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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

> I believe that many in the field are overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do.

I believe that every programmer is overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do -- or, more accurately, that The Market doesn't pay based on difficulty of work. Software pays so well because the product scales so well.

Successful pop musicians don't do work that's 100 times more 'difficult' than software engineering. They do work that scales even better (copying digital music; playing to arenas; branding on merch).

Having worked outside the software world, I absolutely do not believe that software people are any smarter, on average, than anyone else. Ever see a plumbing or electrical or structural system fail spectacularly? Other types of workers absolutely need to understand interactions between multiple complex systems, deal with obsolete and incompatible systems, and deal with changing and conflicting requirements and regulations.

If software is any more complex to deal with than physical systems, it's only because the architects and implementors let it get that way.

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I'm reading Thomas Sowell's "Intellectuals and Society," and while I disagree with a lot in his arguments and his view of the world, I think he nails a key point about the philosophy behind free market economies. He says that conservative intellectuals don't view inequality and other social tragedies as mainly the consequence of policy, but rather as an inherent part of the human condition. Markets may act as a mechanism that conveys those inequalities, but they are not necessarily their cause. Prices are his first example. Commanding a higher salary doesn't mean you're a harder or even more skilled worker, it just means that you produce something that is judged by buyers (employers) to have a higher positive impact on their well-being.

Funny, I was just reading that same example of his in his book “basic economics”, and it makes sense.

Still, couldn’t you say the same for a feudal structure? That nature has power imbalances, and the role of king only conveys that inequality?

Instead, we’ve intentionally built a more egalitarian system (and we’ve all prospered because of it), seemingly against nature.

That's kind of his point though: that we have managed to get this far, but we shouldn't take it for granted and expect that we can just "turn up the equality dial" and get more equality. These are complex systems and barbarism is always at the gate, because that's the default state. It's not that equality isn't a laudable goal or worth pursuing, it's that it's an extremely hard goal that must be approached thoughtfully and often indirectly.

Interesting point, and well put--thanks.

Maybe there's a distinction to be drawn between "inherent part of the human condition" and the "default state", as you have described it. Attempting to change something "inherent" seems worthless, but default is merely waiting to be overwritten with something better.

For ex: death is inherent in the human condition, we cannot avoid it and must deal with it. Nakedness is only the default state, and is pretty easily solved.

Back to economics: maybe scarcity is inherent, but "social tragedy" may be merely a very solvable default.

Not the best example :). Death seems inherent on the timescales of the lifetime of the universe, but on our timescales, it's merely a default. There's nothing in physics or biology saying we can't solve that; it's just an extremely difficult challenge that we didn't solve yet. I mention it because if we classify it as default, not inherent, it means we can and should be doing something about it.

But keeping appropriate timescales in mind, I agree with the conclusion - for given constraints, there are things that are inherent and not worth attacking, and then defaults that are merely attractors for the system state.

> I mention it because if we classify it as default, not inherent, it means we can and should be doing something about it.

Should? You're assuming that mortality is a problem. Extreme longevity or immortality would certainly change the human condition, but it's purely speculative to think it would be better in some objective, widely-accepted sense. Not every "default" is something waiting to be fixed.

Eliminating the biggest cause of sadness and suffering (not to mention, economic loss) sure sounds like something that would be widely accepted as good. There's a reason why almost every religion offers some kind of afterlife.

There's a good argument to be made that the assumption of mortality is baked into so many things in our economy that it would break down if people suddenly started to live much longer on average. But that, again, is a default - some state attractor. Something we can try to work around.

I respect your point of view, but I disagree with you. I suspect that people in general would be divided on the issue -- and the 'pro-death' faction (!) have not merely accepted, sheepishly, the limits of our existence without any reflection on the matter.

As a speculative anecdote, imagine spending ten thousand years missing a child who died in an irreversible accident. (Would childbirth even be permitted in such a future? How would overpopulation be addressed?) Or the dampening economic and sociological effects caused by a millegenerian population's entrenched resistance to change. Or the possibility that longevity is only available to the wealthy, or the drudgery of being stuck in a boring job for millenia...

Longevity doesn't necessarily solve sadness, suffering, and social ills -- it just shifts the goalposts.

