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People choose whether or not to go into a field for both reasons which are intrinsic to the nature of the field and also reasons which are related to the mutable, hmmm, socioeconomic conditions? surrounding the field. Example: I grew up on a farm and love farming. The moment I had some free cash I bought a couple of acres to engage in hobby farming. I would never, ever consider becoming a farmer professionally, because farming is a terrible job. In bad years you rely on crop insurance and loans to get by, and in good years you make enough money to cover your costs and keep going. You're squeezed in all directions by megafarms who sometimes have legitimately lower costs and sometimes just want to drop prices to drive everyone else out, real estate developers who can pay more than you for new land, and middle men who use their mass to pay producers less and charge consumers more. You'll work eighty, ninety hours a week for the pay of a McDonald's employee, without the chance of a "big score" like a startup founder. None of these are intrinsic to the actual act of farming. So what is the reason why the composition of the hiring pool for software engineers does not match the composition of the population as a whole? If it for reasons intrinsic to the nature of the job, that's one thing, but if it's for stupid reasons, like an unappealing culture (eg, white dude-bro culture) or lack of early access to computers and programming, well, we can fix that. If we can fix that, and bring in all the people who are currently excluded from software engineering for stupid reasons, we could potentially double the number of software engineers. Doubling the number of software engineers should be an obvious good. |