Agathos

It's worth pointing out that generating a lot of value (productivity) is not a guarantee that your wages will grow in proportion to that value. In fact, for the last 50 years, in most careers, wages have not tracked productivity. This is the "Productivity-Pay Gap." (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ )

While that gap has opened for most Americans, it looks like the average progammers' wages are right in line with productivity growth (maybe not Silicon Valley wages, but I think those are pretty disconnected from the rest of the country anyway). So the question is not, "why are programmers' wages so inflated?" but instead, "what depressed everyone else's wages and will programmers remain immune?"

The "what" has been a noisy political argument in the last several years especially. Suspects include foreign competition, automation, changes in corporate management, lax antitrust enforcement, and the decline of unions.

Foreign competition is an obvious and much-discussed threat. My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book) was the title of a real book in the wake of the dot-com crash. More recently that threat seems to have receded, if temporarily. Companies still employ offshore programmers where they can, but the consensus has emerged for now that some combination of language differences, cultural differences, quality of training, and the difficulty of coordinating across time zones holds them back from taking over the most complex tasks. I see this as a temporary reprieve. Foreign programmers' quality will improve, both sides will learn to cope with language and cultural differences, tools for remote work are rapidly improving, and perhaps most importantly, competitive companies are being founded outside the US. For those companies, there are no language, cultural, or timezone differences in hiring local talent.

I don't see automation as a threat. Or rather, programmers' jobs have been "automated away" on a regular basis, but you still need programmers to operate the automation! Assemblers replace machine code, compiled languages replace assembly, higher-level languages replace lower-level languages, off-the-shelf frameworks and middleware replace starting from scratch... After each change, programmers are more productive and more valuable, not less. This is unlike manufacturing, where the worker who is replaced by a robot may never learn to program that robot.

I don't see the last three (corporate management, antitrust, unions) as especially important changes but others may disagree. I certainly don't see any reason programmers should be immune, except that the above two factors give them a lot of leverage. Lax antitrust enforcement was obviously a factor when some of the big companies conspired to hold down wages, but again, it doesn't seem to be enough by itself to hold wages down. Programmers seem to have done okay without unions, but I do wonder what it would be like if programmers had a guild system the way physicians and lawyers do.

The article, which I'm sure you've read, links to a survey in which Gallup attempted to answer your question. They asked people exactly what features they look for in a quality job, then asked people if their jobs meet those standards. The summary specifically mentions "autonomy, opportunities for advancement and job security."

The survey link, but you have to register to read the whole thing: https://www.gallup.com/education/267590/great-jobs-lumina-ga...

So the same except everyone at SpaceX has an extra meeting in the morning?

Got to tip your cap to him for selecting "Cow Tools" for the first day's front page.

Thanks for writing it! I'm a Python programmer in my day job. I have sometimes remarked that the reason I play around with Haskell in my free time is because I don't want to see another run time type error unless I'm being paid to do so. But I needed to do some spreadsheet-scraping and data-munging for a personal project and I figured it would be easier in Python. So I searched and found your article and it was just what I needed.

Now to sneak it in at work...

I thought this was a good introduction to that problem of unwinnable configurations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGIDzGvsrV8

Sounds like a good opportunity to dust off those graph algorithms many of us learned in undergrad CS.

The reason the rocket is so expensive is that it has to lift a lot of weight, mostly fuel. I charge that to the fuel's account.

Fuel on the ground is cheap. Halfway to orbit, nothing is cheap.

I don't see any sign here that anything is improving for smaller brands like No Starch Press (https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/1091840257073471488). They're only policing Nintendo products, and only because Nintendo has the clout to force them. Amazon doesn't want to lose their supply of Switch Lites.

Between the Bayh-Dole Act, DARPA, NASA, the NSF Seed fund, and Department of Energy loans (I seem to recall the A123 loan was a political football for a while) doesn't the US already put a lot of money into technology startups?

The only difference is, the US government doesn't take equity, and thank goodness for that. Imagine a political appointee on the board of every new technology company.

Yeah, but I can't use the [img] tag to inline a .gifv on a random phpBB-like forum. So I still have to save the unconverted .gif somewhere.

Northern Europe or Mediterranean Europe? Greece and Italy are a mess, but the North's budgets look a lot better than the U.S.'s does.

Ah, my favorite Crusader Kings II minigame: stitching my kingdom back together after a gavelkind succession.

In 2011 I was just finishing my PhD, so I couldn't afford a new car. At least my brain has that V8 now...

The Parker Solar Probe is using seven Venus flybys to fly pretty close to the Sun (but not into it).

Well, there's "I want to match Mars' orbit around the Sun, so I can orbit the planet," and then there's "I want to intersect Mars' orbit just as the planet is passing through so I smack into its surface and leave a big crater."

The latter takes a lot less delta v, but it has its drawbacks. Leaving the solar system, you don't have to budget for that rendezvous.

Maybe one day we'll have software-controlled corrective lenses, and then they can take over-the-air updates to subtly enlarge and sharpen certain logos...

"It doesn’t contain vodka or any other distilled spirits. Instead it is made through fermentation, like beer, but starting from a base of sugar instead of cereal grains like barley."

This is a roundabout way of saying it's undistilled vodka. All spirits are fermented before distillation (or else what is there to distill?), and some vodkas already start with pure sugar instead of grains, potatoes, or fruit.

Politicians ignore economists unless and until they happen to propose something politically convenient.

So We is a real estate company, that doesn't own its own real estate, that wants to be seen as a technology company, that doesn't develop its own technology.

Are banks, airlines, hospitals, or big retailers not named Amazon tech companies? If you took their tech away now, could they stay in business?

The only reason anyone can get a 30-year fixed-rate is that the government makes it so, by guaranteeing and eventually taking over Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.

So, album then.

A few possible reasons come to mind.

The government may not have standing to sue on the worker's behalf.

The agency that prosecutes tax fraud may be larger and better funded than the agency that protects workers.

One tax evasion charge may combine the cases of thousands of affected workers into one case, where the individual cases are too small and time consuming to pursue.

The penalties for tax evasion may be more severe than the penalties for wage theft.

You may be confusing the GPL with the Creative Commons "non-commercial" restriction. (I do find the latter a bit confusing myself.)

If a material disaster strikes, my local highways will be locked up harder than a diamond.

Economists have been scratching their heads over that contradiction for generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

I think a fair summary is to say that there must be some value in having thousands of people who start each day with some vague idea of what the organization needs from them. And this value must be huge, because it has to outweigh all the value destroyed by corporate inertia, dead weight, infighting, etc. If it doesn't, the firm can't survive very long.

I don't understand the lowercase letters and scare quotes around python foundation. Is that not its name? (Okay, it's Python Software Foundation.)

The end of life date is already set: January 1, 2020.

It's open source so I don't know what you're looking for in terms of a formal handover. Yes, I bet Red Hat and others will continue to maintain their own versions past that date.

Oh wow, that does give me mid-90s PC Magazine flashbacks.