Why do we have to take for granted that equality is even a worthy goal? Raising quality of life for everyone would be... Like if someone making 80K today has the quality of life of a millionaire from a few hundred years ago, then isn't that notable? Why would it even be reasonable to try to get the same outcome for everyone? It's like a function that concatenates diversity - what leftists claim to love - but their principles, like equality, don't produce it!

If you’re on the receiving end of a system that, systematically, hurts/kills you, your family, your community, and culture, storming the bastille or marching on washington or whatever for equality probably will suddenly make a lot of sense.

That's also equality of opportunity - which we have. Do you have evidence that we have no equality of opportunity, or that I am simply trying to pass-off equal opportunity with equal outcome? Acting like we don't have equality of opportunity, and then promoting equality of outcome is intellectually disingenuous.

You don't have to take it for granted, although I would suggest that equality of opportunity at least is fundamental to the American conception of liberty. That said there's not any reason you have to agree with it, though, or with any broader notion of equality. My point was simply that Sowell's arguments don't exclude it as a goal for those of us who do believe some form of equality is a laudable aim.

Did you purposefully parse my words incorrectly? It is very common to confabulate equal outcome with equal opportunity. Do you understand the difference? I was certainly talking about equal outcomes.

> we’ve intentionally built a more egalitarian system

More egalitarian in the sense of opportunities, yes. But that doesn't mean it will be more egalitarian in the sense of outcomes. The disparity in wealth between the poverty line and Bill Gates, for example, is probably larger than the disparity in wealth between a serf and a king in feudal times.

We represent a lot more power as money now. In the feudal system most power imbalances were not assigned a number

> We represent a lot more power as money now.

I'm not sure that's true. While, as I said, the disparity in wealth between Bill Gates and the poverty line is much greater than that between a king and a serf in feudal times, the power disparity between Bill Gates and a person at the poverty line is a lot less. A feudal king could command all sorts of things of serfs and exert all kinds of power over their lives that Bill Gates can't command or exert over anyone. So Bill Gates' money does not represent power the way a feudal king had power.

This is far too celebratory of markets. Markets pay for things that people of means want. If I make a useless toy that delights a rich person I am paid lavishly. If I make a useless toy that delights a poor person I get next to nothing.

> Markets pay for things that people of means want.

No, markets pay for things that are worth more than it costs to make them. Only a very small fraction of those things are useless toys that delight rich people.

This is a bit of hyperbole; desire and need are direct contributors to "worth" because you can extract more profit for it.

That being said, profit is a notoriously crude way of measuring utility, given that a lot of tragedy-of-the-commons type problems don't have "profitable" solutions without some type of government intervention. (See: pollution, public education and health, childcare, working week limits, etc.)

> profit is a notoriously crude way of measuring utility

There are no non-crude ways of measuring utility among different people with different, often incompatible, preferences.

> a lot of tragedy-of-the-commons type problems don't have "profitable" solutions without some type of government intervention.

They also don't have good solutions with government intervention, because the downsides of government intervention (regulatory capture, increasing power of the state, micromanagement of all aspects of people's lives, political power being used to benefit some instead of all) more than outweigh any increased benefit in a particular area.

> desire and need are direct contributors to "worth" because you can extract more profit for it.

Yes, but everyone's desires and needs count in a market. Only the politically powerful's desires and needs count when the government intervenes.

The word "worth" is muddying the waters here a bit. Markets pay for things that people of means will pay for more than it takes to create them.

> Markets pay for things that people of means will pay for more than it takes to create them.

Markets pay for things that people, period, will pay for more than it takes to create them. There's no restriction to "people of means". But yes, the word "worth" can be misleading if it's not understood to imply having something to trade (almost always money in today's economy) that the seller will accept in exchange.

The viewpoint, IIUIC, is that rich people and poor people will exist regardless of whether markets exist. There's pretty ample empirical evidence that this is true: rich people and poor people existed under feudalism, rich people and poor people existed under fascism, and rich people and poor people existed (de facto if not de jure) under communism.

What markets provide is an information-carrying mechanism to determine how you should allocate your efforts to get some of that wealth. If you're poor and want to be rich in a market economy, make a useless toy that delights a rich person. If you're poor and want to be rich in a communist economy, suck up to the party bosses. If you're poor and want to be rich in a feudal economy, you're fucked, because that useless toy that delights a rich person is his by divine right.

