit/firefox, be aware of sql injection, xss, csrf and stuff. Do not forget http, rest, be able to understand caching, dns, proxying, load balancing. It's a lot of knowledge. In 2002 you could get away with a perl script!

use CGI;

[mrgordon]

Yeah it is very difficult to find Rails developers who are on the market. Wages for Rails developers have certainly been going up in the Bay Area, even including the tons of junior hires, because no one can find senior talent.

Maybe this isn't the case in the middle of the country where businesses don't realize that a 10x programmer is easily worth 2x the salary of a brand new programmer.

Ruby may be easier to pick up than C++ but the entire web stack still requires quite a lot of knowledge. Especially when you start talking about scaling databases, distributed systems, fault tolerant cloud architectures, etc.

[guard-of-terra]

Even 1x programmer still has to know a lot of topics or his products will be lacking.