| > When the most frequent complaint you hear is “I wish recruiters would stop spamming me with six-figure job offers,” life’s gotten pretty good. As other have said many times here, a six figure job in some places is just enough to possibly be compared to a middle class lifestyle elsewhere in the U.S. Go look at the database of BART salaries, and as big as their pay appears, these guys went on strike. > WordPress does in fifteen minutes what once kept a freelancer busy for two months. And yet, you can still easily spend two months plus on a Wordpress project. Compare what people were building then compared to what people are building now. The great thing about web development is that we can continually move up the value chain. As some components get easier, that frees us up to work on something else, always pushing the boundaries outward. As those boundaries move, we are probably creating more work to do, not less. > Maybe you don’t think a total n00b can walk out of a nine-week training program and do your job. That noob better learn how to learn on his / her own. Really, who learns how to be a developer from a school? I don't have a computer science background, but does a computer science degree even teach this stuff? The bottom line is that it's a relentless grind to continue to learn and build on that knowledge. Not everyone has the drive to do that. It's far easier to pay for someone to feed you knowledge and pretend that you are getting somewhere. > To upset the labor market, one of two things needs to happen: an increase in supply, or a decrease in demand. I don't see supply outstripping demand happening anytime soon, if ever. I have been waiting for the hordes to come for years, but this hasn't happened. I would think it would have happened by now. And demand doesn't sit still either. As other markets emerge, they eat up their local talent.Sure, this local talent may work for far less than their U.S. equivalents, but for how long? When you have cost of living in certain regions of developing nations ratcheting up to be as high as any U.S. city and companies like Alibaba hitting huge numbers, then developers in these regions will get paid. They just have a bit of catching up to do, that's why we call them "developing." > No profession stays on top forever… just ask your recently graduated lawyer friends. Isn't that a crazy comparison though? This article mentions how low the friction is for getting into development, and then makes this comparison with a profession with a relatively huge friction. The development industry looks nothing like law. Part of the problem there is that the law profession built walls up that technology is tearing down. The development industry has no walls. |
Exactly law school was such a golden ticket because the lawyer's guild set it up that way. The ABA convinced the state governments that that they should be the gatekeepers of the legal profession. They manufactured scarcity that drove up prices.
New lawyers can still make a decent income, even now. The problem is that they need to make way more than a decent income to pay the inflated tuition rates charged by most law schools.