Software programmers and Engineers work an inmense amount to build things that are commercially unsuccessful. In fact, most projects are botched completely, let alone those that run at a loss, before you get the big wins.
There is a definite disproportion of price/value across all professions, and programmers are today in the spectrum where the expectations are rather low. 20 years from now, we could have so many engineers that there wont be much advantage in comparison with accountants, operations managers, sales or retail etc.
It is a priviledged position, albeit not as priviledged as lawyers or bankers (whose salary can vastly outpace their value).
Classical service jobs dont have that luxury: you serve x burguers, u sell x products, you build y chairs.
I don't really see us getting many more IT/CS engineers anytime soon. The amount of businesses that actually need a programmer / tech person on staff keeps increasing while the amount of engineers out there stays relatively the same. That's why we can charge so much for our hours. It's a seller's market. Even if the country decided to make programming part of the elementary school curriculum it wouldn't necessarily translate into more engineers because computer science & IT people tend to be nerds/geeks who like to tinker in their free time and as a percentage of the population they stay relatively the same from year to year. If anything the kind of programming curriculum that most programmers dream of might actually create more of a demand for them because finally everyone who's not a programmer will realize the potential value of having a good programmer on staff.
The amount of office drones I see messing around with giant Excel sheets for hours doing the same task day in day out that could easily be automated by a simple application is astounding.
>computer science & IT people tend to be nerds/geeks who like to tinker in their free time and as a percentage of the population they stay relatively the same from year to year
Why do you say that?
I think you may be thinking too much in the short-term. I was actually wondering what programmers in their mid-20s today are going to be doing when they're, say, 70. How many programmers in their 70s do we have today? Very little, because computing was in its infancy 50 years ago. With every generation, more and more are being exposed to computing/programming at an early age.
You also have to remember that there are tinkerers in not just the computing field. Think about the weekend woodworkers, car guys, model aircraft enthusiasts; could many of them be tinkering with software if they were exposed and educated in it at the right age? I say yes. On the macro scale, we are only at the dawn of computing and the internet, and there are going to be MANY more people working on it in the future.
Software programmers and Engineers work an inmense amount to build things that are commercially unsuccessful. In fact, most projects are botched completely, let alone those that run at a loss, before you get the big wins.
There is a definite disproportion of price/value across all professions, and programmers are today in the spectrum where the expectations are rather low. 20 years from now, we could have so many engineers that there wont be much advantage in comparison with accountants, operations managers, sales or retail etc.
It is a priviledged position, albeit not as priviledged as lawyers or bankers (whose salary can vastly outpace their value). Classical service jobs dont have that luxury: you serve x burguers, u sell x products, you build y chairs.