While all of these systems still have rich people and poor people, I would argue that the former leads to much more socially desirable outcomes than either of the latter, because at least the rules of the game for how to become rich are stable and well-known and the side-effects of the wealth-acquisition process are beneficial to humanity (or at least to that one rich person, but that's better than them being outright negative-sum, like when the way to get rich was by conquest).

If you’re poor and want to be rich in a feudal economy, get titled by participating in a war, seize property in a war, buy a minor peerage, marry a child into a peered family, become a merchant. This is all date- and location-dependent, of course.

This argument rests on the idea that inequality is equal across systems and that no system attempts to set a floor on how far you can fall or a ceiling on how far you can rise.

Are you talking about relative (ordinal) inequality, i.e. who is above whom" on the social strata? Or absolute (cardinal) inequality, i.e. how much more* do people above you have compared to you?

I would argue that the former is self-evidently equal across systems. By definition, if you're speaking in relative terms, for you to rise up the social strata someone else must fall.

I would not argue that this is true in absolute terms - measured in your country's currency, it seems empirically true that certain systems (in particular free-market corporate capitalism) lead to much wider disparities in wealth than others (say, communism). However, I'd argue that if you actually care about absolute wealth rather than relative wealth, this shouldn't matter to you, because the median person in corporate capitalism does far better than even the wealthy in communist countries (we discovered this in the early 90s).

There may be hybridized systems that can still generate adequate absolute wealth while capping relative disparities. I'm skeptical of many of the examples that are often cited, though. IMHO unionized capitalism actively failed during the 70s; people like to blame Reagan or Wall Street for the dismantling of unions & pension plans, but the competitive reality is that the companies that made up this system all went bankrupt because of foreign competition, not because of any particular policies. That's a failure to generate adequate absolute wealth; you can't ignore the existence of outsiders who follow a different system when judging the sustainability of your own system. European-style socialism is intriguing to me, but may suffer from a similar problem: it's unclear to me whether the EU can a.) hold together and b.) avoid getting conquered militarily by outside powers in the absence of the NATO security umbrella.

I didn't "celebrate" them at all, I just said that in a market system a purchaser of labor pays more when they determine some skill is worth more to them than another skill.

I don't think fidget spinner relied on the rich for it's success.

What do you think of cigarettes and other tobacco products?

>Inequality and other social tragedies

Poverty is a social tragedy. Inequality is an inevitable consequence of choice.

Perhaps not a direct consequence of choice, though. Certainly whatever poltical and economic system we choose has implications for inequality, but it's not simply a matter of "we choose to have less inequality –> less inequality." Redistributive choices have complex interactions and results.

I read that less as "inequality is a choice", but rather as "if we allow choice, there will be inequality".

So you can't easily choose to have less inequality, unless you also choose to eliminate almost all (other?) choice.

Exactly what I meant. I mean, you could still permit some choices, but they couldn’t meaningfully influence outcomes.

Right. Intuitively, it is obvious that political choices impact inequality, as does perusing world data sorted by GINI coefficient, or even just a review of the US over time.

I do find it darkly funny that so many folks seem to throw up their hands - it is obvious that inequality will always exist, so just live with however much we currently happen to have and shut up about it. (Inflation, however - we can totally micromanage that!) Humans have an innate sense of fairness that becomes offended at some point, and they start punishing even when doing so harms themselves. The peasants get restless at some point, the tumbrels come out, and there's your natural law in action.

Sure, people do that, but you're reading things into my post if you're implying that that attitude exists anywhere in it. I didn't say anything about throwing up our hands, and as far as I can tell neither does Sowell.

Apologies if I gave that impression - I wasn't trying to attribute that to you (or Sowell). Just riffing off your comment.

Some people are more influenced by fairness. Some people are more influenced by their desire to compete and win. Both are built into humans. Don't judge the whole humanity by your personal temperament.

Ironic bit of advice there, given how personal you're making things. I'm talking about behavioral phenomena that's not even specific to humans. But since we seem to be advising each other, don't personalize things so much; the world's bigger than both of us.

What I mean by choice is that as long as people can make decisions that affect their outcomes, people will experience different outcomes.

Which choices lead to inequality, and by whom?

Choices about what profession or business to go into, whether to buy things and how much to pay for them, what goods/services to provide and how to provide them, etc.

