Autoworkers of Our Generation
blog.baugues.com
blog.baugues.com
This is really a poor comparison. The issue with the legal industry is that there are too many bad law schools. Students from top 13 law schools simply don't have trouble finding BigLaw positions, sort of like how engineers from Stanford have their pick of top tech shops, or how Wharton undergraduates have a whole host of investment banking and private equity opportunities.
It's the law school candidates from poor schools that have trouble.
If the author's point was to say that anyone can log onto the Internet, learn Ruby for a month, and make a very respectable salary, and that this isn't sustainable...well, duh.
The rockstars — the people that read HN, the people that think about software engineering and computer science constantly, the people that don't stop tinkering and building — they're not going to have trouble keeping their jobs. They are the top 13 law schools, the target school investment bankers.
The difference between the automobile industry and the technology industry is that the tech industry won't be going away for a long, long time. One can easily imagine other forms of transportation, but computer science is here to stay, as far as we can tell. Even as we automate how easy it is to make a web application, we see new engineering challenges in different domains that still require the rockstars to be rockstars.
Yeah, we should obviously still be learning. That's why we're on HN in the first place. But I'm not exactly worried for the long term.
Maybe I'm too bullish.
After a century of existence, auto manufacturers are still here too. The issue is how the industry has changed over time, and what their experience can teach others. Auto manufacturers have increased output relentlessly through better tooling, automation, and engineering advancements, while reducing labor requirements to levels that would have been ridiculous even 10 years before. And, they have done that for decades. Software has the same vectors of improvement and shows a similar growth of form factors. Consumer software, as it is now, is only ~40 years old. I think there is a lot of experience, and lessons, that could translate from older industries, especially around the handling of people, knowledge, and industry shifts. And, it might be wise to avoid relearning some of their lessons the hard way.
I think some blame for economic decline has to go toward world overcrowding and fewer resources per capita, but I also agree that no profession stays on top forever - although bankers sure give it a good run.
I'm wondering if the social/mobile/videogaming crazes are ever gonna burst. It's hard for me to even visualize all the sectors that utilize programming. Health Care, NSA spying, autonomous drones, genomics, ...