Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

Programmers are incredibly productive. An hour of a doctor's time, an hour of a lawyer's time an hour of an investment banker's time only help one person. An hour of a programmer's time impacts tens of thousands of people.

Programming at a high level which gets good money is hard. It's hard to reach that level, it takes lots of time learning, reading and practicing, it's hard to do the work. Also many programmers work more than 40 hours weeks.

If a good programmer helps a company win a few millions per year or he helps the company to make economies of few millions per year, then he deserves a share of those money.

The demand is larger than the supply and it is likely to stay so since all sectors of the economy demand more automation and not many people like to code or are willing to become programmers.

The "winter of programming" might never come. Even if it comes it is likely that won't happen during our lifetimes, even if we live a lot.

People said long time ago that software is a fad or a bubble that will burst. Still software continued to rise year after year.

> Programmers are incredibly productive.

Some developers are. Most aren't. If you work in a startup, or on some new project within some big company, you are very likely to be producing vaporware that will impact zero users, either because the software is bad or because of some issues in marketing or management beyond your control. In either case, your real economic productivity is negative.

This argument rings hollow when you look a level down.

You couldn't do your work without your keyboard. Why doesn't your keyboard's designer deserve a share, too? What about the EE who designed the CPU in your machine? The physicist who came up with the process to manufacture the CPU? The mechanical engineer who built the machine that implements that process? The chemist who invented the solder that connects it all together?

Every single one of those people gets paid less than the programmer, their work affects millions, and without them, the programmer could not affect the same number of people or indeed could not work at all. So why should the programmer get all the cash?

(This is kind of a strawman argument, and is meant to be a little provocative. There are some pretty obvious holes in it. But I do think it is a real argument and you cannot dismiss it entirely. There is something here.)

A 16 year old child can work in a factory putting a keyboard together. Face it, there is a pyramid , and some jobs require the smartest people humanity has and that job is programming. Computer science is becoming established and is the most important area in the progress of civilization now. All other human work exists only to support us programmers at a species level of thinking and we make the real contributions that matter , that live on for centuries. The doctors exist to keep programmers and all the people below us that we depend on for supporting us healthy. The farmers exist to keep programmers fed. But have you wondered why do we programmers exist? We exist to automate and manage all these cattle below us and direct humanities endeavors with the systems we imagine and bring into reality.

Lmaooooooooo

This is a bad troll post.

Excuse me, what? This is extreme even for sarcasm

Although a lot of people have made fun of your post, and it sounds a bit funny in a macabre way, I actually think it has more than a ring of truth to it. Programmers are essentially doing this, except that I would say that the people on top are the CEOs that know how to put a team of programmers together. But regardless, I think your description is actually eerily accurate because people are so dependent on technology, that they basically work like crazy to afford it and be immersed in it.

Software developers don't need expensive hardware most of the time. They don't have to pay the cost of borrowed capital unlike a factory that costs millions and takes years to pay off the business loans.

The companies producing chips do make a lot of money but nothing compared to e.g. a $5000 lathe that only does one job.

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