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Comment by formalsystem | Hacker News Reader

My take is that gig economies are a band aid solution over the fact that a large fraction of the workforce needs to retrain itself in tech. I'm optimistic about universal basic income to help people get started but let's be real tech is gonna be a huge pie and I find comments like there's no way a truck driver can learn how to program extremely cynical. Relative to a 1,000 years ago any human today is a technological genius so we shouldn't underestimate humans.

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I am of the opinion anybody can learn to program, but there is not an infinite demand for developers. In fact, more probably already exist than necessary. Any jobs that can't be filled are probably more the result of hiring inefficiencies than anything else.

Also, software development as a discipline is filled with highly (and formally) educated people. A lot of the non-traditional (non-computer science) developers at least come from a math/science/engineering background. Even if you have the skills, these people will not allow their ranks to be sullied by the "unwashed masses" who didn't "work as hard" as they did. (Quotations to indicate these are not my personal thoughts, but I am not quoting a specific source).

I've been programming for 30 years. I have also spent most of my career as a contractor, startup developer, or a gig worker on Upwork or something.

I'm sure that many HNers will try to claim that I am a bad programmer or something. I believe the reality is that a large portion of the market for software engineers just doesn't have a lot of resources and so is looking for ways to save money. Not dealing with benefits or even minimum wage is a way to do that.

HN likes to think that low paid or non-benefit work for software development doesn't exist. It is a huge global industry in fact.

"Tech" is not going to provide jobs for people who previously did manual or clerical work. It's intrinsically geared towards automating away those classes of labour, without any guaranteed provision of a one-for-one replacement of 'old' jobs with tech jobs. I would be surprised if the level of technical skills of the population increases over the next few years. There's really no reason to expect that it should.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous to expect a one-to-one replacement.

Let's imagine a large bank that closes down 1000 branches with 10 employees each, due to online banking becoming more prevalent. Does this mean that the bank suddenly (or ever) needs 10,000 extra developers working on their online banking? Not even close!

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