Ask HN: Is tech starving other industries of talent?

Probably, there's a lot of things Id like to do, none of it will pay me 300k a year. Now that Ive matured a bit id like to do like go back to school maybe and learn something in depth but ehh there's no real roi.

Id take this a little bit further, especially with the quote you have, and say that tech talent is even consolidated in a small amount of companies. Plenty of companies need tech people but just can't compete with the comp packages these big companies offer. I turn down tons of recruiters when they reveal their staff eng or team lead position is only offering 130k with a 5% bonus.

We as a race are starving non-tech industries of talent. We pay developers a lot of money, honestly disproportionately to the returns they generate for society (aside from a handful of extremely specialized and well trained individuals). This is the invisible hand of the market deciding the relative value of fields. Computing is extremely hot right now and it is enjoying a lion's share of society's interest.

We do not pay farmers, fruit pickers, garbage men, nurses, cleaners, mailmen, waiters, etc. similarly, despite the fact that our society runs on this underclass of people. We also don't offer them a great quality of life in their jobs. These jobs used to be careers, and now they are temporary camping spots on the way to "real careers", which, I think, is a contemporary american invention, and, annoyingly, a rather sticky meme. What this means is that people are not becoming subject matter experts in these fields. That's a bit of a concern, as SMEs are often well placed to identify opportunities for advancement in an area.

You could argue that it's the government's job to compensate for the fanciful nature of people and intervene to balance this out, as markets won't optimize investment and wages to align with the best path for a country. This is, again, undesirable for small government types, and, probably, Americans at large who believe that government is a necessary evil that can do nothing right when it comes to ownership and running companies.

"Why would someone become a nurse when they could become a developer, and make more for less work while WFH?"

Because a lot of people are bored to tears by coding or have no talent for it. Thankfully, there is a lot of diversity of talent.

The same reason I am not a brain surgeon. I'd probably get paid better, I may have the talent, but being a medical professional is the last thing I want to do with my life.

I mean, define "tech." Tech is other industries. Every product is built with technology. Every service is rendered using technology.

If you mean "software" to be synonymous with "tech" then there is some cannibalization within the industry itself. If you stick around long enough you learn that it ebbs and flows.

You can make good money pretty easily with a tech career, but the stupid rich money is still in doctors and lawyers and business executives or business owners, as far as I can tell anecdotally comparing myself to some of my peers.

I'm not driving around in one of multiple sports cars like my previous dentist was, for example. Also a cousin of my wife is just a few years out of law school working for a top firm and already building a $750k vacation home (in addition to their luxury condo they're living in downtown right now).

You could make the same argument that for the longest time lawyers and real estate and MBA programs are starving other industries from talent as well.

I grew up pretty smart, and I probably could have entered academia and made some decent research contributions, and might have if I hadn't heard so many horror stories. Instead I stayed out and designed a few games people liked (nothing to do with mobile ads there, in fact my most popular game was a free Flash game I made no money off of) and had a more tame software engineer career besides that.

Sometimes I kind of wonder how life would be different if I had gone the more academic route, or stayed within the video game industry despite the toxic bullshit that's common in it as well.

Kind of hoping I somehow get lucky with a couple of investments and I can afford to take a nice long break, at least a year, to focus on getting my games out there again instead of a few hours a week.

People attracted to software development for money alone without any interest in technology or development will not last long.

Lets play your comparison in reverse and nursing suddenly becomes extremely lucrative because of staff shortages or whatever. Like pretend it pays as much or more than software development and nurses get a cut of insurance bills or something. I might be able to get training and fake it for a while but I would be an utter failure since I have no interest in nursing or health care from a career perspective.

There are probably as many developers working on health care systems as there are working at FAANG/ad-tech. Then nearly every industry these days has software developers. Have you read about the licensing of updates to farm equipment? that's software.

Who says software developers have the best minds anyhow? It's a fallacy that someone excelling in one field somehow could excel at anything.

> People attracted to software development for money alone without any interest in technology or development will not last long.

How do you figure? It's such a big field, anybody can find a niche that's interesting. You think people become proctologists because they like butts?

Tech ≠ Information Technology industry, instead = technology

If we look at it with the perspective that technology is an essential integrated part of the society. Time and space has evolved the world from analog to digital, and there is less likely a road to go back, given the numerous benefits of tech. It's the same question as if AI or robots will replace the humans. They will not. Instead, they will work together - in tandem.

Tech has definitely superimposed over almost all other spaces or industries. It has redefined the professional space completely. Now, with the help of tech, we have the best minds with enhanced capabilities than previously possible. Looking at a layman's life, we may sey that tech made us dumb. But the nuance here is that it's not the tech, instead the internet or over-dependence on the web has made people lazy, because they can find out anything on the internet.

Why everyone is running to tech? only for money? not really. People run after the best ideas, which make the world a better place, and make our life easier. It's just the fact that due to this, almost everyone is interested to learn tech skills to stand competitive in a digital world, and we may think that other professions are less lucrative. The reason here is that other professionals did not change or evolve with time, as much as the technical workspace has evolved. Due to this, the money is not invested at equivalent scales, however the best experts in any field make more money than a deep tech guy (specially people in business, doctors as well).

> “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

Now that the era of free money seems to be over, at least for now, the ad networks are firing many of their employees. One can only hope that many of them will have the opportunity to reorient towards more beneficial work.

That said, tech is large. Very large, and some tech is also benefiting doctors, nurses and patients. Though I agree, typically not at the salary levels one was able to get building ad networks.

Absolutely. There was an article here just the other day about the massive inversion of new EE grads vs. CS grads. I think that can almost entirely be attributed to the interesting tech problems and huge incomes associated with software vs. hardware.

Yes definitely, but not doctor or nurses. Fields such as mechanical/electrical engineering are seeing student enrollment numbers dwindling while CS is more popular than ever.

Yes, this is how markets work. That said, tech is underpaid due to code monkeyism.