Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Think in terms of supply and demand in the labor force and its effect on costs to wonder why the system is trying to push people into coding.

Do tech firms want to push H1B Visas because they deeply care about the people of distant lands and genuinely can't find anybody in America to do the same job, or do they simply want access to more cheap and compliant labor to keep salaries low?

Is tech trying to push stuff like Women and Black Girls Can Code Too for the sake of being noble and kind to all, or are they just desperately trying to increase the size of the labor pool to reduce the leverage that their highly paid employees have?

I don't want to be elitist about this because I'd love to teach anybody who genuinely wanted to try and learn to code, but the reality is that you cannot teach everybody to think in abstract terms and actually learn to code and this effort is futile, harms real programmers, and just benefits big firms who want to try and pay less.

PS: And this push is sort of ironic because saying "Learn to Code" briefly became akin to a hate crime for a while. https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassme...

> Is tech trying to push stuff like Women and Black Girls Can Code Too for the sake of being noble and kind to all, or are they just desperately trying to increase the size of the labor pool to reduce the leverage that their highly paid employees have?

It's probably a bit of both, but I also firmly believe that DEI initiatives are largely supported from the top because this is the type of criticism that has historically led to unionization and labor organization efforts, and the software industry is trying very hard not push the workforce in that direction. Some of the early unions in the US were comprised of minorities that were excluded from the labor force by whites.[0]

I understand that labor organizing is still a fairly taboo topic, but it gave us things like the 40 hour workweek and the minimum wage. Those were not just handed out by the ownership class.

0: https://racial-justice.aflcio.org/blog/est-aliquid-se-ipsum-...

> Some of the early unions in the US were comprised of minorities that were excluded from the labor force by whites.

And some unions were comprised of whites who went out of their way to exclude minorities. It takes two to tango.

Sure, just as police use unions today to escape accountability for bad behavior. I'm certainly not arguing that every single thing a union has done or stood for is universally moral or just. What institution in any period of history bats 1000 in terms of doing the right thing by every person in society? Feel free to name one. But we absolutely take a lot of what labor movements have given our society for granted. Child labor laws are another great example.

The underlying point still stands: a labor force that works together is vastly more powerful and therefore much more of a threat to the ownership class than a workforce that acts individually. It's in the best interests of executives to facilitate the conversations around DEI to avoid that anger spilling over into collective action, especially as sympathy in the labor movement continues to rise in America.

>Some of the early unions in the US were comprised of minorities that were excluded from the labor force by whites.

Most early unions were created for the exact opposite reason, to keep minorities from diluting the labor pool.

I'm really curious about what somewhat politically mainstream people think about stories like this.

https://archive.fo/1khJw

> Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks

How did they arrive at such a correlation? What explains such a correlation? Why are they tracking these metrics? If companies are tracking these metrics and found an actionable correlation, what does it say knowing that these corporations are very gung-ho about promoting DEI?

You are 100% right. We developers need to wise up before it's too late. I don't see doctors advocating to lower the barriers of entry.

I have a moral problem with trying to keep people out of a better life just to fatten my own income. If you want to be smarter and better and more skilled than the competition, that's great, but trying to keep supply low to rent-seek just seems insatiably greedy to me.

The next time we hear about a security breach, who takes responsibility?

Why are we allowing immature engineers and product managers to drive decisions that impact millions if not billions?

The same people who take responsibility now? The topic on hand isn't whether we should encourage untrained 12 year olds to secure our technology. It's whether trained STEM educated professionals should. Some here don't want more STEM professionals because it would increase supply and reduce the equilibrium price (wages).

> The same people who take responsibility now?

That’s not good enough. That’s why making software a trade is what some engineers have been pushing for.

> Some here don't want more STEM professionals because it would increase supply and reduce the equilibrium price (wages).

And some don’t want to see an influx of low-quality engineers, because these decisions have major negative consequences.

The OP mentioned the push for more STEM workers, but the push for more STEM workers comes doesn’t equate to more CS degrees or STEM degreed workers.

It’s also about bootcamps and a broad questioning of why a college degree is needed at all.

I was in construction in my 20s. I earned $X when I was learning. A few years later, I was working independent and earning $Y. It ended up that $Y was lower than $X. This is akin to earning less as a senior dev than you did as a junior dev, except you'd also have to buy your own chair, desk, computer, and software license to work as a sr dev.

The problem was multifold, and I think the crux of the situation. The people who entered the field didn't respect the field, and only aimed to undercut the next guy, causing wages to plummet in the span of 5 years.

Software doesn't need that much protection yet, but that slide happens way faster than you think it will. It's not about keeping people out; it's about educating those who come in to respect the industry they are entering. Many people are actively preventing people from learning about the proper value of their work.

I see no problem with people competing for work by lowering their bid? Sounds like you’re encouraging cartel-like behavior (which is, for example, why a pit of real estate agents still get paid 5-6% in a transaction despite clearly not being worth that, on average).

the computer science field is under no obligation to fix all the hiring and career problems in existence, just like law or medicine is not under that obligation.

that's why we need unions!

why is this voted down?

I neither upvoted or downvoted that comment, but this isn't Reddit. Low-effort opinion posts like that aren't the type of thing that people generally want to see here.

As far as unions go, I always support the right of anybody to voluntarily organize, but unions are IMO a horrible fit for programming.

I hate how this sounds, but programmers have a creative job that's not relatively fungible like say a house painter who does a relatively standardized task. The best painter in the world is physically capable of what, painting about 2 or 3 times more square feet per hour than an average painter? I don't know exactly, but I doubt that the best painter in the world is say 100x more effective than an average one.

