I think people also have a natural tendency to assume that the amount you are paid is correlated to how difficult the job is, which isn't quite true. The market value of a role has a lot of additional factors besides how intrinsically difficult the actual job is such as supply and demand and the funding source. Programmers may have been able to demand high salaries partially because the explosion in demand came faster than the explosion in supply.
While it is true that a programmer's job is a lot more than writing code, I also wonder to what extent that businesses will actually be able to tell a good programmer from a bad one. For example, a lot of folks at big companies can honestly get away with being a ticket-taking code monkey because so much of the responsibility has been abstracted away so that they don't actually get punished for not caring about the customer. It's sort of similar to how many schools realistically wouldn't care to distinguish between a teacher who puts in extra effort into their classroom versus one who clocks in and clocks out as long as some bare minimums were being met.
I think strong programmers will get rewarded in the right companies that need them, but it's still an open question as to how many companies exist that have their bottom lines actually depend on a programmer doing a good job at wearing all those extra hats.
This is the correct answer. Of all the engineering fields, SWE is by far the one with highest salary compared to how difficult it is. SWE lucked out on the fact that we have been going through a technological revolution, and naturally the demand for the people who work in this field is huge. Hence the pay. In my university SWE bachelors + masters degree has been seen as the easiest one as far as i can remember. Mechanical, bio, aerospace and electrical as the most difficult.
It's always been funny to see the arrogance of some SWE who think that since they're the highest paid, they are also the most difficult and most important jobs, while it has zero to do with either of these two. Just luck of supply/demand. Otherwise mathematicians and physics would be sitting at the top with the highest paid careers and they... are not even close to that.
For this reason I don't really feel sorry for AI replacing programmers/SWE, at least the ones that were arrogant enough to think in the way i explained.
Definitely agree with this! Given the pace of technological development, we should basically expect entire groups of people to constantly drop out of the competitive labor market. Don't get me wrong, new jobs will be created as well, but it's also very possible many people will also not be able to reskill into those new roles without some sort of structural support. People have faith that technology will create new markets and roles, and while that's historically been true, I think people also tend to forget that this happens in aggregate, and that someone's personal career trajectory can be largely luck dependent. You may happen to find the role of the future or you might get stuck with depreciating skills, hard to say which unless you can predict the future!
I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.
I can remember the Thatcher years when redundancies for hundreds of thousands was routine, with the unemployment figures going stratospheric.
The miners, auto-workers, ship workers, BT (phone) workers and other swathes ended up leaving the workplace as a general rule.
To massage the figures, the government were able to expand the education sector and take the 'long term sick' off the books.
For the education sector there are mature person degrees, however, education mostly takes the young off the books, the people that did apprenticeships.
Long term sick can be an easy skive, if you have taken up the bottle, can claim to be depressed and have the doctor in the job centre believe you. The incentive is more money than dole and no need to check in with the job centre on a fortnightly basis.
IMHO AI is the fig leaf for what is going on, with further financialisation of Western economies (rent seeking) and absurd energy costs, due to the Anglo-American 'war for oil against humanity', making most Western economies doomed to never be competitive ever again. Soon the only jobs will be 'multi-drop delivery drivers' and 'care workers for seniors'. Immigrants and young people will fill these roles, not whomever is being laid off 'due to AI'.
While it's true that a lot of China's conveniences come from essentially labor market arbitrage and rural/urban inequality, the fact that the Netherlands can afford to attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country. I would also prefer the pace of life in the Netherlands, but I wonder to what extent you also have to buy more fairness and a slower pace of life?
> attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country
Poor countries also reduce wealth inequality. In fact, China went through a Communist revolution where all private landowners’ wealth was taken from them. This happened from the 1930s through the 1950s and was a fairly bloody, violent process, involving lots of revolutionaries inciting peasants to forcibly occupy land and buildings and killing landlords if they didn’t cooperate.
Good point, I guess another way to reduce inequality is by your ruling party having an extremely ideological stance, pragmatics be damned, although I imagine most people wouldn't prefer this method
As always, correlation is not causation, so it's very possible that the people who tend to be happier also tend to maybe fit into society better and thus get higher paying jobs, not that you necessarily need to make X/year to be happier.
It is still interesting to see how the actual numbers shake out though, especially the section on how the income quintile groups actually scale linearly instead of log linearly with reported happiness.
I also see the decline of reading, at least more "serious" long-form works, partly as an extension of the cult of productivity. Why read a 300 page book on something when you can get 75% of the main points in a 30s TikTok video? What's the point of "beautiful" language if it makes the sentence twice as long? I once had a coworker refer to Washington's farewell address as "deprecated" English, and he wasn't interested in reading it at all unless it was compressed down to an easily digestible structure.
Similar to the sentiments expressed in the article, I do think something is lost when your mind is no longer allowed to wander before getting "to the point," but it's hard to articulate this loss clearly without reaching for vague justifications like "aesthetics". However, I also don't think we should force our kids just to read for the sake of reading; I think there should be some intrinsic desire to read a well-articulated sentence, whether it be from books or articles or even Twitter, and it's the seeming lack of that desire which is sad to see.
It was a pleasant surprise to see that the article wasn't about bashing on Bourdain at all. I was a little scared when I opened it.
Like the author, I'm also a little conflicted about travel and tourism. I love seeing how other people live life differently than mine, but I wonder to what extent this becomes a weird poverty fetishization. I also haven't fully decided how to feel when a once-niche place becomes big. On the one hand, it brings life to the local economy, but on the other hand, somehow it loses "authenticity", whatever that means. I currently only travel when I have a specific reason for being there like a certain event or attraction because I find it rather hollow to just be going from tourist attraction to tourist attraction, but maybe that's just a me problem.
I think this article mostly says what we already know about the negative effects of too much screen time, but I personally always struggle to follow the basic mitigating advice like look away every 20 minutes and exercise for a little bit each day :')
While it is true that a programmer's job is a lot more than writing code, I also wonder to what extent that businesses will actually be able to tell a good programmer from a bad one. For example, a lot of folks at big companies can honestly get away with being a ticket-taking code monkey because so much of the responsibility has been abstracted away so that they don't actually get punished for not caring about the customer. It's sort of similar to how many schools realistically wouldn't care to distinguish between a teacher who puts in extra effort into their classroom versus one who clocks in and clocks out as long as some bare minimums were being met.
I think strong programmers will get rewarded in the right companies that need them, but it's still an open question as to how many companies exist that have their bottom lines actually depend on a programmer doing a good job at wearing all those extra hats.
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