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Comment by JVIDEL | Hacker News Reader

I think the real news here is stuff like this:

According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000 fewer jobs than existed in 2001.

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If it's true that anyone who could say "HTML" in 2001 was called a "programmer", then that year is not a good baseline for tech job statistics.

If it's true that anyone who can say "Ruby on Rails" in 2013 is called a "programmer"...

Ruby is an actual programming language that runs on most platforms, what's the problem? Do you have a specific flavor of Real Programming that you prefer?

Ruby is a programming language. Rails is a framework. I guarantee that you can, in 2013, find "Ruby on Rails programmers" who wouldn't know what to do if you took the Rails away.

I'm sure you could also find a lot of C programmers who wouldn't know what to do if you took the compiler away. Talentless amateurs.

Are you seriously comparing a web application framework to a compiler? Wow.

Serious question: What can you usefully do in C without a compiler? Write your own self-hosted compiler somehow?

I reject the notion that people who are skilled at using a set of tools are "talentless amateurs" because they don't know how to work without those tools, or create the tools from scratch.

How good is a master carpenter if you took away his hammer and saw?

Not all tech jobs are for "programmers". Writing HTML may not be glamorous or prestigious, but it's undeniably a tech job, as is being a sysadmin or ops or qa or technical writer.

To clarify: My point was that the height of a bubble (like 2001) is not a good baseline for employment statistics. If the number of employees in the tech sector were lower than in, say, 1995, that would be more meaningful.

My comment regarding "html..." was tangential.

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