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.
Why are we allowing immature engineers and product managers to drive decisions that impact millions if not billions?
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.
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.
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.
by organizing, further commodization of this very challenging and relatively modestly compensated profession can be prevented.
How exactly did you interpret this?
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 at work
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be one.
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
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.
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.
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.