Programmers vary wildly in the value they produce. Good programmers who want to unionize are going to plant themselves near the lower tier of compensation when they easily provide 10x or 100x of the value that a less skilled programmer brings.

computer scientists are not programmers. programming is a task that might be done as part of what a computer scientist does.

by organizing, further commodization of this very challenging and relatively modestly compensated profession can be prevented.

I'm not sure I follow your opinion here. In what way did anybody advocate preventing competition?

"We developers need to wise up before it's too late. I don't see doctors advocating to lower the barriers of entry."

How exactly did you interpret this?

except we are not doctors? the average web dev(aka most devs) is closer to a plumber or an electrician than a doctor

maybe 10% of devs have actually complicated jobs, the rest is just crud BS

we have access to good jobs and good salary because the educational system is crap, not because SWE is some kind of elite field unreachable to most people

it's outrageous that learning about software development is not an option starting from middle school, at this point it's more important than like half of what you learn in school

Please most medicine isn't that complex either. Only a small minority of doctors really do anything the average person cannot do. Its really just that they've set up barriers to protect themselves. The really complex stuff in any field generally involves open ended research-y work and the reality is that that research work has fairly low demand. Though to clarify, I don't think we should be setting up more barriers to software development, I think we should be reducing barriers to all fields. I also do agree we should be teaching basic coding to all kids, it would compliment math classes well. I also don't think basic webdev roles will pay this much in 10 years when the average person knows how to code.

Facts.

Your GP isn’t a genius, and they’re more often than not just reading the solution from webmd the same way you might look it up on stackoverflow.

I know this because my GP flat out told me this is the case.

It’s certainly a job that requires a lot of skill, knowledge and experience so as not to do harm, but that’s true of software engineering too.

Your gp could probably be replaced with a chat bot

> when the average person knows how to code

Some exposure to some kind of programming is probably a good thing, but I think this it is very unlikely for the average person to learn to code without either thousands of years of evolution, genetic engineering of humanity, or changing the definition of coding.

The average person cannot build a consistent mental model of complex abstract concepts. Schools have done lots of tests to prospective CS students trying to see how they'd be as programmers. The point isn't to see if they got the right answer, the point was to see if they could merely come up with a consistent mental model of what abstract symbols mean, and many people can't do that.

I am not a doctor and cannot say this for certain. I respect the effort involved in acquiring the title of a medical doctor. But purely as a thought-experiment, I'd argue that the actual intellectual complexity of the job of many programmers far exceeds that of many doctors, outside of some complicated specialties or surgery I suppose.

Many doctors' jobs essentially become following checklists that insurance companies require. Many of them do not do much of anything other than push whatever pills and medications that Pharma salesman wine and dine them to automatically push. And unlike TV shows like House, most doctors do not do much investigation to try and diagnose ailments outside of trying the most common solution: the number of stories you can read about patients' pain not being taken seriously by doctors and having to read WebMD and try and diagnose themselves and then begging a physician to try and seriously consider their theory is breathtaking.

I'd recommend watching Scrubs if you think surgeons are perceived as the intellectuals in medicine. Or watch a talk about Egyptology by literal brain surgeon Ben Carson.

Yeah and look at where that got them in terms of quality of life and work. Doctors are caught in an elaborate hazing ritual most of their lives and shortages make the work shitty even after they pass the hazing phase.

Here's a fun article that talks about why raising the barriers to entry for "professional" vocations maintains the status quo (but limits upward mobility) for people in those vocations, while increasing social inequality by shutting people out:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

The barrier for entry is made artificially high for many medical professions.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be one.

Doctors literally have their own organizations which actively work to limit the supply of medical school graduates.

What would happen if they didn't have that legal protection? Look at Pharmacy; it used to be a great field until they started opening up Pharmacy schools everywhere and pumping out graduates nonstop.

The same thing is now happening with CS. We have no legal protection to limit our supply.

Luckily for us, most normal people don't find fulfillment in abstract problem solving but there's no reason why that can't change overtime.

> most normal people don't find fulfillment in abstract problem solving

most normal people don't find fulfillment at work

Software development is the most globally distributed high paying job and is arguably one of the easiest to outsource. Yet FAANG keeps paying huge salaries when they could get 10x the number of people in foreign countries for the same price.

Not really, if you look at levels.fyi you'll see that even in formerly "cheap" locales (India, Ukraine, etc) FAANG & comparable companies are paying 6 figures for experienced devs. There is obviously still a discount, but it's more like 3-5x rather than 10x, and rapidly shrinking (even as compensation in the US continues to skyrocket).

doctors and lawyers have trade or professional organisations, bar exams, etc. they organized many years ago. computer science and engineering are still very young fields and we are at a point where we need to start organizing.

Why can't >1 things be true at the same time though?

People sincerely want higher inclusion for good reasons.

People want to rescue people from the looming jaws of automation, etc. (Some walking alternatives to which you could say stormed the Capitol.)

they simply want access to more cheap and compliant labor

Only bad programmers believe software scales with manpower. And it's those bad programmers who become hiring managers; the good programmers keep programming.

It has taken a gargantuan amount of wasted capital and a sea disastrous projects to gradually wake C level execs up to the fact that programming talent isnt a fungible commodity.

The drive to commoditize anybody seen as "worker" is frequently strong enough to overwhelm their perception of reality.

but there are always new execs who will believe that engineers are commodities. they were thaught these ideas in biz school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com