Or choices about the socioeconomic status of your parents, or your intelligence, or the country you are born into, etc. There is nothing unjust about inequality, because in a free market universe, everything is a choice and being left holding the shorter straw is due to your choices.

Sure, a variety of factors lead to inequality, some of them unjust. It is those unjust factors, not the inequality itself, that must be eliminated.

"Justice" is the ultimate social construct – that everybody constructs to his or her needs.

it just means that you produce something that is judged by buyers (employers) to have a higher positive impact on their well-being

My partner is a nurse, she gets payed peanuts while daily ensuring that people don't die. Literally.

What judgment exactly is exercised to have life saving jobs be payed order of magnitude less than "plumbing" jobs? The argument of "higher positive impact on their well-being" is laughably naive.

Your question here was one of the biggest open questions in political economy (now just economics) in the early 20th century. It motivates the modern foundation of the field, and earned itself the moniker the marginal revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_Revolution

It resulted in an explosion of theoretical and empirical literature in microeconomics, and in many ways creates the field we know today.

Supply.

You are wrong - the supply of corporate software developers outstrips the supply if qualified nurses - in London at least.

Then it smells like an ineffective market, compared to software development. Let me guess, which one has more red tape, regulation and government involvement?

It's always those pesky free market saboteurs isn't it?

Consider this - it takes years of formal training to produce a qualified medical professional and pretty much nothing to produce a software developer.

The utility of the software engineer scales with the number of people using software vs the number of patients for the nurse.

If the software engineer is able to provide more utility, this roughly translates to more demand which means higher salary which means higher supply

Doesn't the government set the rates for nurses in the UK? Also you need to compare the supply to the demand. Perhaps more software developers are needed than nurses.

In the past, the ancient past, a great actor would have gotten a measly salary.

Today, Some actors(not necessarily the good ones), get lucky and become filthy rich.

So is their luck an inherent part of the human condition ? or is it the result of technology, TV/Cinema ?

And do we have a right, as a society, to choose how technology will shape us, or not ?

If you’re reading Sowell. I would recommend Wealth, Poverty and Politics. :)

I disagree on several points. A good chunk of why software engineers get paid well is because most people don't like writing code. It's not just because the businesses scale well, it's because it's an undesirable job for most.

Having worked many jobs I also disagree that it's easy, relatively. It's probably not due to IQ, it's because it requires constant thinking. Every other job I've worked is a light mental load compared to software and electrical engineering.

Most jobs you don't think about anything half the time. In hospitality you largely sit around waiting for people. Same with finance and sales in many cases. In HR most of your time is spent sending email, entering data on websites, and attending meetings. Or, your job is to talk to people most of the day, something many find more appealing.

Engineering is 6-8 hours of intense focus and fixing difficult to find bugs. As palatable as doing math homework for most people.

I disagree about intellectual difficulty as well. In school I was a teaching assistant and many, many students simply couldn't put working programs together. Even if you know all the constructs, software engineering is basically building something in your head then tanslating it. I've seen enough people try and fail to build any working programs for 6 months to believe that some people just aren't capable

A good chunk of why software engineers get paid well is because most people don't like writing code. It's not just because the businesses scale well, it's because it's an undesirable job for most.

By that logic, the cleaning staff in your local adult movie theater would be millionaires.

There's a limited supply of people with the education and life opportunity to become engineers, but still the vast majority of those don't despite the pay.

Keep in mind that it's easy to you because you're from that particular field. For a lot of people software development is still basically witchcraft.

So is plumbing.

I had a plumber over for some fixes about a month ago, and he saw me doing some coding on my laptop. He made a comment like "I have absolutely no clue how any of that works... it is wizardry to me". I said "I'm watching you fix plumbing issues around my house, and that is wizardry to me". I think we could probably learn each others' jobs if we really tried, but the point is that all things can seem like magic until you learn them.

In both cases, it probably boils down to shit ton of small and easy things. Each individual unit of knowledge would be trivial for a typical person to grasp, and also mostly useless. Only together they form this large lattice of interlinked concepts that can be used for "doing magic" - but also can't be easily explained.

A random person from the street would be able to fix a small plumbing problem. Water and pipes are well into the normal day to day experience.

A random person from the street would not be able to fix a trivial problem/bug in some software - let's say a missing runtime package on linux.

