That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.
Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?
A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.
That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.
(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)
There is a broader question of whether having people who are in it for the money leave independently "causes" wages to go down (e.g. if you were to replace all such people with people "purely in it for the passion"). My suspicion is yes. Mainly because wage markets are somewhat inefficient, there are always mild cartel-like/cooperative effects in any market, people in it for passion tend to undersell labor and the people in it for the money are much less likely to undersell their labor and this spills over beneficially to the former.
Note that this broader question is simply unanswerable assuming perfect competition, i.e. a supply-demand 101 perspective (which is why it doesn't make sense to posit "perfect competition" for this question).
It posits durable behavioral differences among suppliers that are not determined purely by supply and demand which do not update reliably in the face of pricing. This is equivalent to market friction and hence fundamentally contradicts an assumption of perfect competition.
All of my developer friends in the gaming industry have had far worse working conditions then what I've had.
Your example runs counter to the laws of supply and demand too. You understand that wages will rise when supply is restricted, but you don't want to accept that supply will respond to the price signal in the form of more people entering that job market.
why then do they all have those interview rounds where you have to talk about what really attracted you to work at this boring company and how you would love to do that kind of work? They evidently haven't gotten the memo.
I’ve gone through the BigTech guantlet successfully. Even then I showed I cared about doing my job well and competently.
I have purposefully thrown nuggets out during interviews letting companies know that I had a life outside of work, I’m not going to work crazy hours and in the latter half of my career, I don’t do on call.
If you need a lot of low quality code in a hurry, AI can definitely do that for you now. The path to making money by writing mediocre code for people who don't really care that much is going to look like managing a network of bots that constantly spit out a huge volume of code that kind of mostly works and if it sometimes doesn't then whatever. The people in it for the money can probably make a decent amount in the "high volume low quality" space.
Then there's the code that needs to actually work, or have some thought put into it. Consider the process of writing IETF RFCs. Can you get an LLM to spit out English text that conforms to their formatting? Absolutely you can. Is the RFC it emits going to be something you'll want to have the whole world trying to implement as a standard? Not likely. So the people doing that are going to be doing it something closer to the old way.
As many of us in the early IT generation, I came because of I wanted to build games and program cool stuff.
Today, while I admit Games are supercomplex stunning apps, I hate it and I love to do boring finance app development :-))
If you would have told me in my 20ies that I will end up in banking & finance IT, I would have laughed at you - today I really like it and I do not play a single game anymore.
However almost all of the companies I have worked for in my 30+ years career treated devs well.
So if you are in a shitty situation, I highly recommend finding another job instead of just placing yourself over a barrel.
“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”
That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.
Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
Nonsense research showing how crappy academic research has become
Why are teachers special to merit any "protections" that aren't afforded to all employees, public or private?
1) Resources and Membership: Membership is essentially compelled, and the resources of the union rarely support member teachers. Three of the anchorage teachers in my life say their union reps are useless and they have little agency in rectifying the problem.
2) No comment: Politics in AK is FUBAR, and as an aside I imagine less gets spent on politics because we all know the oil companies own it all.
3) "Alaska education leaders value bottom-up decision making (see sidebar);" Absolute nonsense. Decision making is almost entirely dominated by outside economic concerns and the behavior of the state and federal government from year to year. I say this as someone whose brother has participated in nearly every union negotiation for the last 20 years at ASD.
4) Irrelevant to the livelyhood of alaskan teachers, AFAICT
> Why are teachers special to merit any "protections" that aren't afforded to all employees, public or private?
Teaching in public school, like serving in the military or working in emergency services, is a career that we should maintain for the well-being of our country and citizens. If teachers cannot earn a living wage -- to have the basic dignity of owning a home and raising a family should they want to -- then we are worse off as a country over time.
To be clear, I am biased here. I started my career working for ASD, have lots of family that work for ASD in both admin and teaching, and many friends directly involved in education in Alaska. Public education in Alaska is a shit show, and seems to be on the an accelerating downswing since covid. The unions aren't helping the situation either, hence my opinions.
The only thing that report does for me is show that our metrics for what makes a good teachers union or a strong teachers union are wrong.
Even by your own example, you're only at 35 hours a week, and that's before you subtract out the weeks of summer vacation, winter vacation, spring break, etc; where the workload is certainly far less than 40 hours a week.