Most other professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc) throttle supply through things like certification, but for some reason developers can't / don't want to get their act together to do the same.
Even worse, they (we) welcome more supply! The mind boggles. And I say this as a Canadian employer who would certainly welcome more good developers at a lower price...
Being the only plumber in town means you can charge whatever you want. Being the only developer in town means you're telecommuting and competing with Satyam.
I think we might be talking about two different Silicon Valleys. The one here in the real world has a glut of developers fighting for scraps. Companies that have the luxury of being extremely picky and only hiring the best. Lots of interviewing and so-called "open positions" but not a lot of hiring.
The unemployment rate for Computer and Mathematical Occupations was about 2.0%. [2]
Anecdotally, since a large part of someone's world view is by bad things that have happened to them, none of my friends from college are working outside of software. Some earn at the 10% spot in low cost-of-living areas, but they all are employed with enough money to get by.
1. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
2. https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea30.htm
Edit: this only holds true for the U.S.; unemployment for coders is probably far different in other countries.
I've never thought of it this way, but it seems so obvious in retrospect.
1. there isn't much of a culture of entrepreneurship;
2. there are few VCs, and they're pretty much all hyper-conservative, to the point that they may as well be banks.
In a few months/years, students from India and China going to US for grad studies will slow down, and most of them chosing Canada over US.
In a few years, if US continues its systematic and unfair ways of keeping citizens of India and China from immigrating to US, and Canada continues its policy of courting immigrants, you'll see a culture of entrepreneurship growing in Canada too.
Meanwhile, these startup founders often come back to Canada after getting their startup off the ground in the US... to create a Canadian "engineering branch office"—i.e., to hire tech talent at the cheaper Canadian going rate. But, of course, this only happens for startups that manage to get to a stage where they need whole offices of additional tech talent—which is not most startups.
Given this dynamic, I wouldn't expect increasing the number of available developers would do much at all. Now, if you could come up with some way to keep entrepreneurs from moving to the US, that might help...
Canadian policy was always much easier than US for immigration. I wonder then why Indian/Chinese did not go in much larger numbers to Canada as compared to US.
They did, and they still do:
Canada's percentage of foreign born population: 20.6% [0]
US's percentage of foreign born population: 13% [1]
[0] http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-010-x/99-01...
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2013/10/03/what...
Anyone should be able to become an engineer. Don't the fact that they have an effect on our huge salaries? Well thats the market. Tough shit. Get better and compete with them. Don't stop other people, who are better than you, from competing by using the law against them.
Paralegals and specialized software is a market response to the bottleneck of lawyers. Physician's assistants, BSN Nurses, and Nurse Practitioners are another market response to doctor bottlenecks.
I think that the majority of stakeholders in software would be opposed to licensing legislation for coding.
They would care because laws would be put into place making such certificates required for doing work. Just like accountants need to follow GAAP etc.
> I think that the majority of stakeholders in software would be opposed to licensing legislation for coding.
For sure they would. But that doesn't necessary mean it could be stopped from happening.
Yet programmers writing embedded software for medical devices are not regulated for safety and reliability purposes, as far as I know. Why is that?
There are some guidelines for writing software in regulated industries, eg: FDA Part 11 and Annex 11 in the EU for food and drug manufacturing.
However it's more of a speed limit situation. If you're willing to risk your client getting audited while you're speeding you could get yourself and your client in trouble with the industry watch dog.
That being said I think our industry does need professional recognition and liability. That's not a bad thing... it just means you can't be reckless and you have to have someone with a PE on your team. I know SV likes to move fast without their permission but that's insane when it comes to protecting the public interest. Just look at the vulnerabilities and shady practices in automobile automation, testing, verification, etc, etc.
We could do a lot better and build more reliable things if there were some guiding hands leading the way.
So we should reduce the supply by forcing licensing?
That would lower employment in the field since it would require accreditation i.e we would get an increase in unemployment which is what reducing the supply means. And Canadian companies can't afford developers as is, and you suggest increasing the cost of said developers which would force Canadian companies to either change field or close their doors. How could this possibly help anyone but Americans and American companies?
If Canadian companies can't afford to pay developers what the market bears out, they will close because those developers will get paid what they're worth somewhere else. That's capitalism.
You're suggesting Canadian developers should take lower market salaries to help those mediocre companies survive...?
We are specifically arguing that the market should determine salaries. Don't put up barriers to entry. Let the market work it out.
I'm merely stating that if I were a Canadian developer competing against other developers for a job, and the supply of competitive developers increased, I would be unhappy because that would drive down salaries. This is uncontroversial.
Barriers to competition like certification are one way to keep salaries high. I'm surprised that for how analytical developers are, this barrier has yet to be erected.
I think it is actually a kind of wtf that there are no certifications for software devs that make life and death things, life auto-pilot or pacemaker software.