Having helped people with both software and plumbing problems I am not convinced that "a random person from the street" would be able to trivially tackle any plumbing problem. In my experience random people consider both software and plumbing to be black boxes they don't need to understand. Most people would have no idea what tools to buy to even approach the problem. I have no doubt that with the right documentation and a little handholding the average Joe could figure out a fix for both small plumbing leaks or trivial bugs in software, but it would take much more experience to design the plumbing system in a large building or to architect a new complicated software application.

The parent didn't say any plumbing problem.

I think you wildly overestimate the cleverness of the average Joe. I watch users struggle with basic GUI concepts. Add in learning a specialized language and support libraries? Joe can figure out a wrench by looking at it. He's not going to get very far with a shell prompt.

Sorry, I should have italicized any in my post. As in I don't think the average user can solve any plumbing problem or fix any software bugs without additional resources: documentation and/or assistance.

At least on a command line you can get somewhere with trial and error:

  $ ?
  ?: command not found
  $ what do I do?
  No command 'what' found, did you mean:
  (...)
  $ help me
  bash: help: no help topics match 'me'. Try 'help help' or 'man -k me' or 'info me'.
  $ help help
  (...)

A diy plumber who doesn't know of the existence of teflon tape is always going to have some leaky joints. However, as I asserted, I agree that most people can figure all this stuff out pretty easily, I just think most people are too intimidated or just not interested in trying in the first place.

To put it another way, I've found that the concepts of "hierarchical filesystems" and "drain waste vent stacks" are equally foreign and equally accessible to average laypeople.

I still think you're still off by two or three orders of magnitude of difficulty.

I have no background in plumbing - in fact, as a new homeowner, I just learned what a compression fitting is ($#@%!). I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drain-waste-vent_system and... it seems pretty straightforward. I could build this, if perhaps with a few more trips to the hardware store than a professional might make.

On the other hand, I work with databases every day. I wrote ROLAP engines in the 90s. And yet this is probably the first time I've ever used the term hierarchical database in a sentence. If you said "here's this hierarchical database, generate a report for me", it would take me some hours to figure out what kind of db it is and how to actually use it. If you asked a layman I think you would get a blank stare.

Not to belittle the craft, but there's something intuitive about plumbing. Software is something different.

In my experience, most people are too afraid to enter the initial `?` in the command line for fear of breaking something. I imagine many would be afraid to do anything with the rench for the same reason.

Also, people new to programming and command lines are seemingly incapable of reading error messages.

> Also, people new to programming and command lines are seemingly incapable of reading error messages.

Aren't all people seemingly incapable of reading error messages? (ignoring the rouding-error-amount of people who do)

I agree. Plumbing is physical and real - you can touch it and easily observe it. There is no abstraction to it, there are only a few driving concepts (like gravity.) The fact that plumbing has been around for 4700 years and 'computing' less than a century speaks to their inherent complexities.

With respect to their normal, day-to-day experience, a random person - at least from my generation - would be as likely to be able to fix an equivalent small software problem, because they have experience with e.g. reinstalling software, installing missing drivers, etc. A missing runtime package on Linux is definitely not in daily experience of anyone non-technical. For regular people, try with Windows, or maybe macOS.

Parent was comparing software development with plumbing, not general computer maintenance.

Initially I wanted to give an example of fixing a missing include/import in the source code followed by building the binaries as a trivial software development task, but I think we can agree that regular random Joe has about 0% chance of figuring out that, so I toned it down to just a missing runtime package.

Does random person have mobile access to YouTube ? Good chance their is a YouTube video to show them how for both.

I would say the set of possible software bugs is much larger than that of plumbing bugs, not that the latter is trivial.

And plumping is not badly paid either. But it's a trade that you can learn in relative little time and it's a field that you don't constantly have to readapt your approach. someone who learned plumbing 20 years ago is not outdated. meaning that the supply of people who can fix your pipes is far larger than if it would be similar with IT.

and also there are a lot more people around who have the mental capabilities to learn plumbing than there are people around who are capable of consistently apply the abstract thinking patterns that involve software development.

Recently residents were displaced from their apartments for a month due to persistent flooding in their 5 year old building in Seattle. The manufacturer who developed the novel piping technology claims the plumbing system was incorrectly designed and installed.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/pricey-sea...

Wanted to edit this to be more clear.

I think it's just confusing different terms. I'd say the bulk of programming is similar to plumbing - maintaining, resolving issues, etc. But that software engineering is more similar to engineering in general.

A mechanic works on cars, a mechanical engineer would design the components. Much like IT consultants/administrators would maintain systems and do minor coding, but engineers would deal with architecture and new designs and more advanced solutions to common problems faced by IT.

Don't be so sure, Pex and the like wasn't on the scene 20 years ago.

It's also unfair because plumbers deal with buildings decades old - some even a century. They may have extremely old systems and knowledge of that is important.

Where I live in Los Angeles we recently acquired the USS Iowa, a WWII battleship built in the 1930's. One day I was there, going to the bathroom, and one of the maintenance workers happened to be there and we started chatting. Turns out he was a former SeaBee who was there to retrofit the very old saltwater-based plumbing system to connect to the civilian freshwater system so people could use the head in a normal way. A very non-trivial and specific skillset. If you have ever visited a museum ship you can be sure they had people who knew this stuff.

It's no surprise then that plumbing also pays pretty well.

I've done a bit of plumbing and I would say it is much easier than programming. Even basic "plumbing" programming.

I think there is a spectrum of difficulty in both arenas. For instance, I found writing some javascript code to toggle css around my personal website was far easier (and required less math) than sizing the pipes in the house I am designing. That said, I have also worked on much more complicated software projects that demanded more effort on my part. I assume there exist more complicated plumbing challenges as well.

It is easier, but it's physically more demanding (including being far more dangerous).

Well being physically more demanding than programming doesn't say a lot!

Really? Sh*t flows down hill seems to be about the crux of it!

Sometimes the shit flows uphill

And sometimes shit flows downhill but you need it to flow uphill. And sometimes shit that's flowing uphill suddenly flows downhill unexpectedly and in a dramatic fashion, necessitating emergency fixes before developing a better solution in a time crunch.

you don't happen to be a project manager?

"In obscurity lies opportunity"

Job security by obscurity? :)

> I believe that every programmer is overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do -- or, more accurately, that The Market doesn't pay based on difficulty of work. Software pays so well because the product scales so well.

...which is another way of saying that writing software is a good use of relatively smart people's time, which is why the market rewards it.

> I believe that every programmer is overpaid relative to the difficulty of the work they do

What?? :D

No and no. People get paid for working on things that take an effort. Nobody would pay you if there was no reason for it. Even the "window watchers" (or how they're called) are payed because they didn't change jobs for 40 years, were loyal to their bosses, colleagues and company.

And yes of course, some jobs take a higher amount of "problem crunching" (whatever that means) than others. In fact sometimes this is the reason certain jobs can only be performed by certain programmers. Most programmer jobs cannot be done by none-programmers.

> If software is any more complex to deal with than physical systems, it's only because the architects and implementors let it get that way.

There are not many fields that are purely abstract, namely that's mathematics, logic and theoretical computer science. Those fields are notoriously difficult, every school kid knows this for mathematics and eventually gets that logic is also a hard nut. This completely misses the point that reasoning about completely artificial entities is an effort by itself. It not only gets harder with complexity but also depending how abstract it gets.

In fact their are even weird limitations that you do not experience in the physical world like paradoxes.

Then any year now, the explosion of boot camps, nano-degrees, and general online courses should start to push the market to equilibrium with people looking to get a leg up, right? Any year now...

If that is the case then why not hire cheaper individuals to do the same job?

He's saying that it's not about difficulty it's about the value of the output.

There are many difficult things that are worthless in value.

You could be the greatest deep sea underwater basket weaver, that doesn't make your goods valuable. Nobody wants your damp baskets.

He's not saying that programming is easy: he's saying it has high value to difficulty, higher than other more difficult careers.

>Having worked outside the software world, I absolutely do not believe that software people are any smarter, on average, than anyone else

The average CS major has an IQ of around 125[1], meaning the average software engineer is somewhere around the top 5% of the population in terms of intelligence. The average IQ at the top tech companies is probably a standard deviation higher than that. Despite this, the consensus is that the majority of software developers are pretty terrible at what they do.

If you've ever tried to help people learn to code you would realize a good chunk of the population doesn't have what it takes to do anything beyond basic programming. If it was easy more people would do it and salaries would drop.

1. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

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